Marjorie

To most of Dearborn High, Marj was a bit of a question mark. “I think people were surprised about me and my friends: that we did anything, or were anything.” Lacking a burning desire for social relevance, she was most comfortable out of the spotlight. Still, she loved theater, and performed with the drama department all four years of high school. While she got along well with her fellow cast members, relating to the theater director was another story. It was here, in her interactions with a trusted adult, that Marj experienced the brunt of her teenage run-ins with fatphobia. “He always cast me as someone’s mother or as someone who was about to die,” she recounts, citing his argument that she could do the “‘straight man’ act” with not-so-subtle incredulity. 

​

Memories like Marj’s abound in the wider theater community. It seems that every self-identified fat actor has a high school horror story: whether it’s Maggie Rogers being cast as the matronly nurse in Romeo & Juliet or a smaller girl replacing Abigail Mowbray during a choreographed lift in Thoroughly Modern Millie, teenage girls are told that in a sphere where their bodies are their instruments, the instruments they have are faulty. Because of their size, it is assumed that “fat” girls can’t move gracefully, that they can’t keep up with choreography and blocking, or that the amount of space they take up onstage will distract from their character’s story somehow. This blatant discrimination on the basis of practicality (“the costumes we have just won’t fit you”) or aesthetics (“you’ll stick out too much if we cast you in a major role”) exacerbates the already precarious body consciousness of teenage girls, and perpetuates the notion that plus-sized individuals are less capable overall than their thin-privileged peers. Marj found that her acting skills were constantly underestimated, and her theater teacher seemed surprised when she succeeded onstage. “By my senior year, when I auditioned to be in Almost Maine and I did a funny monologue for that, he was sort of shocked that I could do something else, that I could be funny,” she recounts. “He was like, ‘What? You’re really funny!’ and I was like, ‘You could have learned this if you didn’t just see me as the fat woman that you can make dead.’” 

 

Marj often evaded teacher recognition outside the theater as well. “I was spending all this time on these subjects, like I was in marching band and I took lessons—I was doing all this extra stuff to be good at these subjects where I felt like my teachers either constantly overlooked me or were happy to throw me on the fire for somebody else,” she explains, becoming a bit heated as she looks back. “Like, it was only my senior year that I learned that my band teacher thought I was good at flute.” While teachers should strive to discourage bullying and provide a nurturing and equal learning environment for all students, implicit social biases often creep into the classroom in harmful ways. The American Academy of Pediatrics reported in 2017 that “teachers have lower expectations of students with obesity than they have of students without obesity, including expectation of inferior physical, social, and academic abilities.” Compounded with the authority educators hold over their students, teacher weight stigma can be just as cruel and petty as peer ridicule.