ABSTRACT
Opera is a hotbed of paradox. It stages subtle intimacy between lovers with loud music, enormous scenery, and overwrought acting. Most ambiguous, most maddening, most intriguing of opera’s paradoxical images is the infamous “Fat Lady” of the opera. In short, the Fat Lady embodies an overdetermined gender image, a primer of obvious and contradictory sexual stereotypes. Contemporary feminist criticism provides ample tools for dismantling the Fat Lady’s iconography. If the Fat Lady represents opera’s conspicuous consumption of resources, she represents the audience’s enormous appetite as consumers of opera. The iconic image of the Fat Lady, rather than the evidence of reality, induces the belief that sopranos outweigh normal women. The overdetermined gender signifiers that adorn the body of the Fat Lady are a camp performance of the sexual excess of opera itself. The Fat Lady is a camp icon for opera’s embarrassing plenitude. To non-operagoers, she represents everything bad and overdone about opera, which is to say everything about opera.
