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Summary
Summary
Winner, 2020 Body and Embodiment Best Publication Award, given by the American Sociological Association
Honorable Mention, 2020 Sociology of Sex and Gender Distinguished Book Award, given by the American Sociological Association
How the female body has been racialized for over two hundred years
There is an obesity epidemic in this country and poor Black women are particularly stigmatized as "diseased" and a burden on the public health care system. This is only the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat Black women, which Sabrina Strings shows took root more than two hundred years ago.
Strings weaves together an eye-opening historical narrative ranging from the Renaissance to the current moment, analyzing important works of art, newspaper and magazine articles, and scientific literature and medical journals--where fat bodies were once praised--showing that fat phobia, as it relates to Black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of "savagery" and racial inferiority.
The author argues that the contemporary ideal of slenderness is, at its very core, racialized and racist. Indeed, it was not until the early twentieth century, when racialized attitudes against fatness were already entrenched in the culture, that the medical establishment began its crusade against obesity. An important and original work, Fearing the Black Body argues convincingly that fat phobia isn't about health at all, but rather a means of using the body to validate race, class, and gender prejudice.
Author Notes
Sabrina Strings is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. She previously held an appointment as a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology and the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Strings, a University of California Irvine assistant professor of sociology, delivers a thoroughly researched exploration of the historical relationship between race- and weight-related prejudices, examining centuries of Western artistic values, race-based pseudoscience, and Anglo-Saxon religious teachings. Her study begins in the Renaissance era, in which "larger, fleshier physiques" were commonly revered and depicted in the paintings of the masters, and moves through the early, racist anthropological texts by European visitors to Africa during the 18th and 19th centuries. The ideas disseminated in these texts are epitomized by the story of Sara Baartman, a full-figured Cape Town woman sold into slavery and hailed as the "most correct and perfect specimen of that race of people." The 19th century also saw the rise of the first women's magazines, which incorporated Protestant ideals of "temperance" and racist rhetoric to shame women into losing weight; one magazine suggested that women who were not sufficiently thin ought to go to Africa "where women, like pigs, are valued at so much a pound." Strings also traces the history of medical concern about obesity, stretching into the 20th century with the development of the body mass index (BMI) concept, noting the many racial biases underlying that concern. This fascinating and carefully constructed argument persuasively establishes a heretofore unexplored connection between racism and Western standards for body size, making it a worthy contribution to the social sciences. Illus. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Choice Review
This is a problematic book. It hopes to trace the origins of obesity through a historical lens that validates gender, "race," and class prejudice. Fearing the Black Body appears a little off-key in a number of respects. Indeed, in the 18th and 19th centuries what is deemed as obese today was viewed as a part of opulence among the aristocratic. Today, with more knowledge of health matters, it is widely understood that obesity leads to all kinds of illnesses, from diabetes to heart failure. Yet the overall theme of this book puts aside the notion that being overweight is unhealthy, and the author instead posits a "fat phobia" that is merely racist and sexist. This is the kind of study that will be widely appreciated in liberal elite schools that pontificate about the "black body" image while overlooking the deeply distressing realities of obesity for what it is: unhealthy and life threatening. Instead of coming up with a nuanced way to tackle the historical legacy of desire and aversion, there's a skewed analysis to "fit a gap" in contemporary scholarship that offers a "scholarly" way to dismiss the obesity epidemic in the black experience, which is cutting short the lives of many, both female and male. Summing Up: Not recommended. --Mark Christian, Lehman College - City University of New York
Library Journal Review
In her first book, sociologist Strings (sociology, Univ. of California, Irvine) explores the historical development of prothin, antifat ideologies deployed in support of Western, patriarchal white supremacy. Beginning in the aesthetic ideals circulated by Renaissance thinkers and artists and bringing her narrative up into the 1990s, Strings charts how white Europeans and Anglo-Americans developed ideals of race and beauty that both explicitly and figuratively juxtaposed slim, desirable white women against -corpulent, seemingly monstrous black women. The work is divided into three sections. The two chapters in the first part consider how Renaissance white women and women of color were depicted as plump and feminine, separated by class, yet belonging to the same gender. The second part of the work charts the rise of modern racial ideologies that yoked feminine beauty to Protestant, Anglo-Saxon whiteness. Later chapters and the epilog consider how Americans normalized the "scientific management" of white women's bodies for the purpose of racial uplift, a project that continued to situate black women as the embodied Other. -VERDICT This work is a much-needed examination of the racism and colonialism embedded within society's imagined dangers of fat (black) bodies.-Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, Massachusetts Historical Soc., Boston © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Introduction: The Original Epidemic | p. 1 |
| Part I The Beauty of the Robust | |
| 1 Being Venus | p. 15 |
| 2 Plump Women and Thin, Fine Men | p. 42 |
| Part II Race, Weight, Gob, and Country | |
| 3 The Rise of the Big Black Woman | p. 67 |
| 4 Birth of the Ascetic Aesthetic | p. 99 |
| 5 American Beauty: The Reign of the Slender Aesthetic | p. 122 |
| 6 Thinness as American Exceptionalism | p. 147 |
| Part III Doctors Weigh In | |
| 7 Good Health to Uplift the Race | p. 169 |
| 8 Fat, Revisited | p. 187 |
| Epilogue: The Obesity Epidemic | p. 205 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 213 |
| Notes | p. 215 |
| Selected Bibliography | p. 245 |
| Index | p. 257 |
| About the Author | p. 283 |
