For this week's post, I chose a short clip from the fabulous Tyra Banks show as an example of someone accomplishing something greater than saying certain choice words. There are a few possible performative acts and utterances to examine so I will start with the obvious. As a whole, Tyra IS performing on her own show and with that comes certain styles of performing herself for the audience and viewers. She starts off the clip with a seemingly unflattering picture of herself in a bathing suit. This I saw as the second performative act, exposing something that would otherwise be tucked in a tabloid somewhere. She openly talks about her own body image, posing the great statement, "The bottom line is that most people are used to seeing me looking like this and like this and all that (poses unaturally). And everyone seems to be pretty okay with that. But for some reason people have a serious problem when I look like that..(poses naturally)". By showing her picture on her own TV show, she had the power to turn the ridicule on all the people that were "shocked" at her "unflattering picture". Even more so, her choice of wearing the same bathing suit from the picture stated that she wasn't shameful or even embarrassed. At this point in the clip, I saw her going beyond her TV show "performance" and we catch a glimpse of the "real" Tyra. Her infamous statement, "Kiss my fat a#@!" can be seen as a performative utterance by saying to all the haters to back off her and other women like her. Of course, she isn't literally meaning for them to kiss her rear end but using a statement like this shows that she's not playing around. It was also a way of empowering other women with similar issues to rise above any criticisms, comments, and situations they find themselves.
check it out!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mOQh3evqsI
First off, nice choice with the video, it was amazing. Secondly, I really liked the weight that "kiss my fat ass" holds, particularly in this situation. She is a figure of influence and of power and she can manipulate words or phrases to get a more powerful message then what the words originally weigh. I think that this is a prime example of how important our word choices can be when conveying messages and how the exact same words in different contexts can mean completely different things, which I guess is the beauty of performance utterances.
ReplyDeleteI love that clip and I love Tyra Banks! It's interesting that you say that you felt you saw the "real" Tyra. In a chapter from the LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES READER, by Judith Butler, entitled “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”, Butler explains why she dislikes "identity categories," claiming that they "tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression." In a nutshell, identity categories help us and hurt us at the same time. For example, I think the identity category "supermodel" helped Tyra until the media felt she was too fat for the title. In this clip, Tyra says, "People are used to seeing me like this and this and this, but not like this." I wonder how comfortable Tyra feels with the identity category of "fat" or “overweight.” She never truly made a big statement such as this until she didn't fit into her former identity category anymore. So. . . Can we classify this performance as the "real" Tyra when she felt "real" before her weight gain? This poses an interesting question about the casting, for lack of a better term, that is placed upon us based on the objective of others! Tyra went from supermodel to positive body image advocate because people from the outside viewed her differently and voiced it.
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