ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how the body politics of Melissa McCarthy's performances in US comedy inflect normative constructions of gender and class. It argues that McCarthy's performances provides the opportunity to explore how post feminist body politics are refracted in contemporary Hollywood genre cinema, as well as secondarily in mainstream US television. McCarthy's performance similarly undermines the apparent sincerity of Megan's utterances when, in a bid to shake Annie from her malaise, she tells her of her troubled years at high school. McCarthy's performance similarly undermines the apparent sincerity of Megan's utterances when, in a bid to shake Annie from her malaise, she tells her of her troubled years at high school. In McCarthy's hands, the scene becomes a disruptive moment, in which her character's story is expressly framed as a performance, with facial gestures that convey the impression of quoting from an existing repertoire of, rather than merely expressing, emotions evoked by her story.
