“It’s Top Chef, not a personality contest”: grammars of stereotype, neoliberal logics of personhood, and the performance of the racialized self in Top Chef: New York

ABSTRACT

This article explores the intersections of racial identity performance, culinary style, and neoliberal logics within reality cooking television. By close reading the performance and evaluation of Top Chef: New York contestant Carla Hall, this article argues that reality cooking competitions depend on a grammar of stereotype in order to transform contestants into characters, and the contestants both acquiesce to and resist these preconceived notions, sometimes simultaneously. Neoliberal logics of personhood both constrain contestants within their ‘characters’/‘brands’ and also allow chefs to agentially and reflexively self-construct particular personas out of their own culinary ethos. Relatedly, food operates as a multivalent racialized signifier of identity, in which the contestants racialize the food and the food racializes the contestants. As Carla Hall’s performance in Top Chef: New York demonstrates, reality cooking competitions place demands on their contestants to ‘appropriately’ perform their identities, and contestants are evaluated by both the judges and the viewers on how they navigate these performances. This article contends that in its reliance on racial stereotype and conflations between labor, identity, and being, Top Chef propagates neoliberal and multicultural/postracial logics, demanding that its contestants of color perform their individualized, racialized identities in ways that the program deems ‘authentic’ and ‘appropriate’.

KEYWORDS:

• Reality television
• Top Chef
• popular culture
• race
• neoliberalism
• identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The gamedoc format may allow self-aware contestants to strategically harness, deploy, and/or defy the stereotypical stock-character slot the show’s editing creates for them, as Grace Wang and Timothy K. August argue season-three winner Hung Hyunh did through his Vietnamese American identity in Top Chef: Miami (Wang 2010, 406–417; August 2012, 99–105).

2. For instance, almost any chef who focuses on molecular gastronomy will inevitably be compared (by themselves, the judges, or the other contestants) to Los Angeles’s Marcel Vigneron or Chicago’s Richard Blais, who also both appeared on the first All-Stars season of Top Chef. As of 2022, Top Chef has had two All-Stars seasons (season 8 [2010–2011] and season 17 [2020]), and the upcoming season 20 (2023) will feature a cast of ‘world all-stars’—contestants from across the various international iterations of the format.

3. In his auto-ethnographic article about his time on Big Brother, Ragan Fox utilizes a phenomenological framework to suggest that reality show contestants can utilize ‘protention’ and ‘retention’ to anticipate scenarios in the reality context and act accordingly. Fox (2013) explains how ‘a contestant on Big Brother, for example, may justify lying and backstabbing if he or she has seen those strategies work in previous seasons of the show (retention) and believes similar performances may increase his or her ability to win $500,000 (protention)’ (192). Top Chef contestants similarly deploy protention and retention, particularly with regard to the series’ own tropes – in almost every season of Top Chef after seasons three (Miami) and four (Chicago), a contestant will try to avoid making dessert due to its reputation for getting chefs eliminated, even though chefs are actually twice as likely to go home for making vegetarian food and six times more likely to go home for making seafood than they are for making dessert (Fisher). The disparity between the narrative and data around cooking dessert speaks to the power of self-reflexive narrative construction within Top Chef.

4. For more extended analysis on the specific economic dynamics of reality television, see Bergman et al. (2018) and Deery (2014).

5. ‘Frankenbiting’ refers to the editing of multiple separate audio clips to create a new audio clip that appears to be a single clip. Frankenbiting can be used to edit contestant interviews for clarity, but it can also be used to create entirely new sentences that were never actually spoken by the contestants. The Bachelor franchise is particularly notorious for frankenbiting individual words into totally new sentences.

6. In her article, Squires (2014) specifically discusses America’s Next Top Model, which demonstrates the kind of discipline she references in even more overt ways than does Top Chef.

7. Hall certainly has had more culinary success and continued television exposure than New York’s winner Hosea Rosenberg.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Olivia Stowell

Olivia Stowell is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at the University of Michigan, where she studies the intersections of race, genre & narrative, food, and temporality in contemporary popular culture. Her scholarship has appeared in Television & New Media and in the forthcoming volume Feminist Posthumanism in Contemporary Science Fiction Film and Media, and her public writing has appeared in Post45 Contemporaries, Novel Dialogue, Avidly: A Channel of the L.A. Review of Books, and elsewhere.