The Bachelor: Whiteness in the Harem

Abstract

This examination of the representation of whiteness and women of color in the reality-based television series The Bachelor shows how the series is “raced.” It is a context in which only white people find romantic partners, a process that women of color work to facilitate. The Westernized trope of the Eastern harem structures The Bachelor, duplicating in the series the imperialist, Orientalist, and oppressive racist premises of the harem trope.

Keywords:

• Whiteness
• Harem
• Orientalism
• Race
• Reality TV
• The Bachelor

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Kent A. Ono, Debby Dubrofsky, Linda Steiner, and Susan J. Harewood for their invaluable contributions to this article.

Notes

1. See Hill and Palmer (2002); Ross and Moorti (2004a, 2004b); Friedman's (2002) edited collection Reality Squared; Murray and Ouellette's (2004) edited collection Reality TV; and Andrejevic's work (2002, 2004).

2. Maher (2004) and Stephens (2004) discuss women in reality-based shows. Kraszewski (2004), Nadel (2002), Derosia (2002), and Orbe, Warren, and Cornwell (2001) discuss race and reality-based programming. Articles in Entertainment Weekly criticize the overt racism of The Apprentice and reality-based programming producer Mark Burnett's cavalier attitude about race (Harris, 2004a, 2004b). Two points are noteworthy: First, scholarship on people of color on TV is primarily about representations of black people. Second, scholarship on media portrayals of black people is useful for discussions of TV representations of people of color.

3. The Bachelor generated three seasons of The Bachelorette, where one woman chooses among 25 men. All the women in The Bachelorette were white.

4. Participants can leave at any point: On season three, and again in season six, one woman left before the second rose ceremony; in season five, a woman told the bachelor in private before the second rose ceremony that she wanted to leave (the bachelor does not offer her a rose).

5. All the women appear in bikinis at some point and we see close-ups of their bodies, but Mary is the only one for whom the core visual motif is her bottom.

6. Ono notes how in Buffy The Vampire Slayer the use of a mock accent to communicate to a person who speaks a different language and who is from a different culture becomes an exercise in xenophobia (2000, pp. 172–177).

7. While many women across the seasons complain about being unfairly treated by the bachelor or by the competing women, only one other woman, Lee-Ann (a white woman in season four), critiques the unfair set-up.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rachel E. Dubrofsky

Rachel E. Dubrofsky is a post-doctoral fellow in Communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and a Research Associate at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University. The work is based on her dissertation, completed at UIUC