Female Bodies on the American Stage

The fat female body is a unique construction in American culture that has been understood in various ways during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Analyzing post-WWII stage and screen performances, Mobley argues that the fat actress's body signals myriad cultural assumptions and suggests new ways of reading the body in performance.

"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

"[Mobley's] analyses are sharp and insightful and her use of canonical cultural and fat studies theorists . . . is capable and convincing. More than that, the book is interesting and fun. Mobley argues the importance of textual analyses of popular cultural texts . . . This book amply contributes to feminist cultural and fat studies conversations about the implications and effects of mediated representations of fat, feminine bodies and performances." - Fat Studies

Jennifer-Scott Mobley is Visiting Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Rollins College, USA.