Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

“Learn Something from This!”

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 10; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14680777.2010.493656

1471-5902

M. W. Thompson,

Race, History, and American Society

Abstract America' s Next Top Model (ANTM), the popular reality television show produced by and starring Tyra Banks, has garnered a sizeable audience over its thirteen seasons. Synergistically marketed to readers of Young People and Teen Magazine, ANTM enjoys an audience of five million viewers mostly from the 18–35 year-old female demographic. This essay explores representations of ethnic and gendered identities constructed through the visual and discursive rhetoric of ANTM. ANTM judges define "model" femininity as those contestants whose look is "a blank palette" or "androgynous," descriptors that signal unmarked whiteness, while nonwhite women are most often marked as "exotic" or eliminated for being "too ethnic." This essay argues that despite Banks's expressed desire to help more women of color into the modeling business, ANTM participates in emerging, neoliberal understandings of racial and gendered identities, which, characterized by a hegemonic postfeminist and postrace worldview, obscure the operating of privilege in the young women's "choices" of how and when to perform their ethnicities. Rejecting the ANTM judges' claims to objectivity, this essay attempts to situate the gaze of the fashion industry and its aesthetic knowledge through its unspoken reliance on the notion of "optional" ethnic identity. Keywords: reality televisionpostfeminismoptional ethnicity Notes 1. An ensemble interview with reality television writers in Radar Magazine reveals the practice of casting show participants with an eye to constructing "archetypes" such as "one jerk, or one slut, or one priss" (Goldman 2005 Goldman, Andrew (2005) 'Rewriting reality', Radar Magazine, Nov./Dec., pp. 63–67, 99 [Google Scholar], p. 99). Producers also rely on such practices as "Frankenbyting," cobbling together sound bytes in order to create phrasing that meets the producers' needs, and the "butted byte," taking a particularly desirable byte and overlaying it on a different scene. One writer observed, "On a show, if you don't actually see them [the participants] saying it, it's a safe bet they didn't say it in that context" (Goldman 2005 Goldman, Andrew (2005) 'Rewriting reality', Radar Magazine, Nov./Dec., pp. 63–67, 99 [Google Scholar], p. 65). As the Radar article also notes, participants (with good reason) are often furious to find how they have been fictionalized by the show through these editing practices. Because producers like Banks have creative control over how they are represented, this is by no means to say that their representation on the show is more "real." Ultimately, meticulous editing of hours of raw footage works to shape coherent plot lines, which, in addition to repetitive previewing and flashbacks of key scenes function to focus each episode. "Advertainment" (Deery 2004 Deery, J. 2004. Reality TV as advertainment. Popular Communication, 2(1): 1–20. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]) reliance upon opportunistic product placement shots (Cover Girl is, after all, a sponsor), as well as suppression or neglect of some events by editing and obsessive repetition of footage of other events crafts a text for viewers that not only is not "real" but also asks to be read in fairly limited ways. A voiced-over summary of the previous week's episode by Banks, as well as rhetorically posed questions about the fate of contestants in the upcoming segment, all provide an interpretive frame for the episode and season. Combined, these editing techniques lead to the creation of recognizable, character types, plot lines, and other elements. 2. While the successes of Tyra Banks, Beverly Johnson, Iman, Naomi Campbell, Vanessa Williams, and Halle Barry suggest that women of color and black women in particular have made great inroads into beauty culture and the fashion industry, these women prove to be exceptions rather than norms. The concept of multiculturalism, as I will discuss later, has impacted consumer culture through advertising, but the worlds of beauty culture and high fashion remain dominated by Eurocentric definitions of gender and beauty, both of which are informed by ideologies of race and racial difference that normalize white/European appearance. As many feminist cultural critics have discussed the social construction of embodied femininity is interwoven with fictions of racial Otherness and difference (Bordo 1993; Crenshaw 1995 Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1995. "Race, reform and retrenchment: transformation and legitimation in anti-discrimination law". In Critical Race Theory: Key Writings that Formed the Movement, Edited by: Crenshaw, Kimberle, Gotanda, N., Peller, G. and Thomas, K. 103–122. New York: The New Press. [Google Scholar]; hooks 1992 Hooks, Bell. 1992. Black Looks: Race and Representation, Boston: South End Press. [Google Scholar]; Kondo 1997 Kondo, Dorinne. 1997. About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theatre, New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]; Negra 2001 Negra, Diane. 2001. Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom, New York: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Roberts 1997; Wallace-Sanders 2002 Wallace-Sanders, Kimberly. 2002. Skin Deep and Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture, Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Williams 1991 Williams, Patricia J. 1991. The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar]). Hegemonic, patriarchal white womanhood is normalized through oppositional comparison to ungendered, dehumanized black female bodies, a process that extends back through slavery to the New World conquest and invention of the ideas of race and racial difference. As the process of race formation in the New World set about marking difference in the service of racial hierarchy, skin color was attributed with the power to determine morality, ability, and beauty, and Europeans imagined for themselves an identity in opposition to the apparent differences of the peoples they colonized (Dyer 1997 Dyer, Richard. 1997. White, London: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Morrison 1992). Within the formation of racial identities, gender identities were enabled and disabled. Ungendered by the process of enslavement during which their bodies were subject to the same tortures and labors as enslaved men (Spillers [1987 Spillers, Hortense. [1987] (1997). "Mama's baby, papa's maybe: an American grammar book". In Feminisms, Edited by: Warhol, Robyn and Price-Herndl, Diane. Princeton, NJ: Rutgers UP. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]] 1997), black women were believed to stand in contrast to patriarchal white femininity and its characteristics of frailty, innocence, and purity. hooks (1992 Hooks, Bell. 1992. Black Looks: Race and Representation, Boston: South End Press. [Google Scholar], 2003) and others (Bordo 1993; Morton 1991 Morton, Patricia. 1991. "The myths of black womanhood". In Disfigured Images: The Historical Assault on Afro-American Women, 1–16. New York: Greenwood Press. [Google Scholar]; Rooks 1996 Rooks, Noliwe. 1996. Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. [Google Scholar]; Wallace 2004 Wallace, Michele. 2004. Dark Designs and Visual Culture, Durham: Duke University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) suggest that the problem with representations of women of color has not been a simple matter of exclusion, which the introduction of more women of color into the media or fashion industry will solve overnight. Instead, the problem of how women of color are represented in mass media is also an issue. As hooks observes, "If we compare the relative progress African Americans have made in education and employment to the struggle to gain control over how we are represented, particularly in the mass media, we see that there has been little change in the area of representation" (2003, p. 1). hooks's concern is amplified when considering the power representations have not only to reproduce dominant ideologies, but also the way in which they produce gendered and ethnic identities. This concern was recently proven justified by Davis's short documentary A Girl Like Me (2005 A Girl Like Me (documentary) (2005) Kiri Davis (dir.), 7 min., USA [Google Scholar]) in which she reproduces Kenneth Clark's 1940s "Doll Test," revealing that black children (and girls in particular) continue to struggle with internalized messages of black inferiority (see also Boylorn 2008 Boylorn, Robin. 2008. As seen on TV: an autoethnographic reflection on race and reality television. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 25(4): 413–433. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). To resist such messages, bell hooks argues for an "oppositional gaze" that would politically inform practices of viewing and consuming mass culture: [c]ritical black female spectatorship emerges as a site of resistance only when individual black women actively resist the imposition of dominant ways of knowing and looking. While every black woman I talked to was aware of racism, that awareness did not automatically correspond with politicization, the development of an oppositional gaze. (quoted in Amelia Jones 2003 Jones, Amelia, ed. 2003. The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar], p. 103) Here, then, in hooks's attack on depoliticized practices for engaging with dominant visual representation, we can locate the challenge to Banks's ANTM endeavor. 3. Within psychoanalytic feminist film studies, the phallocentric gaze is understood to position Woman as its object and Other, onto which desires are projected and fears of castration—through too close identification with the (female) object—must be allayed (Mulvey [1975 Mulvey, Laura. [1975] (2003. "Visual pleasure and narrative cinema". In The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, Edited by: Jones, Amelia. 44–52. New York: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]] 2003). Certainly ANTM participates in the construction of the male scopophilic gaze through countless mis-en-scene photo and video shoots, in which models are coached on how to look sexy and "fierce" for the camera, as gratuitous semi-nudity flashes before its view and suggestive (same and opposite sex) sexual encounters are hinted at. Meanwhile sexual difference (and female subordination) is elaborately enacted through the very idea of the "model" (and its association with frivolity, decoration/display, and consumption) in order to ward off threatening identification. My point, however, is not regarding the functioning of the male gaze within the show, or, it is only in so far as its participation in constructions of gendered ethnic identities. 4. For other examples of how racial conflict is deployed on reality TV, see Bell-Jordan (2008 Bell-Jordan, K. E. 2008. Black.white. and a survivor of the real world: constructions of race on reality TV. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 25(4): 353–372. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). 5. For an analysis of reality TV's fostering of the ideology of "personal responsibility" in particular, see Ouellette (2009 Ouellette, Laurie. 2009. "Take responsibility for yourself": Judge Judy and the neoliberal citizen". In Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, 2nd edn, Edited by: Murray, Susan and Ouellette, Laurie. 223–242. New York: New York University Press. [Google Scholar]). 6. Besides the ghetto/welfare queen stereotype, ANTM justifies the elimination of nonwhite contestants through a range of racial and ethnic stereotypes. One such stereotyped figure, popular in reality television generally, is the diva, a contemporary manifestation of the Sapphire character or "the black bitch." Every season of ANTM thus far has featured a "difficult" black woman whose personality irritates contestants and viewers alike and whose flair for dramatic confrontation boosts viewer ratings. She is always eliminated. During the first season, the divas were Robin, about whom the judges conclude: "It's clear that Robin doesn't have the personality to be a Top Model," and Ebony, a confident and assertive black woman, who was eliminated for being angry: Banks tells her "You are beautiful, your smile is breathtaking, but you have anger that makes you push yourself too hard, to the point where you lose focus and become difficult to work with." During season two, the diva stereotype contributes to Camille's downfall, and the eventual winner Eva is pulled aside by Banks and warned not to become "another Black bitch." During season four, Tiffany and Brandy (both dark-skinned black women) are critiqued for their "anger." Most recently season five featured Jade, who seemed to be consciously playing to the role of diva (with shades of Nina Simone), suggesting that while contestants have learned what "types" can land them successful parts on so-called reality television, they may be less attuned to the double-bind presented by these roles. The legacy of the Mammy figure also lives on through the critiques of "plus-size" women of color contestants on ANTM, who are judged to be lacking in confidence and sex-appeal. While there have been several plus-size contestants, only Whitney of season ten (a white competitor) has actually gone on to win the competition; usually they are eliminated early in the season but not before inspiring a great deal of soul searching on the part of the experts: the judges (including Banks) reflect on "size discrimination" in the modeling industry; on the dangerous negative consequences of only using thin models; and on the prevalence of eating disorders within the profession. Nevertheless, the judges ultimately wind up eliminating all plus-size models from ANTM. During the first season, Robin is eliminated after Janice Dickinson observes, "America's next top model is not going to be plus-sized!" Rather than being told that they are being eliminated because they are plus-size, however, these contestants are eliminated because—or so the judges tell them—they lack the "personality" and confidence they would need to overcome the particular challenges of being plus-size. When plus-size Latina Diane is eliminated during season five, the official Top Model website explains "Diane isn't able to hide her insecurities as well as the other girls." The judges allege that she appears "sullen" and not sexy in front of the camera. Desexualizing plus-size women of color harkens back to the legacy of the Mammy image. In the fourth season, seemingly savvy of discrimination in the industry, Banks informs Tocarra, a plus-size black model, that "fat is the new black" meaning presumably that she will face discrimination because of her weight in some way like the discrimination that black models face. Absent from Banks's considerations is the way that discrimination against fatness and nonwhiteness combined to eliminate Tocarra from the competition.