Introduction

Exulansic discusses her series, I am Jazz’s Waking Nightmare, wherein she offers social and political commentary on Jazz Jennings’ reality TV show, I am Jazz. Analysing gender ideology’s infiltration in mainstream media, Exulansic delves into the postmodern condition of the Jennings family’s pathological grooming of Jazz Jennings. Analysing the production of I am Jazz, Exulansic examines the reality show and how all reality has been edited out or caught accidentally on camera while Jazz’s persona, crafted for television audiences as he is coached to demonstrate the happy “transgender” subject, morphs between the scripted lines and unscripted moments that allow for the reality and horror of his life to materialise. Historicising how the audience witnesses Jazz being coached for the show’s production and by his own family, Exulansic ironises how despite his ad-libbed performances we still get glimpses of Jazz’s real self through accidental admissions that are not edited out. Demystifying the rhetoric throughout this show’s history—how sic “transgender” people will always be oppressed, Exulansic studies how this show has become a marketing platform for ideological dissemination while locating the mother, Jeanette Jennings, as the primary perpetrator of her son whom she sexually abuses and shatters his psychological development through the pseudo-medical hokum and dangerous medical experimentation, all executed in the name of transgender ideology.