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Critical Studies in Media Communication
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Performing Race in Flavor of Love and The Bachelor
Rachel E. Dubrofsky; Antoine Hardy
To cite this Article Dubrofsky, Rachel E. and Hardy, Antoine(2008) 'Performing Race in Flavor of Love and The Bachelor',
Critical Studies in Media Communication, 25: 4, 373 — 392
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/15295030802327774
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15295030802327774
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Critical Studies in Media Communication
Vol. 25, No. 4, October 2008, pp. 373392
Performing Race in Flavor of Love and
The Bachelor
Downloaded By: [Institute of Education, University of London] At: 21:11 27 February 2011
Rachel E. Dubrofsky & Antoine Hardy
Using the reality TV (RTV) shows Flavor of Love and The Bachelor, we ask how the
space of RTV is raced. Might the use of surveillance footage and reliance on notions of
authenticity create a space where people constructed as a certain race are privileged? Are
the qualities valorized in a participant on a White-centered show*comfort with being
under surveillance, appearance of not performing*aligned with discourses of Whiteness?
How, then, to understand the construction on Flavor of Love of participants selfconsciously claiming and performing an identity? We argue that while it is true Flavor of
Love animates racial stereotypes, it also allows for fluid and complex understandings of
Black identity through active claiming of identities*in contrast to the restrictive
naturalized White identities presented on The Bachelor. As RTV shows emerge featuring
people of color, it will be the critics’ responsibility to identify if RTV becomes a Televisual
ghetto where only certain performances of race are allowed or if RTV can be a space
where diverse conceptions of race are animated. Scholarship on RTV needs to find new
ways to express the complexity of surveillance and notions of authenticity as they
intersect in the display of raced identities.
Keywords: Whiteness; Blackness; Surveillance; Reality TV; Performance; Flavor of Love,
The Bachelor
Ghetto is as ghetto does, but where I live in the ghetto there aren’t too many White
girls up in there being all ghetto like that. I can’t really figure out if that shit is real
or not. (Darra ‘‘Like Dat’’ Boyd, Season two, Flavor of Love).
Since the success of the first season of Survivor on CBS in 1999, contemporary
reality TV (RTV) has become a mainstay of prime-time television programming.
Rachel E. Dubrofsky, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor and Antoine Hardy a doctoral student in the Department
of Communication at the University of South Florida. Email: [email protected]. The authors thank
Debby Dubrofsky for her incredibly attentive editing and support, Kent A. Ono for his wonderful insights, Mark
Orbe for his feedback and support, two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions, and Lorenzo Hardy,
Robin Boylorn, and Keysha Williams for their insight, support, and feedback. Correspondence to: Rachel E.
Dubrofsky, Department of Communication, University of South Florida, 4202 E. Fowler Avenue, CIS 1040,
Tampa, FL 33620-7800, USA; Email: [email protected]
ISSN 1529-5036 (print)/ISSN 1479-5809 (online) # 2008 National Communication Association
DOI: 10.1080/15295030802327774
374 R. E. Dubrofsky and A. Hardy
Scholars have taken note, producing a rich body of work on the topic. A
remarkable aspect of the genre is the fostering of unprecedented racial diversity on
the smallscreen. Accordingly, the topic of race on RTV is attracting increasing
attention from scholars, although this is limited to how race figures in
predominantly White shows: The Bachelor (Dubrofsky, 2006), Real World
(Kraszewski, 2004; Orbe, 1998; Orbe & Hopson, 2002; Orbe, Warren & Cornwell,
2001; Schroeder, 2006), Road Rules (Andrejevic & Colby, 2006), America’s Most
Wanted (Derosia, 2002); Survivor (Delisle, 2003; Hubbard & Mathers, 2004;
Vrooman, 2003), and The Amazing Race (Harvey, 2006).
In the last two years, hip-hop’s cultural and corporate caché (Neal, 1997, 2002;
Ogunnaike, 2006; Watts, 1997) has cross-pollinated the RTV genre with Black1 hiphop programming such as The Ultimate Hustler, Making the Band, The Way It Is, Soul
of a Man, Welcome to Hollyhood, The Salt-N-Pepa Show, Gotti’s Way, Life in the Fab
Lane, Run’s House, and the series that is the focus of this article, Flavor of Love. The
paucity of scholarship on these programs may be due to their varied commercial
success compared to major network shows and to their newness, since it can take
several years for scholarship to emerge.
This article adds to the discussion of race and RTV but focuses on the subgenre of
romance in VHI’s Black-centerd show Flavor of Love. As a critical counterpoint, we
use ABC’s The Bachelor, a longer-standing show often considered the prototype of
Flavor of Love. Like many RTV scholars, we are interested in notions of authenticity,
surveillance and the ‘‘real,’’ but we also look at how these intersect with discourses of
Blackness and Whiteness. Gray (2005) insists discussions of race look at how the
television industry governs representations of Black bodies and constructs race in a
particular way, reminding us that television representations of Blackness inform the
way our culture engages race. We ask, what are the ways the space of RTV governs
Black bodies? How might the demands of RTV*the use of surveillance footage and
the reliance on notions of authenticity*create a space where certain racial
performances are privileged?
Race and Ghetto
While we see race as a social, cultural construct, not a biological fact determinative
of behavior, we understand race to be both fluid and grounded in contextual
experiential realities often connected to physical bodies. As Hyun Yi Kang (2002)
suggests, scholarship must not reduce race to bodies when dealing with a visual
medium, so as to trouble understandings of racial categories. However, we need to
keep in mind that ‘‘what matters . . . is the illusion of human bodies’’ (Hyun Yi
Kang, p. 99). At times, we base our noting of race on visible racial markers, which
is necessary to address the social construction of race in media culture. In noting
race, we also include participants’ comments about their ethnic background.
While both shows feature multiracial casts, The Bachelor centers Whiteness, and
Flavor of Love Blackness. Though we analyze both series, we explicitly center Flavor of
Love and Blackness, as one of the authors has published several articles on The
375
Bachelor (Dubrofsky, 2007; Dubrofsky, in press), including one on The Bachelor and
race (Dubrofsky, 2006); we discuss The Bachelor and Whiteness only to articulate the
complexities of Flavor of Love and Blackness.
Flavor of Love is often referred to in the popular press as the ‘‘ghetto’’ version of
The Bachelor (Barney, 2006). The increasing use of the word ‘‘ghetto’’ to signify
Blackness reflects the crossover of hip-hop culture’s use of this term into
mainstream culture (Smith, 1997). ‘‘Ghetto’’ can be deployed as a label for
allegedly dysfunctional behavior (hypersexual, uncouth, criminal, violent, loud) and
values (nontraditional family values, materialism) of Black people from urban
neighborhoods. Conversely, ‘‘ghetto’’ can articulate pride in struggle, creativity, and
the ability to survive amidst economic and criminal dysfunction (Daniels, 2007;
Forman, 2000; George, 1992; Kelley, 1997; Watkins, 1998). ‘‘Ghetto’’ is used on
Flavor of Love to engage in a self-referential process of ‘‘naming’’2 (Burke, 1950),
activating an aesthetic that proudly affirms a Black identity authenticated by poor
urban roots (George, 1992; Keeling, 2003; Kelley, 1994, 1997; Neal, 2002, 2006;
Watkins, 1998); performance of ghetto as a dysfunction is thus conflated with its
performance as a signifier of Black pride.
We are not interested in race as a stable and immutable category, but rather in how
the shows construct race: who is conceived of as White, who as a person of color, and
the consequences of these conceptions within the space of the show.
The Real, the Authentic, and the Performative
As Kilborn (2003) notes, reality on television is ‘‘shaped and offered for sale like any
other consumer product’’ (p. 65), and contingent on many factors, including context
(Delisle, 2003; Dubrofsky, 2007). We do not assume there is a true, essential ‘‘real’’ or
‘‘authentic’’ that can be accessed. Hereafter, we will not put the words ‘‘real’’ and
‘‘authentic’’ in quotation marks, but they should be understood as such to mark their
instability.
We take as a premise that what happens on a RTV show is similar to what occurs
on a scripted show, with the difference that the raw material creating the fiction of
the RTV series is footage of real people doing real things: the magic happens in the
editing room, through the decisions of producers and TV workers (Delisle, 2003;
Dubrofsky, 2006; Kraszewski, 2004). Though RTV features real people as the stars,
the events are ‘‘essentially Televisual production’’ (Kilborn, 2003, p. 74), with
participants producing identities in line with ‘‘the logic and rules sanctioned by the
show’s producers and director’’ (Andrejevic & Colby, 2006, pp. 197198).
Participants on RTV shows perform for the camera, either unwittingly or explicitly,
just as people perform in their daily lives to suit the imperatives of a given situation
(Goffman, 1958; Hill, 2005). We are interested in how the space of a RTV show
constructs participants as performing or not performing, not in assessing if
participants are performing or not. We view all behavior as performance.
The Black-chelor
Flavor of Love has a Black star and predominantly Black cast but self-consciously
acknowledges its appropriation of The Bachelor, a series with a White star and
predominantly White cast. In the first episode of the first season, Flavor Flav (hereafter
‘‘Flavor’’) tells viewers, ‘‘I know many of you have seen that show The Bachelor, but
Flavor is the Black-chelor!’’ Flavor of Love and The Bachelor are very different shows
with different budgets, appearing on networks with different mandates catering to
different audiences. However, the shows represent how race is distributed in the
Televisual world. Flavor of Love is the only version of a love story3 about Black people
in the RTV landscape, which exhibits what Projansky and Ono (1999) call ‘‘strategic
Whiteness:’’ recentering Whiteness without calling explicit attention to this fact. While
it is true that more diversity exists on the smallscreen than ever before, especially with
the advent of RTV, it is also true that the landscape of television centers Whiteness by
featuring White-centered shows on the major networks with the most money and
shows about people of color on smaller cable networks.4 In this landscape, we contend
Flavor of Love enacts the Black tradition of ‘‘appropriation’’ (Gates, 1989), creating
boundaries in relation to the dominant form (The Bachelor) to produce authentic
Black cultural spaces (Johnson, 2003; Langellier, 2003).
The Shows
The popularity of the shows is significant in locating them as important cultural
products. The Bachelor is one of the earliest contemporary RTV shows*one of the
original shows focusing on romance and the most enduring of these.5 Since it first
aired in March 2002, ABC has broadcast an average of two seasons a year, now
totaling eleven seasons, with a scheduled twelfth season for early 2008. The show
engendered three seasons of a spin-off, The Bachelorette, with plans for a fourth
season in 2008. The Bachelor has proved its mettle through consistent ratings (even
when low, ratings have always been respectable), with viewership ebbing and flowing
between 7.9 and 16.7 million viewers (Azote, 2006; Oldenburg, 2004; Patsuris, 2004;
Roccio & Rogers, 2007; Rogers, 2006).
In 2006, Flavor of Love became one of the highest rated television shows in cable
history (Martin, 2006), attracting over six million viewers for the season finale of
season one (Ogunnaike, 2006). The second season, airing in late 2006, garnered 7.5
million viewers for the premiere, shattering its own cable television record (Martin,
2006). While popular in several demographics, the show is a favorite with Black
viewers: one in three tuned in to the season finale of season two, making the show the
highest rated among Black adults (Pepitas, 2006; Wiltz, 2006) in its time slot. A third
season began airing in early 2008.
Flavor of Love is the third RTV series for former Public Enemy member and star of
The Surreal Life and Strange Love. Flavor of Love spawned three spinoffs: I Love New
York; starring former Flavor of Love runner up Tiffany ‘‘New York’’ Pollard; Flavor of
Love Charm School, a program ‘‘reforming’’ the past ‘‘dysfunctional’’ Flavor of Love
377
contestants; and Rock of Love, a White working-class rock-and-roll-based version of
Flavor of Love starring Poison’s Brett Michaels.
The aim of The Bachelor and Flavor of Love is similar: help the starring men find
the ‘perfect’ woman. On each season of The Bachelor, a man selects one woman from
among twenty-five eligible (mostly White) women to be his potential bride. He goes
on a series of dates with the women. At the end of each episode, participants are
eliminated at a ‘‘rose ceremony’’ during which the bachelor gives a rose to each
woman he wants to keep for the next week (the others leave the show), until he makes
his final choice.
On Flavor of Love, twenty women (mostly Black) vie for the chance to be Flavor’s
lady. Flavor submits the women to a battery of tests, after which certain women are
granted ‘‘one-on-one time’’ with Flavor so he can assess their potential to be his
‘‘wifey.’’6 At the end of each episode, Flavor rewards the women who pass the tests
with a huge golden clock medallion worn around the neck*losers are sent home.
Although Flavor has yet to find lasting love, Black women who claim a ghetto identity
have an enduring presence in both seasons: winners Hoopz and Deelishis claim this
identity by emphasizing their roots in inner-city Detroit and their predilection for
violence and confrontation.
Authenticity & Surveillance: Inferential Ethnic Presences
Andrejevic and Colby (2006) engage an insightful discussion about race and ghetto
identity in Road Rules, a predominantly White cast RTV series. They note how
ghetto signifiers are used to authenticate Gladys, a Black woman, as real and
Black*thus disqualifying her from the action (Andrejevic & Colby, 2006). When
Gladys becomes aggressive and confrontational, she is constructed as authentically
ghetto and thus unsuitable for the series. What is key is that ‘‘the reason she had to
leave was the reason for her being recruited to the show in the first place’’
(Andrejevic & Colby, 2006, p. 207); she is cast because she personifies ghetto, and
eliminated because she performs this role too well. This example gets to the crux of
the matter: Gladys is verified as authentically ghetto, therefore authentically Black
and an inappropriate participant for long tenure on the series. Thus, ‘‘Gladys
confirms that being ‘ghetto’ is no justification for acting Black. She ought to simply
choose to do what White people do within this reality: Choose to be White’’
(Andrejevic & Colby, 2006, p. 210). Acting White (and middle-class) might secure
Gladys a more enduring spot on the series, but therein lies the bind; this would
code her as not authentic, as performing an identity. And so the conundrum:
White-centered RTV shows seek participants who appear not to be performing but
rather comfortably revealing an authentic identity, an often difficult position for
Black subjects to occupy in this space.
Shohat (1991) insists we look at ‘‘inferential ethnic presences, that is, the various
ways in which ethnic cultures penetrate the screen without always literally being
represented by ethnic and racial themes or even characters’’ (p. 223). There is an
inferential ethnic presence in requirements for subjects in White-centered RTV
shows: the normative White subject who iterates through the ideal of appearing to
not-perform, of being comfortable under surveillance.
Discussions about the intersection of authenticity and surveillance in the space of
RTV (outlined shortly) align with how Whiteness is conceived in popular discourse:
as a norm, familiar, not strange. Whiteness in popular culture stands for the
nonsignification of race, an absence of race, and as such it ‘‘resists any extensive
characterization that would allow for the mapping of its contours’’ (Nakayama &
Krizek, 1999, p. 88). The privilege of Whiteness is that it couches itself in an absence
of explicit signifiers. This is mirrored in the imperative to not-perform on a RTV
show, which means an erasure of explicit markers of race, class and background*
rather, an erasure of explicit references to these. This reflects Hall’s (2003) notion of
‘‘inferential racism,’’ where racist premises are hard to pin down because they are
naturalized and unacknowledged.
The unself-consciousness with which Whiteness is performed in popular
discourse is mirrored in the unself-consciousness a good RTV participant exhibits
under surveillance. The role of surveillance in RTV is a popular topic among
scholars (Andrejevic, 2004, 2006; Corner, 2002; Couldry, 2002; Dubrofsky, 2007;
Gillespie, 2000; McGrath, 2004; Palmer, 2002; Pecora, 2002). Foucault’s (1995) ideas
about the panopticon as a disciplinary mechanism that organizes and monitors
individuals while simultaneously classifying them as a particular subject are often
cited. Much RTV scholarship argues surveillance is presented as a means of
verifying the authenticity (realness) of participants (Andrejevic, 2004; Couldry,
2002): authenticity is verified when participants appear to be themselves despite the
highly contrived panoptic nature of the settings in which the action unfolds
(Andrejevic, 2004; Couldry, 2002; Gillespie, 2000; Tincknell & Raghuram, 2002).
Articulations of the meaning of surveillance on RTV suggest that ‘‘for a growing
number of people in contemporary Western society, surveillance has become less a
regulative mechanism of authority (either feared as tyrannous or welcomed as
protection) than a pluralist path to self-affirmation’’ (Pecora, 2002, p. 348),
reflecting the idea that people are comfortable with surveillance and welcome it
into their lives as a way of affirming who they are (Andrejevic, 2004; Dubrofsky,
2007). Andrejevic (2002) suggests that part of the work of RTV is to equate
surveillance of the self with comfort with oneself and self-knowledge, and with
normal and real behavior.
Participants’ comfort with being on display must translate into a performance of
not being on display*behaving exactly as they would if alone; authenticity is
measured by one’s ability to remain consistent across disparate social spaces
(Dubrofsky, 2007). Hence, being real means acting under surveillance as one would
if one were not under surveillance. Participants unable to do this are cast as
performing for the camera (Hill, 2007). Kilborn (2003) explains that all RTV
participants agree to participate as television performers and that part of this process
involves how participants are constructed in relation to performativity: either as
performing (not being authentic), or as not-performing (being authentic) (Hill,
2007). Good RTV participants perform not-performing.
379
The valorization of surveillance as a tool to affirm self-knowledge and comfort
with oneself (Andrejevic, 2002) assumes one is dealing with an identity that need not
first be established, an identity that is presumed. As Hill notes in quoting Van
Leeuwen, something is perceived to be authentic if it is ‘‘thought to be true to the
essence of something, to a revealed truth’’ (Hill, 2005, p. 74). On The Bachelor, the
rules of the game are to properly reveal one’s authentic nature under surveillance. The
identity of participants need not be spoken or identified; it is always already there,
ready to be revealed, assumed, just like Whiteness. Black identity, on the other hand,
must often be actively claimed and affirmed: on Flavor of Love, the requirement is to
prove one has an authentic identity and to actively claim it.
Actively claiming one’s identity works counterintuitively in the space of Whitecentered RTV shows, since claiming an identity*explicitly articulating oneself*is
associated with performing an identity, which does not fit the imperative to appear as
if one is not performing.
We argue that the space of the two shows we examine is raced, a space where a
particular race is privileged (Dubrofsky, 2006). The ways that participants
authenticate themselves under surveillance and become viable participants on The
Bachelor privileges a White subject whose race is unseen, unmarked, whereas Flavor of
Love privileges a range of Black subjects who can claim a multiplicity of identities*
although certain identities are privileged.
Confession & Authenticity
The difference in how the trope of confession is used on each series expresses the
raced rules that regulate that space. Ferguson (2004) argues that confession takes a
unique racialized angle for Black subjects, who are often invited to confess on behalf
of their race*generating a subject who confesses racial knowledge of ‘‘otherness’’ (to
Whiteness) and speaks a discourse of ‘‘truth’’ about Blacks as a collective (Yancy,
2004). This is a burden not carried by White subjects. Hence, we watch women on
The Bachelor confess their feelings about the bachelor, each other, and the process,
while the confessions of women on Flavor of Love sometimes address these things but
more often monitor the authenticity of other participants. For instance, on season
two, Chandra ‘‘Deelishis’’ Davis, Shay ‘‘Buckeey’’ Johnson, and Larissa ‘‘Bootz’’
Hodge use confession time to call out other women for not ‘‘keeping it real,’’ not
being ghetto; they become the gatekeepers, confessing the parameters of authenticity
for a particular type of Black identity.
To put this in perspective, White subjects on The Bachelor are not framed as
speaking on behalf of their race. Their authentic identity is not contested: Whiteness
and middle-classness is the default authentic identity that need not be actively
claimed. It is assumed. The series acts as if color is irrelevant, implying racial
differences do not matter (Dubrofsky, 2006), but a survey of the women locates them
very clearly as educated, middle-class (Johnston, 2006) and, for the most part,
possessing White bodies. Color matters*it grants access to the action and rewards of
the series*but is never mentioned. This is the imperative of a space that privileges
Whiteness.
Whitened Identities
Ethnic markers of certain women of color are made invisible on The Bachelor,
Whitening their identity since absence signifies Whiteness. Beltran (2002) uses
Jennifer Lopez as an example of racial hybridity: her body (her derriere) can be
framed sexually, but her pale skin and middle-class behavior can be framed as White.
In RTV, Women of Asian and Hispanic descent are often exemplars of such hybridity.
As Dubrofsky (2006) discusses, discourses of exoticism bubble underneath on The
Bachelor as the ethnicity of Mary Delgado (Cuban American) is erased in favor of a
performance of Whiteness. Mary, who appears on season four and six, is marked
consistently on season four (where she is eliminated by the fourth week) by her
Cuban ethnicity. However, when she returns on season six, her ethnicity is almost
never mentioned and she wins the bachelor’s heart. We do not want to repeat the
work of Dubrofsky’s article, but rather to continue the argument: Tessa Horst, winner
of season ten of The Bachelor (Dubrofsky’s article covers seasons one through eight
only) is Whitened much the same way as Mary.
Visually, Tessa appears bi-racial (Caucasian and East Asian American), but her
racial heritage is never mentioned on the series. Race is not even addressed when
Tessa’s mother appears, though she looks East Asian American (more pronounced
East Asian features, visually, than Tessa). As Takagi (1993) and Omi and Takagi
(1996) suggest, discourses around race in the United States tend to divide along lines
of Black and White, with the experiences of Asian Americans defined in relation to
those of other races (Takagi, 1993). As Tuan (1999) contends, Asian Americans are
classified as not real Americans and not real Asians, existing in a kind of ethnic
vacuum. In addition, Osajima argues (2005) that Asian Americans are constructed as
a model minority: an ideal (resembling Whiteness) other minorities should strive to
imitate. In other words, there is a fluidity to the category Asian American that fits the
presentation of Tessa as not having a racial identity (hence, as White) despite visible
racial signifiers.
One clue that the series works actively not to forefront Tessa’s ethnicity is that her
mother is given no screen time, though mothers are usually the focal point of the
hometown visits*suggesting an effort to avoid drawing attention to Tessa’s ethnic
background. For instance, on this season, as is typical of the hometown visits, when
the bachelor meets Bevin and Danielle’s families (two White women), we see the
mothers express their concern about their daughters moving far away and falling in
love so quickly. A focal point of the visit with Bevin’s family is Bevin’s mom giving the
bachelor and Bevin a painting she made. With Danielle’s family, a central scene is of
Danielle’s mother showing the bachelor how to belly-dance. Indeed, the hometown
visit with Amber, another White woman on this same episode, is presented as
unsatisfying specifically because her parents refuse to meet the bachelor: Amber is
381
eliminated at the end of the episode. Not only is the minimal presence of Tessa’s
mother surprising, so is the fact that this is not presented as an issue.
The series animates the idea that under the best of circumstances (when the
bachelor likes a woman of color), race, and potentially racism, is illusory and can be
transcended (Crenshaw, 1997). As Dubrofsky articulates (2006), the race of women of
color becomes visible if they are eliminated. Not only is race mutable, it is so in ways
that privilege Whiteness. This is in contrast to Flavor of Love, where playing up one’s
racial identity is encouraged: the nicknames for some participants, such as ‘‘Miss
Latin’’ (for a Latin American woman) and ‘‘Red Oyster’’ (for an East Asian American
woman) highlight this imperative.
Black Subjects: Surveillance and Authenticity
Conceiving of RTV as a space where participants must show their comfort with
surveillance assumes the object of the surveilled gaze can become comfortable under
this gaze, use it to affirm itself. This not only naturalizes qualities performed
successfully virtually exclusively by a White subject in this space, it also imagines a
subject that does not view surveillance as working against it. This assumption needs
to be troubled to understand how Black subjects are often articulated in the space of
RTV.7
For a Black subject, the relationship with surveillance can be uneasy. In discussing
surveillance as a law-enforcement mechanism for maintaining order in his work on
performativity in the space of RTV, McGrath (2004) notes that ‘‘the impact of this
policing voice is not felt evenly; certain bodies can more confidently expect to be
believed when they protest their innocence in response to the policing voice’’ (p. 22).
Hence, while surveillance is often justified for purposes of crime prevention and
criticized as an invasion of privacy, this does not address the experiences of, as
McGrath (2004) puts it, a ‘‘Black man under surveillance in the streets of New York or
London’’ (p. 23), since the camera targets him in ways that exceed issues of crime
prevention and invasion of privacy (McGrath, 2004). Add to this the fact that
surveillance is used to verify the authenticity of participants in the space of RTV, and
things become complicated*as notions of authenticity are often integral to the
construction of Black identity in a White nation (West, 1992). For instance, the desire
to articulate ‘‘authentic Blackness’’ for many, often middle-class Blacks, is driven by a
civil-rights edict to disprove historical racist stereotypes used to define Blackness
(Dyson, 2001). Conversely, for some, often working-class Blacks, authenticity is a
postcivil rights discourse of defiance and subjectivity which rejects the goals of the
Black community and the social opinions of Whites, opting instead for local and
specific ideas and goals found in the ‘‘neighborhood they are restricted to’’ (Keeling,
2003, p. 35).
We see possible implications of the convergence of surveillance with notions of
authenticity in Shugart’s (2006) work on court TV shows. She writes that surveillance
frames people of color as individuals who are personally irresponsible, lacking in self
control and undisciplined, displaying racial stereotypes that classify their actions as
indicative of their race. It is a double-bind: people of color under surveillance have
the added burden of speaking for their race, while also, paradoxically, having their
predicaments individualized.
How, then, to understand the presence of Black subjects in this space when
authenticity and performance are tightly intertwined? Johnson (2005) suggests:
Blackness does not only reside in the theatrical fantasy of the White imaginary
that is then projected onto Black bodies. Nor is Blackness always consciously
acted out. It is also the inexpressible yet undeniable racial experience of Black
people*the ways in which ‘the living of Blackness’ become material ways of
knowing . . . The interanimation of Blackness and performance and the tension
between Blackness as ‘play’’ and material reality further complicates the notion of
what constitutes a Black ‘‘performance’’ and of what playing Black is and what
playing Black ain’t. (p. 606).
Johnson identifies the complex nature of performing Blackness as more than just a
reaction to the demands of White surveillance. Black performativity highlights the
slipperiness of ‘‘authentic Blackness’’ and suggests how culturally intrinsic authenticity can be to Black performance (Asante, 1998).
Performing Identities
The tone of each series conveys its valuation of performativity. The Bachelor tells its
story of love with earnest sincerity, devoid of irony or self-consciousness, mirroring
the way it portrays its subjects as unselfconsciously and undoubtedly White and
middle-class. Flavor of Love, on the other hand, is self-consciously humorous, with
over-the-top antics, poking fun at participants through funny graphics,8 fanciful
music, and outrageous action.9 We watch as producers humorously subtitle Flavor
or Darra ‘‘Like Dat’’ Boyd when they speak in heavy slang-filled dialect. The
subtitles suggest that the behavior needs explanation, translation, that it is not
natural, foregrounding that the activities are a performance and calling attention to
the producers’ intervention to give the action meaning: we are seeing a mediated
product.
Both shows are excessive, but only Flavor of Love is self-consciously so. The
Bachelor maintains a tact of normative nonperformance despite its over-the-top,
fairytale notions of romance, heteronormativity, materialism and Whiteness. For
instance, though the producers make sure the men on The Bachelor have jewels,
designer clothes, sports cars, castles, mansions, and private jets at their disposal, the
men are not shown self-consciously performing the role of ideal prince charming but
rather as naturally embodying the qualities of a prince charming, easily laying claim
to the luxuries inherent to the role. Flavor, on the other hand, is the urban pimp10
(Ogunnaike, 2006), with his audacious outfits, rhyming dialogue (Quinn, 2000,
2004) and horny hijinks (Dickerson, 2006). He is a good man in pimp’s clothes*
underneath the pimp lies a heart of gold, but no prince charming. His persona is
marked by self-conscious excess and over-the-top behavior.
383
The performative aspect of Flavor’s presentation is made clear in season two when
New York’s parents come to visit. We watch as New York’s mom, Michelle Patterson,
displays her distaste for Flavor. Runner-up on the first season, New York is invited
back the second season, where she is again the runner-up, and on both seasons Mrs.
Patterson harangues Flavor about his gold teeth and outrageous personality. She asks
‘‘how long does he plan on playing Flavor Flav?’’ and demands to ‘‘see the man,
William Drayton.’’ Flavor responds, ‘‘You are seeing William right now, I’ve taken
Flavor Flav away from the table.’’
By including this scene, producers call attention to the constructed nature of the
star’s identity, conjuring questions about the performative nature of participants and
the stability of claims to authenticity. This makes for a different series than The
Bachelor, where participants must never enact different identities lest they be labeled
mentally unstable (as happens to Lee Ann in season four when fellow-participants
accuse her of performing several personalities), become suspect, are accused of
inconsistency, or of performing for the camera and camouflaging who they are.
Flavor of Love, on the other hand, opens up a space where Flavor can be not only a
man looking for love, but also an entertainer and a performer (performing a
persona). While ghetto identity can be constraining, the series exceeds that identity
and the demand to conform to any single identity.
Deelishis animates long-held stereotypes about Black women as unbridled sexual
animals who invite physical objectification (Giddings, 1984; Hill-Collins, 2004;
hooks, 2004; Jhally, 2007; Morgan, 1999; Neal, 2006, Omolade, 1994; Rose, 1994).
Holmes (2006) and Netto (2005) remind us that the 19th-century exploitation in
European sideshows of the ‘‘abnormally’’ large posterior of Sarah Bartman, the South
African ‘‘Hottentot Venus,’’ set in motion the stereotype of Black women as
hypersexual and of this hypersexuality as something to be gazed upon and
commodified. We see this on Flavor of Love, fanciful music playing as the screen
fills with close-ups of Deelishis’ posterior in too-tight clothing. Deelishis remains in
the background until her derrière becomes a focus in episode three of season two. Her
butt is presented as both excessive (Hill-Collins, 2004; Omolade, 1994; Wallace, 2004)
and oversexed. She is the recipient of Flavor’s many sexual attentions (posterior as
focal point), and she is shown welcoming and encouraging that attention. However,
Deelishis articulates a complex personality: she is not simply a sex object. For
instance, in many scenes we see her emotionally confessing her deep feelings for
Flavor, and in one scene she bonds with Flavor’s children.
New York is also presented in complex ways. She animates racial stereotypes about
Black women with her body presented as excessive (cast-mates refer to her as a ‘‘dragqueen’’) and behavior that locate her as the stereotypical too strong, aggressive Black
women*a typification implying lack of femininity (Giddings, 1984; Wallace, 1979).
As well, while New York never claims a ghetto identity, she personifies the loudness
and hypersexuality linked to ghetto behavior.
New York establishes her role as volatile manipulator and calculating temptress,
pitting the women against each other and spouting hilarious put-downs. In episode
six of season two, she tells Becky ‘‘Buckwild’’ Johnston ‘‘You look like a fairy
princess . . . that resides over the pits of Hell.’’ She also makes over-the-top claims of
superiority, saying things like ‘‘I don’t apologize because I never make, you know,
mistakes.’’
However, the series also shows New York repeatedly confessing devout love for
Flavor, proclaiming her affection in a dreamy voice, eyes closed, and fantasizing about
their future together. We witness tender moments between Flavor and New York, with
Flavor openly appreciating New York’s deep feelings for him and expressing strong
feelings for her. New York also shows a vulnerable side when she pleads with her
mother to accept that she is in love with Flavor.
Though New York’s excessive behavior, emotionality and intensity are presented
as the reason for her elimination, these are nonetheless allowed to thrive. In fact, it
is her excessive and intense emotions for Flavor that win her favor with him.
Conversely, such behavior on The Bachelor *especially the variation in behavior*
is sure cause for early elimination and a spectacular fall from grace. Christi on
season two, for example, is labeled a ‘‘Fatal Attraction Girl’’ because she reveals
such strong feelings for the bachelor. She begins as the perfect match for the
bachelor, but when she becomes emotional and displays strong feelings for him, we
are led to believe excessive emotion overshadows her good qualities (Dubrofsky, in
press). New York, on the other hand, is not shown falling from grace. She is the
same from beginning to end: spectacular, excessively emotional, angry, exhibiting
over-the top behavior, and consistently highly appealing to Flavor. Indeed, her
spectacular performance wins her favor with fans (Denhart, 2006a, b), thus landing
her a starring role in her own show, I Love New York.
The allowance for women who are excessive is not limited to New York. Some of
the most notable examples have to do with bodily functions: in the first episode of
season one, a woman drinks too much and vomits copiously and another reveals her
love for masturbation; in the first episode of season two, a woman defecates on the
floor. Flavor is shown accepting these things, just as he accepts New York. He and
fellow cast-mates poke fun at the women and even get angry at them, but ultimately
the women are presented as multidimensional, their outrageous actions not the sum
of their identity.11
Claiming Identities
As the earlier Gladys example from Road Rules illustrates, one of the few ways Black
participants can appear authentic in the space of RTV is by performing ghetto,
though this ensures their tenure on the show will be brief and dramatic. Perhaps the
logical offshoot of a paradigm in White-centered RTV shows that consistently situates
participants like Gladys as unfit for the space of the show, Flavor of Love provides a
predominantly Black space where participants can claim a number of different
identities without White as the default identity against which all is measured.
Significantly, participants on this show do not reveal an identity (as if it were alwaysalready-there), but claim it, sometimes several at once. While explicitly claiming an
identity (one that is not White, since White need not be claimed) immediately
385
disqualifies a participant from The Bachelor, on Flavor of Love this is often an integral
part of proving authentic identity, a core quality of successful participants.
One example of how identity is explicitly claimed on Flavor of Love emerges with
Black participant Like Dat, a woman from New Jersey on season two. Like Dat fits the
ghetto stereotype: she wears ostentatious clothing, uses heavy slang, exhibits a lack of
manners and is prone to arguing. She has pride in being from the ghetto, and
repeatedly claims her love for her ‘‘hood.’’ We watch as she praises herself and Flavor
for never forgetting where they came from. Identification with a specific background
and racial identity is rarely seen on The Bachelor, except in the case of Mary on season
four (the season she is eliminated) and with some of the women of color who are
banished early on.
Like Dat’s ghetto identity is shored up by a focus on her evaluation of Buckwild,
a White woman who espouses the same values and attributes (love for her hood,
audacious sexy clothing, and heavy slang). We see Like Dat recoil as Buckwild talks
to Flavor in heavy ‘‘Black slang’’ and seduces Flavor with erotic dancing. Like Dat
tells the camera, ‘‘Ghetto is as ghetto does, but where I live in the ghetto there
aren’t too many White girls up in there being all ghetto like that. I can’t really
figure out if that shit is real or not.’’ Like Dat situates hip-hop slang and over-thetop behavior as signifiers of ghetto that can only be performed by a Black body.
Like Dat inquires about Buckwild’s background and discovers Buckwild is from
Rancho Cucamonga, which she states ‘‘ain’t no ghetto . . . You can’t be ghetto if you
ain’t from the ghetto, you can’t redo that shit.’’ Like Dat’s suspicions are affirmed. We
watch as Buckwild’s ghetto voice intermittently disappears and reappears, till she
quits the show in frustration with the other participants’ constant questioning of her
authenticity. In her departing scene, Buckwild completely loses her ghetto voice and
Flavor asks her, angrily and incredulously, where her accent has gone.
Closing Thoughts
Readings of race in the space of RTV must recognize the presence and potential
influence of racial stereotypes and be mindful of the constraining and pervasive
nature of discourses of Whiteness.
Some media columnists, media activists, and Black viewers have decried the
representation of Black women on Flavor of Love as hypersexual and angry, exhibiting
the worst characteristics of ghetto behavior. They suggest the series is a 21st century
minstrel show (Moody, 2007; Ogunnaike, 2006; Wickman, 2006; Wiltz, 2006). While
it is true the series displays some of the worst stereotypes about Blacks, it also opens
an interesting space for complex identities to be performed. The imperative to
actively claim an identity on Flavor of Love, versus revealing an already established
identity on The Bachelor, opens up possibilities for claiming a variety of identities at
once; for foregrounding performativity and the constructedness of identities in the
space of surveillance; and for complicating the requirement for authenticity in the
space of White-centered RTV shows. The Bachelor, by contrast, is a fairly flat text,
where most participants are presented as having an already established White and
middle-class identity, with little opening in the text to question how these identities
are constructed.
Molina-Guzman and Valdivia (2004) argue that spaces of hybridity are ‘‘where
bodies and identities resist stable categories and meaning is contradictory and
historically shifting’’ (p. 214). In such a space, marginalized racial bodies operate as
hybrids, a combination of many cultural influences that can perform within the
boundaries of accepted Whiteness while attempting to maintain their own racial
perspective (Molina-Guzman & Valdivia, 2004). This definition could describe the
discursive space of Blackness on Flavor of Love. The women on Flavor of Love often
resist normative rules of female behavior valorized on shows like The Bachelor by
reifying Black stereotypes of female behavior.
The complex space of RTV animates a need for reassessment of performances of
Blackness: RTV fosters the proliferation of long-held and pernicious stereotypes of
Blacks, yet sometimes allows for complex performances of Blackness not permitted in
traditional television programming. Participants on Flavor of Love can embrace their
sexuality, show a three-dimensional ‘‘ghetto-girl’’ or ‘‘pimp’’ persona and express a
desire for Black love absent in mainstream television. Here, women can sob, fight,
laugh, get revenge or reconcile without penalty or overt judgment.
However, such performances must adhere to a ‘‘test of authenticity’’ (Hall, 2003)
by confessing an ‘‘otherness’’ that invariably ‘‘preserves Whiteness’’ (Shugart, 2007,
p. 115). As Gray (1995) points out, Black representations on television must adhere
to the standards of middle-class Whiteness or function as a site of difference or
otherness. Hence, the excessive sexualized discourse and hyperbolic ghetto attitude
is personified as authentically Black and far removed from the normative nature of
Whiteness, erecting the parameters of Blackness in the space of RTV.
In looking at race in RTV, it is important to interrogate the range of issues
managed by participants, as well as the moments of critical resistance to
surveillance revealed in the shows: how might performances of race create cultural
spaces that work within the dominant ideology? As more RTV shows emerge that
feature people of color, it will be the critics’ responsibility to identify if the RTV
genre becomes a Televisual ghetto where only certain performances of race are
allowed under the omniscient eye of surveillance, or if RTV can be a cultural and
discursive space where diverse conceptions of race are animated. Scholarship on
RTV needs to open up possibilities for articulating how identities in this space are
constructed and find new ways to express the complexity of surveillance and
notions of authenticity as they intersect in the display of raced identities.
Notes
[1]
We use the term ‘‘Black’’ rather than ‘‘African American’’ to describe people of African
descent residing in the United States. The term ‘‘African American’’ is less specific as it can be
applied to African diasporic people throughout the American continents.
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]
[10]
[11]
387
Burke (1950) argues that naming can be creative and disruptive, serving as a behavior guide.
Naming does not describe the conditions surrounding people, but reveals the motivations
for their actions.
Since only two of the 11 couples from The Bachelor remain together, and none from Flavor of
Love, it might be more apt to say the shows are about failed love.
In recent years, cable television shows starring people of color have had commercial success.
See Comedy Central’s Chappelle Show and Mind of Mencia, and MTV’s Run’s House and
Making the Band.
We do not include longer-standing dating shows (i.e., The Dating Game, Blind Date) in this
category. We are interested in romance RTV shows that serialize the activities of participants
over time. Dating shows follow the activities of participants in a single episode with no carryover into the next episode.
A term used in Black urban music, ‘‘wifey’’ was coined by the group Next in their 1999 single
‘‘Wifey’’ to emphasize the seriousness of a relationship without the legal commitment.
Though we do not have time to explore this in detail, it is important to ask how these
practices work for a queer subject or other subjects of color: an Arab subject, for instance,
faced with the growing use of racial signifiers to identify them as the ‘‘face of terror’’
which, as Gates (2005) argues, underpins the development of biometric surveillance
technologies for US national security purposes; or a female subject, already always on
display (Berger, 1977; Walters, 1995), who is held in the popular media to a standard for
appearance and behavior and thus at greater risk of transgressing the expectation of
meeting the standard.
For instance, cartoonish images of a clock ticking often appear when a woman talks for a
long time, and when Flavor uses heavy slang, an animated graphic called a ‘‘Flavor-a Lation’’
attempts to decipher his comments.
The tasks are often the focus of media controversy as they shore up stereotypes about Blacks:
Women cook fried chicken to demonstrate their domestic skills, go to church to connect
with Flavor’s mother or swing on a stripper pole. There was also the infamous ‘‘five senses’’
test on season one, where Flavor was blindfolded and used his five senses (licking, fondling,
looking, smelling and listening) to decide who was most appealing.
Quinn (2000, 2004) notes that the pimp is a hero for rappers, representing a way of life that
earns respect and power, a role model for poor Black youth.
Perceived inauthenticity about one’s intentions is judged harshly on Flavor of Love. In
season one, Schatar ‘‘Hottie’’ Tyler and Brook ‘‘Pumkin’’ Thompson are dismissed for
appearing on other reality television shows and not telling Flavor. Cristal Athenea
‘‘Serious’’ Stevenson in season one is eliminated for allegedly trying to use Flavor to spark
her modeling career. In season two, Heather ‘‘Krazy’’ Crawford is sent home for being
more concerned with igniting her music career than being with Flavor. These violations
stem from behavior perceived to be inauthentic (pretending to look for love when they
really want fame), not from allowing their authentic (and inappropriate for the show)
identity to be revealed.
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