In Female Bodies on the American Stage: Enter Fat Actress, Jennifer-Scott Mobley investigates the construction and perpetuation of underlying cultural assumptions that influence the reception and interpretation of the fat female body in live and mediated performance. What results is an engaging, theoretically rigorous read that is nevertheless accessible to a broad audience through Mobley's analysis of an impressive and historically broad array of texts and performances, from Charles Gibson's Gibson Girl, to Madeleine George, to Tennessee Williams, to more contemporary examples like Roseanne Barr and Rebel Wilson. Mobley consciously and convincingly uses a variety of theoretical sources throughout the text, and demonstrates an ability to do so seamlessly with clear, meaningful applications of the theories to the material at hand. Six images, ranging from Lillian Russell to Lena Dunham, helpfully contextualize the numerous descriptions Mobley provides and serve as useful touchstones in a book largely about the spectacle of the female body.

Mobley's goal is to “destabilize negative stereotypes and imbue the word fat with fresh sociopolitical implications similar to the way in which the word queer has evolved”; fat is used “as both a descriptor and a kind of lived identity” (3). In defining her terms with such specificity, Mobley cannily sets the text up for success: the book's central argument is that fat is not simple biology, but a culturally constructed signifier—rich with political and sociological implications that need unpacking. While other scholars have written about the spectacle of the human body in performance, Mobley works at the cutting edge of the intersection between the emerging field of fat studies and performance studies, and presents a methodology for considering “the ways that fat actresses in dramatic and other mediatized representations are imbued by writers, directors, and spectators with a variety of stereotypes and psychological pathologies that are constructs of American cultural attitudes toward fat” (5). Theatre and performance studies, Mobley argues, are particularly useful methodologies for considering the phenomenon of fat reception “because of the nature of live performance where spectators are in the presence of live bodies” (2).

The introduction, “The Body as a Cultural Text,” is of particular note for its historiographical lineage of popular fatness, tracking an overview of the shifting definition of fat to support the book's view of the female body as “a historicized cultural text that is shaped and understood in the context of the social and economic organization of our society” (12). Mobley effectively ties together the historical conflation of fatness with morality, a conflation that has “played a significant role in diverse religions throughout human history” (16). The spectacle of the body is made to take on sociocultural signifiers of either discipline and control or moral looseness and depravity, contributing to a popular and influential conception of fatness as morally repugnant, a point to which Mobley returns often throughout the text. If there is a misstep in the introduction, it comes near the end, when Mobley references a 2011 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine to illustrate the intrinsic fat bias woven into American society. The problem is that Mobley does not cite the research itself, but a New York Times Magazine story about the research. This feels somewhat disingenuous and clumsy; Enter Fat Actress is at its best when it is focused upon the sociologically significant reception of the body in performance as opposed to taking on, or even obliquely referencing, a scientific perspective.

The book is divided into three parts, each with between two and four chapters, for a total of ten chapters, along with an introduction and conclusion. The most successful and engaging are Part I, “Fat Dramaturgies,” which examines “the ways in which playwrights use fat to construct characters or shape plots” (5) and Part III, “Reclaiming Fat,” which “focuses more exclusively on female performing bodies and the reemergence of female body diversity in popular representations—the return of the ‘fat’ actress” (7).

I found Part II, “Fat Subjectivities,” slightly problematic however. Furthering her definition of fat as transgressively “more-than” (“above-average height, broad shouldered, thick waisted, or large breasted … a range of nonnormative body types” [3]), Mobley attempts to illustrate a possible use for the term “fat” as applied to a range of othered bodies. While I agree with the broad definition of the term as being theoretically useful, I am not altogether sure Mobley has enough space in “Fat Subjectivities” to take on the intersections between fat and other “bodies [that] become a site of danger when they exceed culturally acceptable boundaries of size” (86). These chapters take on a range of diverse and intersectional topics, including racialized and queer bodies, each of which could probably withstand its own book's worth of scholarly study. Mobley trades depth for breadth, and, consequently, “Fat Subjectivities” leaves the reader desiring the kind of deep analysis that constitutes the rest of the book.

The book uses and critiques texts “rooted in the tradition of realism” in order to argue that a pervasive definition of the term “fat” reduces the female body to her external parts (4). “American audiences,” Mobley writes, “have become so accustomed to the slender, homogenous beauty aesthetic as proliferated in mass media that any body that strays outside that parameter interferes with the viewer's notion of what is believable — or what is realistic” (180). The fat body is always considered unrealistic for the way it transgresses accepted definitions of beauty, and thus is always a site of political definition and debate. Mobley closes the book by calling on American university theatres to implement “body-blind casting” practices in order to “model true body democracy and include all sizes as part of the world represented onstage” (185). By the time the reader reaches this self-proclaimed manifesto for “reclaiming fat onstage” (185), Mobley's political call to action — and the scholarship that precedes it — come across as effective, carefully considered, and revolutionary.