期刊名称：Liminalities : a Journal of Performance Studies
电子版ISSN：1557-2935
出版年度：2012
卷号：5
期号：2
出版社：Liminalities
摘要：In July 2002, New York attorney Samuel Hirsch filed a class-action legal claim on behalf of New York resident Ceasar Barber and a class of unnamed obese plaintiffs against four fast food chains: McDonald's, Burger King, KFC, and Wendy's. Barber was a man in his mid-fifties who had suffered two heart attacks after eating a diet heavy in fast food. During the weeks following the filing of this first fat suit, Barber made the rounds of news/talk shows, speaking candidly about his eating habits and medical problems, quickly becoming the object of scorn and ridicule among media pundits and online opiners. When Barber failed to pass the public relations test, Hirsch dropped the suit in favor of a more sympathetic class of obese plaintiffs: children. He filed Pelman v. McDonald'slater that same year on behalf of Ashley Pelman and Jazlyn Bradley, two obese New York teens, along with a class of unnamed child plaintiffs. Although the Pelmancase was initially dismissed by U.S. District Court Judge Robert Sweet, these first two fat suits were seized upon by food industry representatives as a crisis worthy of legislated tort reform. In January of 2003, just six months after the first suit had been filed, Congress took steps toward banning obesity lawsuits altogether by introducingH.R. 339, the "Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act," a bill better known around the halls of Congress as the "Cheeseburger Bill."1At the time when these lawsuits were making the news, I was a doctoral student teaching Introduction to Group Performance at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In the fall of 2002, I had decided to focus the group performance class on what I was calling "collaborative social theatre." At the outset, I asked the students (as a group) to choose a socialissue for a semester-long collaboratively-created performance project. They decided on "the media's impact on children" as their top choice, with what they called "U.S. blame culture" as their second choice. I suggested combining the two by taking up the fat suit story in the news. The students were, as one might imagine, a bit skeptical of this idea. Some felt that it would highlight a lawsuit that was unworthy of attention. One student worried that the topic might make overweight people in the audience feel bad. Another felt like we wouldn't be able to get an audience for such a performance. One student just came right out and called it "a stupid idea." Ouch. Another student proposed that our performance look at three different areas related to "the media's impact on 1In the 108thCongress the "Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act," H.R. 339, passed the House by a vote of 276-139 but died in the Senate. The bill was reintroduced into the House during the 109thCongress as the "Commonsense Consumption Act," passing by a vote of 306-120 before once again dying in the Senate. In the 110thCongress the bill was reintroduced in the House, but never made it out of committee. The latest version of the "Commonsense Consumption Act" was introduced in the House on Feb 3, 2009 during the 111thCongress by Rep. Dan Boren (D-OK).
