Female Bodies On The American Stage

Fat, especially the fat female body, is a unique construction within American culture that has been understood and read in a variety of ways in popular representation during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. With an interdisciplinary approach that draws from theatre, performance, and cultural studies, as well feminist methodologies and the emerging field of fat studies, Mobley interrogates common stereotypes and complex cultural beliefs associated with the fat female in performance, particularly in light of the so-called obesity epidemic in the United States.

Analyzing a cross-section of post-WWII American plays, stage, and screen performances, as well as performers' bodies as cultural texts, she argues that the fat actress's body signals a myriad of (primarily negative and/or threatening) cultural assumptions and suggests new ways of reading the body in performance.

Review: Female Bodies on the American Stage pierces the heart of representational politics by parsing how body size influences reception. Mobley incisively analyzes the history of social judgments against larger than sylph-like women, and traces how size prohibitions play out in theatre, film, and television.

Considering gender alongside race and ethnicity, Mobley elegantly unpacks the pernicious, ongoing policing of women's bodies, and persuasively illustrates the complicity of cultural production in enforcing impossible, demeaning standards for normative beauty. - Jill Dolan, Professor of English, Director of the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, Princeton University, US Desired and deified in earlier epochs for their curvaceous and voluptuous figures, statuesque female performers have become, over the course of the twentieth century, reviled and vilified, reduced to stock characters, and a panoply of gross stereotypes.

Interrogating the rise of fat prejudice, Mobley reads the bodies of 'broad broads' as embodied cultural texts within and against a backdrop of material abundance and capitalist excess, American self-determination, and Puritan morality. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the cultural, political, and aesthetic dimensions of corpulence. - Sara Warner, Associate Professor, Theatre, Cornell University, USA