Although initially excited by the opportunity, extreme panic soon set in because in my mind I was convinced that I could not play the part.Because of my history as a morbidly obese person and my lack of experience on stage in a newly transformed, transweight body, my work on this role led me to suffer from psychological and physical stress. I started to experience uncontrollable anxiety when I was told that my costume would be sleeveless and would reveal my legs and torso. Also, I learned that I had to be lifted in the show twice. I was so scared that my cast mates would not be able to lift me that I promised them I would not gain weight during the rehearsal period. They brushed off my promise as one from a slender, body-conscious woman. My character also simulates sex on stage with her husband, inclusive of a vocal orgasm. Morbidly obese actresses are rarely portrayed as sexually desirable, rarely lifted, and rarely have orgasmic sex on stage. As I worked to understand the extreme anxiety that I was experiencing during the rehearsal and performance process in Holding Up the Sky, I decided that I wanted to further explore the implications of mentally living as a morbidly obese woman and actress while physically maneuvering in a slender body. Thus, I began to conduct an autoethnographic study of my transweight identity as a black, female actress.

Building upon Lesa Lockford’s use of Victor Turner’s theory of social drama to analyze a weight loss support group, I used Turner’s theories to explore my transweight journey.²⁴ As Turner posits, “the third phase [of social dramas], redress, reveals that ‘determining’ and ‘fixing’ are indeed processes, not permanent states or givens.”²⁵ When I began my shake diet I was entering the phase of “redress” for what felt like the hundredth time (yo-yo dieting). It is in the phase of redress that I lost my obese body, while still maintaining my fat psychological existence. Similar to the writings on the “new mestiza” and “third space,” the scholarship on liminal spaces in relation to transformation describes my state of entrapment as a person who lost a large amount of weight. The liminal space I am speaking of is one in which my mind manifests in both a fat body and slender body on a daily basis. Though I’ve physically crossed a border, I am trapped by psychological borders, thus my reintegration, or transformation, is incomplete.

With this discovery I realized that I was performing on various levels. My morbidly obese psyche performs as the slender person, and the slender person performs as the slender actress, and the actress performs the character. In Richard Schechner’s familiar construction, I am not me (morbidly obese Sharrell), not not me (slender Sharrell), not not not me (slender actress), and then not not not not me (slender character).²⁶ I constantly oscillate among these liminal spaces. I am always in between entities and never feel as though I’m one integrated self.

The intensive exploration of my performed affectations of survival as a black actress culminated in the creation of a solo performance text, YoungGiftedandFat, which explores my various performative selves. As D. Soyini Madison notes in her foreword to solo/black/woman, the performativity that transcends the black female performing body is a “complex mix and blend of discursive circulations, gestural economies, and historical affects that break up repetition and scatter style across hearts and minds making black female performativity contingent, otherworldly, and radically contextual.”²⁷ My work on body size and image perception joins a long lineage of other women of the Africana diaspora who dismantle hegemonic institutions and discourses through solo performance, including my favorites Beah Richards, Nina Simone, and Whoopi Goldberg.

I approached the creation of YoungGiftedandFat as an actress, a black woman, and a Fat Studies scholar. YoungGiftedandFat was birthed out of my need to suture my fat world, slender world, and liminal world; to bring together my separate lived existences, so vastly different that they would be portrayed as two complete beings. With this performance I re-affirm that black women do have serious issues with body image. And when black women are cast as sexually desirable leading ladies, they too must conform to existing expectations of thinness.