Distributed for Intellect Ltd
Fat Performance
The first edited collection dedicated to the vibrant field of fat performance.
This volume connects diverse materials from the field of fat performance and presents introductory frameworks to this area of artistic practice and scholarly inquiry. It presents fat performance as a diverse field, created by and with many different kinds of fat people and using numerous strategies for meaning-making through performance.
The chapters include contributions from scholars, artists, and activists thinking and writing across dance, theater, live art, community practice, comedy, photography, film, health contexts, and performance in the everyday. The writing forms and research methods are as diverse as the performance forms, including conversations for the page, image-led essays, autoethnography, and poetry, as well as conventional academic formats drawing from history, critical theory, and philosophy. With its rich international scope and multidisciplinary, intersectional approaches, the volume showcases an exciting range of performance forms and demonstrates the expansive potential of fat performance studies.
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Caleb Luna
Introduction
1 ‘You Have a Revolutionary Act’: A History of Fat Performance Art
Stefanie Snider
2 But Is It Healthy? The Fat Activist Dance of Disrespect
Charlotte Cooper and Kay Hyatt
3 fatness, writing, and performance: the unmaking of the unfinished body/text
Miro Spinelli
4 Three Steaks and a Cake: Fat Mad Queer Crip Communing in Cindy Baker’s Dreams
Lindsay Eales, Cindy Baker, and Kristin Rodier
5 Camouflage for Resting
Camila Fontenele de Miranda, Translated by Magdalena Hutter
6 Contemplating Fatness and Ecological Interdependence: Laura Aguilar’s Nature Self-Portraits
Eleanor Roberts
7 Fat Fists Fisting Fat: An Excessive Queer Performance Manifisto
Phoebe Patey-Ferguson
8 Time Loupe: Taking a Closer Look at Fat, Dance, Film and Temporality
Magdalena Hutter
9 The Black in Fat: A Conversation Between Ebony Oldham, Da’Shaun Harrison, Marquisele Mercedes, Mary Senyonga, and Rob Barry
Ebony Oldham, Da’Shaun Harrison, Marquisele Mercedes, Mary Senyonga, and Rob Barry
10 Sometimes, Representation Doesn’t Matter: Fatness, Normativity and Audience Expectations
Sofia Apostolidou
11 The (Mis)Use of Fat Performance in Weight Stigma Interventions with Health Professionals
Rachel Fox
12 Fat Burlesque as Gender Exploration: An Autoethnography of Corpulence and Feminine Flaunting
KB Heylen
13 Heavy Investigations: Moving Between Weight and Weightlessness as a Fat Dancer
Jussara Belchior Santos
14 Fat Theatre Audiences: Finding Comfort at Sofie Hagen’s Fat Jokes
Emily Underwood-Lee
15 Community Dance as Fat Activism
Gillie Kleiman
16 Fattening the Frameworks of Australian Performance: The (Re)shaping of Community Through Fat-Queer Resistance
Kelli Jean Drinkwater and Jonathan Graffam-O’Meara
Notes on Contributors
Index