“It’s Top Chef, not a personality contest”: grammars of stereotype, neoliberal logics of personhood, and the performance of the racialized self in Top Chef: New York

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the intersections of racial identity performance, culinary style, and neoliberal logics within reality cooking television. By close reading the performance and evaluation of Top Chef: New York contestant Carla Hall, this article argues that reality cooking competitions depend on a grammar of stereotype in order to transform contestants into characters, and the contestants both acquiesce to and resist these preconceived notions, sometimes simultaneously. Neoliberal logics of personhood both constrain contestants within their ‘characters’/‘brands’ and also allow chefs to agentially and reflexively self-construct particular personas out of their own culinary ethos. Relatedly, food operates as a multivalent racialized signifier of identity, in which the contestants racialize the food and the food racializes the contestants. As Carla Hall’s performance in Top Chef: New York demonstrates, reality cooking competitions place demands on their contestants to ‘appropriately’ perform their identities, and contestants are evaluated by both the judges and the viewers on how they navigate these performances. This article contends that in its reliance on racial stereotype and conflations between labor, identity, and being, Top Chef propagates neoliberal and multicultural/postracial logics, demanding that its contestants of color perform their individualized, racialized identities in ways that the program deems ‘authentic’ and ‘appropriate’.