Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia

I thoroughly enjoyed this book (if you can use 'enjoy' when talking about racism). Though deeply academic it is easy to read, well formed and flows freely. The premise is that fat phobia is based on trying to avoid the appearance of perceived inferiority. Fat phobia is an attempt to social climb into the highest strata we can achieve. And that ladder is about darker people at the bottom and white people at the top. The book shows how arbitrary and unscientific the medical rationale is for fat phobia but is simply an extension of the social control already at play in cultural aesthetics. At its roots the book shows the role of controlling females by making an obsession with beauty and subsequently weight control as the motive for 500 years of objectifying the female body. The saddest part is the need to demonize black women's bodies so white women could feel a little less crap about their bodies...so if you're an anti-racist, think about why you really 'need' to lose weight. To be better than our African American sisters??? Heck no!

Using this for my dissertation work. What makes this work different from other peer reviewed literature that juxtaposes Black women's body and beauty standards and those of White women's is that it explains the relationship between the two.

Very well-researched and written. It will make you even angrier at white supremacism, but we NEED to understand the history of that, especially in America, especially in relation to larger (actually..normal) bodies. The chapters on that and when the medical community got involved were the most interesting and infuriating chapters. Will probably read again soon.

Fantastic read. So well written and well researched! Highly recommend

The early parts of the book focus on what 16th and 17th century white male artists and naturalists thought of body size and shape, particularly the size and shape of women and of non-Europeans. The blatant racism and sexism of these white male writers and artists is truly appalling. However, I don't see how these attitudes from centuries ago tell us much about attitudes today. For example, the author says that Rubens originally painted Black women as voluptuous and round, as he painted White women. And, then later in his career, Rubens painted black women as thin. This may be, but it's unclear what effect, if any, this had on the views of the (white) public in general, since there was no easy way for most people to see Rubens' pictures of nudes.The middle of the book talks about the increasing emphasis in the mid-1800 on slenderness for American women. The author does have a number of quotes from that time period saying that fatness is only fashionable among "savages" such as Africans and Turks. But, it's not clear how common this view was. Contradicting the idea that other races were "savages", the mid-1800 was also the time of the Second Great Awakening, a religious movement that emphasized God creating all humans equal.Later, the author discusses more recent topics, including medical views of fatness in the late 19th century. She notes some authorities believed white women were too thin, and others believed they were too fat. Many of these authorities were motivated by White Supremacist beliefs and Eugenics, and concerned that poor health in White, elite, women would lead to the "decline of the White race". However, the author says that these authorities tended to say little if anything about non-White groups, whom they felt were destined to go extinct. The book does an excellent job of presenting the bizarre, muddled thinking of these Eugenicists, but virtually none of it has anything to do with beliefs about Black people's body size, or Blacks at all.The very end of the book does talk about stigma today against Black women for being large. I wish this part of the book had been longer.

This author propounds her thesis clearly only at the very end, implying that she is resting her case after 200 pages. But those 200 pages consist mostly of digressive commentary about painting styles and dietary fads and anthropological theories."For decades, white feminist scholars and historians focused largely on the impact of the "thin ideal" on middle-and upper-class white women. They claimed that the thin ideal was oppressive, but also suggested that they did not know how it developed. This book endeavors to address that question, adding a much-needed intersectional component to the analysis of the development of fat phobia and the slender aesthetic, revealing race to be the missing element... In other words, the fear of the black body was integral to the creation of the slender aesthetic among fashionable white Americans."The book does not succeed in illustrating that "intersectional component." Feminist cant notwithstanding, there is no mystery why women who can be stylish and trim choose to be. It's pride, it's comfort, it's vanity, it's a sense of well-being and good health. Third, White people don't much care or judge what Black people think or do, so it's unlikely they'd view Blacks as negative role models. Finally, what she calls "the slender aesthetic" and "fat phobia" are not cultural constructs formed by some abstruse Marxian process, they are routine expressions of mental health and common sense.Most of the book has been gathered up, magpie-style from a mass of obscure reference sources that add nothing to the thesis. The author does not even understand the context of much of what she writes about. The Kellogg cereal company was founded by W. K. Kellogg, not his brother John Harvey Kellogg who ran the Battle Creek sanitarium. The 19th century poet and critic Leigh Hunt was not an American woman (!) but an Englishman, a close friend of Charles Dickens and Jenny and Tom Carlyle—and nearly as famous as they were, back in the 1830s and 40s. The author clearly has never heard of him, and is unaware that his work often appeared in Godey's Lady's Book, the 19th century periodical the author spends many pages discussing without ever really comprehending.

The author explores how the female body has been racialised for over two hundred years. The book argues that the contemporary ideal of slenderness is, at its very core, racialized and racist.According to the medical sociologist Sabrina Strings, fat phobia is rooted in anti-blackness and fat phobia, as it relates to black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Western Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of “savagery” and racial inferiority. Strings argues that there is no empirical science that led to the creation of BMI as a measure between weight and health.

Articulate, so well researched, so well written. A groundbreaking book we should all read.

This book was recommended to me, so I had fairly high hopes, but it was kind of a slow read and only covered the American and European side of things, completely leaving out the rest of the world, which is in my opinion atleast as important to cover. The fat phobia in Asian countries is even more wide spread so not even mentioning that part comes off narrow minded.

Llegó maltratado de las puntas, sin embargo, al ser exportación no quise devolverlo ya que tenía mucho tiempo buscando este libro.