“I have been told my arms are too fat and I should cover them up… I’ve been advised that I looked thinner in college and should return to that,” says soprano Victoria Erickson. Promulgated in the early 1990s, America’s moral panic over its so-called “obesity epidemic” extended beyond public health and media into the arts, reinforcing fatphobia entangled with white, classed, and westernized ideals of beauty. In classical music, these bodily norms are often framed as neutral, yet they are deeply embedded in professional training and evaluation. Within the opera industry, such norms surface with particular intensity in Young Artist Programs (YAPs), where emerging singers are judged not only on vocal ability but on their capacity to embody cis-heteronormative, fatphobic ideals of believability and marketability.

Over the past three decades, a neoliberal proliferation of “how-to” discourse—ranging from OPERA America audition guidelines to blogs, workshops, self-help literature, and social media—has codified professional audition attire as a visible marker of competence, belonging, and hireability. These gender-binarized prescriptions converge on a standardized audition “uniform,”disciplining singers’ bodies into industry-sanctioned legibility rather than individual expression. Drawing on young artists’ lived experiences through in-depth interviews, American industry praxis, and cultural criticism, I interrogate how fatphobia intersects with racism, classism, sexism, heteronormativity, and ableism to constrain access and govern opportunity under the guise of professionalism. I argue that audition “uniforms” function as technologies of compliance that naturalize systemic exclusion while displacing responsibility onto individual singers, obscuring the structural forces that shape operatic labor and inclusion.