In this textual analysis of the reality dating show Blind Date, the authors challenge the recent cultural studies scholarship that champions textual openness of reality television. In particular, the authors demonstrate how the pop-up supertext in Blind Date undermines the counterhegemonic potential of this show with regard to gender, class, and ethnic representations. The authors find that the interplay between the comic supertext and the dating coverage tends to punish deviance from dominant conceptions of aesthetics, class, social, and intellectual abilities. The analysis highlights the limits of textual polysemy in the new generation of interactive or enhanced television formats.

memorial exemplified by makeshift shrines, posters of the missing, and graffiti; the museum installations that reflected on these street memorials and on the media's role in our collective experience of 9/11 and its aftermath; and the contested site of the permanent memorial at Ground Zero. The authors argue that both street memorials and museum exhibitions exemplify a tension between utopian and critical relations between the art and its public and that a balance between utopia and critique is perhaps the greatest challenge for the yet-unfinished memorial project in downtown Manhattan. The authors' goal is not so much to propose an ideal design for the memorial as to reflect on the aesthetic and political function of commemoration within the context of debates over public art and public space in the United States.