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“Learn Something from This!” Mary Thompson

Online publication date: 05 August 2010

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The problem of optional ethnicity on America’s Next Top Model

Mary Thompson

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 television; postfeminism; optional ethnicity

Today, planned authenticity is rife; as a product of hegemony and a remarkable counterpart of universal standardization, it constitutes an efficacious means of silencing the cry of racial oppression. We no longer wish to erase your difference. We demand, on the contrary, that you remember and assert it. At least, to a certain extent. (Trinh T. Minh-Ha [1987] 2003, p. 158) Downloaded By: [University of California, Santa Barbara] At: 21:01 13 September 2010 Introduction 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 (Trebay 2005). This essay explores representations of ethnic and gendered identities

Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3, 2010 ISSN 1468-0777 print/ISSN 1471-5902 online/10/030335-352 q 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2010.493656 336 MARY THOMPSON

constructed through the visual and discursive rhetoric of ANTM. The “model” femininity sought by the ANTM judges is defined by 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.

America’s Next Top Model, Reality Television, and Neoliberalism Tyra Banks’s modeling career peaked in the late 1990s with covers on Sports Illustrated and GQ, making her the first black American women to achieve supermodel status. At the time, her appearance was considered novel and striking due to the contrast between her skin and lighter eye color, and she was touted as one of the first “voluptuous” models (contrasting with Kate Moss’s waif look), which led to her career as a lingerie model for Victoria’s Secret. Banks then created the charitable foundation, T Zone, as a summer camp for girls designed to address self-esteem. Now the successful creator of her own reality television and talk shows, Banks has garnered comparisons to Oprah, whom she identifies as one of her mentors, for her business savvy and self-promotion. Over the seasons on ANTM, Banks has stated her desire to help young women learn from her modeling experiences, including her search for self-confidence; The CW network’s America’s Next Top Model website notes, “After writing Tyra’s Beauty, published by HarperCollins, Banks realized that the trials she overcame as a teen could be used to connect with girls who struggle with self-esteem issues.” Part narrative of development, part contemporary retelling of the life of Madame CJ Walker, Banks’s (relative) rags-to-riches story is held up to ANTM contestants as their guide, and it works as the underlying archetypal storyline for the editing of the show; therefore, it’s worthwhile to inquire into this “model” narrative of development and its contradictory message about the importance of ethnic identity. Each season or “cycle” begins with a pool of model contestants, young women with no professional modeling experience, who audition and, allegedly, are handpicked by Banks herself. The models live together in customized lofts in urban American fashion

Downloaded By: [University of California, Santa Barbara] At: 21:01 13 September 2010 centers (such as New York and L.A.) before moving in the second half of the show to overseas locations (which, in previous seasons, have included France, Italy, Japan, Thailand, South Africa, and Australia) for an international perspective on the fashion industry. Over the twelve-week seasons, while being mentored by Banks, the women compete in various “modeling challenges” for the grand prizes of a contract with Cover Girl (with whom Banks modeled for five years) and photo spreads in mainstream fashion magazines. Competitions involve some aspect of the industry—runway walking, “go-sees” (the modeling equivalent of a job interview), makeovers, press interviews, and photo or video shoots—and often reproduce a situation or photo shoot from Banks’s own modeling experience. Each episode concludes with a judging session, during which Banks and her fashion “experts” (regulars have included former models Janice Dickinson and Twiggy) deliver capricious yet withering commentary on each model’s performance, photos, and, importantly, development. “LEARN SOMETHING FROM THIS!” 337

Ultimately at the conclusion of each episode, one woman is eliminated, usually for reasons that remain unclear both to viewers and the remaining women, but which inevitably seem to have little to do with the woman’s appearance and allegedly everything to do with her potential for the business: model perfection is a moving target at which the contestants must continually and humiliatingly hurtle themselves each week. Although reality television shows claim verisimilitude through the absence of scripts, the use of nonactors, and borrowed conventions of nonfiction documentary, they are in fact highly crafted texts.1 Despite its generic label as “reality television,” ANTM follows a carefully edited, conventional narrative arc of formation (Feng 1997), modeled on Banks’s own life. Elements of the show draw from Banks’s narrated memories of breaking into the modeling business as a young woman of color, traveling overseas by herself to Europe, seeking mentors, and gaining self-knowledge and confidence amidst the cutthroat competition of the modeling business, which, Banks indicates, was not particularly open to women of color. Contestants on ANTM are, like Banks, young women, traveling to unfamiliar cities far from home, becoming apprentices and seeking mentors, facing daunting challenges, and learning something about themselves, thus enabling a passage into the next phase of life. In fact, contestants are judged by Banks based on how much they develop over the course of the competition. The emphasis on personal development has crystallized over the seasons to the extent that the real “work” of the show has not been the creation of supermodels (so far no contestant has gone on to achieve such celebrity) or even the fostering of empowering role models (although recent contestants have cited previous competitors as negative models of what not to do in order to be selected for the show). Instead, the “work” of ANTM has been the dissemination of neoliberal ideology, including new gendered and ethnic identities that, in the Althusserian sense, “hail” young women, and the very public manner in which their choices to assume these identities are judged. ANTM, I argue, participates in new “forms of luminosity,” a term used by McRobbie (2009) to describe the conditions that make new (gendered, ethnic) identities visible, and foregrounds the role of choice and being a good choice maker as the favored approach to expressing one’s gendered and ethnic identity. In what follows I analyze the ANTM judge’s choices of winners and losers over the first ten seasons of the show (May 2003–May 2008). While this essay is concerned with how ANTM constructs contestants as racial (stereo)types,2 it is more concerned with the show’s claim to represent the “real” and its role in mediating racial and gendered realities through neoliberal ideology. In doing so, I extend the growing scholarship connecting reality television and neoliberalism to critical race and gender studies (Bell-Jordan 2008; Boylorn

Downloaded By: [University of California, Santa Barbara] At: 21:01 13 September 2010 2008; Hasinoff 2008; Joseph 2009; Kraszewski 2009; McRobbie 2009; Orbe 2008; Squires 2008) with the intention of examining the deployment of individual “choice.” Hall (2001) has described the current cultural moment as a postcolonial, multicultural, globalized world where old hierarchies have not been abolished entirely but reconfigured into new relationships of power. Neoliberalism, characterized by Duggan as the unquestioned, default set of values shared by both the political left and right, has come to dominate this new world order through its attack on New Deal social welfare programs and pro-business stance, resulting in “the reconstruction of the everyday life of capitalism, in ways supportive of the upward redistribution of a range of resources, and tolerant of widening inequalities of many kinds” (2003, p. xi). Reality television, reflective of and imbricated in the emergence of neoliberal ideologies that rely on notions of the individual, “free choice,” and individual responsibility, has emerged as a new mode of expressing the 338 MARY THOMPSON

changing relationships of the individual to a “neoliberal” society. As critical media scholars have shown, within its transformation of the once civic-minded documentary to a new “postdocumentary” form, reality television reflects a transformed notion of the public that lacks any notion of “solidarity” and instead reflects and fosters a new “structure of feeling” now characterized by a dialectic of “attraction and dislike” (Corner [2002] 2009, p. 45). Reality television invites viewers to “test their own idea of reality against what is represented” (Ouellette & Murray 2009, p. 8)—a vacillation between public and private that becomes increasingly normalized and internalized as viewers are encouraged to compare individual choices that are increasingly evaluated out of social context and understood apolitically as “personal choices.” Indeed, this essay explores how contestants on ANTM are encouraged to participate in confessional moments during which they reflect on and assess their ethnic identities as well as the identities of other contestants; in turn, viewers of ANTM are invited to participate in judging the models for the authenticity of their confessions according to an unspecified measurement of ethnic authenticity. The particular gendered and racial identities constructed on ANTM reflect neoliberal ideological themes in mainstream culture that privilege notions of individualism, freedom, and choice as important features of contemporary womanhood. As McRobbie has recently argued, the economic necessity of women working has demanded an adjustment in the phallocentric symbolic, promoting a new form of femininity by which young women are hailed (2009, p. 56). Early twenty-first-century western culture, she claims, is characterized by a particular interest in young women, who are understood to be the beneficiaries of certain economic, political, and social transformations; the representation of their freedoms are therefore understood to be measurements of western progress and advancement. However, the reality that women constitute half the world’s population, in addition to the new global demand for their labor, requires that a new women’s movement never emerge. Promised access to (masculine) power by this new symbolic, young women now make the choice to “put on femininity”—what McRobbie refers to as a postfeminist masquerade (2009, p. 64). However, characterized as much by excessively girly consumerism and mannerisms as by raunchy licentious behaviors, this new phallic femininity takes place in a “leisure field” that presumes a white female subject and from which women of color are excluded. Thus, while representations of young women are put to such ideological work, a process of what McRobbie calls “disarticulation” is also taking place, whereby sexual politics and other intersecting social categories are broken apart so that feminism and other social justice movements/concerns are seen as no longer related or needed. McRobbie concludes that young women are able to come forward in society on the condition that feminism fades

Downloaded By: [University of California, Santa Barbara] At: 21:01 13 September 2010 away (2009, p. 56). Patriarchy, within this system, retrenches itself, while a recolonization by racism takes place within popular culture. Postfeminist masquerade resecures the submission of white femininity to white masculinity and resurrects racial divides by undoing multiculturalism (McRobbie 2009, p. 70). These themes operate within ANTM through the young contestants’ participation in postfeminist masquerade. This masquerade assumes a highly traditional, submissive form of femininity3 that is ironically aware (contestants frequently discuss disparaging attitudes about models) but that nevertheless fails as a genuine political awareness of women’s social position as a class. Furthermore, the absence of political awareness extends to the show’s representation of a flat multicultural playing field (presumed to be free of racism) for the expression of ethnic identities, where individuals are presumed to be equal and able to choose when and how to express ethnic heritage and pride. On the surface, detached from “LEARN SOMETHING FROM THIS!” 339

politics, neither gender nor race is seen to be a meaningful feature of identity beyond a playful stylistic choice; however, at a deeper level this masquerade works to obscure and reinforce the privilege of unmarked categories of maleness and whiteness. While other critics have observed ANTM’s participation in neoliberal constructions of a “postrace society,” these studies have focused on the figure of Banks herself (Dahl 2006; Joseph 2009) or a single season (Hasinoff 2008). This essay explores the persistence across several seasons of the manner in which ANTM depoliticizes ethnicity, resurrects racial stereotypes as marketable commodity-identities, and obscures the normalization of white privilege behind the concept of choice and “optional ethnicity.”

Embracing Ethnicity Echoing the advice promoted in her book Tyra’s Beauty Inside and Out (1998), Banks tells aspiring models on ANTM that they must “know and love themselves.” This directive is predicated on the suggestion that the contestants’ self-perceptions are initially faulty and that contestants have deep-seated issues that merit investigation. In one-on-one confessional moments, contestants are encouraged by Banks—in good talk show fashion— to love their bodies, forgive their families, stop being ashamed of who they are, move beyond their pasts, and so forth. Relentlessly, Banks narrows in on racial and ethnic identity as an important part of this development for women of color, and they are encouraged by Banks to exhibit pride in their ethnicity; white women, on the other hand, typically confess to secret diseases, disabilities, disordered eating, or same-sex preference, but are never encouraged to “embrace their ethnicities.” In these confessional moments, viewers are instructed in the “normative discontent” (McRobbie 2009) that characterizes postfeminist masquerade as well as the public role confession serves—contestants are to be judged on how they present and handle these “discontents.” Dissatisfaction must be located in the individual’s choice of attitude and not in political issues of social oppression or inequality. This pattern has been established throughout the seasons. For example, in season one Ebony, a dark-skinned African American contestant, is observed by the judges to be neglecting her skin, which Banks suspects arises from shame over her blackness. Banks encourages Ebony to “embrace” her difference and her skin. In season two, the judges praise Mercedes for wearing a flower in her hair as an expression, she explains, of her Latina heritage. Also in season two, the judges praise Sara’s Persian heritage, which she mentions only as a hindrance to her modeling career due to her father’s traditional belief that modeling equates prostitution. Banks encourages Sara to celebrate this heritage in her

Downloaded By: [University of California, Santa Barbara] At: 21:01 13 September 2010 modeling—although, ironically, this will defy her father’s traditional cultural values. While some women of color are praised for “owning” their heritage, other women of color are admonished for appearing to fail to embrace their race or ethnicity. In season two, April, an Asian American woman, is criticized by the judges for “lacking in personality,” which Banks later explains means she doesn’t “embrace her heritage”; but when April initially objects by explaining that she does not identify herself as Japanese American but as simply American, Banks replies that she will be perceived in the modeling industry as “Asian” and that she should work her “exotic” angle. In season three, Kelle, an African American woman who grew up in a primarily white, gated community, self-deprecatingly describes herself as “a white girl with a tan” and faults herself for having a “monkey mouth” and “looking a little primitive”; she is given a stern look by Banks and later is told to “love it, embrace it, you’re black” by fellow contestant (and eventual season winner) Eva. 340 MARY THOMPSON

In subsequent seasons, contestants learn they must offer a convincing performance of owning their ethnic identities before the judges. For example, in the sixth season, Gina, another Asian American contestant, proclaims her desire to break into modeling because Asians are underrepresented in the business, but she later admits her distaste for dating Asian men because, she claims, they are all shorter than she is. After being ruthlessly interrogated by Jade (a black contestant who also proclaims her ethnic pride) about her “identity crisis,” Gina is eliminated by the judges for being confused and uncomfortable with her ethnicity. Other contestants participate in the judges’ production and disciplining of ethnic identities, as is shown in the above examples of Eva and Jade policing fellow contestants’ performances, but contestants have also been punished by the judges for questioning another woman’s expression of her ethnic heritage.4 Such censure can be seen during season four, when Keenyah (an African American contestant) visits Mandela’s prison cell in South Africa and has a dramatic fight with Brittany, a white contestant who doubts the sincerity of Keenyah’s emotional reaction (perhaps with good reason—Keenyah asks the group if Mandela is still alive). Brittany is eliminated during that episode, suggesting to viewers that she was in the wrong to doubt Keenyah’s “embracement” of her heritage. Through these lessons, viewers are invited to judge and assess each woman’s choices of how to best express her ethnicity and gender. Additionally, each of these examples reveals how neoliberalism has appropriated and commodified multiculturalism—albeit in a depoliticized form—a process Hall refers to as “con-forming difference” (2001, p. 215). As the previous examples of models “embracing” their heritage suggest, the performance of racial and ethnic identities on ANTM is by no means intended to be political—rather it is meant to be a strategic engagement with the fashion industry’s fascination with the “exotic” (Craik 1994). Wearing a flower in one’s hair or simply expressing emotion at Mandela’s historic struggle are safe, nonradical gestures that do not suggest a politicized ethnic identity or any challenges to the contemporary political status quo of inequality. Such gestures foster an understanding of multiculturalism as a matter of surfaces and styles and efface the contemporary legacy of inequalities and on-going stratifications (Duggan 2003; Hall 2001; Kuo 2005; Minh-Ha [1987] 2003), all of which enforces the neoliberal idea that “we” are not so different (unequal) after all. Ann DuCille’s study of the deep play of various ethnic Barbies contends that in this cultural moment, “difference” gains visibility insofar as it assists in marketability; true difference (and its inequalities) must be suppressed:

Downloaded By: [University of California, Santa Barbara] At: 21:01 13 September 2010 In today’s world, race and ethnicity have fallen into the category of precious ready-to-wear difference. To be profitable, racial and cultural diversity—global heterogeneity—must be reducible to such common, reproducible denominators as colour and costume. Race and racial differences—whatever that might mean in the grander social order—must be reducible to skin colour or, more correctly, to the tint of the plastic poured into each Barbie mould. Each doll is marketed as representing something or someone in the real world, even as the political, social, and economic particulars of that world are not only erased but, in a curious way, made the same. (quoted in Amelia Jones 2003, p. 340)

As Kuo has argued in “The Commoditization of Hybridity” (2005), marketplace multiculturalism’s assertion of similarity over difference eclipses real inequality in material conditions and any disquieting suggestion that consumers may participate in the “LEARN SOMETHING FROM THIS!” 341

reproduction of these conditions. Hall describes this as “commercial multiculturalism,” which assumes that “if the diversity of individuals from different communities is recognized in the marketplace, then the problems of cultural difference will be (dis)solved through private consumption, without any need for a redistribution of power and resources” (2001, p. 210). Indeed the desire to play with/at difference and the need to suppress its political significance is expressed in ANTM’s fascination with biracial and androgynous contestants. Androgynous contestants promote the “phallic girl” form of postfeminist masquerade described by McRobbie (looking and acting like a man as a bid for masculine power but also a “sign” of achieved equality), whereas biracial contestants signal a “postrace” society. For example, several contestants have been praised for their androgynous or “tomboy” looks, including Eva Pigford (winner of the third season), Naima Mora (winner of the fourth season), and Kim Stolz (an out lesbian contestant in the seventh season). The judges in particular praised Naima’s “look” for being sexy, androgynous, and exotic, which Naima attributed to her Irish African American heritage. Eva, similarly, was told her look was “weird” in a good way because of its ethnic and gender ambiguity. Notably, while Eva, Naima, and Kim were all upfront throughout the show about their pride in their heritages and, in Kim’s case, sexual orientation, no mention was made about the social or political role of these factors in their lives, suggesting its relative insignificance to their outlooks on the world and sense of how these factors connect to larger social structures. In other words, their ethnicities and sexualities were represented as sources of a kind of titillating but safe difference, no more threatening than other kinds of apolitical difference like, for instance, hometown origins. In the cases of these three contestants, ethnic and sexual identities were represented as less of a means of connecting to social communities and more like branding gestures intended to assist consumers (here, modeling agencies) in their recognition. An example of the failure of commercial multiculturalism to comprehend the politics of race and ethnicity occurred during the fourth season, when Rebecca, a white competitor, won a challenge and received a shopping spree at a shoe boutique, which she shared with five fellow contestants of her choosing. Rebecca chose four other white girls and the light- skinned Naima (interestingly, when women of color win these competitions, they tend to select a more racially diverse entourage of fellow contestants). The remaining women (mostly women of color) were required to wait on them as shop girls, serving them chocolates, fetching and returning shoes from/to the stockroom, and helping slide shoes onto their feet. Inspired, Rebecca reveled in her victory by abusing the losers with a demanding yet dismissive attitude. Astonishingly, her behavior went unremarked by narrative of the show. Within ANTM’s neoliberal ideology of apolitical multiculturalism,

Downloaded By: [University of California, Santa Barbara] At: 21:01 13 September 2010 scenes like the one described here are unproblematically presented as the apolitical triumph of winner over loser. But we cannot and should not ignore that the lasting and disturbing image painted during this episode was of (mostly) black women holding trays of candy and standing aside seated white women, while other women of color knelt on the floor to fit shoes on their feet. The racial exclusivity of the white contestants and Rebecca’s condescension (both of which the show failed to challenge) normalized white discrimination and black servitude.

Optional Ethnicity Commercial multiculturalism’s suppression of the material implications of difference is facilitated on ANTM by the notion of “optional ethnicity.” Alba has described the way in 342 MARY THOMPSON

which ethnicity, for white ethnic groups in America, varies widely in “saliency or intensity” (1990, p. 294), meaning that white ethnics select whether or not to value part, all, or none of their individual heritages and usually perceive ethnic identity as divorced from larger social structures and more as a connection with family history. Richard Alba argues that

whites are largely free to identify themselves as they will and to make these identities as important as they like. This is especially true of the emerging majority of white Americans who come from mixed ethnic backgrounds, who can present and think of themselves in terms of a hybrid identity, or emphasize one ethnic component while recognizing the other (or others), or simplify their background by dropping all but one of its components, or deny altogether the relevance of their ethnic background. (1990, p. 295)

While Alba’s research examines white ethnic identities specifically, other critics, such as Waters have extended his findings to suggest the significance of optional ethnic identity in larger thinking about the politics of race and ethnic difference. In her work, Ethnic Options (1990), Waters argues that white, European Americans have choices when it comes to acknowledging (or “embracing”) their ethnic identities. Members of such groups—she uses, for example, Irish and Italian identities—can choose to identify as white or simply “American,” or they can select one of their European heritages with which to identify. Waters terms this identification “symbolic ethnicity” and argues that there is no cost to the (white) individual in forming this allegiance. Alba and Waters’s observation that dominant society perceives ethnicity as optional— and something to be deployed advantageously—is reflected in ANTM’s neoliberal treatment of ethnicity. On ANTM, ethnicity is commodified as a style or fashion accessory that should be turned on and off according to the particular demands of neoliberal ideology in any given situation as it affords the individual model “cultural capital.” For example, one of the more disturbing photo shoots of the fourth season, which astonishingly has been repeated in the thirteenth season, required the models to assume a race or ethnic identity other than their own by using “traditional” costume and blackface and whiteface makeup. The now-defunct UPN website summary described this episode with a wildly irresponsible assessment of the photo shoot’s challenges:

The next day the girls are ready bright and early for their photo challenge: an ad for “Got Milk” in which they will all acquire a new ethnic persona through the power of makeup. Christina: East Indian, Tiffany: Native American, Michelle: Eskimo, Naima: Icelandic, Tatiana: biracial and Lluvy: Swedish, Brittany: African-American, Keenyah: Korean, Kahlen: Downloaded By: [University of California, Santa Barbara] At: 21:01 13 September 2010 Hawai’ian, Rebecca: Italian and Noelle: African. Noelle is half black, so she is proud to be transformed. There’s something even more challenging to this shoot: the girls will be posing with a three-year-old child in their arms ... Naima was more concerned with her change of skin color, which is “a little mind-blowing, but it goes to show you’re ultimately defined by who you are, [and] not the outside.”

This challenge clearly reflects the values of commercial multiculturalism in the idea that race and ethnicity are purely surface concerns—not political ones attached to the material conditions of life. Naima, perhaps due to her perspective as a biracial woman, is the only model shown to reflect on the problematic assignment—though only commenting that is was “mind blowing”—but ultimately she adopts the “appropriate” attitude and wins the competition. Her statement (which mirrors the rhetoric of Tyra’s Beauty Inside and Out), “LEARN SOMETHING FROM THIS!” 343

however, reveals the extreme logic to which commercial multiculturalism can be pushed: identifying with an ethnicity is purely the individual’s choice. To return to Duggan’s (2003) claim that neoliberalism signals the relentless upward redistribution of resources and privilege, it is important to note Waters’s (1990) point that for non-European Americans ethnic identity has “costs,” of which white, European Americans remain unaware because of their belief that ethnic belonging is a painless option or choice. She argues, “if your understanding of your own ethnicity and its relationship to society and politics is one of individual choice, it becomes harder to understand the need for programs like affirmative action, which recognizes the ongoing need for group struggle and group recognition in order to bring about social change” (Waters 1990, p. 163). While it may seem like ANTM and the fashion industry generally are expanding definitions of beauty by including more models of color, the reality may be that representing ethnicity as optional may in fact complicate or silence difficult cultural conversations about race/ethnicity and inequality in this country.

Being Too Ethnic ANTM also invites viewers to identify inappropriate expressions of gendered racial/ethnic identity. On the one hand, women of color on ANTM are encouraged and even required to identify with their ethnic heritage, and those who would reject their heritage or question another woman’s embracement are punished. On the other hand, another message reflected in the judges’ commentary and the choice of the competition’s winners is that being “too ethnic” irreparably limits a woman’s chances in the modeling world. In this manner, ANTM reflects the neoliberal belief that the individual’s choices to conform determine her success or failure in the marketplace. However, the belief in “choice” in these situations hides how women of color have been eliminated by the judges after being caught in a double-bind of ethnic identity: while being encouraged to embrace their ethnicity, the women are simultaneously reduced to racial/ethnic stereotypes and told they lack the versatility necessary to succeed. For example, Sara, who “embraced” her Persian heritage, was eliminated in season two after a challenge involving dancing for a rap video; during the judging, Janice Dickinson dismissed Sara, observing that she “looked like she was belly dancing.” This off the cuff comment, following so closely on the praise Sara received for identifying with her heritage, suggests that her elimination was because of it. Additionally, during the second season of ANTM, April faces a similar struggle between being told to embrace her heritage

Downloaded By: [University of California, Santa Barbara] At: 21:01 13 September 2010 and being reduced to its stereotype. The judges initially tell April she must embrace her “exotic” Asian look, but ultimately she is eliminated because, Banks and the judges claim, she is too technical and “she thinks but doesn’t feel,” the stereotype of the Asian intellectual. Similarly, during the third season, Julie, whose parents are Indian immigrants, explains that she wants to challenge the image of Indians as only doctors and engineers, so she instead seeks a career in fashion; however, when she expresses interest in the business of apparel manufacturing, the judges eliminate her for approaching modeling too intellectually. This double-bind becomes more pronounced for black contestants. For example, during the second season, Camille (a former Miss Jamaica) claims during a judging session that she typically wears the colors of Jamaica as an expression of her ethnic heritage. She is then told by Banks that “clinging” to her heritage will decrease her versatility in the 344 MARY THOMPSON

modeling business and that she is “acting too black.” Similarly, in the third season, YaYa introduces herself to the judging panel by expressing her desire to challenge the fashion world to recognize that “black is beautiful”; she is described by the judges as “Afrocentric” and later, as part of a make-over, is debraided with the explanation that taking the braids out of her hair will make her a more versatile model. And, as I will discuss later, the “ghetto- fabulous” style of Tiffany, an African American contestant in season four, ultimately becomes a marker of unassimilated identity and the basis for her dismissal.

Being a Blank Palette Over the seasons, ANTM has privileged the unmarked white body for the idealized role of “blank palette” and eliminated women implicitly or explicitly deemed by the judges to be “too ethnic.” Whiteness, cultural critics such as Rothenberg have observed, is understood within western culture as the default, neutral norm, a condition that renders it invisible and thus obscures its power and privilege (Dyer 1997; Lipsitz 1998; Rothenberg 2005). In the context of neoliberal ideology, the invisibility of whiteness and white privilege intensifies with the belief that race no longer matters and that achievement is equally obtainable to all who seek it. Success, in such a worldview blind to structural inequalities and hidden privileges, is a matter of making good choices. On ANTM, contestants of color struggle to make such “good choices,” through their strategic performances and downplaying of markers of difference. Repeatedly over the seasons, Banks has explained that “part of being a top model is about being a blank palette” (Franklin 2005, p. 144), meaning a model must be malleable to client-designers’ needs and provide them with a “neutral” canvas available for reflecting various styles. And consistently, white contestants (or those who are best able to approximate whiteness) are rewarded for this reason. For example, during season four, the aforementioned Rebecca from the shoe store scene is the judges’ early favorite because she is a “clean palette.” I want to suggest that it is Rebecca’s whiteness that signals to the judges the idea of a blank palette. To return briefly to the scene in the shoe store, my belief is that the scene escaped critical notice by the editors because the dynamic between Rebecca and the nonwhite contestants who must wait on her is not unlike a familiar racial and gendered aesthetic that critics (Collins 2002; O’Grady 1992) have since observed in European portraiture such as Manet’s Olympia. This well known image relies on a racialized dynamic of womanhood in which the white woman’s unmarked body and beauty is understood in contrast to the marked body of the black woman’s servile and sexualized

Downloaded By: [University of California, Santa Barbara] At: 21:01 13 September 2010 body. In Black Looks, hooks posited that “[i]n contemporary postmodern fashion sense, the black female is the best medium for the showing of clothes because her image does not detract from the outfit; it is subordinated” (1992, pp. 71–72). However, this observation does not prove true within the discourse of ANTM. Although hooks accurately observes that the model’s body must be subordinated to the clothing, a more powerful requirement of the ANTM judges is that the model’s body not interfere with or distract from the “look” of the moment, an expression of dominant norms of femininity and beauty (Craik 1994). Whiteness, the unmarked norm of femininity and beauty, is the “blank palette” on which designers cast their creations, while nonwhiteness is “marked.” A brief survey of the apparent racial identities of the first ten seasons’ winners reveals that whiteness or light-skinned nonwhiteness are repeatedly rewarded on the show. The first two (white) winners of ANTM, Adrianne and Yoanna (who, despite identifying her “LEARN SOMETHING FROM THIS!” 345

mother as being from Mexico, does not claim to be Hispanic), were described as “versatile” and “chameleon-like,” and while half of the winners so far over ten seasons have been women of color, three of the five have been very light-skinned black women (Eva, Naima, and Saleisha) and one has been Latina (Jaslene). Only one dark-skinned contestant, Danielle (season six) has been a winner on ANTM, though, as Hasinoff (2008) observes, she had to go through a process of shedding her markers of difference: she shakily agreed to have the distinct gap in her teeth (of which she was determinedly proud) minimized by cosmetic dentistry and to alter her Southern black vernacular speech to sound more standardized. The racial (and class) markers that serve as foils to normative Eurocentric femininity consistently override ANTM’s presumed best intentions to judge women of color fairly and objectively. While Danielle’s make-over serves as one example of ANTM’s preoccupation with markers of difference, the earlier dramatic expulsion of another black woman in season four offers another. The most memorable moment from season four came in the fifth episode with the elimination of Tiffany, an African American, single mother and “reformed ghetto-girl” (according to Banks’s voiced-over narration), who laughed off her loss, igniting a now-infamous black-woman-on-black-woman “Tyrade,” during which the supermodel, apparently enraged by her protege’s failure to pull herself up from the ghetto by her fashionable bootstraps, delivered the condescending directive: “You think this is a joke? Learn something from this!” Why was Tiffany eliminated, and why did Banks become so enraged at her? While the show offers one explanation—she was a bad choice maker who failed to take advantage of the opportunities afforded her—I want to suggest another interpretation. As the unassimilated Other, she served as an instrumental foil to Banks’s own postfeminist masquerade of successful neoliberal ethnic and gendered identity. Tiffany did not fail at “taking advantage of opportunities” so much as she foregrounded the real context of gendered, racial, and class-based inequality in American society. Banks’s response to her “failure” expresses McRobbie’s (2009) idea of “disarticulation”—the breaking apart of solidarity across lines of gender, ethnicity, and class. Rather than recognizing any social basis for gendered and racial solidarity, Banks saw Tiffany as an abject poor choice maker. Initially, Tiffany started on ANTM during the third season, but, the UPN website reported, “Tiffany’s temper got the better of her during a raucous evening out on the town,” and she was eliminated; however, the 22-year-old from Miami was conditionally readmitted to the show during season four despite being repeatedly described as “ghetto” by Banks and the judges. Much was made during season four of how much Tiffany needed the opportunity that ANTM offered her, and how she had gone so far as to take anger management courses. But Tiffany remained unassimilated or, in the discourse used by the

Downloaded By: [University of California, Santa Barbara] At: 21:01 13 September 2010 judges elsewhere, “too ethnic.” Already framed as “the angry black woman,” I want to suggest that Tiffany’s personal “ghetto-fabulous” style also contributed to the perception of her as “too ethnic.” ANTM has at times celebrated ghetto fabulous style through the inclusion of Kimora Lee Simmons, the creator of the urban fashion label Baby Phat,asa celebrity judge. In the case of Simmons, an established and wealthy designer who represents the commercial cooptation of the style, ghetto fabulous signifies conspicuous consumption and flair born of class mobility. In the case of Tiffany, however, ghetto- fabulous style signified something else entirely: unassimilated, urban, black gendered identity. A “polysemic signifier” (Mukherjee 2006, p. 613), ghetto fabulous’s use of over-the- top accessories, erotic and colorful clothing, as well as elaborate hairstyles, has mutated over the past decade through cooptation and appropriation, leading critics to such assessments of its meaning as a subversion of exclusive white norms of femininity or a form 346 MARY THOMPSON

of pathological consumerism (Mukherjee 2006; Shaw 2005). Critics more attentive to class dynamics have argued that, in its repudiation of “reified racial identities,” ghetto fabulous becomes a means for partial and incomplete self-expression, or it acts as a marker of class-based racial authenticity that talks back to middle class black censure (Mukherjee 2006, pp. 611–612). It is this last interpretation of the style that seems to best explain Banks’s virulent rejection of Tiffany. Tiffany’s gesture of laughing off her loss arose from what appeared to be her recognition of the double-bind in which she was caught by the show. On the one hand expected to seize the opportunity offered her by choosing to assimilate into a “blank palette” presumed free of ethnic and class privileges, Tiffany was, on the other hand, repeatedly reminded of her inability to do so. Viewers watched Tiffany over season four grow increasingly less confident in her looks and abilities as the judges chided her for her disastrous attempts at ballet and tennis, and for her nonstandard speech. In the episode of her elimination, Tiffany participated in an acting competition reciting Eliza Doolittle lines and a spokesperson competition in which she read off names of haute couture designers from a teleprompter. She failed spectacularly at adopting a Cockney accent and pronouncing the designers’ names, but it also became clear that Tiffany lacked what Bourdieu would call cultural capital: she had never taken ballet or tennis lessons, never seen My Fair Lady or read magazines promoting these fashion designers, and spoke using nonstandard, black vernacular English with a Southern accent. By the end of the episode, Tiffany was clearly humiliated, confessing to the judges, “I’m sick of crying about stuff that I can’t change, I’m sick of being disappointed, I’m sick of all of it.” In neoliberal fashion, however, Banks interprets her lack of the necessary cultural capital as a self-defeatist attitude and lack of desire to succeed. After hearing her confession, Banks called Tiffany back and bellicosely scolded her: “Stop it! We were all rooting for you ... Learn something from this! Take responsibility for yourself, because nobody is going to take responsibility for you. You might need a little more time to look in that mirror, find some self-esteem and start loving yourself.” Tiffany’s apparent failure to “take responsibility” for her loss frames her attitude as the cause of her elimination and effaces the judges’ role as well as any social context for understanding the operation of cultural capital and privilege. Looking more closely at the judges’ and Banks’s responses to Tiffany, however, suggests that intersecting racial and class ideologies inform much of their commentary. No other models received such a violent reaction from Banks, so we might ask why she was offended by Tiffany’s inability, in particular, to assimilate to model ethnic and gender norms? The answer lies

Downloaded By: [University of California, Santa Barbara] At: 21:01 13 September 2010 in Tiffany’s ghetto-fabulous style for various reasons. Following Mukherjee’s reading of ghetto-fabulous meanings, Tiffany’s style represented unassimilated, “authentic” urban blackness, credited at times with “rebellious creativity and stylish daring” (Mukherjee 2006, p. 601) and offering contrasting challenge to Banks’s assimilated, suburban identity. On a symbolic level, though, Tiffany, a single mother, came to stand in for the ghetto welfare queen, who, as the antithesis of neoliberal values, is presumed unable or unwilling to appreciate opportunities to “improve” herself.5 This stereotype served as a more positive foil for Banks’s image as a successful black woman who has made it in a white-dominated profession. Just as Mammy serves as the “alter ego to women like the lithe, fair-skinned Vanessa Williams” (Shaw 2005, p. 145), so Tiffany’s unassimilated ghetto-fabulous attitude became an alter ego to Banks’s own neoliberal commercial triumph.6 Either way, Tiffany, her ghetto-fabulous style and its reminders of class and racial inequality, had to go. “LEARN SOMETHING FROM THIS!” 347

In producing conflicting messages to “own” one’s heritage but to avoid appearing too ethnic, ANTM foregrounds the impossible demands of neoliberal multiculturalism on women of color. Moreover, because the racial meaning of what being a blank palette implies is never overtly discussed on ANTM, the elimination of women of color from the competition is attributed to their lack of versatility rather than to the industry’s racism and classism. As a result, embracing one’s ethnicity comes at a high and unchallenged price for contestants on ANTM.

What Do “We” Learn From This? What do “we” learn from the lesson of Tiffany and the other women of color on ANTM? Contestants learn that to succeed on reality television, women of color must identify and express self-confidence in their heritage as a self-commodifying, branding gesture; however, this ethnic identity must be either recognizable to dominant groups (a nonthreatening, apolitical stereotype) or it must perform an approximation of whiteness in order to be successful. Above all else, ethnicity is represented as a choice, an option, which the individual can choose to strategically but selectively deploy. Politicized identities are discouraged through elimination even as the need for a politicized worldview is represented as unnecessary. Viewers thus receive uncritical instruction in the values of neoliberal ideology, including personal responsibility, choice, and public surveillance of one’s choices. As Angela McRobbie observes,

Choice is surely, within lifestyle culture, a modality of constraint. The individual is compelled to be the kind of subject who can make the right choices. By these means new lines and demarcations are drawn between those subjects who are judged responsive to the regime of personal responsibility, and those who fail miserably. (2009, p. 19)

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, 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

Downloaded By: [University of California, Santa Barbara] At: 21:01 13 September 2010 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, 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) 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 348 MARY THOMPSON

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; hooks 1992; Kondo 1997; Negra 2001; Roberts 1997; Wallace-Sanders 2002; Williams 1991). 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; 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] 1997), black women were believed to stand in contrast to patriarchal white femininity and its characteristics of frailty, innocence, and purity. hooks (1992, 2003) and others (Bordo 1993; Morton 1991; Rooks 1996; Wallace 2004) 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

Downloaded By: [University of California, Santa Barbara] At: 21:01 13 September 2010 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) 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). 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 “LEARN SOMETHING FROM THIS!” 349

automatically correspond with politicization, the development of an oppositional gaze. (quoted in Amelia Jones 2003, 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] 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). 5. For an analysis of reality TV’s fostering of the ideology of “personal responsibility” in particular, see Ouellette (2009). 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

Downloaded By: [University of California, Santa Barbara] At: 21:01 13 September 2010 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 350 MARY THOMPSON

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.

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Mary Thompson is Associate Professor of English at James Madison University, where she co-coordinates the Women’s Studies Program and teaches American and women’s literatures. Her research examines representations of women’s bodies and reproductive justice in literature and popular texts. E-mail: [email protected] Downloaded By: [University of California, Santa Barbara] At: 21:01 13 September 2010