“Learn Something from This!”

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.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 27 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.