“Tyra Banks Is Fat”: Reading (Post-)Racism and (Post-)Feminism in the New Millennium

Abstract

In the new millennium United States, race and gender are popularly understood, from legislation to television, as personal, individual, and mutable traits and not structural, institutional, and historic forces. The incredible popularity of African-American supermodel cum media mogul Tyra Banks reflects, creates, and perpetuates such post-racial and post-feminist ideologies. In this paper I examine the recent infotainment-media scrutiny of Banks's weight gain and her publicity team's carefully scripted “so what!” retort. I thus explore how the figure of Tyra Banks functions as a celebrity-exemplar of the post-feminist/post-racial U.S.

Keywords:

• African American
• Gender
• Race
• Women of Color
• Post-identity
• Colorblindness
• Post-Race
• Post-Feminism

Notes

1. This focus on black women “below the neck” can be traced through any number of figures, including Sarah Baartman, the eighteenth-century Khoisan woman better known as the “Hottentot Venus,” whose naked body was displayed in an animal cage when alive and whose genitalia were cast in wax for display after her death. Baartman was subjected to such debasement and violence because she was read as sexually dangerous and thus deserving of imprisonment and exhibition (Sharpley-Whiting, 1999). For hundreds of years black female bodies have been represented as not only sexually available but also complicit in their exploitation. In fact, in order to enjoy popular and commercial success African-American women have sometimes been forced to take such exploitative roles. In an example of a contemporary representation, mixed-race African-American actress Halle Berry took a much lauded Academy Award-winning turn in 2001's Monster's Ball when she portrayed Leticia, a woman having an affair with a character played by Billy Bob Thornton, a white male prison guard and executioner of Leticia's African-American husband. In the film's climactic sex scene Berry repeatedly screams out to Thornton, who one could argue functions as the very agent of her oppression, “Make me feel good!” Berry's portrayal of Leticia follows a long line of chattel-slavery-based iterations of the “tragic mulatta” and “jezebel,” controlling images documented by scholars like Deborah Gray White (1999). Berry was awarded the United States cinema industry's highest honor for this portrayal.

2. In addition, historian David Hollinger (1995) uses the term “post-ethnic” in a prescriptive, celebratory manner. All of the scholars I have listed and a number of others also simultaneously use “post-civil rights” and the other terms, sometimes interchangeably.

3. Although post-feminism enjoys more cache as a buzzword, particularly in the media, it appears to be rhetorically conjured more infrequently for support of political measures than post-race. While there is certainly a post-racial, or perhaps more specifically, racially flexible, aesthetic, scholars like Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra illustrate that post-feminism truly revels in its stylistic underpinnings (2007).

4. Here is a complete list of countries with a national version of Top Model: Australia, Canada, France, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Norway, the Philippines, Russia, Scandinavia (with contestants from Norway, Denmark, and Sweden), Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, and the UK (Sales, 2007).

5. I use the term “white” as opposed to “Anglo-American” or “European-American” to mark a linguistic difference between the groups of color and whites. I wish to underscore the fact white is expression of power and not merely an expression of ethnicity.

6. My goal to identify ideological rupture in the post- is inspired by Daphne Brooks's (2006) stated aim to name “the ruptures and blind spots where … performers defy the expectations and desires of the audience member/recorder” (p. 10).

7. The racialized and gendered concept of self-esteem has been operative in such important political moments as the black dolls/white dolls experiment used by psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Phipps Clark (1953). In the Supreme Court Case that ended de jure racial segregation, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954), the Clarks’ research was used to link internalized racism and the psychological harm to black children of segregated schools (Clark, 1953).

8. In a series of essays Stuart Hall (1996a, 1991) coalesces and expands various theories on ideology, illustrating that ideology marks how we think about, represent, interpret, and make sense of the world. Ideology is an inherently politicized notion; it cannot remain on neutral terrain because as a set of ideas and beliefs it is used as a means to justify conditions of existence. Ideology, functioning as part and parcel of hegemony, is thus how a group in power maintains maximum control with minimum conflict. Hall (1981) argues that ideologies do not remain as isolated, separate concepts but instead function as a varied “chain of meanings” that dictate virtually all thought and action (p. 89). In other words, while we believe ourselves to produce truth, we really just produce ideologies, or, as Hall states, we “formulate intentions within ideology” (p. 90).

9. Indeed, this is not an isolated reaction. A cursory examination of the spring 2007 Don Imus scandal, when Imus referred to the Rutgers University women's basketball players as “nappy headed hos,” illustrates a rupture in post- notions usually so prevalent in popular culture (Steinberg & McBride, 2007). In the aftermath of Imus's racist, misogynistic, and homophobic comments, race, gender, and sexuality were “exposed” for the U.S. public as undeniably central and explicit in the events themselves and their media coverage, and these two—the “truth” of the event and its media coverage—prove impossible to pry apart. For all of the ideas that circulate to illustrate the still racist and still sexist nature of U.S. society, other equally powerful voices counteract these ideas by saying: Imus is simply exercising his first amendment rights, he is only one voice, one individual, (an assumed white) “we” do not feel like that; or, in an articulation of the post-racial sentiment underscoring these statements, white people would not even know how to be racist, homophobic, or sexist without the African-American art form of hip hop. In other words, Imus expressed an isolated, personal opinion and did not issue an attack reflecting structural, institutional, and historic violations of black women's bodies.

10. At a public lecture at the University of Washington on April 17, 2007, Angela Davis described Condaleeza Rice's narrativization of her own life story as doing a similar thing—articulating racism and sexism in order to arrive at a post- where she can claim “So what?” It's the post-racialized and post-feminized story encoded in the American Dream.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ralina L. Joseph

Ralina Landwehr Joseph is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Washington