BIRDS AND BACKS: A SCHOLARLY EXPLORATION OF WRITING, PERFORMANCE, AND BODY IMAGE _______________________________________ A Dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School at the University of Missouri-Columbia _______________________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy _____________________________________________________ by MELISSA JACKSON BURNS Dr. M. Heather Carver, Dissertation Supervisor MAY 2017 © Copyright by Melissa Jackson Burns 2017 All Rights Reserved The undersigned, appointed by the dean of the Graduate School, have examined the dissertation entitled BIRDS AND BACKS: A SCHOLARLY EXPLORATION OF WRITING, PERFORMANCE, AND BODY IMAGE presented by Melissa Jackson Burns, a candidate for the degree of doctor of philosophy of theatre, and hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance. Dr. M. Heather Carver Dr. Kevin Brown Dr. Catherine Gleason Dr. Elaine Lawless For James and Cyndi Lauper. You are my home and my muses. For you, Mom, for the last 35 years of friendship. I hope you like it. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My academic journey and writing of this dissertation were made possible and pleasant by several people with whom I have worked over the years. The following people have played important roles in helping me research and write this dissertation. Dr. M. Heather Carver showed me a world of possibilities with her own performance and scholarship, proving that I could do scholarship that is exciting and passionate. She has worked with me and helped me to find my own autoethnographic voice and to make that voice stronger. Dr. Cat Gleason has been a mentor in several ways throughout my doctoral program and writing this dissertation. She has given invaluable feedback on my writing, performance, and teaching, and has always been willing to listen and give me advice. Working with her as a performer and student helped me grow in both capacities and strengthen my work. Dr. Kevin Brown has offered encouragement and support throughout the process of writing and revising. He has been a close, careful reader. My first semester in my doctoral program, he suggested performative writing as a style I could explore in my own work, which has worked out tremendously well. Dr. Elaine Lawless challenged me and pushed me to be better as a student and a writer. She provided feedback that helped me clarify my writing during the revision process. Dr. David Crespy, Dr. Suzanne Burgoyne, and Dr. Cheryl Black have worked with me in the classroom and outside of it, in varying capacities. Their feedback on ii papers and creative works encouraged me to improve and to believe in my own capabilities as a writer and scholar. Xiomara Cornejo was a wonderful and talented collaborator in preparing “Bird Song” for performance. As a director, she challenged me to make the show better and inspired me in my writing and performance. As a friend, she supported me as I worked to create a performance that would touch my audience. James Jackson Burns is always my first reader and has given me useful feedback and engaged in fruitful conversation with me about my ideas and experiences. He gave me invaluable information during this process about mental health treatment and its relationship to fat clients. He has also been one of my proofreaders, reading closely for any small errors in my writing. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................. ii List of Figures ......................................................................................................................v Chapter 1: A Bird is Born ................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2: The Bird Waits ................................................................................................ 61 Chapter 3: The Bird Speaks ............................................................................................ 135 Chapter 4: The Bird Sings............................................................................................... 178 Chapter 5: The Bird Calls ............................................................................................... 239 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 251 Vita .................................................................................................................................. 259 iv List of Figures Figure Page 1. Moment from “Bird Song” (Rebecca Allen Photography) ............................................................................159 2. Picture of a bird ......................................................................................................181 3. “Bird Song” curtain call (Rebecca Allen Photography) ............................................................................209 4. Collage of Tooka’s world .......................................................................................235 v Chapter 1: A Bird is Born The Bird Takes the Stage (Tooka, a human bird, enters a dark, empty stage. A single spotlight comes up on her. She smiles at her audience invitingly.) TOOKA: Hello, everyone. Bring your chairs closer. It’s time for a tale, to be told in the form of a dissertation. Sit back and relax. It’s going to be a long flight. It’s okay to be scared. I get scared sometimes, too. But we’ll do this together. Come on. Let’s go. (Tooka, who is a master of ceremonies, gestures behind her. A red curtain appears and then rises, taking the audience members, readers of this dissertation, into their own imaginations. The play begins.) Prologue: The Bird Emerges It is late at night. James and I are driving down the road, with me at the wheel. We are both tired, having driven our way from Iowa to Oklahoma in one stretch, and we are finding our town and hopefully our hotel. I am a fan of booking hotels online, though when we take this trip I have not yet discovered my favorite website, bringfido.com, which lists dog-friendly hotels in the area of choice. Of course, we opted to leave Cyndi Lauper with my mom for this trip, because we still live in Texas, near enough to drive up the highway to my mom’s house and leave Cyndi in her care. Tomorrow, we will go to the Cherokee Nation and research my heritage, unaware at this point that I will not be able to find my ancestors in the sparse library but will still take a rewarding tour of the grounds during our visit. I am tired and fussy. I probably should not be driving, but I wanted us to get there faster so I took the wheel and have been speeding as much as I dare, which is not much. 1 We already exited the main highway and threw our coins into the toll collector, an action that flooded me with memories of watching my mother throw her own coins into those baskets during our yearly road trips from Iowa to Oklahoma and Texas. We are now driving down a dark two-lane highway, no streetlamps to guide our way, the headlights illuminating the dark trees on either side of the road. There is a feeling of isolation, of mystery on this highway, but there is also something comforting about the mystery held in those dark trees as we speed past. Despite my tendency to go on journeys like this one in search of answers, I take solace in knowing that I will never have all the answers. Finally, we make a turn and find ourselves on a road that is illuminated by lights, driving into the city where we will stay the night before heading out in the morning to research my heritage. My fatigue settles in my body, making me jittery and restless. Now that we are almost there, I feel mean and fussier than ever. We still have at least fifteen minutes to go before we reach our destination, and those fifteen minutes seem interminable. Then it happens. Having no other outlet for being fussy, mean, and tired, I do the only thing I can do. I pull the hood of my short-sleeved sweatshirt up over my head, hunch down over the wheel, and bare my teeth. A bird, not yet named, has emerged at this late hour. James looks over at me and chuckles. I respond by hunching further down in my hood, biting my teeth together in a temporary release of the exhausted tension I am holding in my body. He exclaims, “You’re a bird!” I am a bird. 2 It is the summer of 2013. I am struggling to complete a script for a class entitled Writing for Performance. I sat down with my advisor weeks ago and discussed my writing project for the class. I started a journey with body image earlier in the summer, as a result of enrolling in Eat for Life, a mindful eating class offered at Mizzou. I am enrolled in an online section, which means I have missed the instructor’s in person spiel about the “problem of obesity” inspiring her to create the class and have been left to decide for myself why taking a class about eating is important to me. At the beginning of this mindful eating class, I read about the ill effects of dieting and, scared for my health, let go of dieting, and days later suspended my membership to Weight Watchers after deciding that I could not keep telling myself that being in Weight Watchers is different from being on a diet. Truthfully, I enrolled in the mindful eating class because I wanted to, yet again, lose weight and hoped to make that weight loss permanent this time. I had cycled through diets for over decade, forcing and punishing my body into a size four, sometimes