Selling Sunset… and My Postfeminist Sexual Capital: New Sexual Subjectivities in Reality TV

Selling Sunset is a Netflix-produced real estate drama that revolves around a high-end LA brokerage firm. The reality show offers a hyperfeminised and hypersexualised vision of the all-female group of elite agents. In the show, female power is located on the women’s bodies and the success of their private/professional lives. It is this interweaving of the public and intimate spheres that I focus on in this chapter, introducing the idea of “postfeminist sexual capital”. Illouz and Kaplan (2021) define sexual capital within the context of late modernity as the capacity of some subjects to increase their socio-economic and personal status through the commodification of their sexual subjectivities. In this work, I explore the idea of sexual capital as infused with postfeminist discourses that configure female empowerment through, among other elements, a compulsory sexual agency (Gill 2008; Burkett and Hamilton in Sexualities 15:815–33, 2012). I argue the representation of these female agents centres their use of postfeminist sexual capital, which works to bring success, or failure, to them. In this regard, the postfeminist sexual capital emerges as a double-edged sword which can accentuate neoliberal competition, and consequently, contribute to the further hierarchisation of acceptable feminine sexual subjectivities (Liu 2018) and social inequalities.