Making Cake Daddy: Dramaturgies to 'Fatten' the Queer Stage

Making Cake Daddy: dramaturgies to ‘fatten’ the queer stage

Jonathan Allan Graffam

Bachelor of Arts (Hons.) Master of Dramaturgy

ORCID ID: 0000-0002-1139-1890

December 2020 Submitted in total fulfilment of the degree Master of Fine Arts (Theatre) Theatre, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music The University of Melbourne

Declaration

This is to certify that:

• The thesis comprises only my own original work towards the Master of Fine Arts except where indicated in the preface;

• Due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used;

• The thesis is fewer than 50,000 words in length, exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies and appendices.

Jonathan Graffam

Acknowledgements

I am tremendously grateful for the tireless support, guidance and dual artistic and academic mentorship I have received from Dr Alyson Campbell, which began well in advance of composing this thesis and continues beyond. Thank you to Dr Eddie Paterson for his expert supervision, keen insights and ability to read multiple drafts with fresh eyes. Additionally, I would like to extend my gratitude to Dr Zachary Dunbar for his care and support throughout this project.

I am deeply indebted to artists Ross Anderson-Doherty and Lachlan Philpott for their openness and generosity and I extend this to the rest of the Cake Daddy creative team. It has been an honour to be part of this fabulous queer assemblage. I hope the sheer joy I felt during our time together making this work is conveyed through the writing. Thank you to colleagues in Theatre at the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music (VCA), especially Dr Sarah Austin, as well as my graduate researcher peers. A special thank you to Rachel Patenaude for kindly sharing recorded interview material of the Cake Daddy team, which has found its way into this document.

There has been much backstage support. Thank you to my parents Julie and Joe for their unceasing encouragement. The same for siblings near and far. A very special thank you to my partner Russell O’Meara who has been a source of endless kindness, hugs and laughter. To my best friend and four-legged companion Koda, I’m finally coming, buddy, go get your leash…

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Abstract

This thesis examines the dramaturgical strategies used in making performance about fat identity. The research responds to fat activist performance scholar Jennifer-Scott Mobley’s call for of a ‘Fat Dramaturgy,’ and attempts to further the field by presenting unique insights and findings from within the process of making new performance work.1 The inquiry is framed by my dramaturgical practice, and that of the creative team, in the process of making Cake Daddy, an original stage work performed by fat- and queer-identifying artist Ross Anderson-Doherty. Given the powerful influence of queer activism and theory in consolidating and galvanising the nascent field of fat activist performance—and the queer identification and aesthetic of the Cake Daddy creative team—I address how queer performance strategies can be used to highlight the negative impact of dominant, medicalised narratives and the societal urge to pathologize fatness and, in doing so, encourage meaningful dialogue around other aspects of the lived experience of fat people: the social, cultural, political and sexual. Thus, I ask: what dramaturgical strategies can be used when making queer performance that frames and celebrates fat identity? By analysing moments of the Cake Daddy performance, I articulate how and why certain choices in composing these moments were determined in the creative process. I draw on the fields of fat studies, performance studies (dramaturgy) and queer theory, and situate the work within the wider field of fat activist performance. The thesis also offers an important and needed shift in the way fat activist performance is analysed by presenting perspectives from within the process of making it. Of particular significance, then, is my position as a practitioner-researcher embedded in the creative process.

1 Jennifer-Scott Mobley, “Toward a Fat Dramaturgy: Activism, Theory, Practice,” Fat Studies 8, no. 3 (2019): 213–18.

Table of Contents

Declaration ...... ii Acknowledgements ...... iii Abstract ...... iv Table of Figures ...... vii Preface ...... viii Introduction ...... 1 Subject of thesis ...... 1 Aim of thesis ...... 3 Scope of thesis ...... 3 Methodology ...... 4 Structure ...... 6 Significance of the study ...... 8 1. Background: Fat studies—formalising a field of fat activist research ...... 9 Introduction: What is fat studies? ...... 9 Fat identity and subjectivity: resisting erasure ...... 12 Social determinants of health and ‘problem’ framing...... 14 Intersections of fat and queer ...... 17 Fat sex, sexuality and desire ...... 20 Conclusion ...... 22 2. Background: Fat Dramaturgies—formalising a discourse of fat activist performance 23 Introduction: Staging fatness ...... 23 Towards a more expansive ‘Fat Dramaturgy’ ...... 27 Fat activist performance and fat community ...... 31 ‘Obesity’ and Diet Discourse in Fat Activist Performance ...... 33 Fat Performativity ...... 34 Conclusion ...... 36 3. Expanding (Fat) Dramaturgy: establishing an artistic practice and creative methodology ...... 38 Introduction: defining ‘dramaturgy’ ...... 38 Dramaturgy as a contemporary practice...... 43 Recording and documenting collaborative practice ...... 44 ‘Queer Dramaturgies’ ...... 46 Genesis of Cake Daddy and the emergence of a queer hybrid form ...... 47 Conclusion ...... 52 4. Visibility, Presence and Community-building in Cake Daddy ...... 54 Introduction ...... 54 Hamburger Queen, a fat talent contest ...... 55 Cake Watchers: interaction, conversation and ‘watching cake’ ...... 59 Devising Cake Watchers: establishing an audience community ...... 65 The Cake Daddy Pledge ...... 70 Conclusion ...... 79

5. Queering ‘Obesity’ Discourse and Diet Culture ...... 80 Introduction ...... 80 Queering the subject and creative process ...... 81 Cake Watchers as queer deconstruction ...... 84 ‘Emotional dramaturgy’: the personal as (fat/queer) reparative work ...... 94 Conclusion ...... 103 6. Flaunting Fatness: Fat Performativity in Cake Daddy ...... 104 Introduction ...... 104 Framing Cake Watchers ...... 105 The ‘actual-virtual’, the fat body and fat performativity ...... 109 Queer futurity and utopic potential ...... 115 ‘Cake Daddy’s Recipe’ as a fat-queer utopian performative ...... 117 Conclusion ...... 123 Conclusion ...... 125 Bibliography ...... 129 Weblinks cited ...... 137 Online Video Links ...... 137 Performance works cited ...... 138 Interviews ...... 139 Appendix 1 ...... 140

Table of Figures

Figure 1: Ross Anderson-Doherty as Cake Watchers group leader...... 61

Figure 2: Ross Anderson-Doherty chatting with audience in front of Cake Watchers visual design ...... 63

Figure 3: Example pages of the Cake Watchers workbook/program from the Belfast production season ...... 67

Figure 4: Ross Anderson-Doherty in cucumber tracksuit designed by Leho De Sosa ...... 72

Figure 5: Ross Anderson-Doherty with Cake Daddy visual design ...... 75

Figure 6: Ross Anderson-Doherty wearing ‘cucumbomber’ shirtdress...... 106

Figure 7: Ross Anderson-Doherty performing ‘Cake Daddy’s Recipe (Fat is a Verb)’ ...... 119

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Preface

The thesis examines the production of Cake Daddy, a queer- and fat-positive performance work which premiered at The Black Box Belfast (Northern Ireland) in November 2018. This was followed by seasons in Melbourne and Sydney, Australia in February 2019. Since minimal changes to the content of the show occurred between the production closing in Melbourne and opening in Sydney, only performances in Belfast and Melbourne will be used for analysis. The Cake Daddy creative team consists of performer Ross Anderson-Doherty, director Alyson Campbell, playwright Lachlan Philpott, sound designer and composer Marty Byrne, visual and costume designer Leho De Sosa, production manager Siobhán Barbour and myself as dramaturg-researcher. The concept and dramaturgy of the production was a collaborative effort between the team, which is highlighted in my description of the process throughout the thesis. Lighting designer Bronwyn Pringle joined the Cake Daddy creative team in early 2019 for the Australian tour of the production. Two Cake Daddy rehearsal and development periods took place in Belfast during June 2017 and July 2018, respectively.2 The time was used to develop individual song concepts and formalise discussions around the key ideas and intentions for the performance. Songs were written, composed and recorded, a form and narrative structure for the performance also emerged. A final three-week rehearsal and development period began mid-October 2018, leading into the production’s premier in Belfast on November 9th and 10th. Here, Cake Daddy was presented as the headline act of Outburst Queer Arts Festival 2018.3

2 In June 2017, Anderson-Doherty, Barbour, Byrne and Campbell collaborated in an initial research and development for Cake Daddy. This resulted in the launch of ‘Cake Daddy’s Recipe (Fat is a Verb)’ as a single on vinyl at Blackbox Theatre in November 2017. This first stage was funded by The Arts Council of Northern Ireland, British Council and Outburst Arts Festival. In July and November 2018, Anderson-Doherty, Barbour, Byrne, Campbell, Philpott and myself collaborated in Belfast with ongoing communication with DeSosa in Uruguay. Additional funding was received from The Australia Council for the Arts and The University of Melbourne. In touring the production to Melbourne and Sydney, Anderson-Doherty and Barbour received further support from Creative Ireland. 3 https://outburstarts.com

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In January 2019 further rehearsals commenced at The Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne. Significant changes were made to the performance during this time, details of which inform parts of my discussion. The Australian production ran from February 3rd to the 10th, 2019 at Theatre Works in St Kilda, programmed in Melbourne’s Midsumma Festival.4 A Sydney season followed, running from February 16th to 22nd, 2019 at Seymour Centre, part of Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.5 Cake Daddy was then again staged June 8th, 2019, programmed in the Belfast Book Festival for a single performance.6

4 https://www.midsumma.org.au 5 https://www.mardigras.org.au 6 https://belfastbookfestival.com

Introduction

Subject of thesis

There has been a long-standing, identifiable gap in contributions from theatre and performance scholars to locate and tie together strategies used by fat activist performance- makers. Responding to this, in 2019 academic Jennifer-Scott Mobley guest edited a special journal issue titled ‘Fat in Theatre and Performance’ in Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society.7 A key concept in Mobley’s introduction to the issue is what she terms ‘Fat Dramaturgy’. That is,

a collection of writing that seeks to develop a theoretical framework through which to create and understand fat in performance as well as provide inspiration to performing artists with practical examples of how theatre can disrupt stereotypically negative social narratives around fat subjectivity through performance.8

Mobley’s intention of moving toward articulating fat dramaturgies calls attention to vital work that remains in the field: documenting and recording multiple examples of fat activist performance so that together these begin to shape a critical framework of the dramaturgical tools and strategies adopted by artists staging fat-positive performance work. This thesis can be understood as a contribution to this emerging discourse that draws on and responds to Mobley’s provocation. The Fat Studies issue, as noted by Mobley herself, is particularly U.S.-centric. Mobley’s introduction draws heavily on a traditional, logocentric understanding of dramaturgy in order to frame the contents of the issue—a position which remains popular in the U.S. given the dominant legacy of playwrighting and actor training across the American theatre landscape. For instance, when first introducing the concept in Female

7 Mobley, “Toward a Fat Dramaturgy: Activism, Theory, Practice.” 8 Ibid., 214.

Bodies on the American Stage, Mobley positions ‘Fat Dramaturgy’ as a means to understand ‘the ways in which playwrights use fat to construct or shape plots.’9 The Cake Daddy production is the result of a highly collaborative devising process that purposefully resists the strictures of a traditional, text-led hierarchical process. Therefore, I adopt a more ‘expanded’ understanding of dramaturgy in my writing as it is applied in Australian and European contexts.10 In providing an overview of contemporary dramaturgy, I situate my own artistic practice, and that of the Cake Daddy creative team, within the fields of queer theatre and performance studies. As the creative team is made up of queer-identifying artists with a history of making work together and a strong commitment to exploring alternative performance dramaturgies, the thesis attempts to locate and trace those identifiably ‘queer’ strategies used in Cake Daddy to frame Anderson- Doherty’s fat subjectivity. That is, I examine how queer performance methods operate when creating work that explores intersections of queerness with fatness and fat identity. Thus, in order to locate and articulate key findings, I ask: what dramaturgical strategies can be used when making queer performance that frames and celebrates fat identity? By providing a background to the social, political and medical discourse that surrounds fatness and fat identity, I highlight important critical and theoretical frameworks underpinning the research. Significant to this is how dominant, negative discourse around fat bodies shapes and informs lived experiences of fatness. This becomes a major factor driving the resistant ideology embedded in fat activist performance. Key to this is the influence of lesbian feminist activists and scholars in the early and ongoing consolidation of fat studies, emphasising its inherently queer roots.11 The impact of queer theory and activism on fat studies is significant and as such is prioritised for discussion throughout the thesis. It is my contention that examples of fat activist performance share similar ways of framing fat identity at their centre while attempting to destabilise mainstream, oppressive assumptions that typically surround fat bodies. In this kind of performance, the personal

9 Jennifer-Scott Mobley, Female Bodies on the American Stage (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 5. 10 See: Peter Eckersall, “Towards an Expanded Dramaturgical Practice: A Report on ‘The Dramaturgy and Cultural Intervention Project,’” Theatre Research International 31, no. 3 (October 10, 2006): 283–97. 11 See, for instance: Charlotte Cooper, Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement (Bristol, England: HammerOn Press, 2016).

and political become vital in understanding the intentions of the artists making the work. Certainly, this is the case with Cake Daddy, and so at times I adopt a socio-cultural lens in analysing aspects of rehearsal or the production in order to situate the position/s and ideas of the creative team. Immediately, it is crucial to note the contribution and presence of Anderson-Doherty as lead artist of this production and his personal experiences and insights that drive the content of the Cake Daddy performance. As such, I attempt to ensure Anderson-Doherty’s voice remains present through my discussion while also highlighting the work of Campbell and Philpott in developing and framing this material for the stage.

Aim of thesis

The aim of the thesis, then, is to examine the dramaturgical strategies used in making Cake Daddy and to use these findings to draw attention to the possibility and creative potentiality of ‘fat dramaturgies’—distinct strategies developed and shared by performance work in the field.

Scope of thesis

The thesis prioritises the Cake Daddy production as a main case study for analysis. Cake Daddy and the other examples of fat activist performance referred to in this thesis predominantly feature White artists residing in the Global North (that is, economically strong geographic regions). This underscores a need for documenting fat activist performance and perspectives outside of the United States, United Kingdom and Australia. While a more diverse and complexly intersectional selection of performances would be ideal, it is beyond the scope of this research to locate, record and document such work. This is perhaps suited to a larger project that has the scope and capacity to conduct a wider investigation of fat dramaturgies, which the thesis beckons toward. I am aware that the subject of the thesis shifts back and forth across a range of social discourses at any given time, such as: fatness, gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, and more. Instead of attempting to distinguish between these at all times and draw lines to separate ideas associated with different social identifiers and groups, I approach the

research with an intersectional queer perspective, one that embraces blurred boundaries and the overlapping that occurs across areas of research.12

Methodology

Though this research is in many ways practice-led, I have chosen to submit it as a full dissertation without an artistic component. This is due in part to the highly collaborative nature of this project, as well as the precarious position of a dramaturg within a devising context, where their creative work is inextricably tied to the work of others.13 This is a pertinent issue that emerges with the formalisation of the role of ‘dramaturg’ as a distinct figure within a creative project.14 For the dramaturg, ownership of material is immediately and necessarily problematic in the sense that the dramaturg’s role within an artistic project relies almost entirely on responding to and facilitating the work of others.15 For dramaturg- researchers, there remain significant questions around how to present creative materials for examination or publication that are distinguishable from the work and contributions of others. This remains a fertile space for further investigation. In the context of this thesis, however, while I refer to resources and materials created during and for the Cake Daddy production, in no way do I claim these as solely my own work. The boundaries between practice and theory in the field of dramaturgy are intrinsically blurred, which I believe makes it a useful place from which to generate meaningful reflection and analysis within a process. My position as a dramaturg-researcher within the project importantly frames my discussion. Documenting and recording rehearsal material and processes were key to my dual role as artist and researcher within the space, thus I am well-positioned to reflect on and trace elements of the production from inception through to the performance event. In this way, the dual practical (creative) and theoretical approach to this research together produce my methodology.

12 See: Jack (Judith) Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); and Annemarie Jagose, “Feminism’s Queer Theory,” Feminism & Psychology 19, no. 2 (2009): 157–74. 13 See: Katalin Trencsényi, Dramaturgy in the Making (London; New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). 14 Duška Radosavljević, “The Place of a Dramaturg in Twenty-First-Century England,” in The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, ed. Magda Romanska (Oxfordshire, England: Routledge, 2015), 40–44. 15 Katalin Trencsényi and Bernadette Cochrane, New Dramaturgy: International Perspectives on Theory and Practice (London; New York: Bloomsbury, 2014); Trencsényi, Dramaturgy in the Making.

There are a number of other examples of fat activist performance that I refer to in the thesis. It is important to note I was not present in the audience for these productions. Instead, I rely on artist descriptions, online videos, documentary film, media promotion, academic papers, mainstream arts reviews and fat activist community blogs and boards in order to inform my discussion. While examining the Cake Daddy production, I refer to rehearsal and production notes, photos, audio recordings, video recordings, interviews with artists, and a wealth of other materials gathered from the production: song lyrics and script text, the workbook/program, marketing and social media details, funding applications and audience response feedback, among others. A post-show audience question and answer session was staged in Melbourne16 and post-show audience questionnaires were available to all Belfast, Melbourne and Sydney audiences by an online link in a workbook/program provided to audience members upon entering the performance space.17 Although these materials are not referred to directly in the thesis, I acknowledge these here as they have significantly informed my thinking around the prioritising and presentation of findings—particularly regarding the importance of fat community visibility within and around the performance. The post-show audience questionnaires were also available in person in the theatre foyer at the end of each show of the Melbourne season.18 I acknowledge any data collected in person may have been impacted due to my own presence and those of other artists associated with Cake Daddy being in the space, and because this potentially biases a certain type of participant that is more comfortable and inclined to stay back and provide feedback. It is also important to

16 The post-show question and answer session took place after the Cake Daddy performance at Theatre Works (St. Kilda, Melbourne) on Thursday February 7th, 2019. The details of this were included in all publicity leading up to the event. 17 The production program, including show credits and artist notes, also functions as a Cake Watchers ‘workbook,’ containing parodic diet testimonials, recipe ideas, song lyrics and interactive games for audiences. It even includes placeholders for stickers won during the performance. Details on how the workbook is incorporated into the performance are included in Chapter Three. 18 A copy of the audience response questionnaire used in Melbourne is attached as Appendix 1.

note that the questionnaire was adapted from a previous set of questions developed by Campbell from her own previous research, with permission and support.19

Structure

The thesis begins with an initial background chapter that serves as an introduction to the field of fat studies, outlining a sociocultural and political framework of ideas that inform the approach of the creative team in making Cake Daddy. It defines ‘fat’ as a social and political identity and addresses how fat activists and fat studies scholars disrupt hegemonic assumptions of fat/ness and ‘obesity’ discourse. A second background chapter examines the literature around fat activist performance. The chapter also expands Mobley’s notion of ‘fat dramaturgies,’ while introducing a review of influential performance works in the field. Chapter Three situates my dramaturgical practice, and that of the creative team, within a tradition of queer theatre and performance-making. Additionally, the chapter introduces a history of the Cake Daddy production and identifies its hybrid cabaret-theatre form as the first queer dramaturgical strategy adopted by the creative team in making the work. Chapter Four examines Cake Daddy as part of a legacy of fat activist cultural production and community-building. The chapter analyses two distinct moments from the performance that contribute to the community-building capacity of the work. Initially, I

19 In partnership with Campbell, and in order to conduct this research activity, Ethics approval was gained from The Human Ethics Advisory Group (HEAG), Faculty of Fine Arts and Music at The University of Melbourne. This specifically applies to the recording and documentation of rehearsals, interviews with the creative team, the post-show audience questionnaire and post-show question and answer session in Melbourne. This means Campbell and I both have permission to draw on this data to inform our own research outcomes. For Campbell it relates to practice-as-research as director with the possibility for future publication; in my context, it is for the purpose of writing this dissertation and any publications that may eventuate from this research. If you would like more information about the project, please contact the researchers: Dr Alyson Campbell (Responsible Researcher) Tel: + 61 3 9035 9183; Email: [email protected]; Jonathan Graffam Email: [email protected]. If you have any concerns or complaints about the conduct of this research project which you do not wish to discuss with the research team, you should contact the Manager, Human Research Ethics, Office for Research Ethics and Integrity, University of Melbourne, VIC 3010. Tel: +61 3 8344 2073 or Email: HumanEthics- [email protected]. All complaints will be treated confidentially. In any correspondence, please provide the name of the research team or the name or Ethics ID number of the research project (Ethics ID: 1750448.1).

examine the opening sequence, set in a fake diet group called Cake Watchers, which uses camp, subversive humour to collectively critique the insidious behaviours and ideals embedded in diet group culture. Secondly, I analyse The Cake Daddy Pledge, which invites audiences to engage in what I describe as a (queer) community-binding performance ritual. Chapter Five considers the queer identity and position of the creative team making Cake Daddy, specifically how this informs the ideas and approaches (the queer doings) used to address ‘obesity’ discourse and diet culture within the work. Doing so, I assert two key strategies: firstly, a dramaturgy of queer deconstruction, which I associate with devising and composing Cake Watchers and, I argue, is a way of exposing repressive power structures embedded in diet groups; and secondly, the ‘emotional dramaturgy,’20 of composing the monologue and song that sit at the centre of the Cake Daddy performance, in which the effects of such repressive structures on a fat subject (Anderson-Doherty) are made explicit through queer-ly reparative storytelling. In this chapter, my focus shifts from discussing the composition of the performance to more rigorously examining processes of rehearsal. Chapter Six discusses ‘fat performativity,’ first introduced by Mobley, as a way of scrambling the fat body’s encoded cultural meanings.21 I claim the performativity of fatness—specifically the ‘flaunting of fatness,’ as defined by Abigail Saguy and Anna Ward— as a queer dramaturgical strategy used by the creative team to purposefully keep the performance distanced from real-world experiences of dieting while importantly affording the possibility to playfully explore and reinscribe ideas and assumptions associated with the fat body.22 This discussion leads me to examine ‘Cake Daddy’s Recipe (Fat is a Verb),’ the final song sequence of the Cake Daddy production, with which I argue that the sonic and visual aesthetic offer queer utopic openings: powerful yet ephemeral glimpses of a better, more empathic world that hover on the horizon, just beyond our own present moment— ideas theorized by queer scholars Jill Dolan23 and José Muñoz.24

20 An idea introduced by Alyson Campbell via phone interview, August 27, 2019. 21 Mobley, “Toward a Fat Dramaturgy: Activism, Theory, Practice,” 215. 22 Abigail Saguy and Anna Ward, “Coming Out as Fat: Rethinking Stigma,” American Sociology Association 74, no. 1 (2011): 53–75. 23 Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2005). 24 José Estaban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

Significance of the study

There are currently no existing examples of fat studies research from within the process of developing new performance work about fatness, nor perspectives from insider participant-researchers (that is, members of the artistic team). While film documentaries SWAGGA (2016)25 and Nothing to Lose (2018)26 record and respond to live performance works that share the same titles, there is no evidence of fat activist artists analysing their own work through academic writing and publication.27 This is a major gap in the literature and is an important factor in how my research is framed. While Cake Daddy attempts to make fat identity visible and accessible through performance, my research attempts to do something similar: to make explicit the process of creating this kind of performance by describing and analysing the composition of key moments within the performance. In this way, the thesis offers an important shift in the way that Cake Daddy, as an example of fat activist performance, is analysed from within the process of making it. As such, my position as a practitioner-researcher in the creative process is significant. Highly regarded fat activist and academic Charlotte Cooper suggests: ‘Fat Studies can morph into a canon that considers the value of fat diversity, fat culture, that can address new complexities, and create possibilities for recognising fat as a perspective, a new kind of interdisciplinary lens.’28 My research responds to this assertion from the perspective of performance-making, with the hope that by extending ideas put forward by Mobley and other key contributors in the field that it may advance the discourse around fat activism in theatre and performance.

25 Katarzyna Perlak, SWAGGA: A Study on Camera, Documentary, 2016, https://vimeo.com/261101935; the film records the dance work SWAGGA (2015), created and performed by Cooper and Kay Hyatt. 26 Kelli Jean Drinkwater, Nothing to Lose, Documentary, 2018, https://vimeo.com/ondemand/nothingtolose?fbclid=IwAR0MADE41fm5ozt7xGDt_l8RgWixRxusxnAoPMg5iJ3h znFaJnVN0ykDFo8; the documentary examines the process of making Force Majeure’s dance production Nothing to Lose (2015). 27 However, Cooper has written a reflective piece on making SWAGGA that recounts personal and historical aspects: Charlotte Cooper, “I am a fat dancer, but I am not your inspiration porn,” Open Democracy, February 11, 2015, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/i-am-fat-dancer-but-i-am-not-your-inspiration- porn/. 28 Charlotte Cooper, “Fat Studies: Mapping the Field,” Sociology Compass 4, no. 12 (2010): 1029.

1. Background: Fat studies—formalising a field of fat activist research

Introduction: What is fat studies?

With a review of fat studies scholarship, I initially provide a history and overview of the field, including key political aims and influential publications and figures within the social movement. With this, I focus particular attention on discursive methods of treating ‘fat’ as a social and cultural construction. Additionally, I analyse research that examines the intersection of fat and queer identity, which draws heavily on queer theory to validate and legitimise fat subjectivities. This proves significant to my research since the Cake Daddy creative team approach ideas of staging fatness and fat identity through a lens and history of queer performance-making. In doing this, I attempt to frame a background of the key socio-cultural theory and discursive practices that underpin and inform the creative team’s intentions in making Cake Daddy. Fat studies is inherently linked to fat activism, a socio-political movement that actively resists common, problematic understandings of the fat body. ‘Fat’ is a term adopted by activists and academics in the field as a preferred descriptor because it is inherently biological, and thus potentially neutral. It is reclaimed from historically discriminatory use and freed to become, as Marilyn Wann describes it, a ‘political identity’.29 On this, fat studies academic Saguy adds:

I use the terms fat and fatness as neutral descriptors, not as derogatory terms. I sometimes use the word corpulence as another neutral term for bigger bodies. This is an imperfect solution. Given the extent to which fatness has been condemned and pathologized over the past century, it is impossible to choose a truly neutral word for fat.30

29 Marilyn Wann, “Foreward—Fat Studies: An Invitation to Revolution,” in The Fat Studies Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2009), xii. 30 Abigail Saguy, What’s Wrong with Fat? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 7.

The practice of reclaiming historically oppressive language in the forging of subversive political identities and activism can be traced clearly through civil rights, disability rights and lesbian and gay rights movements, among others. Fat activism and fat studies, as a diverse but singular field, regularly draws on ideas and frameworks established by other, preceding movements in order to strengthen its position and legitimacy.31 Fat activism aims to drive the public discourse around fatness beyond mainstream medical frameworks, which currently suffocate the potential of other possible conversations and understandings of fatness.32 In undermining and subverting the rhetoric surrounding bodies that are labelled ‘overweight’ and ‘obese’ (language that is refuted by fat activist scholars, hence the adoption of quotation marks), it opens the potential for discussing other qualities of the lived experience of fatness through the lenses of social sciences, politics, the Arts, and beyond.33 The initial seeds of fat activism can be traced in the United States to the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (1969)34 and the Fat Underground (1970).35 Individuals aligned with these movements protest by gaining public platforms and calling for wide-reaching policy and laws that work to counter the complex stigma, assumptions, fat-shaming and other various forms of discrimination fat people continue to encounter in their everyday lives. A crucial legacy of this early fat activism is the invocation of The Social Model of Disability as a theoretical basis for rethinking the possibilities of fat subjectivity.36 The medical model of disability, similar to ‘obesity’ discourse, perceives ‘disability’ as an abnormality or problem of the individual that requires treatment or curing; the social model instead establishes that disability is socially constructed and is caused by

31 See: Cooper, Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement. 32 Wann, “Foreward—Fat Studies: An Invitation to Revolution,” xiii. 33 Rhetoric related to ‘obesity’, terms such as ‘overweight’ or ‘underweight’ are refuted by fat activists for suggesting an ideal body/size. I take up this tradition and place such terms in quotation marks to highlight the constructed and fraught nature of such language. 34 https://naafa.org 35 The Fat Underground was an early Los Angeles based fat activist group in the 1970s. Pioneering members Judith Freespirit and Aldebaran wrote the following manifesto, which outlines the intentions and ambitions of the group: Judy Freespirit and Aldebaran, “Fat Liberation Manifesto, 1973,” in The Fat Studies Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 341–42. On this, also see: Charlotte Cooper, Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement, 116–27. 36 For more on this history and its continued legacy, see: April Herndon, “Disparate but Disabled: Fat Embodiment and Disability Studies,” National Women’s Studies Association Journal 14, no. 3 (2002): 121–37; and Charlotte Cooper, “Can a Fat Woman Call Herself Disabled?,” Disability and Society 12, no. 1 (1997): 31– 41.

‘environments filled with physical, attitudinal, communication and social barriers.’37 The onus is placed on those social and cultural barriers to be transformed or removed rather than the individual. By adopting this model, fat studies scholars globally began emphasising the lived experience of fat people as simultaneously political, social, cultural—and perhaps most radically—sexual.38 Many fat studies researchers in the United States remain focused on resisting the medicalisation and pathologizing of fatness by highlighting the inherently flawed nature of ‘obesity’ and ‘overweight’ models that dominate health discourse. Marilyn Wann, for instance, details the fraught nature of the Body Mass Index (BMI), and highlights one particular moment in 1998 when BMI recommendations were adjusted so dramatically that ‘millions of people became fat overnight’.39 Two vital contributions to fat studies discourse that do significant work in consolidating the field are Bodies Out of Bounds,40 edited by Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco, and The Fat Studies Reader,41 edited by Esther D. Rothblum and Sondra Solovay. As volumes, they capture a diverse range of research from around the world and feature fat activist perspectives within the health and medical context, consider social and cultural constructions of fat and fat embodiment, discuss the social inequity of fatness, and examine fat identity as it is framed by popular culture and media. Both volumes have had a sizeable impact in the field by drawing attention to the rich complexities that exist across fat studies research. Acclaimed U.K.-based fat activist-artist and academic Cooper, in her article “Fat Studies: Mapping the Field,” provides a historical timeline of fat activism.42 She details the initial (U.S.) focus of fat studies as a resistance to the medical discourse surrounding the ‘global obesity epidemic’ and perpetuating ‘moral panic’ surrounding fat bodies. Cooper

37 “Social Model of Disability,” People With Disability Australia, accessed August 15, 2020, https://pwd.org.au/resources/disability-info/social-model-of-disability/. 38 Helen Hester and Caroline Walters, “Riots Not Diets!: Sex, Fat Studies and DIY Activism,” in Fat Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism, ed. Helen Hester, Caroline Walters, and Meredith Jones (Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2016), 1–11. 39 Wann, “Foreward—Fat Studies: An Invitation to Revolution,” xiv. 40 Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco, Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 41 Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay, eds., The Fat Studies Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 42 Cooper, “Fat Studies: Mapping the Field.” See also: Charlotte Cooper, “A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline: Queering Fat Activist Nationality and Cultural Imperialism,” Fat Studies 1, no. 1 (2012): 61–74.

notes that this early phase of fat studies tends to remove fat subjectivity from the discourse; thus, in a significant paradigm shift—propelled by the publication of both the above volumes—fat activists and academics are now broadly more interested in framing how structural power inequity impacts the lives of fat people. Meanwhile, fat studies research in Australia exists mostly through research and artistic collaborations with U.S. and U.K.-based academics, journals, and other publishers. Jenny Lee (Victoria University) and Deborah Lupton (University of New South Wales) are the only locatable fat studies researchers currently working from within Australian academic institutions and publishing fat studies-related research.43 Lee’s writing is described below, while Lupton’s key contribution Fat serves as an introductory text to the field, heavily emphasising a discussion around the social construction of fatness rather than exploring modes of fat activist resistance.44 For the most part, fat activism in Australia is active on a grassroots level through blogs and other online forums, discussion boards, social groups, performance, and other forms of social engagement and is yet to be housed in or spilling out of our academic institutions.45

Fat identity and subjectivity: resisting erasure

Within fat studies there is a drive to recontextualise the fat body by resisting the silence and invisibility that dehumanises it. One explicit example of this is the all-too-familiar news montage of headless fat bodies, or the ‘headless fatty’ phenomenon; that is, heads of fat bodies are quite literally cropped from images played out by mainstream news media.46 These visuals are typically underscored by normatively sized newsreaders updating viewers on the ‘obesity epidemic’. This seemingly simple example of image editing poignantly demonstrates how this literal erasure of identity, coupled with the conflation of fatness with

43 Jackie Wykes and Samantha Murray are two early and leading Australian contributors to the fat studies field but appear to have moved internationally and/or are no longer publishing within this area of research. 44 Deborah Lupton, Fat (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013). See also: Maya Maor, “Fat by Deborah Lupton: Review of Fat, by Deborah Lupton,” Fat Studies 4, no. 2 (2015): 49–51. 45 See for instance: http://www.fatlotofgood.org.au; https://aplusmarkets.com; https://www.definatalie.com; https://fatheffalump.wordpress.com. Also see: Creagh Sunanda, “Study Finds Fat Acceptance Blogs Can Improve Health Outcomes,” The Conversation, August 17, 2011, https://theconversation.com/study-finds-fat- acceptance-blogs-can-improve-health-outcomes-2890. 46 Charlotte Cooper, “Headless Fatties,” Charlotte Cooper: Therapy, Culture, Fat, 2007, http://charlottecooper.net/fat/fat-writing/headless-fatties-01-07/.

ill-health, is a familiar but nonetheless insidious process that renders fat people invisible and silent in the public sphere. This is particularly powerful considering the relative hypervisibility of fatness and fat bodies in public spaces. It is a goal of fat activists and fat studies academics to actively resist the erasure and silencing of fat bodies. Fat studies seeks to destabilise such practices by placing fat identity and subjectivity at the centre and examining ways to reframe and reimagine the fat body. In such ways, fat studies research demonstrates the potential of applying various social and cultural lenses to the fat body in order to open possibilities for deconstructing fat identity and make a discursive shift towards framing fat subjectivity/ies. In Volatile Bodies, feminist scholar Elizabeth Grosz argues that notions of a corporeal form—the body—must refuse ‘singular models, models which are based on one type of body as the norm by which all others are judged.’47 She calls for a ‘plural, multiple field of possible body “types”, no one of which functions as the delegate or representative of the others… Such plural models must be used to define the norms and ideals not only of health and fitness but also of beauty and desire.’48 Fat studies academic Kathleen LeBesco directly responds to Grosz’s assertion, appreciating this goal ‘without naïvely expecting a happy, separate-but-equal assessment of bodies’.49 LeBesco notes that the process of bringing forth plural models of the body is of itself a violent and disruptive process. The radical and transgressive nature of fat activism is palpable here, as LeBesco’s writing points to the implicit—though often explicit—violence that is directed towards fat activists, regularly accused of promoting ‘obesity and ill-health’.50 It serves as a reminder of the perceived threat in questioning normative assumptions of fat bodies, and the impassioned responses that typically follow. Various fat studies researchers also draw on Grosz’s writing on the topic of the ‘abject’ nature of body fluids, particularly with regards to the societal urge for vigilance and control around female bodies.51 Grosz draws heavily on the writings of two prominent early

47 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 19. 48 Ibid., 22. 49 Kathleen LeBesco, “Queering Fat Bodies/Politics,” in Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression, ed. Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 74–87. 50 See also Kelli Jean Drinkwater on judgments, abuse and violent threats perpetuated by fat-phobia: TedTalks, “Enough with the Fear of Fat,” Kelli Jean Drinkwater, YouTube, November 23, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzlYyhh3X0w. 51 Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, 193-195.

feminist authors, Julia Kristeva52 and Luce Irigaray.53 Fat activists like Le’a Kent54 and Jana Evans Braziel55 draw from all three feminist authors to argue that fat is commonly treated as a similarly abject and fluid material, and that societal standards reinforce this to be contained and hidden, perpetuating again the silencing and removal of fat identity and subjectivity.

Social determinants of health and ‘problem’ framing

In an attempt to recontextualise the fat body within existing paradigms of ‘health’, Linda Bacon and Lucy Aphramor position fatness within a wider framework of social determinants. Doing so, the authors are able to address fatness in a more holistic way than it has traditionally been framed by medical industries. Education, wealth, racism, class, location, sexuality, gender, and other determinants of health are identified as equally meaningful. Bacon and Aphramor write:

When we talk about the social determinants of health, we’re referring to factors beyond genes and lifestyle that influence people’s health and are largely out of their immediate personal control… Other vectors of illness include racism, homophobia, sizeism, transphobia and classism – the list goes on, but these vectors are not usually accounted for in medical and nutrition texts. Once we understand the centrality of oppression and chronic stress in causing many weight-associated diseases, a different set of responses becomes not only possible but necessary.56

Saguy, in What’s Wrong with Fat?, addresses how the framing of the ‘obesity epidemic’ in public discourse works to perpetuate blame via race, class and gender. She identifies three dominant perspectives that all frame fat as a ‘problem’: personal

52 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Colombia University Press, 1982), 3. 53 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 113. 54 L’ea Kent, “Fighting Abjection: Representing Fat Women,” in Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 130–50. 55 Jana Evans Braziel, “Sex and Fat Chics: Deterritorializing the Fat Female Body,” in Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 231–54. 56 Linda Bacon and Lucy Aphramor, Body Respect (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2014), 97.

responsibility, which sits alongside notions of unrepressed desire, morality, transgression and consequence; society, which places blame on wider society for not educating and supporting fat people; and biology, with which Saguy paints an image of an unfortunate thin person tragically imprisoned by immovable layers of fat.57 Saguy also provides an extensive list of news reports that specifically place blame on working-class people, African American communities and women—particularly mothers— for perpetuating fatness and ‘obesity’. In doing so, the author highlights the disproportionate levels of weight bias placed on those populations, as well as the intense scrutiny placed around their spending and behaviours of consumption. Some fat activists have rallied behind Bacon’s Health at Every Size (HAES), a movement that resists notions of an ideal body and promotes eating and physical exercise that removes weight-based stigma.58 Instead of engaging in diet culture, HAES supporters assert there are ways to become healthier without intentional weight loss. The medical perspective driving this utilises empirical evidence proving both fat people can be healthy and thin people unhealthy, and that ultimately sedentary lifestyles are a greater risk factor for heart disease and diabetes (medical concerns that are most associated with ‘obesity’).59 This is a major point of interest for performer Anderson-Doherty. A key part of HAES’ appeal is its reasoned, scientific approach and the fact it draws on an extensive evidence- base to counter ideas perpetuated by diet culture, while reconsidering ‘health’ outside of fatphobic and restrictive measures. In rehearsals, Anderson-Doherty talked frequently of the physical toll that past dieting has had on his body. This specifically relates to the amount of extreme exercise and low food intake—and overall policing—required for him to attain a normatively sized body. The ultimate physical and mental toll of this level of activity led to a moment in the gym where his heart suddenly stopped and he was hospitalized for days. This experience becomes the centre piece of the Cake Daddy performance, where Anderson- Doherty relays the events through monologue and song (see Chapter Five). Considering these details, it becomes clear why HAES, which strongly opposes the conflation of dieting and diet culture with ‘health,’ appeals to fat activists like Anderson-Doherty.

57 Saguy, What’s wrong with Fat?, 11-13. 58 Linda Bacon, Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth about Your Weight (Texas: BenBella Books, 2008). 59 See: Deb Burgard, “What Is ‘Health at Every Size’?,” in The Fat Studies Reader, ed. Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 42–53.

Importantly, Anderson-Doherty also alludes to the perils of using one’s personal ‘health’ in building a case against ‘obesity’ discourse in the first instance. He notes:

I’ve stopped using my health to validate my body in the world because I don’t owe you my health. My health is none of your business. We don’t owe each other health in order to have our humanity validated. There are a great many fat people—there are different people of all body sizes and shapes—who live with chronic illness and who are ill. If I start to use my health as a playing card to go, “But I’m okay; I’m healthy”, then I’m throwing those people under the bus. So, I’ve stopped talking to people about my health because it’s none of their business.60

Anderson-Doherty’s comments signal a similar issue for some other fat activists who perceive HAES as assimilationist activism that only succeeds in shifting the ‘problem frame’ back onto obesity discourse or, worse, onto fat people that do not qualify as ‘healthy’. LeBesco, for instance, identifies fat activists that respond to fatphobia by ‘developing a rhetoric of innocence which seems to relieve them of responsibility for their much maligned condition.’61 Implied here is that the urge to shift blame of ‘ill-health’ from fatness onto a sedentary lifestyle is a move intended only to appease dominant culture. Vikki Chalklin expands on LeBesco’s comments, drawing similarities to certain gay and lesbian (White, middle class, monogamous) people who argue their status as “normal” by comparing themselves to their heterosexual counterparts—an assimilationist approach.62 Chalklin initially validates the urge for HAES supporters to neutralize ‘obesity’ rhetoric: ‘The most straightforward way to do this is evidently to work to reframe what is considered to be problematic about that aspect of embodiment as less troubling than the dominant culture suggests.’63 However, by further linking this process to gay assimilationist activism, Chalklin emphasizes that such an approach only makes exceptions for some, “non-deviant” lesbian

60 Ross Anderson-Doherty in interview with Dean Arcuri: Mad Wednesdays, JOY FM, “Chewing the Fat with Cake Daddy Ross for Mardi Gras,” accessed August 20, 2020, https://joy.org.au/madwednesdays/tag/cake- daddy/. 61 Kathleen LeBesco, Revolting Bodies?: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 112. 62 Vikki Chalklin, “Obstinate Fatties: Fat Activism, Queer Negativity, and the Celebration of ‘Obesity,’” Subjectivity 9 (2016): 107–25. 63 Ibid., 111.

and gay people while purposefully excluding others. Or, as Anderson-Doherty’s phrases it above: ‘throw[s] those people under the bus.’ Chalklin then draws attention to ‘…a realm of decidedly queer fat activist activity that indulges in unabashed revelry in fatness, highlighting ways in which fat subjectivities are constructed through narratives of trauma, shame and ill-health.’64 Cooper also celebrates influences of radical lesbian feminism, queer identity, punk and anarchism on her fat activism.65 Queer activist strategies offer crucial insights into alternative ways of embodying and enacting fat activism that push more radically against dominant, mainstream discourse—including to the point of rejecting other factions of fat activism.

Intersections of fat and queer

In “Queering Fat Bodies/Politics,” LeBesco draws heavily on queer/gender theory to argue that language is fundamental in reclaiming, reinscribing and resignifying fat bodies.66 LeBesco contends that with the emergence of a multiplicity of fat subjects, all with varying priorities and positions, there is an opportunity to destabilise dominant narratives currently inscribed on the fat body. LeBesco draws on Judith Butler’s theorising of gender identity as a cultural construction, bringing into the discussion important questions around performativity and the fat body. Since ideas around performativity are crucial to this discussion and continue to be raised throughout the thesis, I provide an overview of this term here and how it is understood and applied in the context of my work, linking this back to intersections of fat and queer activism. Performativity is a vital concept to the field of performance studies. It has its beginnings with linguistic philosopher J.L. Austin in How to do things with words.67 Austin explores the potential of words to ‘do’ things: to incite action and enact change (i.e. promises, agreements, apologies, declarations), as opposed to simply describing things. Poststructuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida moves Austin’s assertions on performativity

64 Ibid., 107. 65 Cooper, “A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline: Queering Fat Activist Nationality and Cultural Imperialism,” 67. 66 LeBesco, “Queering Fat Bodies/Politics.” 67 J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).

outside of the strict discipline of linguistics for further examination in literary and theatrical forms since Austin confines his ideas of speech acts to direct speech only.68 Fusing ideas from Austin and Derrida, Butler, in Gender Trouble, describes gender as a sedimentation of repeated utterances or citations that are typically unnoticed and unidentified as acts in themselves.69 As Butler draws from linguistics, cultural studies and performance theory, an understanding emerges of gender—in its everyday, social “performance”—as defined by certain ‘acts’ and ‘doings’. Gender, according to Butler, becomes ‘a dramatization of the body,’70 a matter of ‘ritualized, public performance’71 (influenced also by anthropologist Victor Turner’s writings on ritual events).72 A problematic attachment to the notion of performativity is its common conflation with aspects of live (stage) performance. Theatre scholar Dolan offers an important intervention here, suggesting the liveness of performance reveals performativity by highlighting such ‘acts’ and ‘doings’ as part of an inherently constructed social identity.73 As such, there is the possibility for performance to expose and challenge elements of these constructed identities using playful and parodic subversion. Thus, in drawing (queer) gender performativity theory into fat studies, LeBesco points to the possibility that fatness, like gender, is ‘open to splittings, self-parody, self-criticism, and… hyperbolic exhibitions of “the natural”’74 and, in doing so, calls for ‘fat play, rather than fat pathology’.75 Another important concept that emerges at the intersection of fatness and queerness is the process of ‘coming out as fat,’ initially described by Marilyn Wann.76 LeBesco defines this as, ‘choosing to no longer pass as on-the-way-to thin… coming out meant mustering courage to engage in activities only for thin people, giving up futile diets,

68 Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 69 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). 70 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 519. 71 Ibid., 520. 72 Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982). 73 Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater. 74 Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 146–47 in LeBesco, “Queering Fat Bodies/Politics,” 79. 75 LeBesco, “Queering Fat Bodies/Politics,” 83 (original emphasis). 76 Marilyn Wann quoted in Abigail Saguy and Anna Ward, “Coming Out as Fat: Rethinking Stigma,” 65.

and rebuilding self-esteem.’77 Cat Pausé frames it as a way of putting those around you ‘on notice,’ specifically regarding fat phobic assumptions, language and behaviour.78 In “Coming Out as Fat: Rethinking Stigma” authors Saguy and Ward trace this act to its legacy in queer activism. In doing so the authors frame the notion of ‘flaunting fatness,’ a queer way of celebrating deviance and transgression.79 Highlighting Kenji Yoshino’s perspective that flaunting represents a refusal to assimilate or pass within normative culture,80 Saguy and Ward describe flaunting as a way of rethinking destigmatisation strategies.81 This is tied closely to LeBesco’s ‘revolting bodies’; that is, bodies considered ‘repulsive’ by society can be reframed in acts of resistance once they are freed from containment and restriction.82 In a different line of thinking, Elena Levy-Navarro uses Lee Edelman’s concept of the queer death drive to establish similarities between temporalities in fat and queer culture.83 This plays out specifically with what Edelman calls ‘reproductive futurism,’ the notion of always serving the possible future child. Edelman describes this as a cultural obsession and asserts that normative expectations place desire and dissent secondary to serving a future that may never arrive.84 Jack Halberstam describes the resistance of such temporality as ‘queer time,’ that which does not privilege the future over the past and present.85 Addressing both Edelman and Halberstam, Levy-Navarro adds:

The fat would implicitly fit this group precisely because they are seen as refusing to live their life according to the imperative of “health”. In this sense, the fat are queer in our culture exactly because they are seen as living a life that is “unhealthy,” and thus a life that is presumably defying the imperative to cultivate maximum longevity.86

77 Kathleen LeBesco, Revolting Bodies?: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 95. 78 Cat Pausé, “Live to Tell: Coming Out as Fat,” Somatechnics 2, no. 1 (2012): 45. 79 Saguy and Ward, “Coming Out as Fat: Rethinking Stigma,” 57. 80 Kenji Yoshino, Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights (New York: Random House, 2006). 81 Saguy and Ward, “Coming Out as Fat: Rethinking Stigma,” 41. 82 LeBesco, “Queering Fat Bodies/Politics,” 75. 83 Elena Levy-Navarro, “Fattening Queer History: Where Does Fat History Go from Here?,” in The Fat Studies Reader, ed. Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 15–22. 84 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 85 Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 6–7 in Levy-Navarro, “Fattening Queer History: Where Does Fat History Go from Here?,” 17. 86 Levy-Navarro, “Fattening Queer History: Where Does Fat History Go from Here?,” 17.

Positioning fatness as a rejection of mainstream ‘obsessions’ and cultural imperatives, as Levy-Navarro does with reproductive futurism, is helpful in questioning what else might become of fat subjectivities when aligned with queer identity politics.87 In the introduction to Queering Fat Embodiment, Jackie Wykes emphasises the ways that fat bodies ‘challenge and disrupt—that is to say, queer—the disciplinary powers of normative categories.’88 It is possible, then, to explore ways through which such disciplinary powers might be challenged by engaging in unapologetic fat revelry and playful pursuits. Fat sex, sexuality and desire becomes a powerful lens through which to continue exploring this because of the dominant perception that renders fat bodies “undesirable”. What happens when instead of pathologizing the fat body, it is instead seen as sexually embodied and empowered?

Fat sex, sexuality and desire

Australian fat studies academic Jenny Lee in “Flaunting Fat: Sex with the Lights On,” poses the question: ‘If mainstream culture portrays fat as an invisible sexuality, and further portrays fat as undesirable, … then how queer is it to be fat and have sex with the lights on?’89 In answering this, Lee provides an autoethnographic account of ‘coming out as fat,’ linking the ongoing process of size-acceptance to her identity as bisexual. In such ways, gender and sexuality are deeply bound within the social and cultural frameworks surrounding fatness. In “Sex and Fat Chics: Deterritorializing the Fat Female Body,” Braziel traces Western conceptions of fatness, particularly fat female bodies, to the Aristotelian—and later Christian—associations of physical softness and moral weakness.90 Braziel draws attention to how these systems have operated over time to conflate femininity with

87 See also: Francis Ray White, “Fat, Queer, Dead: ‘Obesity’ and the Death Drive,” Somatechnics 2, no. 1 (2012): 1–17. 88 Jackie Wykes, “Introduction: Why Queering Fat Embodiment?,” in Queering Fat Embodiment, ed. Cat Pausé, Jackie Wykes, and Samantha Murray (Farnham, Surrey, England; Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2014), 5. 89 Jenny Lee, “Flaunting Fat: Sex with the Lights On,” in Queering Fat Embodiment, ed. Cat Pausé, Jackie Wykes, and Samantha Murray (Farnham, Surrey, England; Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2014), 89. 90 Braziel, “Sex and Fat Chics: Deterritorializing the Fat Female Body,” 240.

corpulence: “fat as feminine”.91 The author deconstructs select images of celebrities Rosanne Barr and Elizabeth Taylor to illustrate how excessiveness and overt sexuality can be further hyperbolized as a form of active resistance and dissent to Western constructions of fat femininity. Another (smaller) area of fat studies research examines the ‘bear,’ a gay male subculture, as a site where fat and queer bodies disrupt normative ideas of masculinity. The subversion of masculinity in these communities is described by Scott Beattie as occurring through public displays of hugging and caressing, as well as more explicit, sexually charged behaviour.92 Jason Whitesel’s book Fat Gay Men: Girth, Mirth, and Politics of Stigma is an ethnographic account of how groups founded by fat gay men in the United States simultaneously perform and celebrate their fatness and queerness in different settings.93 Bear culture is one of the few places in which fat masculinity is examined. Since fat studies is a field dominated by explorations of queer femininity and by fat-queer feminist scholars, the experience of men—particularly heterosexual men—is a significantly less documented area.94 The notion asserted by Braziel that fat is feminised flesh, or that fatness is feminising, is significant considering the implications of this on gender and sexuality. Cake Daddy

91 Ibid., 241. 92 Scott Beattie, “Bear Arts Naked: Queer Activism and the Fat Male Body,” in Queering Fat Embodiment, ed. Cat Pausé, Jackie Wykes, and Samantha Murray (Farnham, Surrey, England; Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2014), 115–28. 93 Jason Whitesel, Fat Gay Men: Girth, Mirth, and the Politics of Stigma (New York: New York University Press, 2014). 94 In terms of performance, Scottee’s body of work, detailed in Chapter Two, and Anderson-Doherty’s contribution with Cake Daddy are the only two identifiable examples of fat activist performance projects led by cis-male artists (both queer) that specifically address fatness from the cis-male perspective. Drag performer La Gateau Chocolat identifies as fat, referencing this in their work and includes this across various production marketing and publicity. However, their performances seem to avoid a fat-specific lens or point of inquiry, tending to more purposefully straddle tensions around gender, sexuality and race. See: Maddy Costa, “La Gateau Chocolat: ‘I’m Always in Some Kind of Exhausting Drag,’” Exeunt Magazine, April 3, 2017, http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/le-gateau-chocolat-interview/. There are no locatable examples of fat activist performance work within the public domain featuring Trans and/or Gender Non-Binary artists, or work that explores fatness from these more gender-queer subject positions. This gap is also reflected in the literature around fat activist performance. However, Francis Ray White’s writing examines intersections of trans(gender) and fat identities and has been vital in mapping and formalising early discourse in this area from a socio-cultural perspective. See: Francis Ray White, “Fat/Trans: Queering the Activist Body,” Fat Studies 3, no. 2 (2014): 86-100; and Francis Ray White, “Embodying the Fat/Trans Intersection,” in Thickening Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality, and Social Justice, ed. May Friedman, Carla Rice and Jen Rinaldi (New York: Routledge, 2019), 110-121. Further focus on this area, particularly through performance, can only result in more meaningful insight and nuance between the diverse experiences of gender and fatness.

becomes an interesting case study when examining its treatment of gender and sexuality as performer Anderson-Doherty does not consider the feminisation of fatness as a pejorative. In most contexts, however, men use a variety of strategies to resist this and protect the boundaries of their masculinity. Typically, this involves the adoption of language that affirms their “bigness” and separates their own size from restrictions society places on women.95 As gender, like fatness, is so deeply embedded in our everyday lives and so drastically informs our experience of the world, it has the capacity to become a paradigm unto itself within a wider discourse of fat dramaturgies.

Conclusion

With this, I now turn to locating and examining examples of theatre and other forms of live performance in order to establish how some of the key social and cultural questions raised in this chapter have been addressed by fat activist performance-makers. This chapter has outlined a theoretical framework of ideas and discursive practices that underpin fat activism as a socio-political movement. The treatment of ‘fat/ness’ as a cultural construction that is open to subversive (queer) play in order to challenge and disrupt established, negative understandings is crucial to the approach of the Cake Daddy creative team. In the next chapter, I address how theatre and performance has been discussed by fat studies scholars while also introducing key examples of performance work within the field. Doing so, I locate distinct areas of inquiry that inform my analysis of the Cake Daddy production in subsequent chapters.

95 S. Bear Bergman, “Part-Time Fatso,” in The Fat Studies Reader, ed. Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 139–42.

2. Background: Fat Dramaturgies—formalising a discourse of fat activist performance

Introduction: Staging fatness

The framing of fatness and fat identity onstage has obvious importance to this research. Within the existing field of literature, however, there remain significant gaps. In the first instance, there are very limited contributions from theatre or performance scholars. Instead, analysis is typically conducted adopting a sociocultural lens, which means authors overlook qualities of live performance, technical theatrical elements (lighting, sound, costume) or how performance can be an effective way of generating conversation that spills into the foyer and out into the community. It also means that in the following examples, discussion of identity, character and narrative are prioritised for the most in- depth discussion. Thus, when examining moments from the Cake Daddy performance in remaining chapters, I purposefully conduct a detailed dramaturgical analysis of the work that acknowledges the theatrical elements, the performer’s labouring body onstage, the audience-performer dynamics and the various interactions encouraged in the space— aspects distinct to a live performance event. In “Placing Fat Women Centre Stage,” Julia Jester identifies a number of theatrical leading roles written for fat women and provides an analysis of each.96 Jester uses the work of Dolan to highlight the tradition of the ‘male gaze’97 in theatre and moves to assert that fat women in mainstream theatre are typically relegated to play ‘mothers, wives, daughters’.98 The problem here, though, is that Jester does not engage in a discussion of theatrical forms that are less exclusionary of fat bodies than mainstream theatre. Thus, some of the more radical and effective examples of fat activist performance to be found in independent or fringe venues remain unexamined because of the scope permitted in her writing.

96 JuliaGrace Jester, “Placing Fat Women on Center Stage,” in The Fat Studies Reader, ed. Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 249–55. 97 Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991) in Jester, “Placing Fat Women on Center Stage,” 249. 98 Jester, “Placing Fat Women on Center Stage,” 249.

Gro Rugseth and Gunn Helene Engelsrud examine an aspect of live performance overlooked by Jester: the positioning and experience of audiences in fat performance work.99 In their analysis of My Life as a Fat Person (1972) by performer Lotti Törnros, the authors describe that upon arrival at the theatre venue audience members are invited to sign a guestbook with both their name and weight.100 Rugseth and Engelsrud describe Törnros inviting the audience to stare at her naked body while the performer stares directly back. The methods adopted by the artist work to shift the focus back onto the audience, or at least on the connection between the audience and performer. Rugseth and Englesrud also outline how Törnros constantly blurs lines between the “performing” self and actual lived experience. On this, the authors write, ‘The twisting of discourses is her main tool on stage and she uses this technique to tie the bonds of affection and keep up the shared emotional intensity between her and her audience.’101 The ultimate success of this work, as argued by Rugseth and Engelsrud, is how the performer creates an experience that is more about audience self-reflection and affect than it is story telling. This is an important point I pick up on in Chapter Four regarding Cake Daddy, where I argue that certain community-building activities embedded in the performance generate introspection and conversation in the space that potentially have a greater impact on audiences than moments when the narrative drives the work. Petra Kuppers, a renowned community performance expert, in “Fatties on Stage: Feminist Performances,” raises the important issue for fat performers that a large body ‘is always arrested—the spoken word, the performance, the gesture all become sucked into the sign of excessiveness that fat connotates.’102 By not directly addressing the presence of the fat body onstage, let alone the underlying assumptions and stigma associated with the fat body, the danger exists for the performance to slip back into reinforcing stereotype. According to Kuppers, the question for the performer—and a key point I return to with Cake Daddy—is how to break the culturally constructed meaning that is imposed on the fat body without denying its presence onstage.

99 Gro Rugseth and Gunn Helene Engelsrud, “Staging Fatness,” Fat Studies 6, no. 3 (2017): 281–93. 100 Ibid., 285. 101 Ibid., 291. 102 Petra Kuppers, “Fatties on Stage: Feminist Performances,” in Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression, ed. Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 278.

Kuppers uses two examples that highlight diverging ways to similarly achieve this effect. With comedian Jo Brand’s Through the Cakehole (1995-96), Kuppers describes how the artist holds excessiveness and restraint in tension to destabilise notions of a ‘loss of control’ that is commonly associated with fatness.103 In examining the work America the Beautiful (1995) by performance artist Nao Bustamante, Kuppers describes how the artist situates and inscribes their fat, naked body with coded meaning by playing with makeup, wigs and high-heels while also binding herself tightly in clingwrap. The physical manipulation and strength on show, coupled with endurance of the obvious pain of tortured flesh, demonstrates, for Kuppers, how performance simultaneously operates objectively and subjectively. She describes understanding the political analysis of fat women’s bodies embedded in the performance while also being subjectively aware of her own body and experience in the space—raising yet another key point that informs my analysis of Cake Daddy, which considers the audience’s embodied experience with the work.104 In “Obstinate Fatties: Fat activism, queer negativity, and the celebration of ‘obesity’,” Chalklin adopts the lens of negativity that emerges from queer theory in order to examine a series of fat activist activities that revel in their irreverence about health, beauty and the body.105 Her approach is framed by Francis Ray White’s theorising of ‘obesity’ in relation to the death drive, which itself responds to Edelman’s ideas around queer resistance to ‘reproductive futurism,’ chiming with Levy-Navarro’s previously described contribution.106 Chalklin furthers White’s suggestion that, as with queer activism, there are possibilities for fat activism to embrace negativity in order to challenge and disrupt social order.107 The result, according to Chalklin, is a stream of fat activist activity that offers ‘a carnivalesque cocktail of ambivalence, apathy, catharsis, disgust and shame that emphasises yet resolutely refuses to engage with the fat person’s civic responsibility to strive towards health and happiness.’108

103 Ibid., 285-86 104 Ibid., 289. 105 Chalklin, “Obstinate Fatties: Fat Activism, Queer Negativity, and the Celebration of ‘Obesity.’” 106 White, “Fat, Queer, Dead: ‘Obesity’ and the Death Drive.” 107 Chalklin, “Obstinate Fatties: Fat Activism, Queer Negativity, and the Celebration of ‘Obesity,’” 110. 108 Ibid., 108.

With this, Chalklin introduces Hamburger Queen (2011-2014), a performance event described by its creator Scottee as a ‘beauty pageant and talent show for fat people’.109 While the details and a descriptive analysis of Hamburger Queen are provided in Chapter Four, I situate this here as an important part of Chalklin’s contribution to the literature surrounding fat activism and the adoption of queer strategies in making performance. In her analysis of Hamburger Queen, Chalklin emphasises how the event ‘embraced the negative and often damaging rhetorics of gluttony, malady, misery and abjection through which fat subjectivities are constructed…’ and, in doing so, ‘staged unapologetic shameless fatness that is radically queer in embracing its negativity.’110 This kind of queer resistance to hegemonic assumptions around fatness, particularly in employing playful and subversive strategies, relates closely to the notion of ‘flaunting fatness,’ asserted by Saguy and Ward.111 This is significant to my research in that I return to these ideas in my analysis of Cake Daddy, specifically in terms of Anderson-Doherty’s (at times) hyperbolic physical, gestural and vocal performance. Camille Ronti offers a comparative study of fat activist-artists Scottee, Brenda Oelbaum and performance group Sins Invalid. Her article situates the importance of a Foucauldian lens in encountering fat activist performance, acknowledging the fat body as a culturally coded site of intense and complex power relations. With the example of Hamburger Queen, Ronti highlights the ‘queering’ of identities that occurs in the space, drawing attention to the subversion of binaries: ‘male/female, heterosexual/homosexual, fat/thin…’ In doing so, she asserts Hamburger Queen ‘gave fat women the opportunity to perform onstage and to socially claim their fat identity.’112 A key issue with this is that Ronti does not offer evidence from the performance to support these claims. Ronti moves to outline how categories often associated with dieting—‘obese,’ ‘overweight,’ ‘normal,’ and ‘abnormal’—operate as devices that perpetuate the medicalising and treatment of fatness as a curable (thus temporary) disease. In relation to the work of Brenda Oelbaum, Results May Vary (2012) and (corpo)punishment I (2013), she describes the way the artist directly

109 Scottee and Friends, “Hamburger Queen,” Scottee, accessed June 10, 2019, https://www.scottee.co.uk/post/hamburgerqueen. 110 Chalklin, “Obstinate Fatties: Fat Activism, Queer Negativity, and the Celebration of ‘Obesity,’” 118. 111 Saguy and Ward, “Coming Out as Fat: Rethinking Stigma.” 112 Camille Ronti, “Fat Activists’ Strategies on Stage: Redefining Fat Identity. A Comparison of Scottee, Brenda Oelbaum, and Sins Invalid,” DiGeSt. Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies 4, no. 2 (2017): 51.

responds to diet-related language and behaviours by exposing the inherent harm and risk posed to dieters. I pick up on aspects of this material when reviewing Oelbaum’s work Results May Vary below. On the group Sins Invalid, a collective of performers identifying as fat, queer, of colour, and disabled, Ronti simply points to the intersectional potential of their work without providing any examples or description. This highlights one of the key issues that I locate in the article. While work is done to situate a Foucauldian lens onto examples of fat activist performance, there is little to no detail or evidence offered from those actual examples of performance. Aside from Ronti, there is a clear gap in contributions from theatre and performance scholars attempting to bring together a range of performance examples and strategies used by fat activist performance-makers.

Towards a more expansive ‘Fat Dramaturgy’

Mobley’s special issue of Fat Studies emerges as an important intervention to this gap. In framing the notion of ‘fat dramaturgies’ in her introductory paper, Mobley draws on ideas embedded in American dramaturgical practice/s and highlights strong connections between this discipline and the legacy of 18th Century German theatre—specifically the role of the dramaturg as literary consultant that emerged with Gotthold Lessing (discussed further in Chapter Three).113 Important here is how deeply rooted American theatre is in forms of narrative drama, especially realism.114 Highlighting her previous work in Female Bodies on the American Stage, Mobley calls for ‘rethinking so-called realism and revising aesthetics’, referring to the absence of fat or diversely sized female actors on American stages, even in roles that call for ‘fat/big’ actors.115 Doing so, Mobley emphasises the need for body-diverse casting.116 She asserts, ‘audiences have difficulty understanding a fat female body in the context of realism without attaching to it some of the fat pathology’.117 Mobley prioritises ‘body-blind’ casting as a

113 Jennifer-Scott Mobley, “Toward a Fat Dramaturgy: Activism, Theory, Practice.” 114 See, for example: William W. Demastes, ed. Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996). Also, on text-based American dramaturgy traditions, see: Lenora Inez Brown, The Art of Active Dramaturgy: Transforming Critical Thought into Dramatic Action (Newburyport, Massachusetts: Focus Publishing/R. Pullins Co., 2011). 115 Mobley, “Toward a Fat Dramaturgy: Activism, Theory, Practice,” 215. 116 Mobley, Female Bodies on the American Stage, 182. 117 Ibid.

practice needing to be implemented across the theatrical landscape so that fat representation and body diversity can be effectively and appropriately established on American stages. Originally asserting this in the coda of her 2014 book,118 Mobley reiterates this in the 2019 special issue introduction, lamenting the little progress made in theatre since this time while noting film and television has shown some (albeit small) progress.119 Additionally, Mobley points to the failure of theatre scholars to take up her call for the further theorising of ‘fat performativity.’120 According to Mobley, fat performativity consists of ‘deconstructing texts of several American playwrights and exploring how they utilize what is culturally perceived as “fat behaviour” as a dramaturgical strategy.’121 Mobley argues that behaviours most associated with the cultural image of a fat woman in Western society—excessiveness, loudness, high emotionality and voraciousness—are identifiable traits in characters written by certain key playwrights, which she evidences with examples from Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee. She writes: ‘Williams and Albee solidify a kind of fat identity exemplified if not literally, as when the texts call for a fat/big actress, then symbolically, through writing characters who exhibit fat behavior.’122 In response to Mobley, Chapter Six of this thesis explores fat performativity and the performing of fatness in Cake Daddy. In my analysis, I address Mobley’s theorising of fat performativity, as she relates it to ‘fat behaviour,’ by examining the culturally constructed nature of fatness—how this is established, and ultimately subverted, in the Cake Daddy performance. I extend Mobley’s ideas by also drawing attention to the constructed nature of the theatrical event, specifically the ways in which Anderson-Doherty ‘flaunts’ his fatness through costume, makeup, physical movement, gesture and vocals. Through this, I argue that fat performativity can be playfully enacted and explored in performance as a way of reclaiming and reinscribing the fat body with agency, positivity, humour and enjoyment. Interestingly, only two of the five contributions to Mobley’s special issue of Fat Studies respond to theatre or staged performance. In these, Laura Bock and Carol Squires reflect on their history with Fat Lip Readers Theatre (1981-1999) in the San Francisco Bay

118 Ibid., 185-86. 119 Mobley, “Toward a Fat Dramaturgy: Activism, Theory, Practice,” 215. 120 Ibid. 121 Mobley, Female Bodies on the American Stage, 64. 122 Ibid., 81.

area (further detailed below);123 and Kimberly Dark offers an excerpt from her script Things I learned from Fat People on the Plane.124 The remaining three papers in this issue sit outside of theatre performance and address the following: profiling the experience and performance of fat triathletes in competition;125 representation of fatness on My Big Fat Fabulous Life, an American reality television program;126 and an investigation of Big Beautiful Women (BBW) erotic webcam models and the ‘pleasures of fetishization’ through performance.127 The inclusion of examples framing social and cultural (“everyday”) performance, as opposed to strictly featuring content around live theatre or performance events, indicates, for Mobley, an important looping back to the lived experiences of fat people and the social conditions placed on them that inspire fat activist performance in the first instance. She writes:

Fat Dramaturgy can encourage us to consider fat embodiment and the ways in which the performative fat body functions as a kind of activism beyond the halls of traditional theatre spaces.128

The urge here to return to the performative body for closer examination is crucial to note, specifically with its significant ties to Butler’s work on gender. In my further theorising of ‘fat performativity,’ I specifically emphasise the importance of Anderson-Doherty’s fat body being placed at the centre of the Cake Daddy performance. The presence of his body, I contend, is vital for the performance to function subversively as it sits in a purposeful tension against a hyperbolic enactment of diet group rituals. Thus, in discussing this, I focus on the framing of Anderson-Doherty’s body and the performance of his embodied fatness. In the existing discourse of fat activist performance there are currently no publications that examine the use of costume, lighting, sound or set design, among other

123 Laura Bock and Carol Squires, “Fat Lip Readers Theatre: A Recollection in Two Voices,” Fat Studies 8, no. 3 (2019): 219–39. 124 Kimberly Dark, “Thing I Learned From Fat People on the Plane,” Fat Studies 8, no. 3 (2019): 299–319. 125 Wendy Burns-Ardolino, “Badass Athena Triathletes: Athletic Performativity and Embodiment,” Fat Studies 8, no. 3 (2019): 240–58. 126 Layla Cameron, “The ‘Good Fatty’ Is a Dancing Fatty: Fat Archetypes in Reality Television,” Fat Studies 8, no. 3 (2019): 259–78. 127 Angela Jones, “The Pleasures of Fetishization: BBW Erotic Webcam Performers, Empowerment, and Pleasure,” Fat Studies 8, no. 3 (2019): 279–98. 128 Jennifer-Scott Mobley, “Toward a Fat Dramaturgy: Activism, Theory, Practice,” 214.

technical elements in this field. The literature that does exist, as I have highlighted, prioritises discussion around the performer’s identity, descriptions of physical and speech acts or character and narrative structures. As such, in conducting my analysis of the Cake Daddy production and detailing aspects of other, similar performance works, I purposefully include descriptions of theatrical (and dramaturgical) elements throughout. I attempt to frame my analysis around the total experience of live performance, rather than privileging text, character and narrative. This is important because in asserting the existence of fat dramaturgies, I also question the ability of traditional forms of narrative theatre to achieve the radical aims and ambitions set out by fat activists. My argument here is informed by a number of ideas that have been presented so far. Kuppers’ assertion on the possible arresting of the performer, or performance, if assumptions that sit around fatness—specifically the fat body onstage—are not addressed and challenged in the performance is significant. Additionally, LeBesco’s call for ‘fat play rather than fat pathology,’ chimes strongly with queer activist strategies of playful resistance and subversion.129 This point closely relates to the approach and preferred aesthetic of the Cake Daddy creative team. As a collective of queer performance-makers, in many ways it would go against our creative impulse to present material earnestly and in some kind of traditionally structured and narrative-driven form.130 Also informing my argument is the long-standing history of normative theatre practices and productions excluding both fat and queer bodies, embodiment, narratives and histories. As Mobley asserts, in this regard theatre sits among many other ‘oppressive institutions’.131 Thus, I investigate the use of queer dramaturgical strategies, which operate as an purposeful resistance to traditional, narrative-driven theatre, in order to document how fat activist performance might flourish in other, alternative forms.

129 LeBesco, “Queering Fat Bodies/Politics,” 83 (original emphasis). 130 Anderson-Doherty asserts a similar point in his article: Ross Anderson-Doherty, “Cake Daddy: Fighting Against the War on Fat,” Audrey Journal (blog), February 15, 2019, https://www.audreyjournal.com.au/arts/cake-daddy-fighting-against-the-war-on-fat/. 131 Ibid.

Fat activist performance and fat community

From literature in the field, there is a glaring hole that remains around the connection of theatre and the forging of fat community/ies. Mobley suggests: ‘Staring, seeing, or viewing can be a way to bring communities together and put them in conversation, to demystify “the other,” and to help individuals and communities gain knowledge about themselves.’132 Cooper writes:

Given the lifelong isolation that many fat people have felt, being part of a community of people with shared values is psychologically important in claiming a strong self-identity, relinquishing loneliness, and finding people with whom to share experiences.133

If, as Mobley and Cooper argue, theatre and performance continues to offer possibilities of bringing people together and building communities out of its audiences, then an important question remains: where are examples of this in documented and studied live performance or, more specifically, why has this aspect been so overlooked in scholarly performance analysis? In response, I introduce an example of performance that offers valuable insight into progressing the discourse of fat community and performance. Fat Lip Readers Theatre (FLRT) is a collective of fat activist and feminist theatre- makers active in the San Francisco area from 1981 to 1999. The experience of participating and performing within this group, as described by members Laura Bock and Carol Squires, reflects Cooper’s claims of strengthening a sense of identity and belonging while reducing feelings of loneliness.134 Readers theatre, as a form, does away with costumes, sets, even theatre venues, and instead presents performers, usually script-in-hand, delivering new writing that is often still in-development and seeks communal audience feedback.135 For FLRT artists, the collective offered a place to workshop ideas and writing, to receive and provide feedback and, importantly, to be part of a community that represented a diverse range of voices on fatness and feminism.

132 Mobley, “Toward a Fat Dramaturgy: Activism, Theory, Practice,” 216. 133 Cooper, Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement, 63. 134 Bock and Squires, “Fat Lip Readers Theatre: A Recollection in Two Voices.” 135 See: Leslie Irene Cogar and Melvin R. White, Readers Theatre Handbook: A Dramatic Approach to Literature (Illinois: Scott Foresman & Co., 1973).

In closing their paper, Bock and Squires assert:

… it is the time for political theater — to inform as well as entertain, to tell personal stories of oppression and identify the political and structural sources, to amuse, exhort, bring folks to tears and anger, to rally, to present a paradigm in opposition to the oppressive status quo, to whoever will listen, watch, read, and bring their own stories to the table.136

The reflections of Bock and Squires on FLRT do not exactly provide us with insights into the specific dramaturgical strategies employed in the collective’s works that would detail how visibility and representation, or even fat community presence, were considered by the artists. However, I contend that the insights provided by the authors further legitimise the need for fat activist performance scholars to consider more meaningfully this crucial link between theatre and community. While I address these aspects in respect to Cake Daddy, Chalklin’s analysis of Hamburger Queen provides an important, additional case study on fat community and performance.137 Chalklin’s description of Hamburger Queen points to elements embedded in the performance that encourage community-building and feelings of connectedness between the hosts, contestant-performers and audience. Hamburger Queen offers an experience for audiences that is significantly more visible, active and co-present with the performer/s in the space than traditional, narrative theatre might typically offer, which has clear similarities to the improvisatory and interactive form of Cake Daddy. By drawing on examples from both Cake Daddy and Hamburger Queen, I articulate queer dramaturgical strategies used in creating these works that aim at fostering feelings of community togetherness and the possible forging of meaningful, albeit temporary, connections within the performance space (see Chapter Four).

136Bock and Squires, “Fat Lip Readers Theatre: A Recollection in Two Voices,” 237. 137 Vikki Chalklin, “All Hail the Fierce Fat Femmes,” in Fat Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism, ed. Helen Hester, Caroline Walters, and Meredith Jones (Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2016), 85–96.

‘Obesity’ and Diet Discourse in Fat Activist Performance

Since fat activism is essentially formed by its resistance to ‘obesity’ and diet discourse, it is safe to claim that all fat activist performance, in its own way, challenges assumptions bound up in ‘obesity’ and diet discourse. Many artists choose to render this connection explicit and make this a key departure point from which they create work. Brenda Oelbaum’s short film Results May Vary presents the artist literally consuming the contents of a diet book, tearing pieces and entire pages from it with her teeth, slowly chewing and painfully swallowing.138 At a point when the entire book has nearly been consumed, she stands on the scales to reveal the exact number from before this process began. We can understand Oelbaum’s intention with the work is to question the capacity of diet products (which includes information, advice and programs) to actually transform— reduce—fat bodies.139 Diet discourse relies on framing the fat body in a non-permanent state: fatness as a temporary, “curable” condition.140 Oelbaum’s work questions this assumption by emphasising the failed efficacy of diet products from the perspective of an individual dieter, and by doing so makes it personal. Much fat activist performance, also operating within the long history of feminist performance, understands the “personal is political,”141 while such experiences are further politicised by the emergence of research that validates failure as the most common experience for dieters world-wide.142 Selina Thompson’s Chewing the Fat (2014), an autobiographical fusion of live art and theatre, explores her ongoing relationship with food.143 Placing herself and her own intimate experiences with dieting at the centre of the performance allows the personal to become political and, in this way, for the oppressive structures and devastating impact of ‘obesity’ and diet discourse to be laid bare through intimate storytelling and

138 Results May Vary, Short Film, 2012, https://vimeo.com/41025416. Also see artist website: https://www.brendaoart.com/ 139 Ronti, “Fat Activists’ Strategies on Stage: Redefining Fat Identity. A Comparison of Scottee, Brenda Oelbaum, and Sins Invalid,” 56. 140 See, for instance: Wann, “Foreward—Fat Studies: An Invitation to Revolution,” xiii. 141 Carol Hanisch, “The Personal Is Political,” Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation, 1970. 142 Michael Hobbes, “Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong,” Huffington Post, September 19, 2018, https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/everything-you-know-about-obesity-is-wrong/. 143 “Chewing the Fat,” Selina Thompson Ltd., accessed October 2, 2020, https://selinathompson.co.uk/projects/chewing-fat/.

conversation.144 In order to stage this conversation, Thompson casually greets the audience at the beginning of the performance, welcoming all to the space and proceeds to have informal banter with individuals throughout the production.145 The examples of Results May Vary and Chewing the Fat present different modes through which fat activist artists explicitly address dieting and diet culture within their work. Since fat activism is essentially formed by its resistance to ‘obesity’ and diet discourse, further research that purposefully charts the dramaturgical strategies and devices employed by artists to expose and resist these structures in performance, I argue, would offer a valuable contribution to the field. With Cake Daddy, I attempt to trace certain aspects of Anderson-Doherty’s personal, lived experiences and how, with Campbell and Philpott, this is composed into performance content that operates in both a storytelling and conversational/dialogic mode (see Chapter Five). The purpose of doing this is to elicit more details around the framing of the individual fat subjectivity of the artist at the centre of the performance, in this case Anderson-Doherty, as well as how we, as a creative team, went about staging deeply personal content that aims at confronting and challenging diet culture.

Fat Performativity

In taking up Mobley’s call for the further theorising of ‘fat performativity,’ with the aim of extending this beyond the strictures of narrative and character, questions around how the fat body is inhabited onstage, how individual bodies are framed in performance and how audiences encounter fat bodies and subjectivities in performance are significant. Two examples of dance-theatre provide interesting cases to further examine the potentiality of fat performativity in exploring and staging diverse experiences of fatness: Nothing to Lose (2015), by Australian company Force Majeure, choreographed by Kate Champion, and Fat Blokes (2019), by U.K.-based artist Scottee, a renowned fat activist performance-maker.146

144 “Selina Thompson,” Essential Drama, accessed October 2, 2020, http://essentialdrama.com/practitioners/selinathompson/. 145 Lyn Gardner, “Chewing the Fat Review - Weighty Issues Honestly Handled in Solo Show,” The Guardian, November 27, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/nov/27/chewing-the-fat-selina-thompson- review. 146 https://www.scottee.co.uk

In creating Nothing to Lose, Champion describes a disinterest in having fat bodies conform to established dance practices and instead encouraged the dancers to explore the potentialities of their own unique bodies: ‘shaking and moving… with their flesh, with their shape, with their form.’147 In reviewing the work, performance academic Amanda Card writes, ‘[t]alk about fat is everywhere, but Nothing to Lose insists that we not only look but also see what we rarely see – at least when we’re out and about in the world. Fat is the player here, it’s on stage, and in the audience, and it insists on being seen.’148 Scottee’s Fat Blokes, choreographed by Lea Anderson, is an additional example—a ‘sort of dance show’149—that places the ‘flaunting’ of fatness at its centre while also examining normative, harmful assumptions. The production is a fusion of dance, strip tease, cabaret, confessional theatre and confrontation—the latter of which is a favoured approach by Scottee in his creative projects.150 The five fat male performers (including Scottee) individually introduce themselves by sharing personal stories directed to the audience: moments of childhood bullying, daily humiliations and brutal violence.151 In its way, Fat Blokes critically stares back at its audience, presenting deeply personal stories and dance while daring any person to laugh.152 The hyper-visibility of the performers’ fatness in these works—their bodies and individual subjectivities on display—offer evidence of specific dramaturgical strategies that artists use in reclaiming narratives and discourse around fat. The productions invert and

147 Sydney Festival, “Festival TV: Nothing to Lose,” YouTube, January 5, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7N5DpIairL8. 148 Amanda Card, “Taking up Space: Nothing to Lose at the Sydney Festival,” The Conversation, January 23, 2015, https://theconversation.com/taking-up-space-nothing-to-lose-at-the-sydney-festival-36664. 149 Scottee and Friends, “Fat Blokes,” Scottee, accessed June 10, 2019, https://www.scottee.co.uk/post/fatblokes2019. 150 See: Michael Seaver, “‘People Think When I Talk about Fatness That I’m Trying to Get Everyone Fat’: A New Show by Artist and Fat Activist Scottee Challenges Attitudes to Body Weight,” Irish Times, February 11, 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/stage/people-think-when-i-talk-about-fatness-that-i-m-trying-to-get- everyone-fat-1.3785539. 151 Lyn Gardner, “Fat Blokes Review - Angry and Joyful Cabaret Created by plus-Size Men,” The Guardian, May 23, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/may/23/fat-blokes-review-scottee-home-manchester. 152 This refers specifically to the opening sequence of Fat Blokes where a dancer begins the performance with a striptease, his movements becoming bigger and bolder until an audience member laughs. At this point, the lights snap up and Scottee enters from the side, demanding of the audience member: ‘what’s so funny? What’s so fucking funny?’ See: Freddie Machin, “Review: Fat Blokes at Southbank Centre,” Exeunt Magazine, November 11, 2018, http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/review-fat-blokes-southbank-centre/. Also see Cooper’s blog post related to fat performance and laughter: Charlotte Cooper, “Why Do You Laugh at the Fat People?,” Obesity Timebomb (blog), March 15, 2013, http://obesitytimebomb.blogspot.com/2013/03/why-do- you-laugh-at-fat-people.html.

subvert the audience gaze, while a forceful and physical confrontation with a range of fat bodies, alongside the oppressive language that typically accompanies them, creates a potentially affective experience for audiences. With Nothing to Lose and Fat Blokes, the distinct moments of solo dance and/or storytelling, with the fleshy reveal of the performers—their movement and their corporeality—are significant in that they enact individual fat identities and subjectivities. The effect is that while feelings of empathy and connectedness are potentially fostered in the space (despite a confrontational tone), differences and variations within the “fat experience” also begin to emerge, nuance develops and intersectional possibilities manifest as the performers’ identities and experiences are intimately revealed. By introducing these cases of performance, possibilities emerge to further develop a discourse around fat performativity, specifically how bodies are inhabited onstage, how they are framed in/by performance and, more precisely, how it is that audiences encounter these bodies and subjectivities in performance. While I hope sections of the thesis addressing fat performativity in the Cake Daddy production serve to further some of this work (see Chapter Six), I too urge performance scholars to heed Mobley’s call and contribute to this vital aspect of fat dramaturgies. In drawing connections between the work of key fat activist artists, I have located salient areas of creative inquiry that exist within the field, which, in turn, inform the structure of three subsequent chapters dedicated to analysing Cake Daddy (Chapters Four, Five and Six). A consideration of fat community presence emerges as a distinct priority, as does the treatment (and subversion) of ‘obesity’ discourse and diet culture. Thus, alongside a purposeful examination of how ‘fat performativity’ operates in performance—a direct response to Mobley’s provocation—these topics establish a framework of ideas that ultimately inform my analysis Cake Daddy.

Conclusion

This chapter introduces an overview of the wider field of fat activist performance and its treatment by fat studies scholars. In this, I highlight key priorities within my research as I respond to and further Mobley’s theorisation of fat dramaturgies. The discussion draws specific attention to examples of staging fat identity, emphasising the potential for

alternative (queer) performance strategies as opposed to those belonging to traditional narrative-driven theatre, which has historically excluded fat and queer representation. In the next chapter, I provide further framing of contemporary (queer) dramaturgy in order to more formally situate my artistic practice and training and introduce an important background to the Cake Daddy production.

3. Expanding (Fat) Dramaturgy: establishing an artistic practice and creative methodology

Introduction: defining ‘dramaturgy’

This chapter is designed to function in two ways: initially, to situate my dramaturgical practice, and that of the Cake Daddy creative team, by connecting ideas and principles of creative practice to existing critical discourse in theatre and performance; and secondly, to introduce a background to the Cake Daddy production and the emergence of a queer, hybrid cabaret-theatre form. As part of this, I provide an overview of traditional, Aristotelean-inspired dramaturgy and detail a significant shift that occurred at the turn of the twenty-first century in performance-making across the Western world. Additionally, I discuss the precarious position of a contemporary dramaturg within processes of devising— providing creative input with little to no ownership of the material (production) outcome/s. Since documentation and recording are crucial to my role within the Cake Daddy creative team, I specifically frame this as key to my creative practice. Contemporary dramaturgy has become a critical field of interest to a wide range of theatre artists and academics. There is now an enormous breadth of rich, complex writing that exists within this ever-expanding field. New Dramaturgy: International Perspectives on Theory and Practice, edited by Katalin Trencsényi and Bernadette Cochrane, is a key volume that highlights various artistic and/or artistic-led research projects a decade after the beginning of this paradigm shift.153 In their introduction, the editors articulate that performances within the field of ‘new dramaturgy’ share three distinct characteristics: they are all post-mimetic, intercultural and process-conscious.154 That is, performances do not prescribe to dominant dramatic models, they avoid or resist monolithic (White, European/American and male) perspectives, and the process and ecology of making the work ultimately inform its shape, structures and materiality.

153 Trencsényi and Cochrane, New Dramaturgy: International Perspectives on Theory and Practice. 154 Ibid., xii.

In Dramaturgy and Performance, Cathy Turner and Synne Behrndt provide a vital distinction in the practice of dramaturgy: it simultaneously occurs as a noun and a verb.155 Initially it is linked to naming forms and structures: ‘Essentially we are using the word to describe the composition of a work, whether read as a script or viewed in performance.’156 Secondly, it refers to the process and language employed to make sense of it: ‘While it is a term for the composition itself, it is also a word applied to the discussion of that composition. In other words, when we are engaged in (doing) dramaturgy, we are looking at the composition or dramaturgy of a work.’157 An understanding of this distinction is crucial as this simultaneous two-way process and double meaning is embedded throughout my discussion. In some instances, I apply the term ‘dramaturgy’ as a means of referring to the composition of the Cake Daddy performance, its material content and aesthetic, and other times I use the term to refer to the processes, language and strategies adopted by the creative team in doing the dramaturgical work of devising and composing the performance itself. In this way, both definitions inform my dramaturgical analysis of the Cake Daddy performance and the processes undertaken in creating it. Performance academics Peter Eckersall, Paul Monaghan and Melanie Beddie describe the practice of contemporary dramaturgy as, ‘a confluence of literary, spatial, kinaesthetic and technical practices, worked and woven in the matrix of aesthetic and ideological forces’.158 Theatre-maker and dramaturg David Williams, on processes of devising, writes:

Dramaturgy is about the rhythmed assemblage of settings, people, texts and things. It is concerned with the composing and orchestration of events for and in particular contexts, tracking the implications of and connective relations between materials, and shaping them to find effective forms. In devising … dramaturgy is uncovered, worked and

155 Cathy Turner and Synne K. Behrndt, Dramaturgy and Performance (London; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 156 Ibid., 4. 157 Ibid. 158 Peter Eckersall, Paul Monaghan, and Melanie Beddie, “The Dramaturgies Project,” Real Time Arts 70 (2006): 1.

articulated through the process of making and rehearsing, rather than being predetermined.159

Both of the above descriptions reflect Eugenio Barba’s assertion that dramaturgy is a ‘weave’ of actions coming together to form a texture, or ‘text’.160 He refers to actions as ‘not only what the actors do and say, but also what sounds, noises, lights, changes in space are used…’161 This weaving together of actions to create the performance text—not just the written or spoken words but the performance as a whole—is how Barba defines dramaturgy. It is important to acknowledge too that it is not only the creative combination of theatrical elements that Barba encompasses as dramaturgy, but also how the work itself expresses a belief system or attitude surrounding the production and reception of theatre.162 It demands artists critique how their politics and aesthetics sit alongside the compositional qualities of their work as well as how the audience is asked to experience or engage with it. This relates to Trencsényi and Cochrane’s description of ‘new dramaturgy’ as ‘multi- perspectival, provisional, non-hierarchical and enquiring,’ implying the resistance of a singular audience experience that instead favours the opening of performance to hold a range of possible meanings. Clearly embedded here are the markers of a post-structuralist turn driving these ideas around the devising and composition of contemporary theatre performance—and it is this collective thinking across the field that lays the foundation for contemporary dramaturgical practice/s. These principles stand in stark contrast to traditional, Aristotelean approaches to theatre-making that are inherently logocentric. The centrality of text within Modern Western theatre can be easily traced to its origins in Greek Theatre. Aristotle’s ‘rules’ for dramatic structure, outlined in the Poetics,163 has remained a vital set of guidelines for many modern and contemporary playwrights and only recently has come to be more popularly

159 David Williams, “Geographies of Requiredness: Notes on the Dramaturg in Collaborative Devising,” Contemporary Theatre Review 20, no. 2 (2010): 198 (original emphasis). 160 Eugenio Barba, “The Nature of Dramaturgy: Describing Actions at Work,” New Theatre Quarterly 1, no. 1 (1985): 75-78. 161 Ibid., 75. 162 Eckersall, “Towards an Expanded Dramaturgical Practice: A Report on ‘The Dramaturgy and Cultural Intervention Project,’” 284. 163 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Gerald F. Else (University of Michigan Press, 1967).

contested.164 Interestingly, it is also in the Poetics that the earliest known suggestion appears that plays can be enjoyed without actors and performance.165 The inference that text written for performance can be as easily appreciated by reading it from the page is of critical importance since Aristotle clearly places literary value over other elements of theatre and live performance (movement, sound, lighting, costume, etc). This is significant when considering how written plays remain at the heart of Classical and Modern epochs of Western theatre. Certainly, the continued abundance of realism and naturalism on mainstage, independent and fringe theatres across the Western world is just one example of this legacy. The formalisation of dramaturgy as a distinct area within theatre began in late 18th Century Germany with Gotthold Lessing authoring The Hamburg Dramaturgy.166 In this, Lessing draws on his experience at the Hamburg National Theatre to argue that theatre serves as a form of cultural intervention, highlighting its capacity to critique itself as a medium for sharing stories while making socio-political commentary. In post-World War II Berlin, Bertolt Brecht—famous for his highly politically-charged plays and performances—extended this legacy with the Berliner Ensemble, where emphasis was placed on conducting extensive research and documentation for the development of new writing. Theatre scholar Mary Luckhurst asserts that during Brecht’s time the Berliner Ensemble was essentially run by dramaturgs with directing practice considered secondary.167 At this time too, the recording and documenting of processes, the building of a company archive and the training of future directors and dramaturgs were all well underway. In the Australian context, Eckersall asserts that the logocentric tradition of dramaturgy continues and is most visible with the roles of literary managers at major companies. Eckersall notes that ‘the need to produce new Australian plays has been institutionalized in mainstream theatre culture’ and continues by asserting that given the reductive turnaround timelines for playwrights, the inevitable focus of dramaturgy is placed

164 Zachary Dunbar and Stephe Harrop, Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 165 Ibid., 34. 166 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, The Hamburg Dramaturgy, trans. Helen Zimmern (New York: Dover Publications, 1962). 167 Mary Luckhurst, “Bertolt Brecht: The Theory and Practice of the Dramaturg,” in Dramaturgy: A Revolution in Theatre (UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 109–51.

on fixing problems within writing: dramaturgs as ‘script doctors’.168 This is a phenomenon that is in no way unique to Australia. The continuing tradition and hierarchy of playwrighting in the U.K., and particularly in the U.S., evidence an ongoing priority for text-led dramaturgy practices, certainly in the case of mainstage theatre companies and venues that house such literary managers.169 As a response to the emergence of new performance paradigms in Europe during the late 20th Century, Marianne Van Kerkhoven articulates the need for a new language and theatrical discourse to support this work.170 With this, she refers to modern and postmodern performance that displaces the centrality of text and narrative. Van Kerkhoven’s understanding of this ‘new dramaturgy’ is described as process-oriented, where the substance of the work arises throughout the process of making it:

In this case dramaturgy is no longer a means of bringing out the structure of the meaning of the world in a play, but a provisional or possible arrangement which the artist imposes on those elements he gathers from a reality that appears to him chaotic. In this kind of world picture, causality and linearity lose their value, storyline and psychologically explicable characters are put at risk, there is no longer a hierarchy amongst the artistic building blocks used…171

Thus, with contemporary dramaturgy, it can be understood that a more open or porous approach to ‘dramaturgy’ is taken, which purposefully decentres the importance of the narrative/script to consider more deeply how multiple aspects of the performance operate together in order to effect meaning. This is vital to my research as it articulates a key departure, especially in how I approach Cake Daddy as a case study, compared to the work of Mobley and her theorising of ‘fat dramaturgy’ as related to character traits and behaviours embedded in a play text.

168 Peter Eckersall, “Towards an Expanded Dramaturgical Practice: A Report on ‘The Dramaturgy and Cultural Intervention Project,’” 287. 169 Turner and Behrndt, Dramaturgy and Performance, 121–45. 170 Marianne Van Kerkhoven, “On Dramaturgy,” Theaterschrift, no. 5–6 (1994). 171 Ibid.

Dramaturgy as a contemporary practice

On the practice of contemporary dramaturgy, performance scholars Hans-Thies Lehmann and Patrick Primavesi write: ‘the dramaturg of the twenty-first century will need to be open-minded, ready to accept the job as a position on shifting grounds and to question the categories that used to define the art of theatre.’172 Certain projects require a particular set of skills from a dramaturg, other times they demand a broader range. The nature of the dramaturg’s role usually demands regular renegotiation with other members of the creative team as the processes evolve. The role of the dramaturg in the context of devised performance is even less defined, it is never fixed and requires constant shape- shifting and responsiveness as the material of the work begins to emerge. On this, dramaturg David Williams adds, ‘…the deviser’s – and the devising dramaturg’s – role straddles tensions between structure and possibility, known and unknown, fixity and fluidity, and so on.’173 As captured here, a contemporary dramaturg typically inhabits a range of positions throughout a given project and is always responding to new ideas emerging on the floor. This is often not an easy task and relies heavily on intuition and communication.174 In the context of Cake Daddy, a devised work, while research and recording were consistently underway, the prioritising of particular sets of ideas and knowledge over others were always in flux. For instance, various creative improvisations with Anderson-Doherty brought forth certain findings around dieting and diet culture that were immediately considered of high significance one day but were then discarded early the next in order to revisit other material. Often, improvisations were consistently repeated to attain new material findings, thus promoting entirely new creative threads. Such a process required strategies to constantly move forwards and backwards with ideas while also tracing this development to ensure all was effectively documented so that in returning to ideas, the context in which they emerged was also retained.

172 Hans-Thies Lehmann and Patrick Primavesi, “Dramaturgy on Shifting Grounds,” in The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, ed. Magda Romanska (Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2015), 172. 173 Williams, “Geographies of Requiredness,” 197. 174 Francesca Smith, “The Accidental Dramaturg,” Australian Plays, June 9, 2015, https://australianplays.org/the-accidental-dramaturg.

Much of the rehearsal dramaturgy work I conducted for Cake Daddy focused on charting ideas as they emerged in the process, locating and holding onto certain findings that might then inform further research, discussion and reflection—and documenting again those new sets of findings. This kind of dramaturgical work demands a certain insider awareness of the priorities driving the creative project as well as the urges and impulses unique to the creative team. Anticipating these needs often goes beyond knowing the more global intentions or goals determined from the outset of a process, and thus it calls for a certain creative intuition on behalf of the dramaturg to gauge the “feel of the room” as new discoveries are found, unknown potentials emerge, and priorities immediately shift— sometimes in an unspoken way.175 Underpinning this is the notion that recording and documenting of process/es is a vital part of the role of a contemporary dramaturg.176

Recording and documenting collaborative practice

While I have so far positioned my individual role as ‘dramaturg’ and some of the particularities of this in terms of the Cake Daddy process, it is important to make a clear distinction that it is not discretely my own practice that is framed in this research. A dramaturg’s work is situated in a constant, iterative (and inextricably close) relationship to the work of others. Additionally, Campbell’s approach as a director, in partnership with long-time collaborator Philpott, ensures that all members of the creative team are actively engaged in dramaturgical processes throughout the research, development and rehearsal stages.177 Dramaturgy, in such a context, is a collective effort and not designated to any one person. It is impossible at times to distinguish ownership of certain ideas or other creative contributions. However, by conducting thorough documentation and recording I have attempted to trace the origins of ideas and themes, and their evolution through the rehearsal process, in order to respect the individual input of others while also acknowledging the highly collaborative nature of the Cake Daddy rehearsal space. In this

175 Trencsényi, Dramaturgy in the Making; Turner and Behrndt, Dramaturgy and Performance. 176 Melanie Beddie, “So What Is This Thing Called a Dramaturg?,” ed. Peter Eckersall, Paul Monaghan, and Melanie Beddie, Real Time Arts 70 (2006): 4. 177 Campbell and Philpott share a twenty-year collaborative relationship, working together with a diverse range or ‘assemblage of artists’ under the banner of wreckedAllprods (https://wreckedallprods.com).

way, documenting and recording ideas and findings as they emerged in the rehearsal space are key to my artistic practice. Kate Rossmanith offers ways to consider rehearsal spaces as sites of important social and cultural work, describing: ‘Rehearsals are a thick weave of diverse practices and discourses; rehearsals, by their very nature, are ‘murky’.’178 She asserts that ethnographic tools can be utilised in ways to capture complex social interactions in ‘real time’, considering that meaning and insight usually follow with a more complete sense of the approach and practice of artists in the space. This is also tied to the reality that an array of actions and conversations take place outside of the rehearsal space. Thus, it is virtually impossible to maintain an informed understanding of the dynamics at any given time. In Not Magic but Work, Gay McAuley argues the necessity of considering rehearsal practice as a means of examining the social organisation and structuring of our cultural production spaces.179 In this, she frames the role of a ‘participant-observer’ as a valuable insider to the process that is able to more effectively record and document the experience than an outsider. McAuley describes the potential of an insider to elicit more valuable insights from other participants considering the comfort level of conversations occurring more informally over time compared to the more structured, formal interviews that happen around the event.180 I argue that the insider-outsider position that a dramaturg typically inhabits is a highly useful space from which to reflect on process. The requirement of balancing an informed and empathetic perspective of the creative team while simultaneously conducting critical, detached analysis is a vital skill in generating meaningful field research. This is a crucial aspect of my approach to the research and I argue is the lynchpin upon which quality reflection and analysis is generated. In the instance of Cake Daddy, since I have established that recording and documenting rehearsals were an important part of my role, it is helpful to note that after each rehearsal these materials were made available online to all creative team members—a helpful process considering the collaborative nature of the project. This included: detailed rehearsal notes, audio recordings of sections of rehearsal, photos, music and visual samples,

178 Kate Rossmanith, “Traditions and Training in Rehearsal Practice,” Australasian Drama Studies 53 (2008): 144. 179 Gay McAuley, Not Magic but Work: An Ethnographic Account of a Rehearsal Process (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). 180 Ibid., 7.

lyrics, and more. Initially, as outlined above, my notes attempted to trace ideas that emerged in rehearsal and follow these through the process. Towards the end of rehearsal and approaching the production’s premier, my notes more closely reflected the decisions being made around structure and composition and prioritised tracing certain ideas across the performance for coherence. Since this kind of note taking does not include any inherent judgment or evaluation, it was appropriate for those materials to be shared unedited with others in the creative team. Importantly, this allowed certain discarded ideas to re-enter the process at times, establishing useful iterative loops of creative development.

‘Queer Dramaturgies’

My discussion so far has centred around the emergence of contemporary dramaturgy and highlights processes of documentation and recording as key to my creative practice. It is crucial to also acknowledge ‘queer’ as a position and artistic lens through which the creative team approach making Cake Daddy, informing the dramaturgical processes, content and aesthetic of the work. While I pick up on these details for deeper examination below, I flag these here in order to initially draw explicit ties between the methodologies used in creating Cake Daddy and notions underpinning ‘queer dramaturgies’. In their introduction to Queer Dramaturgies: International Perspectives on Where Queer Performance Leads Queer editors Campbell and Stephen Farrier elicit the qualities of queer performance that, they contend, make it queer.181 On this, the editors assert that while the narrative and aesthetics of performance can inform this, so too do the self- identification of artists as queer, the processes of making the work and the context in which it is experienced by an audience.182 Drawing on Lisa Duggan’s notion of ‘homonormativity’— gay politics that sustain and uphold heteronormative assumptions and institutions— Campbell and Farrier assert that ‘gay theatre’, by using familiar modes of character and story, can reaffirm dominant traditions of mainstream theatre.183 They contend that a vital

181 Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier, “Introduction: Queer Dramaturgies,” in Queer Dramaturgies: International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer, ed. Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 1–26. 182 Ibid., 13. 183 Lisa Duggan, The Twighlight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 50 in Campbell and Farrier, “Introduction: Queer Dramaturgies,” 13.

part of queer performance, as opposed to ‘gay theatre’, is its resistance to and subversion of such models. Campbell and Farrier also draw attention to the writing of theatre scholar Dolan, specifically when she poses: ‘Perhaps the theater really is the place to reinhabit subject positions that seem evacuated by theory, because it creates a space of danger without quite the same consequences, a space of play and potential.’184 I assert that fat subjectivity, as well as queer—though the boundaries are hardly exclusionary—offers a particularly interesting position from which to begin playfully exploring other ways of being in the world, once removed from dominant, hegemonic (and in the case of fat, medicalised and pathologized) narratives. In the following chapters I continue to relate ideas embedded in queer dramaturgies to the processes of making Cake Daddy. Throughout, I refer back into my discussion aspects of the creative team’s history as queer performance-makers, the emerging queer aesthetic of Cake Daddy and specific compositional strategies adopted to purposefully disrupt traditional (heteronormative) theatre modes of story-telling.

Genesis of Cake Daddy and the emergence of a queer hybrid form

The figure of Cake Daddy was initially conceived within the context of another performance, The Tea Cell Dance (part of a larger project titled GL RY). I introduce a history of the work and, in doing so, provide an important history to existing partnerships within the creative team and certain methods previously used in making performance. Significant here is the similar hybrid cabaret-theatre form shared by The Tea Cell Dance and Cake Daddy. I describe the emergence of this within The Tea Cell Dance creative process, and subsequently with Cake Daddy, and situate this hybrid form within a legacy of feminist and queer performance activism. Important to note is that the ideas articulated around this queer hybrid performance form significantly inform my analysis of Cake Daddy in the remaining chapters of the thesis. In 2014, as part of the cultural program around the World AIDS Conference in Melbourne, long-term collaborators Campbell and Philpott created a work titled GL RY.185

184 Jill Dolan, Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 9 in Campbell and Farrier, “Introduction: Queer Dramaturgies,” 9. 185 See: Georgia Symons, “GL RY: Adventures in Public Art, HIV Discourse and Queer Aesthetics,” HIV Australia 12, no. 3 (2014): 27–30.

This took the form of a performance installation situated in City Square, a section of Melbourne’s Central Business District, and used the construct of a glory hole as a means of exploring certain experiences of people living with HIV and AIDS.186 As part of this, and building on a history of collaboration with Campbell, Anderson-Doherty performed as a singer, bringing years of cabaret and music theatre experience.187 Another iteration of GL RY followed in late 2016, part of Outburst Queer Arts Festival in Belfast.188 Conceived and directed by Campbell, an event titled The Tea Cell Dance, was placed within a live performance venue. The production was a drastic shift from the previous outdoor installation and instead presented a blended cabaret-theatre show performed by Matthew Cavan—a local drag artist who self-identifies as living with HIV—and Anderson-Doherty, who took a supportive role in conveying Cavan’s story and aspects of his experience. With The Tea Cell Dance, Campbell led Anderson-Doherty, Cavan, and Philpott to devise and compose materials embedded in this interactive cabaret-theatre form. Cavan and Anderson-Doherty delivered text written by Philpott, lip synched over clips from The Golden Girls television show, conducted games and activities with and amongst the audience, and performed a range of songs. In devising The Tea Cell Dance, Campbell was interested in exploring conversations that take place over tea and cake and how this might be used to break down stigma that surrounds people living with HIV. With this prompt, and through creative explorations that purposefully sought a form to hold such conversations, the figure of Cake Daddy emerged. Anderson-Doherty describes performing this role for the first time, entering the stage virtually naked except for a small apron:

186 For more on GL RY in Melbourne and Belfast, particularly how Campbell considers the experience of women living with HIV, see: Alyson Campbell, “GL RY: A (W)Hole Lot of Women Trouble. HIV Dramaturgies and Feral Pedagogies,” in Viral Dramaturgies: HIV and AIDS in Performance in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Alyson Campbell and Dirk Gindt (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 49–67. 187 Campbell directed Anderson-Doherty in productions Terminating (2008) and Blood Wedding (2011), as well as supervising his Master of Arts research. Also see Campbell discussing elements of Anderson-Doherty’s practice-as-research project for PhD: Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier, “Queer Practice as Research: A Fabulously Messy Business,” Theatre Research International 40, no. 1 (2015): 83–87. 188 In 2016, GL RY was restaged in Belfast as part of the Outburst Queer Arts Festival. Campbell and Philpott’s wreckedallprods, in partnership with Theatreofpluck, produced the work/s. See: https://wreckedallprods.com/brine-pickles; http://www.theatreofpluck.com/gl-ry.

The reaction of the audience—I would call it fatphobic. But it wasn’t people going, ‘that’s disgusting’. It wasn’t a simple kind of fatphobia. It was so much more nuanced and complex in many ways. It was people not having a clue how to react to fat bodies… It was truly extraordinary that this moment was the one that had the greatest effect on the audience—in a show about the violence of HIV stigma. It was extraordinary. It made me go: ‘Okay, I need to explore this. I don’t know what this is. I don’t quite understand it. So, I’m going to make a show about it.189

Not only was The Tea Cell Dance then a catalyst for the inception of Cake Daddy in terms of creatively responding to these issues, the established hybrid cabaret-theatre form inspired Anderson-Doherty and Campbell’s early interest in exploring how we might also encourage conversation with and amongst the audience. The improvised, highly interactive style of The Tea Cell Dance—influenced by the performers’ history within this mode— offered possibilities for the performers to interact with the audience and shatter the performer-spectator binary that exists in most traditional, narrative-driven theatre. As a result, it afforded the performers freedom to interact with their audience and necessarily facilitate certain, rather complex conversations around the experiences of people living with HIV. The setup for Cake Daddy has the audience entering the performance space and into the world of Cake Watchers, a fake diet group. Upon entering, each audience member is greeted by an usher and handed a workbook, along with: ‘Welcome to Cake Watchers; please don’t eat the cake.’ The seating is arranged cabaret-style: scattered small tables surrounded by four to five chairs fan out in front of the stage. Dim, yellow-white house lights fall onto the audience area, barely changing as the performance begins, leaving the audience visible through the entire opening sequence of the show. Anderson-Doherty enters the performance space via the audience seating area, singing, welcoming his audience (‘diet group members’) to Cake Watchers. As the performance proceeds, Anderson-Doherty relates personal stories, poses questions, engages in improvised banter, conducts games and activities, performs numerous songs and has various onstage costume changes. Critical here is that from the outset, as is expected in

189 Ross Anderson-Doherty, online video interview, December 3, 2020.

cabaret, the spectators perform an active role in the mise-en-scène of the performance. Similarly, there are no scene changes or “off-stage” time for the performer: the performance and its structures are constantly exposed. Similar to the hybrid form of The Tea Cell Dance supporting its performers to facilitate conversations around experiences of people living with HIV, Anderson-Doherty in Cake Daddy is able to hold conversations about dieting, fat shaming and size-acceptance with his audience in a production that places his fat subjectivity at its centre. From the outset of making Cake Daddy, both Anderson-Doherty and Campbell understood a pedagogical mode for the performance was significant. Anderson-Doherty describes that engagement with academic and intellectual material relating to science, social justice and ‘health’/medical discourse (some of which is introduced in Chapter One) played an important role in negotiating his relationship with his own fatness.190 Having composed The Tea Cell Dance, there was an established understanding of the potential for teaching Cake Daddy audiences about the complexities of fat/ness as a political identity while providing space and agency for live discussion. The interactive and pedagogical aspects of the performance allowed Anderson-Doherty to convey some of the key material that had the most impact on him through anecdotal examples. The potential to create conversation live in the space is, by nature, better suited and more supported in a cabaret-style performance than traditional, narrative-driven theatre where audiences typically remain passive and hidden.191 Thus, it is by drawing on cabaret’s improvisatory and provocative style that allows Anderson-Doherty to establish this dynamic with and amongst his audience. Performance scholar Shane Vogel, in his historical recount of cabaret’s popular presence in New York, writes: ‘Inextricably bound up with notions of gender, race, sexuality, and nationality, cabaret has provided an opportunity to interrogate the status quo through performance. At the same time, it has produced a space for physical and psychical contact and for the formation of social identities.’192 With the potential of cabaret to disturb normative ideals and assumptions while giving visibility and presence to outlier (queer), “transgressive” social entities, it can thus be understood why, as a form, cabaret proved

190 Ross Anderson-Doherty, online video interview, December 3, 2020. 191 See, for instance: Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso Books, 2011). 192 Shane Vogel, “Where Are We Now? Queer World Making and Cabaret Performance,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 6, no. 1 (2000): 29–60.34.

vital to the interests of The Tea Cell Dance, and subsequently the Cake Daddy, creative team. Similarly describing the political potential of cabaret, via its roots in activism and social justice, T.L. Cowan states that the improvisatory nature of cabaret informs what they term a ‘cabaret consciousness’:

That is, improvisation contributes to a social/cultural frame of mind or, as Raymond Williams puts it, a “structure of feeling” that includes an appreciation of variety, risk, difference, provocation, and surprise accompanied by a concurrent sympathy with, or high tolerance for, the rough-around-the-edges aesthetic that characterizes many cabaret performances; it is a consciousness that allows an audience to enjoy a show not in spite of the mixed-bag-ness of cabaret, but because of it.193

Queer Dramaturgies editors Campbell and Farrier consider Cowan’s ‘cabaret consciousness’ in a wider framework of queer performance-making. Responding to David Halperin’s assertion that queer, in its early articulation, is ‘by definition what is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant’,194 the authors assert that queer dramaturgies are ‘likewise set against the dominant modes of representation and are shaped through forms that are on the fringe and boundaries of disciplines.’195 Campbell and Farrier point to a chiming between queer dramaturgies and a history of strategies used in staging feminist activism and later with grass-roots AIDS performance activist groups ACT UP and Queer Nation.196 The authors extend this by considering the alternative making processes that are typically adopted in queer work—certainly those with limited production structures, as well as non-mainstream venues (often pubs and clubs, where audiences are most likely to encounter drag and cabaret), and the “non-elitist” audiences that attend such work.197 In introducing Cowan’s ideas on this, the authors argue a ‘literature review of cabaret and

193 T.L. Cowan, “‘A One-Shot Affair’: Cabaret as Improvised Curation,” Canadian Theatre Review 143 (2010): 34 (original emphasis). 194 David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Toward a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 62 in Campbell and Farrier, “Introduction: Queer Dramaturgies,” 7. 195 Campbell and Farrier, “Introduction: Queer Dramaturgies,” 7. 196 Ibid. 197 Ibid.

performance art would be as productive to thinking about queer dramaturgy as theatre or dramatic analysis’.198 Thus, it is entirely possible, through Campbell and Farrier, to understand how the hybrid cabaret-theatre form and ‘rough-around-the-edges’ aesthetic of Cake Daddy is situated within a history and context of queer activist performance and, importantly, that we can claim this as an identifiably queer approach to dramaturgy. This offers a perspective from which to understand that the structural form of Cake Daddy itself—this hybrid of cabaret and theatre—that supports the material and aesthetic, is inherently queer. This is the first example of a queer dramaturgical strategy adopted by the Cake Daddy creative team. By embracing a structure that allows Anderson-Doherty to shift between a narrative, conversational and pedagogical mode of performing, and by providing audiences with an opportunity to claim an active and visible role within the performance, a multiplicity of dynamics occur within the one performance. It also lifts the experience for audiences beyond a distinct linear narrative, didacticism or entertainment and complexly blends these so that they operate simultaneously. My discussion in subsequent chapters extends these ideas and elicits clear examples of this from the performance, working to flesh out and support these assertions. It is crucial to note, though, that this queer hybrid form underpins most other aspects and elements of the performance that are raised for analysis in the thesis. Thus, I place this discussion upfront before leading into more discrete examinations of the production outlined in following chapters.

Conclusion

This chapter outlines a theoretical and artistic framework that underpins my dramaturgy practice, and that of the creative team, in making Cake Daddy. My discussion draws specific attention to the queer working history of the Cake Daddy team and their interest in exploring alternative (queer) modes of performance. In my discussion, I elicit the first key queer dramaturgical strategy used in composing the work: the adoption of a hybrid cabaret-theatre form, which importantly sustains certain interactive, conversational and pedagogical aspects of the performance. In the next chapter, I examine how this hybrid

198 Ibid.

cabaret-theatre form provides opportunities for the audience to be active, present and visible within the performance space—ultimately leading towards a discussion of fat community presence and strategies toward community-building in and around the Cake Daddy performance.

4. Visibility, Presence and Community-building in Cake Daddy

From Belfast to Melbourne, audiences have been supportive and generous of Cake Daddy’s form and content. They’ve comprised the most wonderful mixture of queer and fat people, with a huge number of women coming and celebrating my fat male body and finding space to celebrate their own loudly and safely. They have shared their own stories of fat shame and stigma; they have shared the fact that the show brought the effects of fat-phobia into their consciousness; they have shared that, despite their never having worried about their weight, the show allowed them space to reflect on their negotiation of “health” while living with a chronic illness; and some have gleefully told me stories about their favourite cake – something they couldn’t share with any of their friends because they’re all on diets. —Ross Anderson-Doherty, 2019.

Introduction

In his comments Anderson-Doherty reflects on encounters with Cake Daddy audience members. As he describes, after each performance individuals and groups eagerly waited in the foyer for an opportunity to greet him and share their own personal experiences. This desire among fat-identifying and ally audience members to forge meaningful connections with the performer brought a profound realisation of the importance of fat representation and the presence of fat community within and around this production. Renowned fat activist Cooper describes fat activism as cultural work, herself as a cultural worker.199 When claiming this, Cooper highlights that the idea of positioning fat activism as culture-making stems from early fat lesbian feminism, particularly the work of Elana Dykewomon: ‘A cultural worker is somebody who is part of a community and the art that they make it [sic] comes from their experience in that community and is a part of the dreams and aspirations and critical understanding of that community.’200

199 Cooper, Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement, 7. 200 Elana Dykewomon in Andrew Leland, “Elana Dykewomon: An Oral History,” Oakland Museum of California, January 31, 2012, http://theoaklandstandard.museumca.org/elana-dykewomon-oral-history; in Cooper, Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement, 7.

Cooper defines community-building as an integral part of the culture-making process as it ‘enables fat people to develop social capital’—organising and mobilising individuals but also allowing for the sharing of information and experiences in forging new identities and interests.201 She writes: ‘Building community, simply getting together, is a project of generating social capital, developing connections that enable people to exercise power, become agentic and visible, and be legitimised. Through community, fat activists perform the alchemical work of converting abject into asset.’202 The act of making cultural objects— art, events, images, artefacts, texts, spaces—is cultural production and can be viewed as cultural work.203 We can thus firmly, and importantly, situate fat activist performance as a mode of cultural production, one that has a particular capacity for community-building. This chapter positions Cake Daddy within a legacy of fat activist cultural production and community-building. It begins with an examination of Hamburger Queen, a fat beauty pageant produced by U.K. artist Scottee, and, as point of comparison, introduces the opening sequence of Cake Daddy set in a fake diet group called Cake Watchers. The chapter then analyses two distinct moments from the Cake Daddy performance that operate in different ways but ultimately contribute to the community-building capacity of the work: firstly, the Cake Watchers sequence, which uses camp, subversive humour to challenge behaviours and ideals embedded in diet group culture; and secondly, The Cake Daddy Pledge, which invites audiences to engage in what I describe as a (queer) performance ritual. The chapter prioritises a description of events as they occur in the performance, taking care to map out and connect moments, so that I can later necessarily move back and forth in my discussion throughout the thesis.

Hamburger Queen, a fat talent contest

Hamburger Queen, running from 2011-2014 in the famously gay/queer London venue The Royal Vauxhall Tavern,204 is dubbed a ‘beauty pageant and talent show for fat people.’205 This annual event invited contestants to take part in three rounds: a fashion

201 Cooper, Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement, 60. 202 Ibid., 60-61. 203 Ibid., 68. 204 https://www.vauxhalltavern.com 205 Scottee and Friends, “Hamburger Queen.”

show, a talent performance and a taste round (home cooked or store bought).206 The event took place in front of a raucous cabaret audience, was judged by ‘subcultural celebrity judges’207 and co-hosted by Scottee and Amy Lamé (founder of London performer group and club night Duckie).208 Scottee, hosting the 2013 event, declares:

I don’t want to be put in front of a mirror by a stylist and called a piece of fruit and be made to cry—I don’t want to do that!... I don’t want to get my fat out for someone, which [sic] we can only call a Muscle Mary, on a television program, and be told that my body is embarrassing and fat. Not interested!209

His statements are met with loud applause and screams of appreciation from the audience, setting the tone for a night of high-camp, messy and utterly irreverent entertainment. Through footage of various Hamburger Queen events, it is clear the traditional beauty pageant criteria is displaced in favour of acts that purposefully challenge and disrupt such ideals.210 The fashion show serves as an opportunity to accentuate one’s fatness or, in most cases, remove one’s clothing altogether. The taste round is hardly about showcasing quality cooking or baking skills so much as it is an opportunity to over-decorate store-bought food or present some kind of intentionally disgusting and stomach-turning dish. Entries for the talent competition are varied and include: heart-felt spoken word poetry, high-energy dance, cabaret-style singing, burlesque and lip-synching, among other performance forms. In detailing her personal experience competing in Hamburger Queen, Chalklin suggests the event is ‘a large-scale fat coming out.’211 She describes rather poignant moments occurring in the interludes between the wild and rowdy contest rounds. For instance, a weekly recorded video series was projected onto the stage showing Scottee and Lamé interviewed by Cooper (also a registered psychotherapist).212 In these videos, the

206 See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7VW7bJ_FgE. 207 Chalklin, “All Hail the Fierce Fat Femmes,” 85. 208 https://www.duckie.co.uk/about 209 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7VW7bJ_FgE; in this, Scottee refers to “Embarrassing Fat Bodies,” Television series, 2011. 210 See, for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7M8PeWwxL4 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3fxtxEKy8s. 211 Chalklin, “All Hail the Fierce Fat Femmes,” 88. 212 Chalklin, “Obstinate Fatties: Fat Activism, Queer Negativity, and the Celebration of ‘Obesity,’” 120.

hosts discuss past dieting failures, childhood eating habits and their relationships with their mothers. Chalklin notes:

Whilst much of what was staged at Hamburger Queen had a serious, heartfelt, or poignant undertone (whether of personal trauma or institutionalised stigma) glimmering through its glossy glitzy satire, the camp setting made it difficult to consider that any of it was meant to be taken entirely and straightforwardly in earnest.213

In the context of this messy, alcohol-fuelled event, Chalklin suggests the high-camp humour and irreverence of the beauty rounds coupled with this kind of candid and raw material might prove jarring and uncomfortable for many. This kind of ambivalent tone, however, provides an opening to further consider the deeply complex experience of ‘coming out as fat’: simultaneously celebrating the fat body proudly and joyously while continuing to negotiate feelings of shame, rejection and failure that are regularly directed towards fat people.214 According to Chalklin, ‘it seems that perhaps the most radical thing Hamburger Queen did was ask its contestants and audience to be at once genuine and irreverent about their own bodies, identities, and even health.’215 The ambiguous tension Chalklin describes is perhaps one of the key reasons fat audiences responded so positively to the event as it more accurately captures the conflicted experience of an embodied fat subjectivity. As one participant puts it: ‘This is the kind of place—if I can be accepted anywhere, I can be accepted here. Everything I want the world to be is how Burger Queen is all the time.’216 Chalklin relates this event to the practice of queer world-making via Muñoz:

…the mere creation of that environment, even if only temporary and fated to disappear once the glitter has washed away, is reparative in forming a utopic vision for another possibility. The Bacchanalia of flesh and queer femininity enacted through this event is radical in the way it engages in a practice of world-making.217

213 Chalklin, “All Hail the Fierce Fat Femmes,” 91. 214 See: Pausé, “Live to Tell: Coming Out as Fat”; Saguy and Ward, “Coming Out as Fat: Rethinking Stigma.” 215 Chalklin, “Obstinate Fatties: Fat Activism, Queer Negativity, and the Celebration of ‘Obesity,’” 121. 216 Unidentified participant, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5l_lwdACYo. 217 Chalklin, “All Hail the Fierce Fat Femmes,” 92.

In his writing, Muñoz asserts ‘disidentifications’ as a set of survival strategies minority subjects practice through performance-making in order to ‘negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides and punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship.’218 With this, Muñoz describes the process of world-making; that is, the ability of performers to create alternative ways of viewing the world. ‘These alternative vistas are more than simply views or perspectives; they are oppositional ideologies that function as critiques of oppressive regimes of “truth” that subjugate minoritarian people.’219 In her writing, Chalklin draws clear connections between the carnivalesque qualities of Hamburger Queen and how these subversive aspects contribute to the world-making process: ‘It mined the personal, political, specific and universal, the joyous and the traumatic, to create not only an oppositional perspective or fictional utopia, but a very real alternative world…’220 Furthering this, I emphasise the importance of the shared act of acknowledging existing, oppressive power structures and critiquing these together. In this context, it means exposing the traumatic effects of ‘obesity’ discourse and diet culture and, as a community, finding ways to survive, empower each other and parody those oppressive structures through subversive play and resistance. The alternative vista that Chalklin describes, I argue, offers an experience that legitimises and validates fat identity and embodiment for the pageant participants and audience but, importantly, is of itself a world that is created and shared by those same people—together. A vital aspect of this is the establishment of a corporeal co-presence between the performer/s and audience, which, I contend, promotes strong feelings of connectedness and community. Importantly, with the term ‘co-presence’, I am extending Philip Auslander’s definition of liveness that simply suggests performers and audiences are ‘physically and temporally co-present to one another.’221 What I mean here, then, is that Hamburger Queen audiences are provided with an opportunity to have a much more active role in the performance, to interact with the performer/s and other audience members and participate

218 Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, 4. 219 Ibid., 195. 220 Chalklin, “All Hail the Fierce Fat Femmes,” 92. 221 Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in Mediatized Culture (London; New York: Routledge, 2008), 60.

in the forming of the total experience of the event—their own, and those of others. In terms of ‘participation,’ however, I draw a line around the kind of improvisatory, cabaret-style performances of Hamburger Queen and Cake Daddy and ‘participatory theatre,’ in which audiences essentially become the sole performers/ participants of the work.222 This note on language is crucial as I continue with these definitions in my discussion of Cake Daddy. With the example of Hamburger Queen, this co-presence affords fat-identifying pageant contestants and audience members an opportunity to all be visible, present, active and embodied participants in this critique of ‘obesity’ discourse and diet culture together— as a temporary community forged within the performance space. This is significant because it is an opportunity that is otherwise not possible in traditional modes of theatre when a performer-audience binary is in place and, typically, audiences are designated as passive recipients. Hamburger Queen, as a counterpoint to such normative modes of performance, is a high-camp, irreverent fat beauty pageant that leans into its messy aesthetic, proving subversively parodic while amplifying moments of heart-felt sincerity as contestants and hosts relay the real-life pain and trauma of fat-phobic encounters and size-based oppression. For Hamburger Queen, the audience experience is informed not only by the labouring performer/s onstage and the audience’s own immediate thoughts and responses but by the active contributions and co-presence of other fat-identifying and ally audience members. With Cake Daddy, which I now turn back to, this is an idea that emerges in the opening sequence of production and is revisited multiple times at various points in the show.

Cake Watchers: interaction, conversation and ‘watching cake’

At the opening of the performance, we hear the sound of bells rhythmically playing, replaced quickly by a deep, thunderous beat. Over the top of this, a loud, powerful voice belts the opening of a song, something about Cake Watchers’ potential to slim us down and improve our lives: ‘Cake Watchers is your bulge’s handbrake.’223 Anderson-Doherty enters,

222 See, for instance: Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Brooklyn, New York: Verso Books, 2012). 223 Lyrics by Lachlan Philpott.

dressed in a green-blue collared shirtdress with green high-top sneakers. The shirtdress is covered in sequinned cucumbers, though their shape is modified to look like missiles—the effect is phallic, and a camp nod to the ‘war on obesity’ (see more on the Cake Watchers aesthetic and embedded war imagery in Chapter Five).224 In no attempt to reduce or constrict his size, the shirtdress appears to even maximise his presence; with a bald head, big beard and smoky eye, Anderson-Doherty enters loudly and in-charge [see Figure 1]. In role as a heightened version of his past-dieting self, ‘Ross,’ he introduces Cake Watchers—not a diet but a ‘wellness group’—and himself as Cake Watchers group leader. Anderson-Doherty immediately launches into a list of the drastic changes he’s experienced since life before Cake Watchers, calling to mind the all-too-common ‘before and after’ dieting trope.225 He introduces this new group (the audience) to the weekly meeting routine: an individual ‘wellness check’ (weigh-in); games and activities; recipe sharing; and the grand prize of Slimmer of the Week. Immediately, he calls two audience members onstage to hold up a lyric banner and conducts a community sing-along of the Cake Watchers theme. A pre-recorded track plays, capturing the feeling of a piano being played too hard in a community-hall that supports the Cake Watchers theme (a rather specific nod to the performer’s Northern Irish heritage).

I’m on my way, I’m on my way I’m getting very very near I’m on my way, I’m on my way You won’t recognise me next year226

From the outset the aesthetic surrounding Anderson-Doherty is highly flamboyant, colourful and loud, so too is his performance. His physicality and vocal cadence (both in speaking and singing) command attention, if not the apparent smugness he exudes in the role of diet group leader. This high-energy delivery is sustained through the sequence, as Anderson-Doherty begins to share outrageous “anecdotes”: eating thirty-six Tunnocks Tea

224 Also see: Charlotte Biltekoff, “The Terror Within: Obesity in Post 9/11 U.S. Life,” Mid-America American Studies Association 48, no. 3 (2007): 29–48. 225 Rachel Fox, “Against Progress: Understanding and Resisting the Temporality of Transformational Weight Loss Narratives,” Fat Studies 7, no. 2 (2018): 216–26. 226 Lyrics by Lachlan Philpott.

Cakes while crying himself to sleep watching reruns of The Golden Girls;227 and the time he soiled himself after an unfortunate dieting accident on a bus from Belfast to Dublin to see Jason Donovan in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

Figure 1: Image from Cake Daddy (dir. Alyson Campbell) featuring Ross Anderson-Doherty as Cake Watchers group leader. Photo by Bernie McAllister of Argyll Images. Courtesy of Outburst Arts.

Anderson-Doherty’s heightened performance and the language play used in Cake Watchers is complemented by imagery embedded in the aesthetic of the work. At the centre of each audience table is a circular placemat, a cool green-blue colour featuring the Cake Watchers brand name and logo in white—a hand powerfully brandishing a cucumber. This colour scheme is reminiscent of actual branding and marketing materials used by major diet groups and weight-loss companies, though there is very clearly a queer—phallic and sexual—spin on this with the use of the cucumber.228 It equally nods to iconic socialist propaganda that features clenched fists and a call to action, the message: we’re being

227 Tunnocks Tea Cakes are an iconic British treat, individually wrapped in decorative foil coverings. It consists of a marshmallow atop a soft biscuit all coated in chocolate. For more on the history of Tunnocks Tea Cakes and its treatment as a cultural (and controversially national) treasure, see: Audrey Gillan, “The Strange Case of Tunnock’s Teacakes,” The Guardian, January 7, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/06/tunnocks-teacake-scottish-british-nationalists- boycott. 228 For instance, see: https://www.weightwatchers.com/au/; https://www.liteneasy.com.au.

recruited to Cake Watchers. This logo is reflected on four large banners that hang from the ceiling and frame the stage area, each featuring the same distinct Cake Watchers design [see Figure 2] One sadly hangs upside down, reminiscent of a local community diet group where the coordinator has mistakenly done this in haste. The effect makes the image even more phallic. Throughout the Cake Watchers sequence the lighting design renders the audience highly visible and holds them in this state. At the same time, Anderson-Doherty hosts a range of interactive activities within the space, roaming freely and engaging with various tables of audience members. In explaining why certain foods cannot be trusted, the performer introduces the first key guideline to the Cake Watchers program: ‘Watch the Cake!’ With this, he leads the group through a literal cake watching exercise, asking everyone to stare at a Tunnocks Tea Cake that sits at the centre of each table, while he does the same with a large, pink frosted cake, which he wheels centre-stage. Anderson-Doherty takes a deep breath and with utter determination stares fixedly at the cake before him. The room is silent and still; a few giggles break out. As we sit here together, the performer hyperbolically demonstrates for us a level of food surveillance and body policing supposedly required for successful dieting (which proves not too dissimilar from actual diet messaging). As we continue to sit in this moment, the notion of this large pink cake, or shiny foil-wrapped Tunnocks Tea Cake, as some kind of ominous, lurking danger that might suddenly leap from the table and towards our mouths becomes increasingly absurd the longer Anderson-Doherty holds his stare. There are more laughs from the audience, but he holds longer still before releasing and coming back to the room. The audience cheers. The high-camp presentation and the subversive humour embedded in the work operate so that the performance is in a constant effort against slipping into any sense of earnestness. ‘Camp-ness’ can be understood as a device with which the creative team purposefully sustain a sense of playful resistance. Susan Sontag, in her widely known paper “Notes on Camp,” writes: ‘the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.’229 Sontag defines camp as a ‘sensibility (as distinct from an idea),’ and structures her attempt at delimiting this slippery concept as a series of ‘jottings’, because,

229 Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Partisan Review 31, no. 4 (1964): 53.

she claims, ‘[i]t’s embarrassing to be solemn and treatise-like about Camp.’230 Sontag’s comment highlights the resistance of “seriousness” at all costs that inhabits camp-ness. In the case of camp performance, we can understand this as an approach that will always avoid a serious, earnest, or “truthful” mode of representing one’s “story” or “self” onstage.

Figure 2: Image from Cake Daddy (dir. Alyson Campbell) featuring Ross Anderson-Doherty chatting with audience in front of Cake Watchers visual design. Photo by Bernie McAllister of Argyll Images. Courtesy of Outburst Arts.

Defining camp as a particularly queer strategy, Moe Meyers writes: ‘I define Camp as the total body of performative practices and strategies used to enact queer identity, with enactment defined as the production of social visibility.’231 It can be understood, then, that the extreme exaggeration of Anderson-Doherty’s identity and acts like cake watching— within the wider aesthetic framing—is a particularly queer approach to engaging in playful resistance and parody of diet culture. In terms of what this kind of playfully subversive and parodic staging offers fat audience communities, Muñoz’s articulation of the disidentification process proves helpful:

230 Ibid., 53-54. 231 Moe Meyer, “Introduction,” in The Politics and Poetics of Camp (London; New York: Routledge, 1994), 1–19.

The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications. Thus, disidentification is one step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by dominant culture.232

In the context of Cake Watchers, we can understand the literal act of cake watching exposes some of the more insidious behaviours perpetuated by diet culture around body policing and food vigilance. Cake, then, stands in for the ultimate danger, or ‘terror,’ that supposedly lurks in wait for the dieter: cake as public enemy number one.233 But, as an audience who have typically responded to the production’s marketing, or simply gleaned from the title, we know that the figure of Cake Daddy waits for us on the horizon. Thus, the process of disidentification, as provided by Muñoz, includes this moment of cake watching but—in cracking the majoritarian (diet) code—this material, and all that is bound up with it, is later used and transformed into Cake Daddy: a ‘super-hero’-like, celebratory figure embodying fat-positivity. In the first instance, however, in order to get to Cake Daddy, we have to deal with ‘cake’ in terms of normative (diet) culture, which we encounter together as an audience community. Audiences are engaged in a shared act of acknowledging existing, oppressive structures and critiquing these together. In live performance, such a process invites its audience, as a community, to share in the potential purging of the toxic effects of both the inward and outward experience of these oppressive structures. In the case of Cake Daddy, this process begins in Cake Watchers with this act of cake watching. This is an example of the queer dramaturgical strategy I set out to articulate at the top of this section: the establishment of an audience community that draws on queer/camp modes of performance to challenge normative ideals.

232 Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, 31. 233 Biltekoff, “The Terror Within: Obesity in Post 9/11 U.S. Life.”

Queer performance scholar Jill Dolan, in “Performance, Utopia and the ‘Utopian Performative,’” asserts: ‘Audiences are compelled to gather with others, to see people perform live, hoping, perhaps, for moments of transformation that might let them reconsider and change the world outside the theatre, from its macro to its micro arrangements.’234 She further claims that such gatherings in themselves can promote community.235 This, I argue, becomes vital when considering fat and queer communities who, denied presence and meaningful representation for so long, set about finding their own spaces with their own strategies of world-making and story-telling.236 In the context of fat activism, Cooper asserts: ‘Performance is particularly important within fat activist culture as a means of developing capital because of the immediacy of fat embodiment, its use as a reflection of fat experience, and its audiences as gatherings of fat community.’237 Reflecting on both Cooper and Dolan, it is important, then, to consider examples of how fat activist performance is staged so that there is a sense of fat community visibility and presence within and around the event/s, like with Hamburger Queen and Cake Daddy. Additionally, it is key to identify how the performance reflects or comments on embodied experiences of fatness so that audiences might feel connected, legitimised, or even challenged—but, ultimately, as part of that community on display.

Devising Cake Watchers: establishing an audience community

After the collective ‘cake watching’ demonstration, Anderson-Doherty asks audiences to work together at their tables. The second key guideline, he tells us, is: ‘Know Your Cryminals!’ In relating real-world people to foods (i.e. Peter Dutton238 is equivalent to a sausage roll—‘not a bit good for you’; Princess Diana, a pickled beetroot—'a wee sting, you see’), he invites tables to work together in matching a list of people with associated foods.

234 Jill Dolan, “Performance, Utopia, and the ‘Utopian Performative,’” Theatre Journal 53, no. 3 (2001): 455. 235 Ibid., 459. 236 See, for instance Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier, eds., Queer Dramaturgies: International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer; and Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. 237 Cooper, Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement, 72. 238 Peter Dutton is acting Minister of Home Affairs of Australia, who is most known for his deeply conservative political values, particularly the implementation of recent border control policy that enacted the forced relocation of asylum seekers into offshore detention centres. In Belfast, conservative Brexit-supporter Nigel Farage was referenced instead.

These lists are displayed in the workbook/program that audiences are given upon entering [see Figure 3]. Tables are also encouraged to devise their own unique responses to a list of common foods, identifying real-life people using this scale of ‘cryminality’. For instance: who would you associate with carrot cake? During this exercise, Anderson-Doherty roams the audience and chats freely with individuals, awarding stickers and certificates for creative (political, subversive) answers. The material here parodies different nutritional rating systems employed by diet groups. Slimming World in the U.K., for instance, rates food according to their ‘syns’.239 Despite an immediate phonetic association to Christian conceptions of transgression, it is intended to serve as a rating for food ‘synergy,’ which considers a food’s caloric properties against its ability to satiate the appetite. It is rather difficult to imagine, however, that the inherent connection to transgression, through mainstream Christianity, does not consciously or subliminally affect dieters in the group. Weight Watchers has a well-known point system that now appears on a range of products beyond what the company itself produces.240 In developing this material for the stage, the Cake Daddy creative team relied on processes of devising.241 As such, there was no pre-existing text or ‘script’ as we began the process. From the outset, Campbell (often with Philpott) conducted a range of dramaturgical tasks within the rehearsal space to generate ideas for the content and aesthetic, which included among other things: research sharing, concept mapping, improvisations, creative writing exercises and various forms of reflection. Importantly, much of the early dramaturgical work was a retrieval process, which placed an emphasis on Anderson-Doherty’s own experiences. The performer openly shared a range of stories: some deeply personal, others political or outright funny.

239 https://www.slimmingworld.co.uk/what-can-i-eat 240 https://www.weightwatchers.com/au/smartpoints 241 See also: Alison Oddey, Devising Theatre: A Practical and Theoretical Handbook (London; New York: Routledge, 1996).

Figure 3: Example pages of the Cake Watchers workbook/program from the Belfast production season. Content created by Anderson-Doherty, Barbour, Campbell, Graffam and Philpott. Design by Leho De Sosa.

While this process is examined in much greater detail in the following chapter, it is critical to introduce certain details here as they provide important background to the emergence of Cake Watchers as a structure through which Anderson-Doherty could host conversations about dieting and diet culture in the performance space. In the early days of the July 2018 rehearsal and development, we became increasingly interested in the individuals, behaviours and rituals—the world—of diet groups through examples of Anderson-Doherty’s lived experience. Fragments of memories and images began to coalesce in the rehearsal space: dieters regularly lining up for a last-minute bathroom run before weekly weigh-ins; Anderson-Doherty running into a line of fellow dieters at the closest Tesco immediately after group, their arms full of treats;242 or dieters sharing bags of hot chips and wine in the car park after group, as well as many moments capturing the intimacy, support and care shared between these dieters over time. An interesting tension between the individual dieter’s urge for connection and acceptance within the culture of diet communities emerged. In describing this below,

242 Tesco is a popular supermarket chain across the United Kingdom.

Campbell is also reflecting on key cultural differences that emerged between making The Tea Cell Dance/GL RY and Cake Daddy:

If you are living with HIV you can find a community where that is tenderly looked after and nurtured. There are support networks, supporting organisations—there are all sorts of different groups, and we understand quite clearly that the stigma that goes with [HIV] is so misplaced. But, as Ross would say, the place you go to find your community as a fat person is in Weight Watchers, or those other ones, because that’s where you’re getting in a room with people who are sharing a lived experience. But the whole reason they are there is to not live that shared experience, is to not be part of that group eventually, and that is very, very different.243

Articulated by Campbell here is an important gap that exists for most fat people seeking the support of others sharing a similar experience and, as such, diet groups fill this need to some capacity. The structure of Cake Watchers offered a complex landscape through which to explore ideas underpinning dieting and diet culture—the personal, social and political. Among other aspects, Anderson-Doherty relayed multiple examples of the kinds of shared learning and group work that occur in diet groups. It seemed appropriate, then, with Cake Watchers to host group (table) activities, especially given Anderson-Doherty’s history with and proclivity toward cabaret performance, as well as the aesthetic arrangement that is afforded with cabaret-style seating. For Campbell, Philpott and Anderson-Doherty, this hybrid cabaret-theatre form is closely tied to their previous work on The Tea Cell Dance, detailed in the previous chapter. In the Cake Daddy rehearsal room, Campbell described her vision for, and the dynamic within, The Tea Cell Dance as a ‘dramaturgy of conversation’.244 That is, its interactive form and (at times) conversational delivery considered the simple act of sitting down for conversation over tea and cake as a powerful way of breaking down stigma related to HIV.

243 Alyson Campbell, phone interview, August 27, 2019. 244 Also see: Alyson Campbell, “GL RY: A (W)Hole Lot of Women Trouble. HIV Dramaturgies and Feral Pedagogies,” in Viral Dramaturgies: HIV and AIDS in Performance in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Alyson Campbell and Dirk Gindt (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018), 49–67. The book chapter frames the Melbourne production of GL RY, which was an outdoor, public event. In this, Campbell discusses the importance of conversation as a dramaturgical method, particularly regarding kinship/community building.

This speaks of a preferred aesthetic adopted by Campbell and the GL RY creative team that seems to chime with Jacques Rancière’s (rather contentious) assertions in “The Emancipation of the Spectator”:

We … need a different theatre, a theatre without spectators: not a theatre played out in front of empty seats, but a theatre where the passive optical relationship implied by the very term is subjected to a different relationship … where those in attendance learn from as opposed to being seduced by images; where they become active participants as opposed to passive voyeurs.245

If we consider these ideas in terms of The Tea Cell Dance—aware of its strong creative influence on Cake Daddy—the fact that the audience were embedded in the mise- en-scène of the performance is significant. By this I mean that the audience’s active presence and contributions in the space were necessary for the work to function and ultimately informed the total experience of the event for both performers and audience (like with Hamburger Queen). Importantly, the aesthetic form of the production—this cabaret/theatre hybrid—holds the ideological “message” of the work within a mode that remains open and conversational between the performers and audience. Such mixed forms reimagine the traditional unidirectional flow of theatre energy from the stage/performers to the seating area/audience, allowing a more open and porous dynamic to be established.246 Like Cake Daddy, The Tea Cell Dance straddles a particular tension: creating unique, live moments with an audience but, in keeping with theatre tradition, maintaining the repeatability of the event.247 It was important, then, in creating Cake Daddy to find opportunities to initiate conversations between the performer and audience members and to have audiences actively engage in activities, decision-making and reflection together, as well as fun, perceivably low-stake interactions during the show. By low-stake interactions, I mean this in terms of the actual tasks asked of audiences, like those described earlier: the community

245 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 6. 246 Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, trans. Saskya Jain (New York: Routledge, 2008), 17. 247 Trencsényi, Dramaturgy in the Making, 190.

sing-along, collective cake watching and matching ‘cryminals’. Anderson-Doherty carefully and skilfully invites interaction through this sequence instead of forcing it on any individual. Despite the performance’s “improvisatory” feel, the interaction actually takes place within a highly structured and rehearsed sequence. This is important to highlight not only in terms of audience members who are shy or averse to audience participation but for those who might be affected by diet-related content and find this material confronting. In creating this conversational dynamic, the Cake Watchers sequence relies less on Anderson-Doherty in a fixed role/character or the structure of a narrative to carry the burden of delivering a “message”. Instead, this more porous, improvisatory form sustained during the sequence relies on the visibility and contributions of audience communities in order for it to function. These interactions offer a way for audiences to encounter issues related to diet culture as a shared experience, intentionally fostering feelings of connectedness. This dynamic is underpinned, always, by an urge for the performer to craft moments that are lively, spontaneous and “dangerous”—that is, exciting and entertaining. However, it is also held within a structure that is deeply considerate of the potential embodied trauma for some audience members in terms of dieting. As such, this is an incredibly complex space which Anderson-Doherty skilfully negotiates—facilitating provocative conversations onstage and in amongst the audience.

The Cake Daddy Pledge

At the end of the Cake Watchers sequence, Anderson-Doherty sings ‘Slimmer of the Week,’ a high-energy and vocally complex gospel number. Through this, a manic energy swells as the lyrics recount the extreme vigilance, near-starvation, over-exercise and sharp competitive edge required to achieve the ongoing status of Slimmer of the Week.

My stomach’s got so small

I needn’t eat at all.

I underplay the discipline and strength it took

But I’ll be

Slimmer

Slimmer of the Year

Before and after on the front of magazines

Mistaken for a stick, a human toothpick

And I’m feeling dizzy dizzy dizzy weak and sick But I’m slimmer slimmer slimmer slimmer slimmer slimmer slimmer slimmer slimmer slimmer slimmer slimmer slimmer slimmer slimmer slimmer slimmer slimmer slimmer slimmer slimmer slimmer slimmer Slimmer of the Year248

Donning a complete blue-green cucumber tracksuit with matching visor [see Figure 4], Anderson-Doherty stands centre-stage, pausing to lunge and stretch. The song ends with a high, long held note and, by its end, the performer is perceivably weakened and fatigued. From this moment, the established diet world shudders and begins to diminish. The audience fall into darkness, Anderson-Doherty stands in stillness centre stage as the lighting narrows in to surround him. He takes a breath and begins to speak. In a formal shift, Anderson-Doherty delivers a monologue, composed by Philpott, that narrates a literal heart-stopping moment in the gym. At the centre of this monologue, Anderson-Doherty sings ‘Life on the Wing’: a highly affective, vivid flashback to a heartbreaking childhood moment. Both the monologue and ‘Life on the Wing’ are analysed closely in Chapter Five but introduced here briefly to establish a series of events within the performance. As Anderson-Doherty conducts his narration, which includes a weeks-long stay in hospital, the figure of Cake Daddy emerges from the margins of his story—an unexpected visitor while ‘Ross’ is recovering. The monologue ends with the image of Cake Daddy sitting on the bed feeding him cake. Anderson-Doherty walks to the side of the stage, wheels the big, vibrant pink cake centre stage—pauses—and in stillness and silence, picks up the knife, slices the cake and begins eating. The length of this moment varies by performance depending on audience reaction: at times there is wild applause, other times silence. The Cake Watchers piano theme begins to play again but Anderson-Doherty swats it away with a hand. An acoustic guitar-led track is cued, to which he sings ‘Simple Funny

248 Lyrics by Lachlan Philpott.

Really Crazy Things’, which details the small, everyday encounters of fat-phobia and body shaming that are directed at fat bodies.

Figure 4: Image from Cake Daddy (dir. Alyson Campbell) featuring Ross Anderson-Doherty in cucumber tracksuit designed by Leho De Sosa. Photo by Bernie McAllister of Argyll Images. Courtesy of Outburst Arts.

It’s the simple things The tiny little simple things Like boarding a bus To find a spot The filthy looks That I get shot

It’s just the tiny cheer Hearing them say, ‘Fat lad’s here’ And rub my gut for luck Wiggle and jiggle it as we fuck I’m a chubby chaser’s wettest dream It’s just the tiny fluff

I’m fat, I’m fat, I know it I take up space, I’m in your face, I know it Do you want me to hide away? Not ruin your day? Chewing on a celery stick ‘Til I locate my dick249

As the songs ends, Anderson-Doherty unzips his tracksuit top and removes it to reveal an image of his own face as Cake Daddy printed on a vibrant pink singlet. In this moment, the world not only expands but transforms. There is an aesthetic flip—the performer directs the green-blue Cake Watchers banners and placemats to be turned, revealing images of Cake Daddy in pink and gold [see Figure 5]. Anderson-Doherty slices the cake onstage, which is collected by ushers and carried to audience tables with plates and forks. Additional vegan and gluten-free cakes are brought from the sides—this moment is designed to be for everybody. Music begins to play: a deep, uplifting beat. Warm lights flood the space, spilling over the audience. There is laughter and conversation as the audience adjusts to the drastic shift in mood.

249 Lyrics by Lachlan Philpott. This song was added for the Australian season and thus did not appear in the production during its Belfast premier.

In the moments after, Anderson-Doherty hosts a conversation in the space about local cake shops and invites people to share their favourite spots. He offers dieting anecdotes, linking sections of the monologue to real-life events and reflects on the painful, ongoing process of removing oneself from diet culture. At this point, he invites two audience members onstage to hold The Cake Daddy Pledge. Inviting all audience members to ‘grab their favourite fat bit’, he leads the group through the following:

• I pledge to be a good egg and challenge fat stigma, fat shame and anti-fat bias whenever I can; • I will shove a huge cucumber deep into my gob before I compliment anyone on their weight-loss; • I will shove it down further and swallow it whole before I speak ill of my body; • I will plug myself with the cucumber and let it rot inside before I conflate health with thinness; • I will listen to fat people about fat things and use fat as a descriptor of bodies that should be celebrated, included, enjoyed, had sexy time with and shamed no longer.250

In further unpacking the experience for audiences, the “world” of the performance moves from Cake Watchers, with its open, interactive mode with table games and activities, and turns sharply into an emotional personal account with the theatrical elements closing the space so that only Anderson-Doherty is highlighted. The monologue sequence is the most “theatre/performance”-like section of the production. That is, a traditional ‘unidirectional’ energy flow of theatre is established.251 In terms of an embodied experience for audiences, this shift is rather constricting—focus and concentration narrow in on the performer, and the performance suddenly takes on a very earnest tone. It is designed so that the audience are suspended in this moment with the performer, through the embedded song, and only now come out the other end. As they do, the performance adopts its most open and conversational mode yet as they sit together with Anderson-Doherty, no

250 Text by Lachlan Philpott. 251 Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, 138–59.

longer in role as Cake Watchers leader ‘Ross,’ and eat cake. It is at this point audiences are invited to take The Cake Daddy Pledge.

Figure 5: Image from Cake Daddy (dir. Alyson Campbell) featuring Ross Anderson-Doherty with Cake Daddy visual design. Photo by Bernie McAllister of Argyll Images. Courtesy of Outburst Arts.

In terms of crafting this moment, the Pledge emerged at a period in the rehearsal process in which the creative team, specifically Anderson-Doherty and Campbell, were revisiting an urge to include some kind of pedagogical moment in performance. This directly stemmed from a consideration of how we might establish for the audience ways to address everyday fat-phobia and size-based stigma. At the time, I had been working on ideas of what I was calling a ‘Fattyfesto,’ a creative manifesto that drew heavily on both Freespirit and Albaran’s “Fat Liberation Manifesto”252 and Cowan’s “GLITTERfesto”.253 Initial plans were for this to be published in the audience workbook/program. Campbell, however, saw the potential for this to become a moment within the work, an opportunity to ask audiences to commit to certain principles together. Campbell, Anderson-Doherty, Barbour and I worked through a list of potential ideas. Importantly, Anderson-Doherty then took this list

252 Freespirit and Aldebaran, “Fat Liberation Manifesto, 1973.” 253 T.L. Cowan, “GLITTERFESTO: An Open Call in Trinity Formation for a Revolutionary Movement of Activist Performance Based on the Premise That Social Justice Is Fabulous,” Canadian Theatre Review 150 (2012): 17– 21.

away from the rehearsal space for further research and to consult with a network of fat activist peers. A refined list was sent to Philpott, who brought the text into the queer and parodic realm of the performance by embedding the hyperbolic, sexualized (cucumber) references. These details reflect a particular kind of shared, collective dramaturgy active in the Cake Daddy process, however, it is key to note that ultimately the list of commitments that make the Pledge come from Anderson-Doherty. Thus, for him, it was vital to reflect meaningfully on what exactly we would ask of our audience:

I’m not asking anyone to stop dieting. I’m not asking anyone to change their bodies… I’m not doing any of that because it’s none of my business. It’s your body, and telling people what to do with their bodies is never a good look. But it is asking people to be considerate of each-others’, really, more than anything else. How you treat your own— that’s entirely your business; how you treat others’—that’s our business. That’s what the pledge is geared towards. And that’s for straight-sized people, it’s for fat-sized people, it’s for people who identify as anything within that spectrum.254

Interestingly, Anderson-Doherty was not performing alone during the Pledge for the Belfast season. Fellow fat activist and cabaret performer T.J. Tytler joined him so that after the cake sharing, instead of the song ‘Simple Funny Really Crazy Things,’ Anderson-Doherty and Tytler together hosted a conversation and quiz with the audience on assumptions around fatness and the fat body. The dual presence of these performers took some of the burden off Anderson-Doherty having to simultaneously entertain and educate audiences by relating political and intellectual material with personal experiences within this complex, live dynamic. It also guaranteed Anderson-Doherty was not the only fat activist presence in the space, which at this early stage was crucial for him. In preparation for the Australian season, initial plans were to recruit local fat activist artists and/or guest speakers to join Anderson- Doherty for each performance but given the logistics, and with deeper dramaturgical

254 Ross Anderson-Doherty, recorded in conversation with Alyson Campbell, questions by Rachel Patenaude, November 20, 2018.

concerns, an approach to have Anderson-Doherty facilitate a different, more structured, version of this was taken instead. In terms of The Pledge, the embedded ideas, I argue, encourage a form of what Cooper calls ‘micro fat activism,’ which can be understood ‘as a form of minority influence… a method of changing opinion.’255 Micro activism focuses on the changing of small, every day actions and is central to the beginnings of community-building: ‘it represents actions that encourage, demonstrate or communicate alternative ways of being.’256 This is the everyday work of speaking up and bringing awareness to others (friends, family, colleagues) about fat-phobic attitudes and body-shaming language and behaviours and requires vigilantly challenging and resisting ideas embedded in the status quo as they emerge. In terms of the creative team framing this material as a shared “moment” for the performer and audience, this also ties to ideas that fat activism, and especially fat activist performance, is typically required to educate as well as entertain.257 I contend the Pledge enacts this kind of activism and pedagogy in the way that it is collectively performed—and doing so, becomes an act of community-building. Erika Fischer- Lichte, documenting processes of community-building in theatre, writes: ‘communities emerged when groups collectively performed a ritual.’258 Performance studies scholar Richard Schechner writes extensively about the transformational power of performance and its ability to ‘mark’ and effect change on individuals through performative acts.259 He includes the example of bar mitzvahs, for instance, and similar initiations into adulthood that rely on such transformational acts. Muñoz takes Schechner’s ideas and frames these within the context and processes of disidentificatory performance, suggesting similar ‘imprinting’ (affective change) can occur within the potentiality of queer world-making: ‘These imprints or marks are “loaded with power” and potentially “bind a person to his community; anchor him to an identity”; and “are at once intimate and public.”’260 I argue that the Pledge, as a collective ritual performance, has the potential to similarly bind Cake Daddy audiences as a community and, as such, is another queer

255 Cooper, Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement, 81. 256 Ibid. 257 See: Bock and Squires, “Fat Lip Readers Theatre: A Recollection in Two Voices,” 221 and Cooper, Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement. 258 Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, 53. 259 Richard Schechner, Between Theatre and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1985). 260 Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, 197.

dramaturgical strategy used by the creative team. The shared act of holding our ‘favourite fat body part’ and uttering these words together, I assert, is a process that validates and legitimates fat subjectivities within the space. In this collective act, the possibility of an alternative, utopic vista is brought forth—a space, or world, in which we become a community that embodies and practices these principles of fat-acceptance and fat- positivity. In this moment there exists, as Muñoz describes:

‘an insistence on something else, something better, something dawning… a collective political becoming… [with] necessary modes of stepping out of this place and time to something fuller, vaster, more sensual, brighter.’261

It is, of course, up to individual audience members to decide whether and how to join in this shared act. As Schechner writes, moments of transformation in performance exist as a ‘dialectic between solitude and being-with-others’.262 Fischer-Lichte furthers this, and underscores the fleeting nature of such moments in performance, asserting: ‘A community that respected the individual, i.e. a community of co-subjects, became possible only for very short periods of time. It was not sustained for the entire duration of a performance but merely over fluctuating and limited spans.’263 This moment and its ephemerality, then, will hold different meanings of varying significance and impact for individuals in the space. For director Campbell, she understands the Pledge as ‘a moment where the audience encounters themselves in relationship to the material’—and this, even amongst the multiple strategies for community-building employed by the creative team, is deeply personal.264 For Anderson-Doherty:

That’s one of the scariest moments of the show for me actually, whether people are going to join in with me or not. I’ve reconciled myself with the fact that if they don’t, that’s cool, I’ll just do it anyway… I will just say it to myself… Some nights we’ll have people in there that are very entrenched in diet culture and will be absolutely affronted

261 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 189. 262 Richard Schechner, Environmental Theater (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1973), 255. 263 Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, 53. 264 Alyson Campbell, phone interview, August 27, 2019.

by the very fact I would ask people to promise to do that and that’s ok. That’s a risk I have to take, especially when you move outside of normative modes of theatre.265

Asking audiences to engage in an act of fat activism is a risk. Structuring the performance material in a way that relies so heavily on audience interaction and enthusiasm is a risk. Hosting conversations about fatness and diet culture in a space with a diverse range of bodies and histories is a risk. But with fat audience members and allies lining up to share their deep appreciation for these moments, it is a risk that is clearly outweighed with the payoff of an enthusiastic, emboldened community.

Conclusion

This chapter charts the ways Cake Daddy, as an example of fat activist theatre, uses strategies for community-building. A comparison with Hamburger Queen, a fat beauty pageant that pairs unapologetic fat revelry with moments of heart-felt sincerity and pain, offers insight into similar fat-queer methods used for developing audience co-presence and interaction. With Cake Daddy, I frame two specific moments to elicit examples of queer dramaturgical strategies used by the creative team: firstly, the collective act of parodying and subverting normative ideals surrounding diet culture in Cake Watchers; and, subsequently, The Cake Daddy Pledge as a queer performance ritual that binds individual audience members together. In the next chapter, I elicit further details of how ‘obesity’ discourse and diet culture (and its effects) are addressed and refuted within the Cake Daddy production.

265 Ross Anderson-Doherty, recorded in conversation with Alyson Campbell, questions by Rachel Patenaude, November 20, 2018.

5. Queering ‘Obesity’ Discourse and Diet Culture

The war on fat is a war on fat people. Based on bad science, but good business, the hatred of fat people is not only acceptable but encouraged. When dealing with another aspect of my identity that some people find challenging – my queerness – it is largely socially unacceptable to say ‘we hate your queerness, not you’, because we understand that is impossible. My queerness is me; I am my queerness. I am my fat; my fat is me. You cannot hate my fat and not hate me because it is me. —Ross Anderson-Doherty, 2019.

Introduction

Fat activism rejects attitudes and beliefs embedded in mainstream dieting and diet culture as these processes, put simply, sit in direct contrast to their political aims. In Bodies Out of Bounds, editors Braziel and LeBesco provide a critical overview of the burgeoning of diet culture in the United States post-World War II.266 They draw attention to the perils posed by pharmaceutical companies with over-the-counter appetite suppressants and a range of other highly dangerous weight-loss methods still widely accessible to dieters, including gastric surgeries, diet groups and other programs. This is underscored by emerging research that sharply contests the success or longevity of dieting practices: ‘Since 1959, research has shown that 95 to 98 percent of attempts to lose weight fail and that two-thirds of dieters gain back more than they lost’;267 ‘of those who intentionally lose weight, most will regain about one-third of their weight within the first year, and virtually all will return to their baseline weight within five years.’268 This chapter considers the queer identity and position of the creative team making Cake Daddy and how this informs the ideas, aesthetic and approaches used to address

266 Kathleen LeBesco and Jana Evans Braziel, “Editors’ Introduction,” in Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression, ed. Kathleen LeBesco and Jana Evans Braziel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 1– 15. 267 Hobbes, “Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong.” 268 Glenn Gaesser, “Is ‘Permanent Weight Loss’ an Oxymoron? The Statistics on Weight Loss and the National Weight Control Registry,” in The Fat Studies Reader, ed. Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 38.

‘obesity’ discourse and diet culture. Picking up on ideas introduced in the previous chapter around the camp/queer presentation of the Cake Watchers material, I examine more closely the queer processes—specifically those used to explore (and eventually stage) aspects of diet group structures. Since a discussion of the audience experience of this same Cake Watchers sequence is prioritised in the previous chapter, there is a purposeful shift from foregrounding the dramaturgical composition of the work to examining more of the processes and dynamics in the rehearsal space. However, my discussion necessarily drifts back and forth, linking processes to outcomes. This continues with an analysis of the monologue and song ‘Life on the Wing’ that sit at the centre of the Cake Daddy performance. Through my discussion, I assert two key strategies: firstly, a dramaturgy of queer deconstruction, which I associate with devising and composing Cake Watchers and, I argue, is a process of exposing the repressive power structures embedded in diet groups; and secondly, the ‘emotional dramaturgy’, as Campbell refers to it, of crafting the monologue and ‘Life on the Wing,’ in which the effects of such repressive structures on a fat subject (Anderson-Doherty) are laid bare through deeply personal and (queer-ly) reparative narrative.

Queering the subject and creative process

As I move to discuss examples from Cake Daddy, it is important to consider more deeply ideas around ‘queer’ as a subject position for the creative team but also the ways in which this informed the actual processes, the queer doings of making the work. The following discussion traces some of the work of queer theorists in articulating a queer subject position. Importantly, there are continued—and highly problematic—assumptions that tend to universalise claims of a queer position or experience. Thus, I highlight theorist Nikki Sullivan’s move toward Derridean deconstruction as a means of exposing how certain power/knowledge relations affect queer individuals, in place of trying to claim any one queer subject position or experience of repression (which again would prove an essentialising process). Sullivan traces the influence of both Michel Foucault’s popular work on power relations and a poststructuralist interest in subjectivities on early queer discourse, which, in turn, offers a particularly helpful framework of ideas through which to situate queer as a

position to inhabit as well as how queer might operate as a verb: “to queer.”269 Sullivan writes, ‘[f]or post-structuralist theorists there is no true self that exists prior to its immersion in culture. Rather, the self is constructed in and through its relations, and with systems of power/knowledge.’270 Immediately, we can see why queer theory, aligned with the poststructuralist tradition, rejects Cartesian dualism—an assumption that considers the body as the material vessel which holds the mind and locates “identity” within one’s consciousness.271 The urge, instead, is to consider (queer) identity in terms its social constructed-ness, which relies on diverse power/knowledge relations. Sullivan continues by introducing notions of power relations through Foucault, specifically when he asserts that power is both productive and repressive, not simply something that one individual or group has or owns and is able to wield over another. According to Foucault, power should be understood as a network of relations.272 Power and resistance, according to this model, are not so much oppositional forces but positions that are mutually bound; resistance is inseparable from power rather than simply opposed to it. Foucault describes ‘a multiplicity of points of resistance… a plurality of resistance… [which] can only exist in the strategic field of power relations.’273 As Sullivan highlights, by extension, we can understand that any attempt to replace perceivably “false” ideologies or politics with a different set of non-normative ideals is inherently self-contradictory. She claims, ‘[t]here can be no universally applicable political goals or strategies, only a plurality of heterogeneous and localised practices...’274 The understanding here is that “queer” cannot simply be a process of replacing dominant, repressive political agendas with non- normative ideals because this, in turn, would (re)create other, new sets of power relations that simply shift the political alignments of normative/queer. By emphasising the constructed nature of subject positions, especially the contingent and unstable nature of social/power relations, an opening emerges for what we might more meaningfully consider to be “queer”. I return to a quotation used earlier from Halperin (with addition):

269 Nikki Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 40–43. 270 Ibid., 41. 271 Ibid. 272 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980). 273 Ibid., 96 274 Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, 42.

Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. Queer then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative.275

Similarly, Sullivan describes queer (theory) as ‘a sort of vague and indefinable set of practices and (political) positions that has the potential to challenge normative knowledges and identities.’276 There have been many attempts to (re)define queer positionality, specifically with conditions around gender and/or sexual preference/s that deviate from normative gender embodiment and heterosexuality.277 For some, this has encouraged more meaningful and nuanced intersectional discourse to emerge across and between other minority communities (race, class, disability, etc.)278 Though, for many, the appeal of queer’s open, slippery and boundary-less terms makes it an enticing position to inhabit. Additionally, and vitally, queer’s inherent resistance to normative, repressive power/knowledge structures, I contend, remains its most potent political power. There are, however, lingering problems around the universalising of a queer position and/or experience. Attempting to define a shared queer position or experience of the Cake Daddy creative team, for instance, would prove a highly problematic and fraught exercise. As such, Sullivan points to a way of avoiding some of the complexities of “defining” (delimiting) queer identity, which is, as Janet Jakobsen suggests, to ‘complete the Foucauldian move from human being to human doing.’279 Instead of emphasising queer being (position, subject), we can instead think of queer doing, as a verb: a set of actions.

275 Halperin, Saint Foucault: Toward a Gay Hagiography, 62. 276 Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, 43–44. 277 See, for instance: Lisa Duggan, “Making It Perfectly Queer,” Socialist Review 22, no. 1 (1992): 11–31; Annemarie Jagose, Queer Theory (Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 1996); Halperin, Saint Foucault: Toward a Gay Hagiography. 278 See: Cathy J. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3 (1997): 437–65; and Elizabeth Grosz, “Experimental Desire: Rethinking Queer Subjectivity,” in Supposing the Subject, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: Verso, 1994), 133–58. 279 Janet R. Jakobsen, “Queer Is? Queer Does? Normativity and the Problem of Resistance,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 4, no. 4 (1998): 516 in Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, 50.

Sullivan adds: ‘Queer, in this sense, comes to be understood as a deconstructive practice…’280 The Derridean practice of deconstruction, as Sullivan employs it, infers that a critical analysis of certain “absolute essences”, or “fixed truths”, that underpin cultural binaries, i.e. heterosexual and homosexual, would work to expose the power relations, their contingencies and, perhaps most importantly, call attention to their repressive effects.281 She writes, ‘… a deconstructive analysis would highlight the inherent instability of the terms, as well as enabling an analysis of the culturally and historically specific ways in which the terms and the relation between them have developed, and the effects they have produced.’282 From this, we might consider “queer” as an analysis and critique of the structures that shape and inform the repressed experience, rather than a defining of the position and experience of repression. Thus, according to Sullivan: ‘If we turn to queer as a verb (to queer) we find “to quiz or ridicule, to spoil, put out of order.”’283 Borrowing from Sullivan, it is my assertion that the Cake Daddy creative team conduct a deconstructive analysis of diet group structures through performance, specifically with Cake Watchers, by examining the rituals, behaviours and language that exist in these spaces and the effects these have on participants. If we consider the construction of a fat subject and/or subjectivity in terms of a multiplicity of repressive power relations (like queer) then diet groups—or at least a representation of these in performance—offer a particularly potent site for exposing and contesting normative assumptions and ideals around fatness.

Cake Watchers as queer deconstruction

On the first day of the Cake Daddy rehearsal and development in July 2018, Campbell and Philpott set up a conversation led by Anderson-Doherty recounting his own ‘fat history timeline’. With this, Anderson-Doherty addressed a series of significant events and milestones related to his fatness and personal trajectory towards size acceptance. The timeline included moments ranging from time in diet groups and periods of intense dieting

280 Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, 50. 281 See: Jacques Derrida, Writing with Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978). 282 Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, 51. 283 Ibid., 52.

and exercise to individual encounters with fat-positive (but not necessarily fat-identifying) friends. At the centre of the timeline was a moment for Anderson-Doherty where his heart suddenly failed in the change room of a gym, overcome by the pressures of extreme dieting and exercise. He was rushed to hospital where he stayed for days. As both a literal and metaphoric “heart stopping moment,” the dramatic potential of this event, and others surrounding it, were immediately acknowledged by the team. In this way, the timeline offered a possible mapping for a version of the Cake Daddy performance. From this session, and deepening in subsequent rehearsals, an interest emerged in weight-loss groups such as Slimming World and Weight Watchers. This was tied to Anderson-Doherty’s personal accounts of certain groups in Belfast. Of particular significance for Anderson-Doherty and the creative team were the individuals that participate in these programs and, perhaps more meaningfully, the repressive experience for dieters within these environments. During this period an interest emerged in exploring a hybrid cabaret-theatre form (described in Chapters Three and Four). As such, following Anderson-Doherty’s fat history timeline, a series of “cabaret hosting” or “stand-up”-like improvisations were framed by Campbell and Philpott to elicit more details. These exercises asked Anderson-Doherty to inhabit a range of perspectives from within a diet group: his own, other dieters’ and as the group leader initiating the rest of the creative team into the program. For Campbell and Philpott, an important dramaturgical question driving this process asked: how much of the material could be conveyed to an audience through interaction and conversations rather than narrative? From here our interest focused on the rituals, conventions, language, relationships and dynamics that occur within these diet groups. A key part of this early process included sharing academic (critical, theoretical) materials amongst the creative team. In doing so, an early realisation emerged for us that such groups stand in as a concentrated form of the fat- shaming and body policing that exists in, and is normalised by, mainstream society. Alongside these creative explorations and improvisatory exercises, further research was brought into the rehearsal room stemming from ideas Anderson-Doherty had raised: diet program marketing (commercials, testimonials, before and after images); program guideline examples; menu ideas (ingredient swapping); and group meeting structures— weigh-ins, group activities and sing-alongs, among other community-building activities.

More material emerged through Anderson-Doherty sharing his own personal experience as well as with further research and creative investigations so that we were able to better understand how the group structures operate by eliciting the experiences of dieters attending such groups. During this same phase—and running parallel to generating new content material— Campbell facilitated conversations with the creative team on potential ways into creating an aesthetic world for the work. Much of the process involved developing a shared language and ranged from sourcing imagery to gathering examples of queer music videos and other pop culture references in considering how to “resist the sononormative,” that is, asking how we might explore the queer potential of sound and music outside of traditional forms of composition.284 A word bank emerged that would inspire further explorations for Byrne, the composer: wide, visceral, phat, bombastic, bodied, swelling, figures, space, percussive, soft, expansive (among many others). In terms of visuals, Anderson-Doherty was drawn to a particular tension for himself, and many other fat people, between wanting his presence to be big, colourful and impactful but finding himself doing things (sometimes unconsciously) to diminish the body— highlighting the fact, too, that costume designers are typically untrained and ill-prepared for working with fat bodies. We began to consider how we might purposefully resist ingrained urges to minimise the fat body so to ensure his presence in performance remains equally vibrant, big and impactful. Through the process Anderson-Doherty and designer De Sosa maintained regular communication regarding both the costuming and any images (photos, illustrations) of himself as Cake Daddy. These conversations were vital for Anderson- Doherty in terms of accurately representing, and thus respecting, his body. From early drafts, the size and proportion of Cake Daddy’s figure in the artwork were adjusted to enlarge the waist and to purposefully include more confidence in the positioning of the body and its expression. Across the costuming, set design and artwork, the main aesthetic priority moved toward celebrating Anderson-Doherty’s fat/ness by exposing and emphasising this through design.

284 The language here was used first by Campbell in the rehearsal space and does not refer to existing studies or literature. Artistic practice-as-research projects that seek to explore and document ways of ‘resisting the sononormative,’ I assert, would offer a significant contribution to the field of queer musicology, specifically in encounters with processes of queer performance-making.

Cake Watchers as a fictional and hyperbolized diet world became a model through which we could examine diet groups with the audience and, in terms of fatness, offered a complex environment to navigate ideas around fat shaming and body politics. The structure of such groups afforded the ability for Anderson-Doherty to conduct games and activities appropriate to the context but would also directly engage the audience in processes that encourage introspection and conversation. Since Cake Watchers is a highly parodic version of real-world diet groups it invited the queer impulses of the creative team to inform the aesthetic world. At the top of the Cake Watchers sequence, Anderson-Doherty in role as diet group leader ‘Ross’ refers multiple times to Cake Watchers as a ‘wellness’ and ‘lifestyle’ group— explicitly reminding audiences this is not a ‘diet’ program. He encourages his audience, ‘congratulations on taking your first steps towards wellness with Cake Watchers’ and quickly moves to relay a rather miserable account of his own life before joining the group. He asks, ‘Do you like the rebrand?’ The cool green-blue colour and clean white graphics used for the Cake Watchers branding are strikingly similar to those of actual diet companies.285 Key here is that the colours and branding of diet groups now commonly reflect the same inclination in their language towards a more “natural” mode, one more in line with a message of self- care and self-empowerment. From Anderson-Doherty’s personal experience, supported by the research that emerged around this in rehearsal, it was immediately clear that diet companies such as Slimming World and Weight Watchers have starkly moved away from language directly related to dieting. For instance, the current slogan for Slimming World invites dieters to ‘Discover a world of weight loss without dieting.’286 ‘Dieters’ are also removed and instead become ‘slimmers’, which explains Slimmer of the Week—an actual prize awarded in groups, as well as for the Month and Year (inspiration for the Cake Daddy song of the same name). As noted by Cressida Heyes in “Foucault Goes to Weight Watchers,” there is an ever- increasing awareness amongst the mainstream population that diets do not work.287 Heyes highlights the sudden absence of terms such as ‘slimming’ or ‘reducing’ from diet program

285 See: https://www.weightwatchers.com/au/; https://www.liteneasy.com.au 286 “Slimming World,” Slimming World, accessed October 3, 2020, https://www.slimmingworld.co.uk. 287 Cressida Heyes, “Foucault Goes to Weight Watchers,” Hypatia 21, no. 2 (2006): 126–49.

marketing, instead replaced by ‘descriptions, such as “lifestyle change” or “eating program” … with its aura of enlightenment, progress and self-improvement…’288 In her article, Heyes applies Marxian notions of a ‘false consciousness’ alongside a Foucauldian understanding of ‘docile bodies’ to identify how diet companies like Weight Watchers appropriate language and practices of self-care in order to continue profiting.289 In this, Heyes adopts a feminist lens and thus specifically addresses the experience of female participants, including her own. On the concept of ‘false consciousness’, Heyes writes: ‘In its Marxian formulations, the concept… implies that certain social realities are systematically obscured by an internally coherent ideology whose propagation has material benefits for a dominant group.’290 Essentially, in the context of diet companies, they benefit from participants being unaware of the dominant hierarchies and structures existing within the space. However, given the extraordinarily high statistics of diets failing, Heyes asserts that a false consciousness in itself does not explain the considerable numbers of return dieters to such groups.291 Thus, Heyes brings in Foucault’s notion of docile bodies in order to describe the extraordinary disciplining and policing of the body expected of dieters. As I further introduce Foucault’s concept of docile bodies, it is important to situate this within its context as a critique of modern society and the political institutions that condition and control lives, specifically bodies.292 Foucault uses the environments of schools, armies, hospitals and prisons to illustrate how the mechanics of power provide an uninterrupted coercion of bodily activity, partitioning always the body’s time, space and movement. Relevant here too is Foucault’s interest in the panopticon design of the prison system, as the ultimate example of disciplinary society.293 That is, the design has it so that prisoners are so ultimately exposed they not only scrutinise their own behaviour but also those around them. In the Cake Daddy performance, Anderson-Doherty introduces three guiding principles of Cake Watchers: ‘Watch the Cake’; ‘Know your Cryminals’; and ‘Practise your Manoeuvres’. The literal exercise of ‘cake watching’ that posits food as an immediate

288 Ibid., 129. 289 For more, see: Denise Meyerson, False Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 290 Heyes, “Foucault Goes to Weight Watchers,” 129. 291 See: Hobbes, “Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong.” 292 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). 293 Ibid., 360-367.

danger or threat, while perhaps humorous in the context of Cake Watchers, is treated with absolute seriousness in weight-loss companies and diet groups. The language play in Cake Watchers is hyperbolized further through Anderson-Doherty’s performance, where at points his rhetoric escalates, urging members (audiences) to ‘root out’ and ‘stamp out those hidden food cryminals’, and suggesting constant vigilance and extreme exercise are the only real tools for ‘massacring those adipose terrorist cells.’294 This is linked to guildeline three: ‘Practice your Manoeuvres,’ which again for the creative team was a matter of parodically replicating existing language devices. ‘Exercise,’ it turns out, is considered alienating within many diet groups and so the term is now often replaced. Anderson-Doherty even recalls the term ‘body magic’ being implemented in one Belfast group instead. The language play is complemented by war-related imagery embedded in the aesthetic of the diet world, though queerly/parodically. For instance, cucumbers are transformed in the design to resemble missile bombers on the shirtdress Anderson-Doherty wears at the opening of the show and is replicated again in the audience workbook. The ‘cucumbombers’ were coined by De Sosa, for whom English is a second language, by similarly playing with words and imagery. As previously described, the actual Cake Watchers logo—a fist powerfully grasping a cucumber—appearing on the stage banners, table placemats and workbooks is reminiscent of socialist propaganda. Much of this material stemmed directly from Anderson-Doherty’s acute awareness of war rhetoric constantly being used around fat bodies. Thus, the potential emerged for the creative team to align aspects of Cake Watchers’ parodic material with this hyperbolic theme. Charlotte Biltekoff, for instance, highlights a range of comments made from high- ranking U.S. health officials linking the ‘obesity epidemic’ to a homeland terrorist threat: ‘the U.S. Surgeon General listed computers, TV, elevators, close parking spots, fast food and microwave dinners among the aspects of everyday life imperilling the health of the nation… Proponents of the war against obesity amplified the sense that danger lurked in everyday life by borrowing language from the war on terror.’ Biltekoff also quotes a 2002 op-ed piece, where the critic writes: ‘we could use some weapons inspectors right here in our

294 Text by Ross Anderson-Doherty.

supermarkets. Who needs nerve gas when we have stockpiles of sugar, salt, and fat slowly immobilizing our children?’295 In the Belfast season of Cake Daddy, the rhetoric in Cake Watchers was treated with further hyperbolic play.296 Instead of the Cake Watchers theme song ‘Bulge’s Handbrake’ that opened the performance in Australia, a version of the well-known ‘War (What is it Good For)’ plays and, as Anderson-Doherty enters, he instead blasts: ‘FAT! What is it Good For?’297 Later, as Cake Watchers leader, he announces:

The War on obesity: it’s terrible, the worst. Greater than any scourge on the face of the Earth; worse than famine, poverty, plague and genocide is FAT. Like a squishy gelatinous terrorist creeping inside our bodies and not only making us less healthy and less attractive but bringing down society as we know it. ADIPOSITY IS THE TERRORIST WITHIN—and this is your sign-up to the only army that can win the war: Cake Watchers.298

Naomi Wolf, feminist author, famously writes: ‘Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.’299 In this, panoptic culture holds an extraordinary grip. The extreme policing of bodies, our own and those of others around us, is exactly what diet culture perpetuates—manifesting in diet groups and weight- loss programs in its most concentrated form. Responding to Foucault, and adopting a feminist lens, Sandra Lee Bartky writes:

Dieting disciplines the body’s hungers: Appetite must be monitored at all times and governed by an iron will. Since the innocent need of the organism for food will not be

295 Biltekoff, “The Terror Within: Obesity in Post 9/11 U.S. Life,” 33. 296 Decisions around removing much of this specific ‘war on obesity’ language following the Belfast season related to streamlining the Cake Watchers sequence. The imagery embedded in the aesthetic, with ‘manoeuvres’ and other terms in the diet guidelines, carry much of this message so changes were made as not to overlabour this in the performance content. 297 Edwin Starr, War (What Is It Good For?) (Motown, 1970). 298 Text by Anderson-Doherty. 299 Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (New York: W. Morrow, 1991), 187.

denied, the body becomes one’s enemy, an alien being bent on thwarting the disciplinary project.300

Heyes also refers to Bartky’s writing, noting that in groups like Weight Watchers deviation from expected outcomes (i.e. weight-gain, or even maintenance) is interpreted as proof of failure to condition the appetite and is thus pathologized, underpinned always by the conflation of weight loss with ‘good conduct’.301 Heyes claims that the extraordinary disciplinary practices encouraged by diet groups, ‘are concealed in part by one of the most insidious dynamics in normalisation: the reification and subsequent internalization of subject positions initially defined by mechanisms for the measurement of population.’302 It is easy to imagine that the inherent valuing and judgment of one’s self in regards to weight- loss achievement or failure in these contexts become extreme. The adoption of language around self-empowerment and self-knowledge in these groups, according to Heyes, layers additional mechanisms of policing through the guise of self-care. Heyes’ article contains examples of this taken directly from Weight Watchers materials, including phrases such as: ‘predict your own temptations’; ‘weight loss is a continual process of learning about your body, your relationship to food, and the environment you live in’; ‘replace negative messages with positive ones’.303 On the surface there is the seemingly uplifting and positive message of self-empowerment and awareness but, as Heyes demonstrates, this language draws the dieter further into the ever-tightening complex web of power relations and self-policing. In its presentation to the audience, the combined high-camp and subversive stylings of the Cake Watchers material, Anderson-Doherty’s exaggerated delivery and the aesthetic have obvious ties to queer performance histories. Reflecting on ‘Camp’, Richard Dyer describes it as ‘…a way of being human, witty and vital (for the whole camp stance is full of vitality), without conforming to the drabness and rigidity of the hetero male role.’304 Sontag adds: ‘Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style — but a particular kind of style. It is the

300 Sandra Lee Bartky, “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” in Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 1990), 66. 301 Heyes, “Foucault Goes to Weight Watchers,” 133. 302 Ibid., 134. 303 Ibid., 140-141 (original emphasis). 304 Richard Dyer, “It’s Being So Camp as Keeps Us Going,” in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject, ed. Fabio Cleto (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 110.

love of the exaggerated, the “off”.’305 As claimed in the previous chapter, “camp-ness” can be understood as a device through which the Cake Daddy creative team sustain a sense of playful resistance when examining the material. The camp, subversive quality of the performance is likely one aspect that is most obviously and identifiably queer for audiences; however, the underlying processes of making the work potentially offer helpful insights by situating the queer doings of the creative team (i.e. how we “queered” the deconstructive process in rehearsal). Instead of labouring to delimit where queer might begin and end within the complex, fluid landscape of contemporary performance, I offer a useful working concept for a queer methodology, via Halberstam, who describes it as ‘a scavenger methodology that uses different methods to collect and produce information on subjects who have been deliberately excluded from traditional studies of human behaviour.’306 We can also understand, through Campbell and Farrier, that queer performance has as much to do with the processes of making the work as it does the self-identification of the artists or the context in which it encounters its audience.307 The alternative, bricolage approach of devising and composing this sequence exposes important queer doings of the creative team. Eliciting raw personal material, compiling and sharing academic research, staging creative explorations with Anderson- Doherty (improvisation, narration, storytelling), investigating alternative ways of making and encountering music, imagining a queer (and potentially fat-positive) diet group aesthetic, playing with hyperbolic language, composing interactive games, playing with lyrics and song for affect and meaning—these become acts of “queering”. By straddling the forms of cabaret and theatre, it is also possible to trace how the performance at times pulls in and discards aspects of both according to its needs. The logocentric or ‘script-led’ tradition of theatre is discarded during Cake Watchers in place of a more improvisatory cabaret-style (though, admittedly, still highly structured) form that weaves in other, locatable aspects of musical theatre (songs), stand-up (humour) and drag performance (aesthetic). Later in the performance, however, this text-centric approach is salvaged when

305 Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 56. 306 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 13. 307 Campbell and Farrier, “Introduction: Queer Dramaturgies,” 7.

Anderson-Doherty delivers a monologue, while aspects of cabaret and those other forms are temporarily discarded. At this point in the performance—that is, as the monologue begins—the work shifts into an entirely different mode. Through Anderson-Doherty’s presentational delivery, a boundary is placed between him and his audience. While the world of Cake Watchers works to expose diet group power relations, it inevitably—and swiftly—falls away, with its camp/queer subversive mode, so that through Anderson-Doherty and his narration that follows, another, starkly different tone is established that is serious and earnest. Muñoz writes:

Queerness is rarely complemented by evidence, or at least traditional understandings of the term… the key to queering evidence, and by that I mean the ways in which we prove queerness and read queerness, is by suturing it to the concept of ephemera. Think of ephemera as trace, the remains, the things that are left, hanging in the air...308

Ultimately, it is the slippery, indefinable style and fleeting form of the Cake Daddy performance that, I argue, places it at its most queer. It is possible to trace what is brought in, what is discarded, and what remains at any point in the performance. But through its ephemeral form and constant shape shifting, it is possible to articulate and understand— that is, evidence—its queerness and those queer strategies employed by the creative team in crafting the performance. In order to conduct this analysis, I have borrowed from Sullivan to frame the Cake Watchers sequence as a Derridean deconstruction of diet groups and, subsequently, attempted to articulate how the Cake Daddy team “queer” this in performance. This is underpinned by the idea that the Cake Watchers sequence functions by exposing and resisting the repressive structures of diet groups that operate to simultaneously define and erase fat bodies and identities. A significant shift brought on with the beginning of the monologue is that the focus of the performance moves instead to explore the devastating and traumatic effects that such repressive forces have on a fat subject.

308 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 65.

‘Emotional dramaturgy’: the personal as (fat/queer) reparative work

Sporting a complete green cucumber tracksuit, high-tops and visor, Anderson- Doherty delivers the initial sections of the monologue with a certain smugness, shrouded onstage in a green hue of lighting that catches sections of the Cake Watchers banners next to him:

Things I love about going to the gym. The feeling I get there because I’m doing this for me. The free coffee and being surrounded by people who are there drinking it like me, thinking like me—I’m doing this for me… How many gym classes can you do in a day? Depends how many they offer.

He describes finishing a kettle bell class run by ‘bright orange Lindsay’ (a fake tanner) and feeling weak and shaky. He retreats to the change rooms, stripping off his clothes but quickly finds himself sliding down the wall next to him. A high, electronic sound effect plays, rising in pitch slightly before driving downwards into a lower and lower register—the sense of falling: ‘I black out'; and silence follows. Waking in a haze of steam and sweat, he finds himself surrounded by naked ‘bearded daddies’ pushing orange soft drink at him. He gets himself up, steadies, leaves the gym and, as he crosses the street, catches the eye of a ‘bearded man’ watching him. ‘He looks me in the eye, says: That was a close call… Does he click his fingers? That’s how I remember it. We are in the back of a cab, driving through the city…’309 The stranger takes him to hospital but disappears as the triage nurse takes over. As Anderson-Doherty relates the details of this encounter, a hue of warm pink light splashes over the stage, though it disappears with the figure. He describes the surrounds of the hospital, the multiple tests and the comings and goings of nurses and doctors. The sound design sits around Anderson-Doherty’s delivery so the medical sounds and movements evoked in the text are supported by an abstract weaving of swift electronic hums and pulses. His narration continues, describing that the

309 Text by Lachlan Philpott.

various test results reveal his symptoms were not a result of too much free coffee at the gym but that his heart had stopped beating; for a moment, temporarily, he was dead.

At no point before or after did anyone actually say to me: how did this happen? At no point did a nurse grab my hand or the doctor look me in the eye and ask: Ross, what are you doing with your life? Has anyone ever asked me that? My life reel at high speed barrels backwards before my eyes as I search the past for an answer. It stops and stills on me—aged five. My mother smiles at me, she’s holding out butterfly wings and I’m, I’m…310

A piano track plays, to which Anderson-Doherty sings the ballad ‘Life on the Wing’. In his vocal delivery, through consonants and intonation, he chose to return to his own particular Northern-Irish accent. This is culturally significant in that it is deeply bound to his geographical and working-class background and his experiences as a child.311 The lyrics convey playful moments of childhood: the mother tapes wings to his shoulders and the child leaps off the brown settee,312 flying, hands out front, led by his ‘painted nails’, ‘a tropical princess shooting out the door’.313 With wings, he soars above the growing turmoil at home, looking down from the comfort of the clouds above. That is, until the following moment, which, importantly, can be understood as a deeply painful rejection of both his fatness and queerness:

My wings get left on the couch And they drop and fall to the ground

310 Ibid. 311 In video interview, December 3, 2020, Anderson-Doherty describes that in all other Cake Daddy songs he uses received pronunciation, which has a slight American sound and is common in most styles and genres of music. In ‘Life on The Wing,’ however, he intentionally adopts an accent that is associated with the area of County Down in Northern Ireland where he was raised. It is the only local area that has the distinguishable influence of Ulster Scots. This, he notes, is identifiable for a Northern Irish audience and clearly situates him as working-class. Anderson-Doherty also suggests the effect of this within Cake Daddy, and the purpose of embedding this change, is that it enacts a sense of vulnerability within his performance—a clear, noticeable shift from smug diet leader ‘Ross’. 312 An additional marker of a working-class background. In redeveloping material for the Australian tour, these references were never discussed for possible changes. Reflecting on this, Anderson-Doherty suggests that despite an Australian audience likely not interpreting the complexities of these references, the shift in performance towards a more vulnerable and personal delivery is still very much present and recognisable. 313 Lyrics by Lachlan Philpott.

The colours flake off under his boot

Crushed bones make a snapping sound. Splayed wings stick out of the bin She stands and watches me And shrugs and says, ‘you were getting too fat’

For Soaring High above your place Clouds couldn’t support that weight The future’s here and fat lads don’t fly. No life on the wing. No soaring. No life on the wing. No more soaring.314

In the early phase of the July 2018 development, playwright Philpott would generally spend one or two hours daily with Anderson-Doherty at a pub or café local to the rehearsal space. For Philpott, it was a way of connecting with the performer to converse across a range of topics: personal, political, cultural, and other obscure or “off-topic” things. Certain ideas or aspects of their conversations would sometimes be raised in the rehearsal space but mostly these remain private. From their conversations, Philpott initially composed the lyrics for ‘Life on the Wing,’ and subsequently the monologue. On this process, Philpott reflects:

Ross is so brilliantly funny and poetic and a natural storyteller so it’s very easy to listen to him. But he’s very good at hiding the truth beneath the craic... What I was able to listen for was the bits that he was hiding and find those vulnerable bits and use that material... I think it was very much the nature of those private conversations that allowed for that material to come out, where it wouldn’t have in groups… It’s that kind of porch-sitting

314 Ibid.

that brings really good results, particularly when two people are talking, when you just kind of sit and stare at the same thing and things come out.315

The comforting, conversational tone and meanderings that come with ‘porch sitting’ has also been considered as a useful dramaturgical tool by iconic lesbian feminist theatre group Split Britches. For them, similar conversations staged between the performers and audience literally become the material content for their production Porch Sitting (2020). According to member Lois Weaver: ‘Some of the best conversations are in cars, benches, parks or porches.’316 ‘Porch Sittings take seriously the idea that dialogue can happen side-by side, rather than face-to-face with an expert. It makes space for the things we wonder rather than providing a platform for the things we know.’317 In terms of the Cake Daddy production, these kinds of slow meanderings and wonderings with Anderson-Doherty and the creative team allowed for the material to emerge from a deeply personal and emotional place in a way that vitally nurtured and cared for these same conversations. For the creative team, we were not entering the rehearsal process with a finished text or script and dealing only with an aesthetic task of building the world. Instead, both the content and its aesthetic were developed simultaneously in the process. Devising is a notoriously difficult task and often relies on ‘chaotic’ processes, as Turner and Behrndt describe:

one idea might lead to an exploration of parallel stories or ideas which in turn lead to other ideas and before long the process is going down the creative turmoil of devising. Indeed, if we were to draw a map of a typical devising process, it might reveal a labyrinthine journey of blind alleys, dead ends, associative leaps, mysterious paths and links between passages.318

315 Lachlan Philpott, phone interview, August 19, 2019. 316 Lois Weaver in Arifa Akbar, “Online Porch Sitting Review—Collective Catharsis to Guide Us through the Dark,” The Guardian, July 30, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/jul/29/online-porch-sitting- review-split-britches. 317 “Porch Sitting,” Split Britches, accessed October 3, 2020, http://www.split-britches.com/porch-sitting. 318 Turner and Behrndt, Dramaturgy and Performance, 171.

For Cake Daddy, it is important to note that we were working at times within a space and a process that handles deeply personal material for Anderson-Doherty. Thus, while moving backwards and forwards on ideas and events, the process often became slow and the dynamics of the room centred around the close working relationship of Anderson-Doherty and director Campbell. Reflecting on this process, Campbell describes this work as ‘emotional dramaturgy,’ and identifies two important layers within this that operate simultaneously.319 Firstly, there is doing the dramaturgical work of locating key emotional points and the trajectory between points within the performance; and secondly, a sincere caring for both the performer working inside and outside of the material, as well as how those emotional points and arcs are treated within the rehearsal space, especially regarding how far and for how long these processes go—continuously eliciting, reflecting and repeating. Campbell describes:

… it’s a slow process to produce that work when it is so deeply personal. You’re not just dealing with an aesthetic task, you are digging into personal experience and deep emotions. That material, you can try to squeeze out of someone by putting them in a room with pen and paper but actually it emerges in a much more meandering way—but I don’t mean that as a pejorative—it’s just not a straight line… It’s a sort of forward and backward thing, isn’t it, dramaturgy? 320

For Campbell, there were many opportunities to explore stillness and silence within and between moments of the monologue, allowing its affective potential to impact and sit with the audience.321 Within the sequence, Anderson-Doherty stands centre stage behind a microphone. He holds this position for the entire monologue and throughout is contained by spotlight. The image conveys a figure frozen in time, which, significantly, captures the experience for many stuck in the throes of dieting. Diet language focuses on the “future self” as weight-loss motivation, encouraging dieters to exist as much as possible in an indeterminate space between their present and future selves. Rachel Fox writes on this,

319 Alyson Campbell, phone interview, August 27, 2019. 320 Ibid. 321 See: Alyson Campbell, “Adapting Musicology’s Use of Affect Theories to Contemporary Theatre-Making: Directing Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life,” Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 4, no. 3 (2011): 303–18.

asserting: ‘Accounts of the future by dieters and former dieters suggest that it functions as an inescapable fantasy in which thinness is posited as the solution to any and all conflicts of the past and present.’322 She argues that dieting commonly manifests distorted chronotopes that have the ability to suspend dieters in time and space while the “future self” materialises—or fails to.323 Significantly, dieters no longer wish to be associated with the fat body. Since the present moment and their fatness impinge upon notions of an ideal (thin) “future self,” these are ‘relegated to the past, thus letting the dieter look back on their fatness even as they continue to live with it.’324 The danger here is its capacity to create passive, void subjects of dieters by displacing any true sense of embodiment, essentially holding them hostage in space and time. It can be understood, then, how dieting denies the possibility of a fat embodied subject. Though, by exposing the repressive structures and their effects— the latter of which is now under examination—we can move toward freeing the fat subject through playful and empowering embodiment. Following ‘Life on the Wing,’ Anderson-Doherty resumes the monologue describing a weeks-long recovery in hospital. Family, friends, fellow dieters visit and bring treats that he looks past: ‘terrible food, cryminal food, stuff full of crymes’.325 One night the strange figure that rescued him on the street reappears, ripping back the privacy curtain. As Anderson- Doherty delivers the following, warm pink light again spills across the stage and a soundtrack of deep choral vocals plays gently underneath.

His fingers lift the lid a little, the smell of hospital antiseptic pushed aside by wheat and butter, the smell of sticky sticky syrupy sugar.

322 Fox, “Against Progress: Understanding and Resisting the Temporality of Transformational Weight Loss Narratives,” 221. 323 The concept of a chronotope—the configuration or ‘sense’ of time and space—comes from Mikhail Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination (1981). In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are forced into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. ‘Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.’ Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84. 324 Fox, “Against Progress: Understanding and Resisting the Temporality of Transformational Weight Loss Narratives,” 222. 325 Text by Lachlan Philpott.

He is there in the half light of the hospital at night with a box brimming with cakes. And I’m salivating, mouth full of spit but I’m shaking my head cause I can’t eat that shit… But he’s next to me, he’s on top of me, he’s feeding me cake in the hospital bed, holding cake out in front of my mouth and waiting like a mother bird, he’s a cake daddy bird, fat syrup fingers and he’s feeding me cake.326

Anderson-Doherty walks to the side of the stage, eyes fixed on the big pink cake. The choral vocals cut out as he picks up a knife so that in silence, slowly, he proceeds to slice a piece, lift it to his mouth, take a bite and begin chewing. The audience is held in this moment until the Cake Watchers piano theme plays again. Visibly affected, he licks his fingers, grabs the microphone and announces toward the stage manager: ‘Would you ever fuck off with that diet shit? I’m just trying to enjoy a wee bit of cake.’327 In the monologue, Philpott embeds multiple temporal devices that accelerate, lapse, eclipse and condense time so that it moves fluidly and unhindered by normative parameters: things move slowly in the haze and steam of the locker room; a click of the fingers in the taxi signals a temporal leap; a life reel barrels past, stops and zooms in. Queerly resistant to coherence and stability, the monologue is supported by an ambiguous and fleeting sonic, visual and performance dramaturgy that is unfixed and ephemeral. There is no secure “place” or “time” as the monologue proceeds, while embedded metacommentary makes for additional deviations throughout (see above excerpts). Influenced by Walter Benjamin’s critiques of ‘time as a flat plane on which events march forward in sequence’, Elizabeth Freeman suggests that a rejection of linear time brings forth ‘a potentially queer vision of how time wrinkles and folds…’328 On discussing fat temporalities and histories, Tidgwell et al. also pick up on Benjamin’s theorising of time, adding it is a ‘favorable metaphor given common features of the fat body that exuberate a physical renunciation of linearity.’329 In this way, queer temporalities and the resistance of linear progress is crucial in reclaiming and staging fat-queer subjectivities and histories.

326 Ibid. 327 Text by Ross Anderson-Doherty. 328 Elizabeth Freeman, “Introduction—Queer Temporalities Special Edition,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13, no. 2–3 (2007): 163. Also see: Walter Benjamin, “Thesis on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 253–64. 329 Tracy Tidgwell et al., “Introduction to the Special Issue: Fatness and Temporality,” Fat Studies 7, no. 2 (2018): 117.

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On staging queer histories, Campbell writes, ‘performance is potentially one of the most productive sites for an encounter with queer history, as it can enact a “reparative” mode of queer scholarship… wherein the political and the social—possibly even the agency—associated with the “identity politics” discarded by dominant strands of queer theory can be staged queerly.’330 While in this instance Campbell refers to the erasure of lesbian subjectivities,331 there is a strong case that fat subjectivities have suffered a similar fate332 and thus also require a reparative salvaging from amongst the vast ‘cultural debris’.333 I admit Cake Daddy would struggle to be defined as a project of staging fat histories. However, I argue that a reparative process is nevertheless underway in the encounters between ‘Ross’/Anderson-Doherty and versions of his past, present and potentially “future self” (though, unlike dieting, this envisions a fat-positive and embodied figure), particularly in the moment of eating cake. The continued blurring between the real and non-real, the lived and imagined, is amplified by this queerly blended character- performer, with whom it is difficult to delimit clear separations between the persona/character ‘Ross’ and performer Anderson-Doherty. In reflecting on the decisions behind composing this moment in rehearsals with Campbell, Anderson-Doherty interestingly moves in and out of first and third person in describing the performance:

He needs to eat the cake at this point because that’s the dismantling of all of these awful, awful discourses that have informed every aspect of his life for the last thirty odd years and can’t happen anymore. Him eating that cake is the first step away from it… I wanted it to be a moment where I was genuinely enjoying the cake, not binge-eating the cake… I

330 Alyson Campbell, “Taking an Affective Approach to ‘Doing’ Queer Histories in Performance: Queer Dramaturgy as a Reparative Practice of Erotohistoriography,” in Queer Dramaturgies: International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer, ed. Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 224. 331 See also: Sue-Ellen Case, Feminist and Queer Performance: Critical Stategies (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 8–11. 332 See: Levy-Navarro, “Fattening Queer History: Where Does Fat History Go from Here?,” 15–22. 333 Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2010), xiii.

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wanted it to be a moment of a person simply enjoying some cake, like any person on earth should have the right to do...334

In many ways this act of eating cake could be defined as a ‘coming out as fat’ moment for Anderson-Doherty.335 Dramaturgically, having set up the absurd act of “cake watching” enacted earlier in the performance and all of the rules and rituals around resisting cake that are embedded in Cake Watchers, for the creative team the most obvious counterpoint and climax along this trajectory would be for ‘Ross’/Anderson-Doherty to finally eat some cake. In this moment, there is a fracturing of this blended character-performer and through this Anderson-Doherty emerges as himself (still performing but a version that is much closer to his non-performing self). In Anderson-Doherty stepping forward and eating cake, there is a clear moment of breaking free and turning away from painful, repressive diet structures and, in doing so, a fat embodied subject emerges from the cultural and historical margins that have suppressed it. Reflecting on her experience staging queer histories, Campbell writes, ‘[i]n this theatre encounter the materiality of the body of the performer insists on its presence, forcing its way past historical distance and theoretical “evacuation” to enable a performer/“character” hybrid to look up, to speak, to move: to live.’336 Tidgwell et al. write:

Fat opens itself up to queer world building, worlds in which we create time and embody it, not necessarily toward perfect, utopian ends, although some imaginations may aspire to this, but rather we create and embody a world in which fat can be understood differently, as communally binding and desirable, as another variation of the whole and deserving human experience, no matter what shape it is in.337

Reflecting on Anderson-Doherty’s comments at the beginning of this chapter, I suggest that through a queer(ly) reparative process of retrieving fat subjectivities from historical and

334 Ross Anderson-Doherty, recorded in conversation with Alyson Campbell, questions by Rachel Patenaude, November 20, 2018. 335 Pausé, “Live to Tell: Coming Out as Fat”; Saguy and Ward, “Coming Out as Fat: Rethinking Stigma.” 336 Campbell, “Taking an Affective Approach to ‘Doing’ Queer Histories in Performance: Queer Dramaturgy as a Reparative Practice of Erotohistoriography,” 225. 337 Tidgwell et al., “Introduction to the Special Issue: Fatness and Temporality,” 121.

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temporal vacuums, it is possible to reflect more meaningfully on how we might understand fatness as a legitimate, embodied social identity, like queerness, and not an experience or position that can be so easily erased or eradicated without deeply painful and traumatic consequences.

Conclusion

This chapter examines the queer position and ‘doings’ of the creative team in crafting the opening Cake Watchers sequence and subsequent monologue. Through my discussion, I highlight two key queer dramaturgical strategies: initially, a dramaturgy of queer deconstruction that works to expose the repressive power/knowledge relations embedded in diet group structures; and secondly, the ‘emotional dramaturgy’ of generating deeply personal material content and composing this into a queerly reparative narrative. In the next chapter, I examine fat performativity—specifically, the ‘flaunting of fatness’—as a device used by the creative team to achieve the dual aim of placing an emotional boundary between the performance and real life experiences of dieting, while also staging an example of positive fat embodiment.

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6. Flaunting Fatness: Fat Performativity in Cake Daddy

Introduction

This chapter responds to and attempts to further Mobley’s assertions around ‘fat performativity,’ by repositioning the discourse away from ascribed character traits and behaviours to focus more closely on the performer’s body.338 The shift here aligns performativity with Butler’s consideration of gender as the enactment of repetitious language and gestural citations which surround and inform the body, emphasising gender’s constructed (and therefore contingent) nature.339 In my discussion, I situate this process in addressing fat/ness, as well as possibilities for disturbing dominant cultural assumptions via subversive play (i.e. performance). Having established Cake Watchers as a structure through which to explore concentrated forms of fat-shaming and body politics in dieting and diet culture, I begin this chapter by addressing how the presentational mode of Anderson-Doherty’s performance, alongside the interactive dynamic and camp/queer aesthetic, purposefully emphasise the “theatricality” of the performance. That is, I assert that the heightened style of the performance and the ‘flaunting’ of the performer’s fatness, as theorised by Saguy and Ward, are employed to establish an important barrier between the performance, as a clearly demarcated stage event, and real-world experiences of dieting.340 This allows the performance to address deeply embedded and emotionally complex ideas about dieting without ‘arresting’ the performance or the performer, a potential problem for fat activist performers raised by Kuppers.341 In doing so, possibilities emerge to consider fat performativity as a way of scrambling the fat body’s encoded cultural meanings so as to reinscribe this playfully and positively. I then continue this discussion in addressing the final sequence of the production and the song ‘Cake Daddy’s Recipe (Fat is a Verb),’ describing this sequence as a fat-queer utopian performative, in which the possibility of an improved,

338 Jennifer-Scott Mobley, “Toward a Fat Dramaturgy: Activism, Theory, Practice.” 339 Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 340 Saguy and Ward, “Coming Out as Fat: Rethinking Stigma.” 341 Kuppers, “Fatties on Stage: Feminist Performances.”

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more empowered future emerges on the horizon of the performance, as theorized by Dolan342 and Muñoz.343

Framing Cake Watchers

Within the Cake Watchers sequence, the conversational and presentational mode of delivery relies on the dynamic of Anderson-Doherty in role as group leader ‘Ross’—a heightened, (re)imagined version of the performer’s real identity—and for the audience to be placed in the role of Cake Watchers attendees (“dieters”). The question of how to frame the performer within this posed a difficult challenge for the creative team. While it was clear Anderson-Doherty needed to take on certain qualities expected of a diet group leader, it was important not to erase his fatness—his body and his embodied political identity—nor an embedded reminder for the audience that this is, in fact, a fat-positive and inherently fat activist performance work. Anderson-Doherty enters the space showcasing his huge vocal range, belting and riffing between keys. He brings high physical energy, using wide, sweeping arm gestures with a microphone and big facial expressions that give a mock diva effect to his performance. With a bold smoky eye and big grin, he moves easily and quickly through the space, in and amongst the audience, regularly rubbing his belly and laughing deeply. The “cucumbomber” shirtdress that Anderson-Doherty wears drapes over the widest section of his waist without any tailoring of the garment beneath; since the fabric hangs from the widest point on his body, the shape effectively maximises his presence onstage [see Figure 6]. Since the hypervisibility of the performer’s fatness is always already present in the space for the audience, the costume, makeup, vocals and high-energy physicality work together in a way to exacerbate his presence and flaunt his fatness. Social anthropologist Erving Goffman’s frame analysis serves as a useful tool to further articulate this framing in performance. Initially, it is crucial to acknowledge an understanding that the Cake Watchers sequence relies on an implicit agreement between

342 Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater. 343 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.

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the performer and audience on the ‘symbolic, fictional status of performance.’344 Goffman’s idea of keying is fundamental here, which he describes as:

[a] set of conventions by which a given activity, one already meaningful in terms of some primary framework, is transformed into something patterned on this activity but seen by the participants to be something quite else.345

In this instance, Cake Watchers is patterned after ‘meaningful terms of some primary framework’—those of actual diet groups—but is seen by the audience as transformed into something else and is understood, then, as a performance: a parodic and hyperbolic (re)presentation of those diet group structures. A key element of this is that Anderson- Doherty is very clearly playing the role of a diet group leader and is not currently leading diet groups or actively dieting outside of his time performing.

Figure 6: Image from Cake Daddy (dir. Alyson Campbell) featuring Ross Anderson-Doherty wearing ‘cucumbomber’ shirtdress. Photo by Bernie McAllister of Argyll Images. Courtesy of Outburst Arts.

344 Erving Goffman, Excerpt from Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (1974), in Performance Analysis: An Introductory Handbook, ed. Colin Counsell and Laurie Wolf (London; New York: Routledge, 2001), 24. 345 Ibid., 27.

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From the early stages of rehearsal and development, it was planned that Anderson- Doherty would begin the performance in role as diet group leader Derbhla: a fictional figure based on real-life encounters. This dynamic would allow Anderson-Doherty to place individual audience spectators in role as specific members of the diet group and thus allow for multiple “characters” to inhabit the space throughout the performance, including himself as present-dieter. In this instance, the performance positioned Derbhla and ‘Ross’ amongst other personalities within the Cake Watchers world and created the possibility for dialogue, even if characters did not actually communicate directly. This is a strategy that was used in rehearsal and kept for the Belfast season of the production. Effectively, Anderson-Doherty would point to an individual audience member, introduce them with an assigned “character” name and give a brief description—there were six prepared and rehearsed “characters”. At the same time, a large lanyard with the “character’s” name was placed around the audience member’s neck by a Cake Daddy team member. Anderson- Doherty was then able to hold those “characters” in the space with him, referring back to individuals at times, and relate stories and events between these people, thus essentially creating dialogue and relationships between them. While the figure of Derbhla was eventually removed from the performance, Anderson-Doherty as ‘Ross’ still conducted the sequence, as described. The decision to remove Derbhla and allow Anderson-Doherty to begin the show as himself—‘Ross’—was made in the final rehearsals before the Belfast premier. The dramaturgical implications were immediate. Firstly, the partition that Derbhla offered between Anderson-Doherty and the audience was a helpful tool in developing material but was no longer needed; secondly, it resolved possible confusion for the audience with the performer shifting roles throughout the production; lastly, and most importantly, it necessarily placed Anderson-Doherty and his embodied fat subjectivity at the centre of the performance and sustained him there throughout. Kuppers claims that most performers who explore the fat body within cultural politics quickly become ensnared in signs of excess and loss of control. ‘They are too easily read—to twist discourse away from their size proves nearly impossible. Their size is already performance, prior to any staging of it.’346 Thus, Kuppers asserts that performance must find

346 Kuppers, “Fatties on Stage: Feminist Performances,” 278.

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ways to effectively break through hardened, cultural understandings of the fat body in order to reclaim this image from dominant discourse so it can be reimagined. In response to Kuppers, I argue that Cake Daddy is an effective case of how (queer) performance can negotiate this complexity by strategically considering how the performer and their performance are framed within the production. A vital aspect of this involves the removal of Derbhla so that performer Anderson- Doherty—a fat embodied subject—is always placed at the centre of the work playing some version of himself. Through the performer’s high-camp, hyperbolic delivery, supported by a queer aesthetic, there is a constant awareness for the audience that this is, in fact, a fat- positive performance work despite the diet-related content and the persona of ‘Ross’ (the diet group leader) they are presented with. That is, Anderson-Doherty is very clearly playing a version of himself in the role of ‘Ross’ and it is also clear this persona’s beliefs are separate from the performer’s current political goals and agenda. The parodic and absurd language, costuming, physical gesture and the performance mode operate simultaneously to convey this. Significantly, the key anchor and reminder of this for audiences throughout the sequence is the performer’s flaunted fatness. In this way, a parodying takes place that involves the performer implicitly looking back on a phase in his life—those actual real-life experiences of attending diet groups—and reimagining elements of this to inflect subversive commentary. Throughout, Anderson- Doherty inhabits a space of awareness and embodiment that sits as much in the present tense-ness of the performance as the figure of ‘Ross’. I contend that, in doing so, it prevents the performance from slipping into a sense of seriousness or earnestness when encountering aspects of dieting and diet culture. This is important as the Cake Watchers sequence as a whole is sustained by a purposeful denial of earnestness simply because its main aim is to queerly critique and subvert the language, rituals and power structures that exist in diet groups. This is a crucial aspect of how the Cake Watchers sequence resists ‘arresting’ itself or the performer by avoiding the reinforcement or perpetuation of stereotypes of fatness whilst handling diet-related content. While diet groups and the communities that exist within these inform much of the content of this sequence, an important distance is placed between the performance and real-life experiences of dieting for two distinct reasons: to intentionally assist past or current dieters so they can avoid having to directly re-experience negative, harmful aspects of

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dieting, and to ensure the performance does not slip into any kind of earnest mode of retelling when its function is to parody and subvert. The interactive, improvisatory style of the performance, with the embedded interactive games and camp/queer aesthetic, described previously, assist this process but it is crucial to further elaborate on ideas around the performer’s embodied fat identity and, in unpacking this further, I introduce notions around the performativity (and the performance) of Anderson-Doherty’s fatness.

The ‘actual-virtual’, the fat body and fat performativity

In “It’s About Time: Queer Utopias and Theater Performance,” Farrier notes that in dominant (mainstream) theatre, the mechanics and framing of the performance is typically hidden so as to encourage audiences to engage in a “suspension of disbelief”.347 The logic of the “world” and the character/s presented within this inform the meaning, while ignoring the labouring performer/s onstage. He contends that opening the space between the “virtual” present in the character and the “not-virtual” performer has queer utopic potential: ‘This virtual/not-virtual copresence is a site of queer utopia because it offers utopic structures that momentarily propose a resolution to the problem of queer and its relation to identity politics and queer agency.’348 Farrier draws attention to the fact queer identity politics is now “outmoded,” in favour of embracing queer’s fluidity, and thus has been erased from queer’s landscape, along with those who had more at stake in the identity politics.349 Thus, echoing Sue-Ellen Case, he claims this moment also erased lesbian feminists from queer culture, unless represented as ‘old fashioned’ and/or ‘irrelevant’.350 He furthers this by suggesting that in ‘queer’s problems and its inability to be inclusive, there is an echo of the dynamic that theater presents to the audience, that is, in the interests of engaging with the character, a virtual being, there is a level of ignoring the performer…’351 Thus, for Farrier:

347 Stephen Farrier, “It’s About Time: Queer Utopias and Theater Performance,” in A Critical Inquiry into Queer Utopias, ed. Angela Jones (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 47–68. 348 Ibid., 48-49. 349 Ibid., 49. 350 Ibid.; Case, Feminist and Queer Performance: Critical Stategies. 351 Farrier, “It’s About Time: Queer Utopias and Theater Performance,” 49–50.

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a focus on the body of the performer might, in some way, enable the holding of the solidity of the performer alongside a simultaneous holding of the virtual character. Bringing the virtual-queer and the body-political into a space where they do not cancel each other out, but work to produce something else, is a utopian queer move.352

It can be understood, then, in the case of Anderson-Doherty’s performance within Cake Watchers, and subsequently through the monologue sequence, the dual presence of the embodied fat-positive performer and the persona of ‘Ross’ is similarly a utopian queer move: it enacts this actual-virtual copresence. The effect is a reclamation of both fat and queer agency in the performance, offering a temporary resolution to both fat and queer’s slippery subjective nature by a refusal to deny or hide the corporeal presence of the performer’s actual embodied—and celebrated—fat-queer political identity. Opening the show in role as a heightened version of himself, ‘Ross,’ who is clearly not the same embodied and fat-positive individual Anderson-Doherty is off-stage, he flaunts his fatness and makes no attempt to deny or conceal it onstage. The physical enjoyment and positivity with which he embodies his fatness offers a subversive and playful tension against his enactment of diet group leader ‘Ross’. I contend this process operates similarly—but importantly not the same—as drag does with gender. With drag there is typically a layering of coded and gestural signification (clothing, make up, physicalisation) to “conceal” and confuse, to an extent, the performer’s off-stage gender subjectivity.353 As such, the resignification of gender inherent in drag performance scrambles notions of fixed gender identity. Significantly, drag relies on an awareness of the constructed nature of this enactment by its audience in order for the act to function: a “double vision”, of sorts. An important difference of fatness from gender in this context is that fat cannot be “concealed” or hidden: fat is hyper-visible. It might potentially be diminished with the use of lighting and costume but that would likely invoke a multiplicity of concerns within the context of fat activist performance. However, it is helpful to consider that, like drag, the intention is not to remove the inherent subjectivity of the performer. Instead, the potential of performance to frame fat subjectivity exists in its ability to resignify

352 Ibid., 50. 353 See, for instance: Mark Edward and Stephen Farrier, eds., Contemporary Drag Practices and Performers: Drag in a Changing Scene Volume 1 (UK: Bloomsbury, 2020).

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or scramble the coded meaning and mainstream assumptions typically imposed on the fat body. The heightened way in which Anderson-Doherty delivers the material is one technique that makes obvious the highly constructed nature of the Cake Watchers sequence. This is also the foundation from which Anderson-Doherty is able to perform and accentuate his own fatness so that it in no way denies its presence nor attempts to excuse it from the performance. Like the drag performer’s off-stage gender subjectivity, his fatness is crucial for his performance as a diet group leader to be effective in functioning subversively. In moving towards articulating fat performativity in the context of Cake Daddy, I relate these ideas to Butler’s notion that gender, as an identity, ‘is instituted through a stylized repetition of acts.’354 Importantly, Butler argues that speech and physical acts in daily life are different from an onstage performance. Doing so, she attempts to establish an important distinction between everyday performativity and theatre performance. On this, Butler writes:

In the theatre, one can say, ‘this is an act’, and de-realize the act, make acting into something quite distinct from what is real. Because of this distinction, one can maintain one’s sense of reality in the face of this temporary challenge to our existing ontological assumptions about gender arrangements; the various conventions which announce that ‘this is only a play’ allows [sic] strict lines to be drawn between the performance and life.355

In arguing this, Butler adopts a generalised, non-specific example of a drag king performer. In doing so, she further asserts the possibility that ‘a radical proliferation of gender’ within the frame of enforced repetition might ‘displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself.’356 Campbell and Farrier note the criticism Butler received in early interpretations of this work, specifically that Butler was not ‘dealing with the body — either of queer people

354 Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” 519. 355 Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 278. 356 Ibid., 148.

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moving in society or,… those (queer) drag queens or kings doing the actual performance.’357 Simon Shepherd and Mick Wallis also note the criticism Gender Trouble received from radical queer groups and performance scholars, highlighting Butler’s assumption that gender as a willed performance is more easily resisted than she perhaps intended to imply, and claim this led Butler to later publicly change her position and adopt a far less utopian perspective.358 Shepherd and Wallis offer the following summary of Butler’s revised commentary on the theory:

…while sedimented iterations make transformation difficult, and gender parody restates the law it flouts, willed theatricalisations such as the drag king’s can nudge both public and psychic contexts so as to interfere with citation and help performativity drift into new directions, new spaces. The parody makes the space for change, not the change itself.359

A key idea underpinning Butler’s reframing of this material is that—going back to her example of the drag king—performativity of gender ‘consists in reiteration of norms which precede, constrain and exceed the performer.’360 The utterances and citations that enforce normative notions of gender are complex and expansive social structures and thus far exceed the beginning and end of both the drag king’s performance and the performer’s gendered subjectivity. Important here is Butler’s description of performativity as a set of (mostly) involuntary but compulsory every day, ritualized acts.361 For Butler, (queer) agency is located in the possibility of variation within such repetitions.362 It can be understood, then, how the drag performer, through their performance, reveals, and importantly complicates, gender performativity with parody, hyperbole and irony. Theatre offers itself as a useful site in which to play with—to flaunt—those aspects or identity features that are deemed “undesirable” or transgressive by dominant culture. It allows opportunities for vital representation and visibility: for individuals to be seen and to

357 Campbell and Farrier, “Introduction: Queer Dramaturgies,” 12. 358 Simon Shepherd and Mick Wallis, Drama/Theatre/Performance (London; New York: Routledge, 2004), 222. 359 Ibid., referring to Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993). 360 Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, 234. 361 Ibid., 12. 362 Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 145 (my emphasis).

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see themselves onstage. For fat activist performance-makers, the performativity of fatness—the actions, behaviours, language and all of those other citational forces that exist around and through the fat body that manifest its cultural meaning—become material with which to play in order to inflect ‘variation,’ borrowing Butler’s term. In such a way, performers can claim agency in framing and asserting fat subjectivities and, in doing so, create the space for (fat-)positive change. In Cake Watchers, the constant aesthetic reminders and performance of Anderson- Doherty’s size are situated against his repetitious enacting of hyperbolic diet group rituals, behaviours and linguistic gestures. By this I refer to examples from the performance such as the absurd ‘cake watching’ exercise, ‘know your cryminals’ table game and Anderson- Doherty’s heightened “war on obesity”-related rhetoric (described in previous chapters). Significantly, underpinning this, always, is the embodied presence of the fat performer whose subversive performance is driven by an overtly fat-positive political identity. Fat performativity is embedded in the performance by having a hyper-visible fat body centre stage and strategically using parody and other techniques of subversion to enact, confuse and destabilise assumed cultural understandings of fatness. The flaunting of fatness in Anderson-Doherty’s performance reveals the performative potentiality of his fat/ness, (re)claiming agency around his fat (and queer) subjectivity by refusing to deny or hide its presence. Through hyperbolic play, the absurd and insidious nature of diet group language, rituals and behaviours are exposed, thus highlighting the oppressive dynamics that function in these groups. In doing so, the performance presents the alternative of a positive, embodied fat subject that exists outside of this in Anderson-Doherty. This, I argue, is an example of the key dramaturgical strategy described at the outset of the chapter, employed by the creative team in composing this sequence to establish a clear boundary between the performance and real-world experiences of diet groups, while offering playful and subversively efficacious ways of inhabiting the fat body with joyful exuberance and positivity. Importantly, I also argue this is a legitimate and effective response to Kuppers, when she asks of the culturally constructed images of fat bodies: ‘How can we break into the uncertainties that hide between and behind the images, and what does that entrance mean for a fat performance artist?’363 In this context, the opportunity emerges for fat

363 Kuppers, “Fatties on Stage: Feminist Performances,” 280.

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performers to share with audiences the flaunting of their hyper-visible corporeal form sensually and publicly in a way that is politically empowering. On exploring performativity in theatre, feminist performance scholar Elin Diamond proposes that ‘questions of embodiment, of social relations, of ideological interpellations, of emotional and political effects, all become discussable.’364 This stems from Diamond’s interest in reclaiming performativity from cultural studies. Dolan similarly asserts theatre as a valuable site in which to address ‘cultural problems, performed by cultural actors.’365 Dolan urges for the participation of marginalised identities, specifically those who continue to be unrepresented onstage and are aligned with a particular discourse of human subjectivity typically rendered invisible (like fatness). Important here is theatre’s capacity to bring together communities of artists and audiences to explore issues of embodiment, working together to claim agency in articulating and legitimising a shared identity trait or subjective position. She adds:

… theatrical performance offers a special site, one that slows the spin of postmodernist and poststructuralist relativity. Theatrical performance also offers a temporary and usefully ephemeral site at which to think through questions of the signifying body, of embodiment, of the undecidability of the visual, and the materiality of the corporeal. Such questions can still be productively brought to bear in the temporary communities that theatre producing and theatre-going construct.366

With Diamond and Dolan both strongly arguing for the potential of theatre and performance to examine and consolidate notions of constructed social identities, the opening of multiple ways of exploring and considering performativity provides a complex and meaningful way with which to play up and subvert normative ideas and assumptions. Dolan emphasizes too the capacity for theatre to (re)consider how compassion and empathy might be promoted to resist the boundaries and negative assumptions regularly

364 Elin Diamond, “‘Introduction,’” in Performance and Cultural Politics, ed. Elin Diamond (London: Routledge, 1996), 5. 365 Jill Dolan, “Geographies of Learning: Theatre Studies, Performance, and the ‘Performative,’” Theatre Journal 45 (1993): 418. 366 Ibid., 426.

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placed around social identities in order to manifest difference.367 In this way, the individual and embodied performing subject becomes a vital channel through which audiences access feelings of connectedness and sameness, as opposed to hardening or even sharpening their apparent differences.

Queer futurity and utopic potential

In moving toward an analysis of the final sequence of the Cake Daddy performance, I return to details underpinning the importance of community in sharing experiences of positive fat embodiment and celebration. Key to this discussion is the notion of queer futurity, an idea that casts ‘queer’ beyond the present moment and something that we might instead aim towards. In furthering these ideas, I reintroduce process/es of queer world-making, as theorized by Muñoz, and highlight the significance of utopic moments that invite audiences to step beyond the current, oppressive reality that exists outside of the performance space.368 Farrier draws attention to the case of Butler’s Gender Trouble and its potential misreading of gender performativity versus gender as/in performance, alluded to earlier.369 On this issue, Butler reflects: ‘the turn to drag performance was, in part, a way to think not only about how gender is performed, but how it is resignified through collective terms.’370 Farrier notes that such resignification is itself an effort toward the utopic as it simultaneously signs possible futurity while exposing the current temporality ‘as not solidly set but a play of power.’371 That is, through the resistance of heteronormative temporalities, utopic possibilities emerge and converge across (future, imagined) timelines in the performance while the current moment of performance is revealed as existing within a distinct set of continuing repressive power relations. A potentiality emerges to present alternative understandings and ways of being in the world outside this oppressive reality. For Butler, when this kind of resonance occurs between performer/s and audience within a particular community, such performances become:

367 Ibid. 368 Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics; Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. 369 Farrier, “It’s About Time: Queer Utopias and Theater Performance,” 65. 370 Butler, Undoing Gender, 216 in Farrier, “It’s About Time: Queer Utopias and Theater Performance,” 65. 371 Farrier, “It’s About Time: Queer Utopias and Theater Performance,” 65.

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[the] cultural life of fantasy that not only organizes the material conditions of life, but which also produces sustaining bonds of community where recognition becomes possible, and which works as well to ward off violence, racism, homophobia, and transphobia.372

In the context of Cake Daddy, the inclusion of fat-phobia to this list is significant. Butler’s comments here importantly tie back to Dolan’s assertions on the potential for theatre and performance to emphasise feelings of connectedness and sameness. In Cake Daddy, Anderson-Doherty (re)presents an individual, embodied and empowered fat subjectivity. The celebration of Anderson-Doherty’s fatness and his fat political identity is an experience offered to the audience community to be part of. Importantly, with the emergence of the Cake Daddy figure later in the performance, this celebration extends beyond Anderson- Doherty, inviting others to celebrate additional experiences of fat/ness in the space—their own and/or others’. Such ideas of community connectedness chime strongly with Muñoz’s disidentifications.373 On this, Muñoz claims, ‘[d]isidentificatory performances and readings require an active kernel of utopian possibility.’374 Thus, we can locate queer futurity as a vital idea underpinning this that requires further elaboration. Initially raised in this discussion through Farrier, the inference is that utopic openings in performance offer a momentary escape for queers and other minoritarian groups (like fat community) from continuously oppressive social forces operating in the present moment. Muñoz, for instance, argues:

Queerness is not here yet. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer… The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present.375

372 Butler, Undoing Gender, 216 in Farrier, “It’s About Time,” 65 373 Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. 374 Ibid., 25. 375 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 1.

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In this, we can understand how ‘queer’ is displaced into the future, positioned as a “not yet here” that we might instead strive toward. The crafting of queer worlds and utopic visions are not so much driven by an intention toward ‘complete emancipation or even happiness,’ but sign the potentiality for the future: for hope beyond the oppressive present moment.376 Sara Ahmed suggests queer futurity is perhaps less about mapping out requirements of a utopian society so much as it is a process of making life bearable:

We need to think more about the relationship between the queer struggle for a bearable life and aspirational hopes of a good life... I think the struggle for a bearable life is the struggle for queers to have spaces to breathe … If queer politics is about freedom, it might simply mean the freedom to breathe.377

Instead of thinking of the construction of queer worlds and utopic moments as stagings of ‘happiness,’ which itself is a normative and regulatory construct, as queer scholar Angela Jones points out, rather, perhaps these are ephemeral and ‘autonomous spaces in which to breathe.’378 Performances of this nature enact ‘alternative, better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds…’,379 worlds that purposefully and temporarily resist the stultifying realities of what awaits queer audiences outside the theatre. With Cake Daddy, the final sequence of the performance and the song ‘Cake Daddy’s Recipe (Fat is a Verb)’, I argue, offers a particularly powerful example of a fat utopic vision brought forth via queer performance strategies.

‘Cake Daddy’s Recipe’ as a fat-queer utopian performative

At the end of The Cake Daddy Pledge, detailed in Chapter Four, Anderson-Doherty informs his audience that by banishing diet culture from the space enough has been done to conjure Cake Daddy. He turns and walks to the back of the stage. He pulls his pink Cake Daddy singlet off, drops his cucumber-green tracksuit pants and stands in only a jockstrap.

376 Angela Jones, “Introduction: Queer Utopias, Queer Futurity, and Potentiality in Quotidian Practice,” in A Critical Inquiry into Queer Utopias, ed. Angela Jones (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 3. 377 Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 10 in Jones, “Introduction: Queer Utopias, Queer Futurity, and Potentiality in Quotidian Practice,” 2. 378 Jones, “Introduction: Queer Utopias, Queer Futurity, and Potentiality in Quotidian Practice,” 3. 379 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 1.

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He is joined on stage by a costume-hand and assisted with the change. The stage is washed in warm pink lights, which in this moment fills with smoky haze and a backsplash of bubbles. A music track plays over the top—‘Cake Daddy’s Recipe’—the effect of shattering glass with electronic pulses and surges. Falsetto choral vocals join as a deep (Anderson-Doherty’s recorded) spoken voice begins listing cakes: ‘Battenberg, Velvet, Victoria…’380 Through the haze he steps forward, wearing a pink and gold apron, cherry headpiece and gold boots [see Figure 7]. A deep, thunderous beat rolls through the space, Anderson-Doherty, bare- chested, spreads his arms and sings:

Cake Daddy don’t diet, no no Cake Daddy don’t diminish for no one Cake Daddy gonna surprise with you with his size Come on fatties, make daddy’s cake rise

Cake Daddy takes up all the space Cake Daddy loves his big fat painted face Cake Daddy always wears what he wants ‘ta Cake Daddy ain’t no Cake Watcher

I (Fat) You (fat) We (fat)

For each the ‘I’, ‘You’ and ‘We,’ Anderson-Doherty sings in high falsetto, and moves back to spoken word for ‘Fat’. In this chorus break, he encourages his audience, ‘we can all fat because, like queer, fat is now a verb—so let’s fatten the fuck out of this place.’ The next time this is sung, he invites audiences to sing along: ‘let’s conjugate together.’381 The stage remains washed in warm pink lights, while others rove across the stage and audience. Anderson-Doherty dances, arms spread, his fat body undulating as he moves across the stage. Between chorus and verse, Anderson-Doherty invites audiences to ‘stroke your

380 Lyrics by RAD; audio recording available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S7-AbQqcGM. 381 Text by Ross Anderson-Doherty.

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favourite fat bit: on yourself, or someone else—with consent.’ The stage lights pulse, he belts in falsetto, suspended onstage in smoky haze.

Figure 7: Image from Cake Daddy (dir. Alyson Campbell) featuring Ross Anderson-Doherty performing ‘Cake Daddy’s Recipe (Fat is a Verb)’. Photo by Bernie McAllister of Argyll Images. Courtesy of Outburst Arts.

Cake Daddy gonna fat in these streets Cake Daddy always fat between the sheets Cake Daddy fats the seats in your theatres He gonna fat the fuck out all you haters He gonna fat this fashion, look so good We gonna fat these outfits, like we know we should Cake Daddy gonna fatten up this tone Cake Daddy just fatted this microphone

I (Fat) You (fat) We (fat) They… Sprinkle a little sugar, Cake Daddy …

Make it rise Make it rise

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For Cake Daddy

Lights slowly dim, pulsing with the sound. The deep thunderous music continues with interspersed electronic riffs. Anderson-Doherty’s falsetto vocals soar above as the lights all but fade to black except for two soft pink spotlights that hold the performer in space. He delivers the final lyrics, sustained in the thick haze, as the lights drift further into darkness, until, on his last vocal riff, the production fades to black out. It is my contention that the performance of ‘Cake Daddy’s Recipe’ within the Cake Daddy production offers a fat-specific take on a ‘utopian performative’ moment, a term first introduced in performance theory by Dolan. In her seminal text, Utopia in Performance, Dolan articulates:

Utopian performatives describe small but profound moments in which performance calls the attention of the audience in a way that lifts everyone slightly above the present, into a hopeful feeling of what the world might be like if every moment of our lives were emotionally voluminous, generous, aesthetically striking, and intersubjectively intense.382

In the context of Cake Daddy, this final sequence of the performance is particularly potent as it plays out immediately after The Cake Daddy Pledge, which I have previously argued as a (queerly) transformative and community-binding ritual. While individuals may have different experiences and reactions to the communal Pledge, it is my assertion that it ultimately offers the capacity for forging temporary, yet inspired and meaningful, communities of audience members. For Dolan, a key factor for utopian performatives is a sense of ‘communitas,’383 a term she borrows from anthropologist Victor Turner in order to describe moments in theatre in which individual audience members ‘become part of the whole in an organic, nearly spiritual way; spectators’ individuality becomes finely attuned to those around them, and a cohesive if fleeting feeling of belonging to the group bathes the audience.’384

382 Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater, 5. 383 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1969). 384 Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater, 11.

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For Dolan, these kinds of audience connections are forged in the present-tenseness of the performance event, while the performance itself looks beyond the “now” of ‘material oppression and unequal power relations’ to a future that is somehow different, better.385 Dolan’s writing here nods to a similar sense of queer futurity, one of potentiality and hopefulness that Muñoz picks up on and later theorizes. In this, Muñoz makes a helpful distinction between possibilities and potentialities:

Possibilities exist, or more precisely, they exist within a logical real, the possible, which is within the present and is linked to presence. Potentialities are different in that although they are present, they do not exist in present things. Thus, potentialities have a temporality that is not in the present but, more nearly, in the horizon, which we can understand as futurity.386

Significant here is that there is no claim that utopian performatives work by offering a roadmap to a clear, locatable future. Dolan is rather precise in describing utopia as continuously processual, ‘as an index to the possible, to the “what if,” rather than a more restrictive, finite image of the “what should be”’; thus, for Dolan, it allows performance to experiment with the potentialities of a future that then reflect back on the present moment, which itself is also always in process.387 Within the timeline of making Cake Daddy, the song ‘Cake Daddy’s Recipe’ was written by Anderson-Doherty, composed and recorded with Byrne following the initial rehearsal and development in June 2017. Thus, the song existed before any other content was generated from those conversations that took place in the very first period of development. It was understood from the nature of the lyrics and the uplifting quality of the music—a fusion of pop, soul, disco and house—that if it were to appear in the production, it would have to be at its most fat-positive: a climax of fat celebration. Thus, for the creative team, as more material emerged during the rehearsal process, it made the most sense to position this as the audience’s final encounter with the work since it represents a moment of total and unabated fat pride that, even for the most practiced fat activist, would prove a

385 Ibid., 7. 386 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 99. 387 Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater, 13.

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temporary state before the painful reality and process of resisting fat-shame once again take hold. It was important, then, for this moment to strive for impact. The original recording includes an extended “club mix” ending with Anderson- Doherty’s falsetto vocals riffing for minutes beyond the end of the lyrics. Campbell considered at multiple times through the process if an edited version of this or the full, extended mix should be staged. The excessiveness of the extended version, its thick weave of soulful vocals with disco melody and electronic house beats made this a highly enticing sonic landscape for Campbell to compose a visually striking, affective moment within the performance. What I mean by this is that the stage elements—sound, light, haze, costume, movement, vocals, and the performer’s exuberant presence—fuse together to convey what Campbell refers to as an ‘affective climax’.388 The total experience of the performance attempts to create a physical shift in the bodies of audience members: hearts race, hairs rise, tingles run down arms. Such affective moments in performance are in many ways designed to be understood physically rather than intellectually or emotionally. As Campbell describes, this is built through a series of accumulating layers—i.e. ‘text, voice, music, sound, gesture… all adding up’.389 It does not, however, necessarily insist on an experience of audiences being overwhelmed. In the thrust of Anderson-Doherty’s vocal riffing, with the smoky haze, flashing lights and the residual feelings of connectedness that hang in the air during ‘Cake Daddy’s Recipe,’ the lyrics, music, vocals, movement, physicality, costume and lighting all convey a specific message of uplift and celebration, underpinned too by a potential, indescribable, feeling that soars above the present moment. Thus, I argue, this is an example of a fat-queer utopian performative: it gestures toward an improved, fat-positive future. Importantly, the terms I have used to describe the sequence, ‘expansive,’ ‘thick,’ ‘dense,’ ‘excessive,’ are all descriptors that connotate fatness. This is inherently bound to the lyrics of the song, as well as Anderson-Doherty’s call to ‘fatten’ the space. In this, fat, like queer, becomes a compositional approach to crafting this sequence of the performance—a moment that offers audiences an alternative and improved glimpse of the world. I contend it is the most

388 Campbell, “Adapting Musicology’s Use of Affect Theories to Contemporary Theatre-Making: Directing Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life.” 389 Alyson Campbell, “From Bogeyman to Bison: A Herd-Like Amnesia of HIV/AIDS in Theatre?,” Theatre Research International 36, no. 3 (2011): 201.

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striking example from Cake Daddy that responds to the question: how do we ‘fatten’ performance using queer strategies? The flaunting of the fat body, fat sexuality and fat- positivity onstage, I argue, does something. The fusion of affect with the emotional and intellectual experience of the Pledge does something to audience members in the space, potentially nudging their attention toward other, better ways of being together in the world. As Muñoz writes, ‘[q]ueerness is a performative because it is not simply a being but a doing for and toward the future. Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.’390 Through queerness, specifically queer performance strategies, we can envision and inhabit fat- positive and celebratory worlds in which the pain of the current moment is temporarily displaced. Diet culture and fat-phobia can be stripped away so that the brightness and fullness of a fat utopic future can emerge, offering a space in which to breathe, even just momentarily, to feel connected with others, and ultimately, possibly—to find hope. Fat as a performative, like queer, becomes a vital creative and cultural tool to free the fat body from oppression and oppressive structures and offers the capacity to enact empowering fat futures that emerge and converge on the horizon of performance.

Conclusion

This chapter has framed the (queer) ‘flaunting’ of performer Anderson-Doherty’s fatness, as a key dramaturgical strategy used by the creative team. The dual purpose of this within the Cake Watchers sequence, I argue, is to establish an important boundary between the performance and real-world experiences of dieting, thus supporting Anderson-Doherty’s playful embodiment alongside other processes that reinscribe the fat body positively. Progressing this discussion by addressing the final sequence of the performance and the song ‘Cake Daddy’s Recipe,’ I argue this moment offers a fat-queer utopian performative. A glimpse of a hope-filled fat(-queer) future emerges and hovers on the periphery of the performance, which, importantly, highlights the potential of fat performativity to enact utopic worlds. Next, in my conclusion, I revisit the key queer dramaturgical findings

390 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 1.

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embedded across the thesis so far and discuss these in relation to furthering the discourse of fat dramaturgies.

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Conclusion

In this thesis I identify key queer dramaturgical strategies used by the Cake Daddy creative team in making the performance and, in doing so, attempt to expand Mobley’s notion of a ‘Fat Dramaturgy’.391 My combined theoretical and practical investigation permits a deeper interrogation of the creative processes undertaken and the aesthetic decisions made throughout rehearsal and into production. I argue that the role of a dramaturg, specifically the insider-outsider position they typically inhabit, as I do in this project, makes this a particularly useful place from which to generate meaningful reflection and analysis. In Chapter One, I introduce fat studies and highlight key academics and literature that have formalised this as a distinct field of research. Chapter Two analyses key artistic and theoretical contributions to the discourse of fat activist performance and identifies key areas of inquiry. Chapter Three outlines my artistic practice and the (queer) creative methodology of the Cake Daddy team. In this, I assert the hybrid cabaret-theatre form of the performance importantly establishes a conversational and interactive dynamic within the audience. Chapter Four examines Cake Daddy in terms of its capacity for community- building. I describe the queer parodying of diet groups that occurs through the Cake Watchers sequence and argue that the performance operates as a way of collectively critiquing such oppressive structures. Further, I assert The Cake Daddy Pledge serves as a queer performance ritual that invites audiences, as a community, to commit to a series of everyday practices to resist fat-stigma and body shaming. In Chapter Five, I contend the Cake Daddy performance enacts a queer deconstruction of diet group language, rituals and behaviours and suggest the monologue and ‘Life on the Wing’ song that sit at the centre of the performance point to the devastating effects that such structures have on a fat subject (Anderson-Doherty). Chapter Six of the thesis responds directly to Mobley’s provocation regarding ‘fat performativity’.392 In this, I assert the ‘flaunting of fatness’ (as theorised by Saguy and Ward)393 operates as an important device by providing a constant anchor to the performer’s embodied fat subjectivity while he enacts a parody of diet group structures,

391 Mobley, “Toward a Fat Dramaturgy: Activism, Theory, Practice.” 392 Ibid., 216. 393 Saguy and Ward, “Coming Out as Fat: Rethinking Stigma.”

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establishing two crucial dynamics within the performance: firstly, it places a barrier between the performance and real-world experiences of dieting; and secondly, it allows the performance to sustain a camp/queer, subversive tone without slipping into an earnest “retelling.” In examining the final sequence of Cake Daddy and the song ‘Cake Daddy’s Recipe (Fat is a Verb),’ I argue the performance brings forth a fat-queer utopian performative. The implications of adopting these strategies in the composition of Cake Daddy, I contend, are as follows. The queer hybrid cabaret-theatre form invites individual audience members and groups to have an active role in contributing to the conversation and dynamic that occurs within the performance. The visibility and co-presence of audience potentially promote feelings of togetherness, while importantly inviting audiences to contribute to the world-making process that occurs within the space (particularly as a collective critique of diet group culture). In enacting a kind of queer deconstruction of diet groups, the performance exposes their repressive (and insidious) power structures. Through personal storytelling a fat subjectivity is reclaimed from the cultural margins, salvaged from amongst other previously ‘discarded identity politics’, reinhabited and (queerly) brought to life through the persona/performer hybrid ‘Ross’/Anderson-Doherty.394 Opening the space between persona “Ross” and performer Anderson-Doherty, simultaneously ‘flaunting’ his fatness while enacting diet group language, behaviour and rituals, leads to flashes of the utopic—glimpses of a way of existing outside of such oppressive structures. Lastly, fat performativity emerges as a vital dramaturgical strategy and creative tool that has the potential to free the fat body from established, negative cultural images and readings by enacting joyful, celebratory fat futures that emerge and coalesce on the horizon of performance.395 In the interest of expanding knowledge around fat activist performance and the notion of fat dramaturgies, the following questions emerge as possibilities for further investigation:

394 Campbell, “Taking an Affective Approach to ‘Doing’ Queer Histories in Performance: Queer Dramaturgy as a Reparative Practice of Erotohistoriography.” 395 Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater; Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.

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• How have interactive and participatory devices been used in other performance work to facilitate conversations and introspection live in the space? • What resources or opportunities sit around examples of performance that encourage ongoing community-bonding and spill-over conversations to occur (i.e. post-show question and answer sessions, social media; reading groups; blogs; scheduled meetups)? • How else has food been incorporated into performance work about fatness so that the act of eating occurs simultaneous to discussions around dieting and diet culture? How are audiences positioned in relationship to it? If it is an act of eating together— performers and audiences—how are such moments framed so that it remains an invitation and not an expectation? • In terms of the possibilities and freedoms afforded by autobiographical performance, how else does the personal become an effective way of delivering a “message” or intended meaning to audiences? What would a comparative analysis of fat activist autobiographical performance reveal about the ways in which personal material is composed around dieting and diet culture? • Does ‘flaunting’ fatness play as a crucial role in other performance work as it does in moments of Cake Daddy? • How might we locate examples of fat utopian performatives given their ephemerality? How can these be effectively documented and elicited through performance analysis and other research practices so that such moments become definable and their effects conveyable to a reader? • What are the gendered/racial/class/ability differences that emerge through performance-led explorations of fatness, specifically as those intersectional factors become increasingly complex and priorities around identity politics begin to conflict? • Lastly, and I would argue as the most crucial dramaturgical question because of its potentiality: how might artists consider fat as a verb, ‘to fatten,’ as Anderson- Doherty does in Cake Daddy, and allow this to inform a working methodology and/or compositional approach to creating fat activist performance?

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In furthering the discourse of fat dramaturgies, I have set out a theoretical framework of ideas and practical examples that underpin the making of the Cake Daddy production. In doing so, I offer a potential methodology for further consolidating ideas in and around fat activist performance. This, I argue, is valuable given the international and culturally diverse range of artists and artistic practices active in the field. As a nascent area of inquiry, fat dramaturgies conceptually relies on future research to record and document practical examples of rehearsal processes and production outcomes. Further establishing such a framework would do significant work in mapping the field and identifying creative strategies unique to fat activist performance. In concluding the thesis, I have posed a range of questions that might prompt further artistic-research wanderings. These might reveal additional findings and even more questions. Perhaps fat dramaturgies could be better understood as a constellation we can work towards charting—a process of bringing together and formalising the rich, complex field of fat activist performance. In turn, new creative materials, theory, findings and artistic documents can emerge that capture moments of artistic brilliance and innovation, inspiring further creative endeavours and even more expansive and empowering fat futures.

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Weblinks cited https://aplusmarkets.com https://belfastbookfestival.com https://www.brendaoart.com/ https://www.definatalie.com https://www.duckie.co.uk/about https://fatheffalump.wordpress.com http://www.fatlotofgood.org.au https://www.liteneasy.com.au https://www.mardigras.org.au https://www.midsumma.org.au https://naafa.org https://outburstarts.com https://www.scottee.co.uk https://www.slimmingworld.co.uk/what-can-i-eat http://www.theatreofpluck.com/gl-ry https://www.vauxhalltavern.com https://www.weightwatchers.com/au/ https://www.weightwatchers.com/au/smartpoints https://wreckedallprods.com https://wreckedallprods.com/brine-pickles

Online Video Links

Cake Daddy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S7-AbQqcGM

Hamburger Queen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7VW7bJ_FgE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7M8PeWwxL4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3fxtxEKy8s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5l_lwdACYo

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Performance works cited

Blood Wedding Invisible Presences: Translation, Dramaturgy, and Performance Conference Directed by Alyson Campbell April 17, Queen’s University Belfast 2011

Cake Daddy wreckedallprods and Outburst Arts, directed by Alyson Campbell November 9 & 10, Blackbox Belfast Outburst Queer Arts Festival 2018; February 3-10, Theatre Works, Melbourne Midsumma Festival 2019; February 16-22, Seymour Centre, Sydney Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras 2019

Chewing the Fat Selina Thompson LTD 15-16 November Barbican Theatre 2014

Fat Blokes Scottee & Friends, choreographed by Lea Anderson 19-23 March HOME Manchester 2019

Hamburger Queen Scottee & Friends 3, 10, 17 and 24 April Vauxhall Tavern 2014

Nothing to Lose Force Majeure, choreographed by Kate Champion 21-25 January, Carriage Works Sydney Festival 2015; 10-22 March, Malthouse Theatre Dance Massive 2015

Porch Sitting

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Split Britches 28th July Barbican Theatre (online) 2020

SWAGGA Project O with Charlotte Cooper and Kay Hyatt 12 November Unity Theatre, Merseyside UK DadaFest 2016

Tea Cell Dance (GL RY) wreckedallprods and TheatreofplucK, directed by Alyson Campbell November 13, 101 Donegall St, Belfast Outburst Queer Arts Festival 2016

Terminating Outburst Arts, directed by Alyson Campbell November 12, Blackbox Belfast Outburst Queer Arts Festival 2010

Interviews

Audio recorded interview, Ross Anderson-Doherty in conversation with Alyson Campbell, responding to questions by Rachel Patenaude. November 20, 2018. (Shared with permission for use in this thesis and any subsequent publications.)

Phone interview with Lachlan Philpott. August 19, 2019.

Phone interview with Alyson Campbell. August 27, 2019.

Online video interview with Ross Anderson-Doherty. December 3, 2020.

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Appendix 1

Audience Questionnaire Theatre at VCA, Faculty of VCA & MCM The University of Melbourne Project: ‘Cake Daddy: fattening the queer stage’

Dr Alyson Campbell (Responsible Researcher) Tel: +61 3 9035 9185 Email: [email protected] Jonathan Graffam (Research Assistant) Email: [email protected]

This questionnaire is devised with the aim of collecting spectator responses to the performance you have just seen of Cake Daddy. The questions are designed to elicit information on the immediate, personal reaction of the individual spectator to the impact or effectiveness of the performance in terms of what it has raised for them about fatness and its intersections with queerness and how it has done this. The design and use of the questionnaires has been monitored through the Human Ethics Advisory Group, Faculty of VCA and MCM, University of Melbourne.

What made you choose to see Cake Daddy?

Can you give 3 words to describe how you feel after seeing this performance?

Can you pick out the 1 or 2 moments in the performance that immediately stand out for you as making an impact?

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Have you previously attended performance events that are directly about ‘fatness’? If so, can you say which events? And how does Cake Daddy compare to other work/s you may have seen?

How do you think the songs function in this production? Do they have a different effect than the spoken text?

What do you think are the merits or drawbacks of dealing with fat/ness in a form that asks the spectators to be more visible and participatory than traditional modes of theatre (where often they can sit in the dark in rows)?

What do you think is the impact of doing this production in Melbourne?

If you would like to, please indicate how you self-identify in your gender and sexuality, e.g. gay, lesbian, bisexual, heterosexual, trans*, queer, intersex, (cis)female, (cis)male.

If you would like to add anything else, feel free to write here and on the back of this form.

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Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne

Author/s: Graffam, Jonathan Allan

Title: Making Cake Daddy: dramaturgies to ‘fatten’ the queer stage

Date: 2020

Persistent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/267316

File Description: Final thesis file

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