The rich bitch: Class and gender on the Real Housewives of New York City

This project offers the opportunity to examine the ways in which normative conceptions of class and gender cohere to produce an archetypal, trans-historical villain, what we term "the rich bitch". In this essay, we employ the concept of irony to analyze how Bravo's The Real Housewives of New York City creates rich women as objects of cultural derision, well-heeled jesters in a populist court. The show primes its savvy, upscale audience to judge the extravagance of female scapegoats harshly in tough economic times. The housewives' class and gender flops are inter-related on the show. The lure of class status produces inconsiderate mothers. Ultimately, The Real Housewives of New York City uses irony to produce a provocative, post-feminist drama about rich women too crass to be classy, too superficial to be nurturing, and too self-obsessed to be caring.