Female Bodies on the American Stage: Enter Fat Actress - Hardcover

Mobley, J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1137430664 ISBN 13: 9781137430663

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

Synopsis

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 a

About this title

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

"[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

About the Author:

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1137430664
• ISBN 13: 9781137430663
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 251