YoungGiftedandFat: Performing Transweight Identities

The body will tell the truth when all else fails, with or without you.1
Misty DeBerry, Performance Artist
I am a black woman who wishes for a time
That I could gain my weight back
And still be fine
Four years ago I lived as a fat black female, actress and teacher, trying to learn to love my curves and to maintain a healthy lifestyle. I was failing miserably. I ate McDonald’s and Zaxby’s nearly every day coupled with home cooked meals. I imagined myself unattractive, undesirable, and unworthy of love and attention from men. At the same time, through weight loss advertisements, public ridicule, and size discrimination, society made it very clear that I was the gross unwanted “other.” My body was classified as morbidly obese, and I was getting larger every month. Even I began to view my largeness as unacceptable, and the only way I knew to rectify my situation was to lose the weight. As body image scholar Kathleen LeBesco has affirmed: “the possibility of passing, trying to lose weight, wanting to become ‘normal,’ is about the only recognized option available to fat women in twentieth century Anglo-American culture.”2 However, losing a large amount of weight is extremely difficult, and even if this nigh-impossible feat is accomplished, only 5% of people who achieve substantial weight loss are able to keep the weight off for long periods of time.3 Still, we diet and diet again in hopes that one day we will cross the border that separates fat from skinny.

Though the efforts of Fat Studies4 scholars have not gone unnoticed, their textual and political reach has not yet proved significantly influential in the weight loss and health industries. Both Fat Rights by Anna Kirkland and Human Rights Casualties from the “War on Obesity”5by Lily O’Hara and Jane Gregg highlight the need for America to end the vilification, harassment and abjection of the fat body. As SanderGilman has noted, “Obesity presents itself today in the form of a ‘moral panic’—that is, an episode, condition, person or group of persons that have in recent times been defined as ‘a threat to societal values and interests.’”6

As my dieting failures multiplied, the constant, disapproving scrutiny of the world affected my well-being, and I spiraled into a deep depression. In America, a fat person is classified as diseased, one who must be cured of a pathological and physical illness, despite the acknowledgement that most people will fail at dieting; thereby making the border-crossing from fat to skinny a remarkable feat. In addition, physicians argue that an obese body creates exorbitant health costs and is directly correlated with mortality risks,7 while sociologists and cultural observers assert that the size and appearance of one’s body determines marriageability, upward mobility, and/or perceived attractiveness, especially for women.8 Feminist scholar Sandra Lee Bartky argues that “the disciplinary project of femininity is a‘setup:’ it requires such radical and extensive measures of bodily transformation that virtually every woman who gives herself to it is destined in some degree to fail.”9 Yet, “diet we must . . . to be saved.”10 Thus my doomed quest to achieve “normal” weight was never-ending. My depressive state of failure rendered me hopeless. The sadder I got, the bigger I grew, until I experienced my first nosebleed. The illness of my body must have scared me skinny because only a few months later I enrolled in a low-calorie shake diet and lost nearly 100 pounds within 8 months. Having succumbed to the physical and mental attacks from society by nearly starving myself, I crossed one of the most contentious, palpable borders known to women in America: the border that separates fat from skinny.

This essay recounts how my border-crossing journey from morbidly obese woman to slender11 woman shaped my awareness of my outsider-within12 identity as a black woman, a theatre artist, and scholar. It is an exploration of how straddling vastly different physical and psychological identities led me to performance, what I term transweight performance, as a means of understanding this experience for myself and as a means of communicating and perhaps illuminating such experience for others. Just as the Latin prefix trans has been attached to various identity markers to signify crossing from one condition or location to another, as in transgender, I employ transweight as a term to identify someone who willfully acquires a new size identity by losing or gaining a large amount of weight in a short amount of time.13

Recently, there has been a proliferation of studies on the black female performing body, including solo/black/woman, an anthology of scripts, interviews, and essays edited by E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera; Troubling Vision by Nicole Fleetwood, which considers the visual commodity of black bodies; and Embodying Black Experience by Harvey Young, which investigates the black performative body in various socio-political contexts.14 While these works are all significant studies that explore the black female performing body, none focus specifically on the issue of weight, or the performance of “weighted” (fat/thin) identities. This lack of literature on the black/female/transweight performative body is most likely due to the absence of black transweight women writing about and/or performing weight loss, and can also be attributed to the fact that the fat body rarely transforms. Thus, my research aims to carve out a space in scholarship for the transweight black female, one that is intensely personal and, at the same time, profoundly political. With this exploration of my border crossing, I offer my slender palimpsest of a body as an entryway into a liminal world largely unexplored.

The perception that black women do not wish to be slender is a myth situated in the American imagination. Oprah Winfrey’s decades-long public struggle with her weight, Kerry Washington’s recent admittance to battling bulimia, and Jennifer Hudson’s commercially marketed, drastic weight loss are only a few examples of the stark reality about black women and their bodies. Many African-American women aspire to Eurocentric standards of body size. As Bartky asserts, “There is little evidence that women of color or working-class women are in general less committed to the incarnation of an ideal femininity than their more privileged sisters.”15 Though authors Andrea Shaw (The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women’s Unruly Political Bodies) and Susan Bordo (Unbearable Weight) provide compelling arguments as to how and why the presence of the fat female body serves as a marker of direct resistance to Eurocentric standards, one could offer that the very existence of these types of arguments hinge partially on the truth about weight loss, that is, weight is extremely hard to lose.16 Thus, in America, fatness leaves women few options, and one of them is to claim fatness as honorable and admirable. But do we love our large bodies because we adore fat or do we love our large bodies because we cannot lose the weight?

I revere those Fat Studies scholars who are able to embrace their largeness, and I am in the fight with them against size discrimination. I wish I had the confidence to appreciate my largeness as actress Gabourey Sidibe, who seems not to have lost a pound since her big screen debut in Precious, apparently does. You go girl! However, in my case, I could not love the weight that categorized me in my eyes and in the eyes of others as ugly, disgusting, and non-sexual. I work to live in my honesty, and at this moment I lack the volition to re-embrace the fat body.

So what occurs when the fat black female performing body transforms to slender and then engages in the performance of “thin-ness”? What happens when the black female body physically ‘passes’ in a new way? What happens when a formerly fat, black body experiences ‘double consciousness’ in a historically new way: a way in which how the ‘other’ sees the body affords that body a privilege that is unfamiliar, abounding with humanistic perks. This liminal space—the space around and within the border—is where my ethno-theatre work begins.

When I crossed the border, not only was my physical body altered, but my psychological state was significantly affected as well. I changed physically and mentally in ways that I am aware of and ways that I am still discovering. I transformed from physically inferior to physically elite, from ugly to attractive, and from undesirable to desirable. My body now reads as happy, healthy, and worthy of protection. As an actress I went from mammy to mother (or wife), and from asexual, ensemble roles to sexy leading roles. I went from my body being fully costumed to scantily clad. My new body serves as a document of acceptance, my ‘passport,’ if you will, into a new privileged location. At near starvation, I crossed the border that allowed me to immigrate into an ideal American size. However, I’m just as morbidly obese mentally as I was morbidly obese physically five years ago. My outer appearance morphed, but my psyche remained the same. I do not believe myself to be a slender woman, so I feel as though I’m performing slenderness and femininity in life or in the virtual reality of the stage. As I experience fat and thin, unprivileged and privileged separately, I purposefully create and write towards a desegregation of identity.

Though the world now experiences me as a slender black female actress, I process my current encounters, both on and off the stage, as a morbidly obese female actress, inhabiting an outsider-within identity. Coined by Patricia Hill Collins, an outsider-within identity initially referenced the social location of black women in the field of domesticated work. Here I use the outsider-within identity marker as theoretical framing to explore what it means to be a fat black woman living within a privileged body or ‘home.’ Simply stated, I am not fully who I appear to be, nor am I where I appear to be. I envision my mental location as one similar to that of Gloria Anzaldúa’s new mestiza: a place where she could be all that she was.17 Furthermore, I am working to build a healthy ‘third space'18 both within my psyche and in performance where my two dis/identities encounter one another.

The implications of my border-crossing from morbidly obese to slender first captured my attention as an artist and scholar when I moved away from home to attend graduate school. Being surrounded by all new people and a new environment, my recent weight loss remained a secret. I was not aware that my colleagues and professors were experiencing a different physical persona. I was still living and seeing myself as a morbidly obese person, but the people at the university saw me as a slender person who belonged. There, I auditioned for and landed the leading female role in the world premiere of Holding Up the Sky, a play adapted from folklore and tales from across the globe. In the play a young married couple survives a devastating war and proceeds to build a new life with the help of other members in the community.19

At the time of auditions, I hadn’t realized that my mindset was still that of a morbidly obese woman and actress. My habits of being a workaholic and a homebody did not change when I lost weight. I still rejected the nightlife scene, for I had little desire to mingle with or even talk to men who had consistently neglected me in the past. Furthermore, I was unaware that I was negotiating space as a new physical person. Thus, when I greeted the director and production associates in auditions I believed they were seeing me as I still experienced myself: a fat woman.

In The Politics of Women’s Bodies, Rose Weitz affirms that “attractiveness typically brings women more marital prospects and friendships, higher salaries, and higher school grades.”20 In the theatre, attractiveness and a thin body bring more, and better, roles for women. In her dissertation, “The Poetics of Excess: Images of Large Women on Stage and Screen,” Claire Van Ens lists five stereotypical film roles played by overweight actresses: The Butch/Bitch Lesbian, The Dowdy Dowager, One of the Boys, The Asexual/Non-Woman, and The Maternal Earth-Mother.21 Not surprisingly, as a fat stage actress, I was usually cast in similar roles. So when I perused the script for Holding Up the Sky, I focused on the ensemble roles, ignoring the lines of the leading characters. During auditions, however, the director asked me to read for the lead female role. My heart started racing because I thought surely he had made a mistake. I glanced up at the table and just as I was about to ask whether I’d been given the wrong sides, he asked me to go out and practice the lines with a young man, who eventually played my husband.

I was confused and anxious. In my mind I didn’t fit the lead role. This role was clearly written for a slender, attractive woman who could believably play a beautiful, sexually desirable female. Although the young man expressed his opinion that I was perfect for the role, I squinched my face in denial as I rehearsed the lines with him. I had never been asked to play a beautiful, feminine lead, and I didn’t know how to believably accomplish this in the small amount of time that I had.

Judith Butler has argued that femininity is a “mode of enacting and reenacting received gender norms which surface as so many styles of flesh.”22 Furthermore, she identifies three types of discipline that produce the feminine aesthetic: “those that aim to produce a body of a certain size and general configuration; those that bring forth from this body a specific repertoire of gestures, postures, and movements; and those that are directed toward the display of this body as an ornamented surface.”23 I knew what it meant to perform femininity because the media and public had taught me; however, as a big woman I was rarely expected to perform femininity, so my repertoire of feminine gestures was lacking. Nonetheless, when reading the role for the director, I used my imagination in a way that I’d never done before, unknowingly employing methods that Butler mentions to accurately portray femininity. I implemented the stereotypical feminine gesture of loosely hanging my hand from my extended wrist. I made sure that my long kanekalon braids were flowing down my back during the scene, and I elongated my neck as if I were a giraffe to appear model-esque. I imagined myself to be thin as I walked daintily across the floor, because I knew I had to control what I sensed was my big body. I blocked my negative thoughts and read for the part. Later that week, I received the email that I, Sharrell D. Luckett, had been cast as the lead female in the play.

Although initially excited by the opportunity, extreme panic soon set in because in my mind I was convinced that I could not play the part.Because of my history as a morbidly obese person and my lack of experience on stage in a newly transformed, transweight body, my work on this role led me to suffer from psychological and physical stress. I started to experience uncontrollable anxiety when I was told that my costume would be sleeveless and would reveal my legs and torso. Also, I learned that I had to be lifted in the show twice. I was so scared that my cast mates would not be able to lift me that I promised them I would not gain weight during the rehearsal period. They brushed off my promise as one from a slender, body-conscious woman. My character also simulates sex on stage with her husband, inclusive of a vocal orgasm. Morbidly obese actresses are rarely portrayed as sexually desirable, rarely lifted, and rarely have orgasmic sex on stage. As I worked to understand the extreme anxiety that I was experiencing during the rehearsal and performance process in Holding Up the Sky, I decided that I wanted to further explore the implications of mentally living as a morbidly obese woman and actress while physically maneuvering in a slender body. Thus, I began to conduct an autoethnographic study of my transweight identity as a black, female actress.

Building upon Lesa Lockford’s use of Victor Turner’s theory of social drama to analyze a weight loss support group, I used Turner’s theories to explore my transweight journey.24 As Turner posits, “the third phase [of social dramas], redress, reveals that ‘determining’ and ‘fixing’ are indeed processes, not permanent states or givens.”25 When I began my shake diet I was entering the phase of “redress” for what felt like the hundredth time (yo-yo dieting). It is in the phase of redress that I lost my obese body, while still maintaining my fat psychological existence. Similar to the writings on the “new mestiza” and “third space,” the scholarship on liminal spaces in relation to transformation describes my state of entrapment as a person who lost a large amount of weight. The liminal space I am speaking of is one in which my mind manifests in both a fat body and slender body on a daily basis. Though I’ve physically crossed a border, I am trapped by psychological borders, thus my reintegration, or transformation, is incomplete.

With this discovery I realized that I was performing on various levels. My morbidly obese psyche performs as the slender person, and the slender person performs as the slender actress, and the actress performs the character. In Richard Schechner’s familiar construction, I am not me (morbidly obese Sharrell), not not me (slender Sharrell), not not not me (slender actress), and then not not not not me (slender character).26 I constantly oscillate among these liminal spaces. I am always in between entities and never feel as though I’m one integrated self.

The intensive exploration of my performed affectations of survival as a black actress culminated in the creation of a solo performance text, YoungGiftedandFat, which explores my various performative selves. As D. Soyini Madison notes in her foreword to solo/black/woman, the performativity that transcends the black female performing body is a “complex mix and blend of discursive circulations, gestural economies, and historical affects that break up repetition and scatter style across hearts and minds making black female performativity contingent, otherworldly, and radically contextual.”27 My work on body size and image perception joins a long lineage of other women of the Africana diaspora who dismantle hegemonic institutions and discourses through solo performance, including my favorites Beah Richards, Nina Simone, and Whoopi Goldberg.

I approached the creation of YoungGiftedandFat as an actress, a black woman, and a Fat Studies scholar. YoungGiftedandFat was birthed out of my need to suture my fat world, slender world, and liminal world; to bring together my separate lived existences, so vastly different that they would be portrayed as two complete beings. With this performance I re-affirm that black women do have serious issues with body image. And when black women are cast as sexually desirable leading ladies, they too must conform to existing expectations of thinness.

With my interests and various identities in mind, I developed questions: How much of my offstage fat identity is informing the textual creation of my slender performative identity? When I write my slender voice, am I writing first through the voice of my fat self? I am also thinking about the performance of identity in relation to space. What does it mean to create a textual space (border) in which both bodies simultaneously exist? What does it mean to have both voices speak through one organism/body? My goal is not to provide universal answers but to share one woman’s attempt to suture these two selves for a unified performance. By addressing the aforementioned questions, a malleable, yet tangible script emerged. My script is a testament to the trials and tribulations of fat women and a call for critical conversations about insecurities and oppression projected onto the fat body.

Though my script is an autoethnography, I also consider it a testimonial. Regarding the history of testimonials in Latina feminist tradition, Chandra Talpade Mohanty has argued that “testimonials do not focus on the unfolding of a singular woman’s consciousness (in the hegemonic tradition of European modernist autobiography); rather, their strategy is to speak from within a collective, as participants in revolutionary struggles, and to speak with the express purpose of bringing about social and political change.”28 My collective consists of fat women, slender women (however brief my encounter with this culture), and the voice(s) in my head.

My story is told through the voice of my fat identity (Fat), my slender identity (Skinny), and my liminal identity (Sharrell). ‘Fat’ often speaks from the past, when she lived in the fat body, but Fat recognizes that she is trapped in a slender, unfamiliar body. ‘Skinny,’ who lives and experiences the world in a slender body, is a purposefully under-developed character because she is relatively young, existing only a little over four years. ‘Sharrell’ is the character who straddles the border. She represents the fat psyche coupled with the premature slender psyche who both live in the slender body. By writing the voices of my fat body, my slender body, and my liminal existence, I work to disrupt the “solo” versus “multiple” cast dichotomy, an artistic trait of other solo performances by black women that highlights experiences with race and gender.29 In my case, however, I am highlighting race, gender, and various size identities, making this disruptive dichotomy even more complex. For my present body houses the lived experiences of both a fat and a slender person, as well as the psyche of a bordered identity.

The characters are created through prose, movement, and poetry that aims to express the complex mental reality in which I exist. In “Fat’s Lament” I struggle with my desire for the sexual gaze of black men. I’ve always wanted my black brothers to be curious about my sexual prowess so when my slender body afforded me sexual freedom and an abundance of newfound attention from men, I found myself in virtual spaces, places, and relationships that I had ‘no business’ being in. In a slender body, I am no longer sexually invisible, and I have a difficult time negotiating sexual advances from my male counterparts. This poem was born out of my new sexual identity and the agency I was afforded in ‘pullin’ attractive men.

[caption id="attachment_1125" align="alignnone" width="606"] Figure 1., Sharrell D. Luckett performs an excerpt of YoungGiftedandFat at for the Univ. of Missouri’s 10th Anniversary Life Literature Series. Photo by: Rebecca Allen[/caption]

“Fat’s Lament”
 
Look at you skinny
Got me wide open and hot like a pot uv grits
Now I’m getting served
Bubbling brown hot dog sticks
Too many
I ain’t got enough holes
They all won’t fit; don’t make me choose
dumb decisions; I ain’t used to this
abuse is bliss
is this what dem thin bitches be complainin’ about
count me in; let em out
pass the cuties but save the cooties
wink at the married ones cuz they smoking guns
ready to burst, pop, spaz at any second
shawty swang my way, I’ll be ur 2nd blessing
dumb decisions
I’m rolling my 3rd blunt; all thanks to my cuteness
Yeah, I’m loose and I think I’m losin.
I ain’t used to this
Fullness; all wrapped up in his arms
Don’t mind if he’s an alcoholic cuz
He, he be my daddy
remind me of my daddy
That’s a shame; rolling blunts with my daddy
Sexing up his frame
Drowning in a spa full of cold water
Posin for a pic that’s gone take me under
I swear I’ll let him go if you promise to love me
When he leaves
Wither up and get off of me; I gotta go to school
Big ambitions and a lot of talk
But dem mens make me fall
I asked God to send me a sign
I’m layin on my back just taking it
I wish she’d call
I swear I’ll pick up and suck the milk from her breasts
Even share my eggs cuz motherhood I missed.
Now skinny has got me wide open
Legs stretched and I’m hoping
Something good will come out of this
Whipped cream rushing
All this like has got me blushing
And I laugh; cuz all this like is something I ain’t never had . . .

In “Riot,” the personal is political, beckoning collective resistance. Again, I am solo, while at the same time representing many women who struggle with the burden of losing weight. I speak from within the border, and on both sides of the border. In this piece, my liminal identity is exploring my haunted past of being neglected and abused by men, while working to make sense of what has happened to my body. Skinny admits that she feels as though she is living a lie, but she knows that teaming up with Fat would surely strip her of her privilege. Skinny is dreaming of an imaginary world in which size doesn’t factor into how she is valued.

“Riot”

Father of black back
Mother of strong bones
Consecrated in the middle to create my song
Within me, his wit
The curve of his smile
pearly white teeth
legs that run for miles
Not to mention my mathematical genius
Goes unused
But who needs chemistry when u’ve got the blues
Too much pressure
In the crock pot
To be like her: hot
From Jane Eyre to Elizabeth Taylor,
From Beverly Johnson to a fine black woman, just name her
Nothing like her
The woman who bore me pain
Nothing like, yet identical all the same
A thing for men who didn’t love me back
A thing for boys that scolded my fat
These rolls on my back
This meat on my thigh
cut it off and it’ll stand a mile high
Big, black, bitch
That was my name
Big, black, bitch
All the lil n*ggas would proclaim
Threw me into silence
Forced me into shame
Ran from me while playing
“take yo fat friend home”
“take yo fat friend home” and don’t bring her back the next day
I think those boys made me hide my song
 
In this next section, the liminal identity (Sharrell), begins to speak from the border. At the border she envisions a song. Her song is a metaphor for her ‘true identity.’ One that she feels is fat, black, young, and gifted. But which identity marker is the first marker, second, and so on? One might assume that Sharrell’s skin pigmentation of deep dark cocoa brown is her primary identity marker, especially in America. It is at this point that I, the writer, would like to note that I ‘missed’ the colorism discrimination in childhood that other dark-skinned women endured, and am not able to clearly recognize pigmentation bias against my dark skin within the black community in my adult life. My dark skin color was rarely an issue in or outside of my home. In fact, when the boys on the back of the school bus titled me ‘Big, Black, Bitch’ I remember thinking that they had the ‘black’ identity marker correct, and not understanding why being ‘big’ was so bad. That they coupled ‘big’ and ‘black’ with ‘bitch’ was the signifier that their beat box performance was meant to hurt me. Lesson learned at age nine: don’t sit in the back of the bus.

The world made me hide my song
My song
I’m not singing it yet
It’s tucked away somewhere
Catching its breath
Been running far too long
Hiding under clothes too small
Under hate that’s well worn
Under burgundy rivers that sleep in my womb
In feathers of the pillow that catch my tears released too soon
In long awaited nights
In all my years
My song transcends my fears
Beah Richards says
A black woman speaksAbout oppression, about slavery, about all this heat
Fuck those little black boys and these grown men
That withheld their drooling
Down with skinny bitches and all this schooling
Fuck the scale
Fuck a diet
Fuck fruits and vegetables
This is my riot
And although I open my mouth
My song won’t come out
It sits in silence
 
I am a black woman who wishes for a time
That I could gain my weight back
And still be fine
That I can let my curly hair show and blow in the wind
Without being seen as a threat to all men
So I wear straight wigs
This degree that flows down my back;
I want it for every black person that has been attacked
All of my n*ggas that’s been held back
I read and write and read and fight
Read and write and read and cry
Read and write, and when I speak I fly
Bag lady, why you carrying all them bags
I carry them to remind me of my past
All of the “no you can’ts” all of the “you’re too bigs”
All of the “why you so black and yo mama light skinneds”
All of the “you won’t get a jobs” all of the “they won’t let you ins”
All of the “you can’t ever be a teacher cuz you distract the kids”
I wish I could fall into the arms of my father and do it all again
I’d whisper in his ear, that he’s a great man, I’d tell him to keep his sperm
Locked away in his pants,
but I guess my mama felt too good
and the universe decided to give me a chance.
So here I am.

At this point, the “I” in the final phrase “So here I am” is the borderland. “I” is the place and space that my obese psyche and slender body share. “I” is black, a woman, and a site of total confusion, while Fat is literally trying to catch up with Skinny. “I” is Sharrell, who waits patiently at the border, hoping to fully integrate with Fat and Skinny to build a new, complete life. “So here I am” also affirms my presence in this world and my right to interrogate my identity as a means to peel myself apart and put me back together again.

As I continue to think through my various personas, I have come to understand that Fat and Skinny truly experience the world differently, while my liminal self acts as sort of mediator between the two. The work that I am doing in the borderlands is born out of a desire to love that part of me which is fat just as much as the world loves that part of me which is slender. My journey is a difficult one because I am consciously making an effort to erase the border, revealing a whole human being. As I continue my research and performative inquiry, I do so knowing that I may never reach a resolution. I am also aware that the possibility of being physically deported is quite real, as my genetic make-up and appetite work against my slender existence at every meal. Nonetheless, I do believe that peace, harmony, and healthiness can co-exist in my mind, my body and my art. Thus, I explore and I write and I perform and I write some more. The work at the borderlands is multifaceted. This work is integral to my survival, for crossing over is never an easy task.

I went missing in 2008
Shed my skin, withered away
This body ain’t mine; it never belonged to me
Escaped like a thief in the night and now I’m tryna find me
With all my might
What is this in my hand? What is this in my hand?
If you force me to speak, I will surely tell a lie
When I killed myself, I had an alibi
I was at home, alone, wanting to be let out
Had to find my song
And now my ancestors tell me it’s been within me all along
so why in God’s name am I so far from home
A skinny bitch could NEVER do this shit
That fat, black girl sings my song

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Sharrell D. Luckett is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at California State University-Dominguez Hills. She is an award-winning director/producer of over 60 shows and has co-created four musicals. Luckett received her Ph.D. in Theatre at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where she was selected to serve as Doctoral Marshal and keynote speaker. Her upcoming projects include the world premiere of her one-woman show, YoungGiftedandFat, and a seminal manuscript outlining the Freddie Hendricks acting method.
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Endnote:
[1] Solo performance artist Misty DeBerry made this statement at the Mellon/Northwestern University Institute of Feminist Performance in the African Diaspora, 20 June 2011.
[2] Kathleen LeBesco, Revolting Bodies? The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 62.
[3] F. Grodstein et al., “Three-year follow-up of participants in a commercial weight loss program. Can you keep it off?” Archives of Internal Medicine (JAMA) 156, no. 12 (June 1996): 1302-1306.
[4] Fat Studies is a field of study dedicated to ending discrimination against large people and accepting size diversity.
[5] Lily O’Hara and Jane Gregg, “Human Rights Casualties from the “War on Obesity”: Why Focusing on Body Weight Is Inconsistent with a Human Rights Approach to Health,” Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight Society 1-1 (2012): 32-46.
[6] Sander Gilman, Fat: A Cultural History of Obesity (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 9.
[7] Steven N. Blair and I-Min Lee, “Weight Loss and Risk of Mortality,” in George A. Bray, et al, eds. Handbook of Obesity (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2008), 805-818.
[8] Rose Weitz, introduction to Section III: The Politics of Appearance in Rose Weitz, ed.,The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behavior (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 133. See also Susie Orbach, Fat is a Feminist Issue (New York: Paddington Press, 1978).
[9] Sandra Lee Bartky, “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” in Weitz, The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behavior, 25-45.
[10] Gilman, Fat, 13.
[11] For this essay, I define slender as being in one’s BMI (Body Mass Index) normal range or lower overweight range.
[12] Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), 11-13.
[13] 6 months to a year.
[14] E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, Eds., solo/black/woman: Scripts, Interviews, and Essays (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014; Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); and Harvey Young, Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010).
[15] Bartky, “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” 34.
[16] Andrea Shaw, The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women’s Unruly Political Bodies (Oxford: Lexington Books, 2006); Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
[17] See Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987).
[18] See Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture for further discussion of the ‘third space’ (New York: Routledge, 1994).
[19] Holding Up the Sky is an original play adapted by Milbre Burch, first produced in 2009 2010 at the University of Missouri-Columbia, directed by Clyde Ruffin.
[20] Weitz, The Politics of Women’s Bodies, 133.
[21] Claire Van Ens, “The Poetics of Excess: Images of Large Women on Stage and Screen” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1999).
[22] Judith Butler, “Embodied Identity in de Beauvoirs The Second Sex,” paper presented at the American Philosophical Association, 1985, quoted in Bartky, 27.
[23] Ibid.
[24] See Lesa Lockford, “Social Drama in the Spectacle of Femininity: The Performance of Weight Loss in the Weight Watchers Program,” Women’s Studies in Communication 19 (1996): 291-312.
[25] See Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982), 77.
[26] See Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 4-5.
[27] D. Soyini Madison, foreword to solo/black/woman, E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, eds.(Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 2014), xiii. Emphasis in original.
[28] Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 81.
[29] E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, introduction, solo/black/woman: scripts, interviews, and essays, xx.
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The Journal of American Drama and Theatre
Volume 26, Number 2 (Spring 2014)

Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson
Advisory Editor: David Savran
Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve

Guest Editor: Cheryl Black
(University of Missouri)

With the ATDS Editorial Board:
Noreen C. Barnes (Virginia Commonwealth University), Nicole Berkin (CUNY Graduate Center), Johan Callens (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Jonathan Chambers (Bowling Green State University), Dorothy Chansky (Texas Tech University), James Fisher (University of North Carolina at Greensboro), Anne Fletcher (Southern Illinois University), Felicia Londré (University of Missouri-Kansas City), Kim Marra (University of Iowa ), Judith A. Sebesta (The College for All Texans Foundation), Jonathan Shandell (Arcadia University), LaRonika Thomas (University of Maryland), Harvey Young (Northwestern University)

Managing Editor: Ugoran Prasad
Editorial Assistant: Andrew Goldberg
Circulation Manager: Janet Werther

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center

Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications
Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director