No Such Thing As Standard Beauty: Intersectionality and Embodied Feeling on America's Next Top Model (Critical Essay‪)‬

What is wrong with you? Stop it! I have never in my life yelled at a girl like this. When my mother yells like this it is because she loves me. I was rooting for you. We were all rooting for you--how dare you. Learn something from this. You go to bed at night, you lay there, and you take responsibility for yourself. 'Cause nobody's going to take responsibility for you. You rolling your eyes and you acting like you've heard it all before. You've heard it all before. You don't know where the hell I come from. You have no idea what I've been through. But I'm not a victim. I grow from it and I learn. Take responsibility for yourself (Tyra Banks on America's Next Top Model, Cycle 4, Episode 7). First aired in the U.S. on 13 April 2005, Tyra Banks' outburst of emotion earned episode seven of the fourth "cycle" (Season) of America's Next Top Model (ANTM) the title: "The Girl Who Pushes Tyra Over the Edge". By the fourth cycle, audiences of ANTM are accustomed to Banks' particular variety of emotional guidance, repeatedly packaged as "tough love" and delivered to anxious and troubled contestants in an ostensibly pastoral relation of care. From tenderness to outrage, Banks' expression of feeling takes place within a landscape of visibility that consciously and overtly capitalises on difference. The show's conditions of visibility are shaped from the standpoint of Banks' championing of class and race mobility, which is reinforced through the deployment her own "rags-to-riches story" (Thompson, 2010: 336). The limit of this story, and its post-feminist and post-race refrain, undergirds the emotional intensity of Banks' enraged response to defiant contestant Tiffany.