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

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.