**warning, thoughts centering on body image, fatphobia**

Excerpts from I am Afraid to Own My Body

To the Campus Climate Officer,

My name is Sarah Spencer and I am submitting this letter as part of my report of a discrimination incident. I have been discriminated against based on my weight by                         of the Grand Valley State University Theatre Department.

During the audition process for Mac Beth,                 continually discussed the importance of movement for her actors. I felt confident in my ability to move in a way that she wanted, and I received a callback for the show. I was contacted by               after the first round of callbacks, requesting a movement callback from certain students. (A screenprint of the email can be provided) When I entered the room for callbacks, I was immediately put on edge. I was one of two people who would be considered plus-sized, and every other student in this movement callback was of a similar weight and appearance. We were told by               that the movement callbacks would be made up of two phases; individual movement and partner movement. It became clear to me that the individual movement callback required a certain body type in order to satisfy what appeared to be the requirements (as typical with callbacks,              never disclosed what she was looking for explicitly to the actors). After every student finished their individual movement callback, which was going through a makeshift obstacle course as              , J (the costume designer for the show) and every other student watched in silence,               announced that she was satisfied with what she saw and ended callbacks without the partner movement.

When I was twelve, I attended a theme school for sixth grade. I got to learn a specialty in Environmental Science while studying at the local zoo. My classroom was on the zoo grounds, and we would go hiking in the neighboring park every day. For whatever reason, these hikes were usually tied to the lessons we were learning, but not the environmental science ones. Our English material became a point of conversation on the hike, the teachers prompting us with questions that we’d have to answer correctly in order to cross the log over a small valley in the hills. Math equations became reality as we began to study angles and graphs, learning how ratios affected the steepness of a plotted line.

One day, we hiked to the bottom of a steep hill; it was really more of a cliff face in my memory, nearly a straight line as trees grew out sideways as they reached for the sun through the thick woods. We had to guess the ratio of the angle of the hillside before we were permitted to climb it. I had hung in the back of the group of thirty-odd students, afraid to attempt the climb as so many seemed to scale the earth wall so effortlessly. I eventually gave my answer, and began to climb. It took what felt like an eternity but what was probably five agonizingly embarrassing minutes to scale the hill. My tennis shoes left scores in the loose dirt that other students had churned up in their scrambling, and I gripped a fork in a tree desperately in order to haul myself up the last few feet to solid, flat ground. My classmates had all been watching me struggle, and my teacher tried to ask how I was. I was humiliated. I hung my head for the rest of the hike, refusing to meet anyone’s eyes and keeping my vision limited to my dirt-covered jeans and the ground directly in front of my sneakers.

I felt that dirt-covered shame creep in me again as I left that movement callback.

I left this callback feeling that I will not be receiving a role in the show. I felt humiliated and believed that I was called to this as a performative act, as one of two students with my body type in this callback and no chance to fully display my movement skills. I did not receive a role in the show.

I think the most humiliating moment of my life was the dead silence that followed my completion of the obstacle course. It seemed fairly simple, a rod placed on two chairs forming a bridge, a yoga mat, a wheely chair, a table, and a costume rack. Go from one end, pass through the costume rack, and come back. I had offered, beforehand, to play some music to avoid how absolutely dead the air was. The idea was shot down quickly and harshly, as if I was offending the entire room with my suggestion. So I began, hoping that the humor in my movements would be enough to compensate for the fact that I could not roll and jump and lift my body into the air in the ways that felt expected of me. My peers laughed as I comically flipped a heavy table on its side and peered out over top at the director; the director remained silent and noted something on her goddamned pad of paper. The clattering of the rod that I had failed to crawl under at the end of the course was amplified in the freezing cold quiet. I sat back down on the floor, trying to make myself as small as possible as the next student stood to go. But it’s hard to make yourself small when you’re the largest person in the room.

After the cast list was announced, I began to have friends involved in the audition process tell me about some concerning and harmful things that                  said. I was told that in a phone call with the director of the Greenshow (a recent alumni of the program who was casting at the same time) that                   was basing a lot of her movement judgments on how a student would get up from sitting on the floor, claiming that it became as important as a dance callback. She also discussed the idea of movement with a student on her stage-managing team, using my name explicitly when saying “I need to know if Sarah Spencer can move.” These two incidences alone are fatphobic and ableist, no matter the intent behind them. She is generalizing and discriminating against a group of people, and then used me as an example of the kind of person she is generalizing and discriminating against.

After hearing these incidences, I brought this to the attention of B, a staff member in the MTD department and alumni of the Theatre program. She took the first step in our program’s conflict resolution pathway, designed for incidents like this, and set up a meeting with herself,                , and M, another faculty member of the department. From what B told me,                 appeared to be skirting responsibility and apology for the incident and wanted to set up a meeting with me personally to resolve the issue. B assessed the situation and believed that               would be able to meet with me and apologize, and agreed to her reaching out to me to set up a meeting. She let me know of                ‘s plan so I had time to prepare myself and decide if I wanted to meet with                . I agreed to meet with her and we planned a meeting for October 5th.

Ever since high school, I’ve been finding myself locking eyes with my reflection in the mirror as I wash my hands. They’re a different hue every time I do; I heard somewhere on the internet from some unreliable source that hazel eyes can shift between brown and green based on blood pressure and lighting. I like studying them as I warm my hands under a too-hot tap. They glitter in the weak lighting of the second-floor girl’s bathroom at my school, catching the dying yellow light and reflecting back in a natural gleam. Sometimes they stare back, dull and unfocused as the only thought running through my head is surviving the next few hours until I can clamber in my car and start the music-filled drive home.

I don’t even remember why I started doing it. I know it didn’t come from the tip that smiling produces serotonin. I think it truly came from a place of wanting to see what I looked like when I smiled. Might have been a thing about my teeth, which I have always been self-conscious about. I had my father’s teeth which meant braces in the fifth grade. That seems more like high school me; terrified that my smile didn’t look good enough.

               approached me when I was alone in the Performing Arts Center lobby on October 4th and committed to meeting a day early, bringing me outside to the patio area to talk. In this talk, she admitted to “fucking up” and to being ableist and sizeist. She then told me that I was only being considered to play Macbeth in the show, and the reason she chose the student who is in the role was due to my size.               claimed that I was an incredibly talented and creative actor and that she didn’t want to “waste me” in a smaller role. She then proceeded to go through the roles in the show and tell me why she didn’t cast me in any of those parts. After that, she told me that as an actor, I need to work on my body, listing taking dance classes and going to physical therapy for a hip injury that I disclosed to her as options to “work on myself.”               also told me that if I felt that I didn’t give a full display of my abilities at the movement callback, that I should have asked to stay behind and show more.

She asked me after talking extensively if I had anything I wanted to say to her, and I attempted to tell her that no matter the intention of the callbacks, the impact was very traumatic for me as a plus-sized student. I became emotional at this moment, mostly due to the fact that I felt ambushed by the sudden change of date for this meeting and had not prepared to discuss the incident. She listened to what I had to say and replied that she was “sorry that I felt” targeted and dismissed during the movement callbacks. We did briefly discuss the possibility of explicitly disclosing the level of physicality that she was expecting of actors in order for students to “self eliminate” from the audition process. She continuously apologized then asked if had anything I wanted to say, pushing for me to accept the apology. I did not accept the apology because I felt as if she was not apologizing for the emotionally and mentally harmful process that she put me through but apologizing for my reaction to her words and actions.

When I started college, I indulged myself in the mirror that hung on my dorm room door. I would preen in front of it, twisting every which way to examine myself. I remember it now as mostly a vain attempt to see myself as something beautiful, but in the moment it was purely examination. I would lock eyes with myself in that mirror frequently as well, and I began to smile to watch my eyes crinkle at the action. I watched the way the light glinted and shifted when I did that, and I loved it. Somehow along the way, my eyes became my favorite part about myself. I used to hate my eyes, they weren’t a vibrant brown or dynamic green like my sisters; it was something between that felt muddy and plain. But now I can see the way they change now, the way they light up when I smile, first falsely in order to examine the way my face changes then genuinely as I find myself delighted with the way my eyes become the centerpiece of my face. I hypnotize myself.

I now reflexively smile at myself whenever I find a mirror, just to watch my eyes and remind myself that my body has its redeeming qualities. I admitted this to a group of friends and strangers one day in a lobby space, all of us crammed together around a table. I watched as they reacted with love for this admission. I watched their own eyes crinkle in delight at the prospect. Maybe this is an act of self-love, and not of examination.

I learned the next day, October 5, from several students in the cast that she issued an apology to the cast of Mac Beth because “someone was triggered by the movement callbacks.” This was very hurtful to hear; especially since               used such an inflammatory word like triggered in order to sensationalize my trauma to a group of students, many of whom I had not disclosed this incident to and wouldn’t feel comfortable doing so. These students expressed their discomfort at her apologizing to the group of students she did cast, rather than those that she did not cast.

“I need the cast to be active”

I heard that so many times. Whispered in the halls as state secrets between friends, sweeping through the political landscape of the Theatre Department before reaching my ears. Spoken in quotes from people who had more power than I did to affect change. I never expected the words to be spoken so boldly, without remorse to my face. How she could look me in the eyes and spout her excuses, hurling them at me one after the other like knives as they sunk into my brain, hitting their mark and slicing through her own image.

“This is the most physical group in the cast. I’m going to have you all running around the stage a lot.”

Diane said this multiple times throughout that show, spoken from where she perched in the audience, a director watching over her cast to make sure her job was done efficiently. It hadn’t even occurred to me what those words really meant. I was there to do a job, fulfill a role with a group of friends and classmates that I didn’t know well yet but would come to trust with my life. I raced from corner to corner of the stage, dying over and over as my body fell without restraint. I leapt to my feet without hesitation, climbing and crawling, moving without a thought to my actions. I wore through knee pads, and my legs were decorated with bruises that would put old fruit to shame. I displayed them with pride as I changed into costume night after night, a reminder of becoming something that               could never envision in her narrow mind. The biggest fuck you I could give someone who didn’t give a shit about how her actions destroyed me.

Thank you for taking the time to listen.