Abstract
As a counterpoint to exploring texts written by white playwrights about white women and geared toward a homogenous, white, heteronormative middle-class audience, this chapter examines plays, some of which were written by men and women of color, that explore racial subjectivity and representations of fatness and blackness onstage. This chapter investigates the connection between fat and racial otherness in various modes of representation. In addition to asking how white middle-class American audiences read a big black body versus a big white body in representation, I argue that there is an overlay and a blending in depictions of fat and racial difference in various cultural texts that result in a kind of representational “miscegenation.”
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Notes
See Sander L. Gilman’s essay “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed. Amelia Jones (New York: Routledge, 2003), 136–150.
Amy Erdman Farrell, Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2011).
bell hooks, “Selling Hot Pussy: Representations of Black Female Sexuality in the Cultural Marketplace,” in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, eds. Nadia Medina, Katie Conboy, Sarah Stanbury (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 113–28.
Andrea Elizabeth Shaw, The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women’s Unruly Political Bodies (New York: Lexington Books, 2006).
August Wilson, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (New York: Plume, 1981), 86.
Lisa M. Anderson, Black Feminism in Contemporary Drama (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 53.
Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1997), 35.
Sara L. Warner, “Suzan-Lori Parks’s Drama of Disinterment: A Transnational Exploration of Venus,” Theatre Journal 2 (2008): 181–99.
Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan, Hairspray (New York: Applause Books, 2002), xv.
Linda Martín Alcoff, “Toward a Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment,” in Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 268.
Samantha Murray, The ‘Fat’ Female Body (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 34–7.
See also Jennifer Terry and Jaqueline Urla, “Mapping Embodied Deviance,” in Deviant Bodies, eds. Jennifer Terry and Jaqueline Urla (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), 1–18.
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© 2014 Jennifer-Scott Mobley
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Mobley, JS. (2014). Fat Black Miscegenation. In: Female Bodies on the American Stage. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137428943_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137428943_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-49211-4
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