User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
Strings’s book is an urgent and compelling work not just for conversations around fatphobia, but for the idea of race more generally. Many are taught that racial difference is a matter of “biological truth,” but actually what scholars like Strings show is that race is a social construction. Different attributes are exaggerated + diminished in order to create the mirage that racial difference is a fact, not actually a series of political decisions.
Most often we think of race as skin color, but European theorists initially began to define race by facial attractiveness + body size. In order to perpetuate the racist myth that white people were superior to Black people, these thinkers asserted that Black people were inherently fatter than white people (erasing the variation of sizes among white people and Black people). Women’s bodies were (+continue to be) the battleground for proving racial difference. Despite Black women having long been idolized across Europe, they were soon shifted from aesthetic counterparts to counterpoints for white women. White women had to define their beauty against Black women. Mandating thinness was about the pursuit of western rationalism, as experts maintained that fatness stifled one’s ability to think clearly. Fatness – a state of being which at various times had been seen as a mark of beauty -- became associated with racial failure. White women, in particular, were tasked with managing their size as a way to preserve the integrity of the race.
Strings concludes that the slender beauty aesthetic was a racial project – one that always was informed by a fear of fatness which was already a fear of Blackness. In other words, fatphobia is an extension of anti-Black racism.
This book shows how ideas of beauty have always been used to justify systems of oppression. Racism + transphobia perpetuate the false idea that there is only one way to be beautiful, and anyone who is unable to fit this is made to feel as if it’s their individual fault, not actually because they are denied power. To redefine beauty we have to learn about how ideas of what is “normal” + “beautiful” are rooted in discrimination – and, in particular, anti-Black racism.
Rating: really liked it
A thorough and accessible book about how fatphobia originated from anti-Black racism. I feel like a lot of body positivity and anti-fatphobia movements in the United States focus on the experiences of white women, so I appreciate Sabrina Strings for providing such a robust analysis of fatphobia’s anti-Black underpinnings that integrates historical, textual, and scientific investigation. Strings highlights how even though people at one point in history perceived fat women as attractive, later on people in power started to associate beauty with slim white femininity. This uplift of white women’s appeal and parallel disparaging of Black women’s bodies continued into the scientific and medicinal realms, such that scientists perpetuated racist ideologies surrounding weight that further stigmatized both fatness and Blackness.
I liked that String made such rigorous academic work accessible to a broader audience through the quality of her writing. While reading
Fearing the Black Body, I thought a lot about how wild it feels that people with power – those who choose actresses/actors, those who create science, those who even choose which books they want to publicize on their Goodreads profiles – really have so much influence in maintaining or disrupting anti-Blackness and anti-fatness. I am reflecting on how I want to continue approaching my reading, research, and clinical work from a critical perspective that takes into account a lot of the forces String exposes in this book. While I feel like incorporating her research and commentary with more contemporary issues related to fatphobia and anti-Blackness would have been even more compelling, I recognize that she may not have done so because of disciplinary boundaries or wanting readers to draw those connections ourselves. Recommended for folx who are interested in race as well as body image!
Rating: really liked it
4.5 stars -- Wow. This has given me so much to mull over. I would describe this as an academic history of ideas, with the ideas in question being the aesthetic ideals around fatness in European & American culture and how those ideas came to be rooted in racism towards non-white people. While the writing itself is going to be a little dry for some people's taste (like, I wouldn't describe this as narrative nonfiction or as nonfiction that is attempting to have an elevated prose style), I think this is a superb example of a well argued piece of historiography. Learned so much and highly recommend
Rating: really liked it
Fearing the Black Body traces the origins of fat phobia and unpacks how it is grounded in racist and eugenicist ideas. It's very well researched and offers a great deal of interesting, thought-provoking information that really should inform how we think about race, health, and fatness.
For instance, we get a history of the BMI tables which originated in a study by a eugenicist that looked only at white bodies, and primarily those of white men, and were then adapted into actuarial tables by life insurance companies. Which the medical community decided to adopt with very little if any research into how this actually functioned with real people, especially non-white people. Also, "normal weight" for women was arbitrarily dropped by 10+ pounds at one point, apparently because weight loss industry lobbyists wanted a higher percentage of Americans to become potential customers. Yikes. That's one small element, but this book is a trove of information and I highly recommend giving it a read.
It also traces how Black female bodies in particular came to be described as "barbarous" in contrast to the supposed idea of white, thin female bodies. There is so much misogyny wrapped up in the entire narrative as well, it's just wild.
The only drawback is that the style of writing is rather academic and therefore can feel a bit dry in presentation. However, I found the actual information to be so interesting I wasn't particularly bothered by it. Just don't expect a narrative nonfiction style, or a book that offers a great deal of interpretation. For most of the book the author simply lays out the information and leaves the reader to draw their own conclusions. Do be aware that there are quotes of extremely racist and fatphobic language throughout.
Rating: really liked it
3.5 stars Sabrina String's,
Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia looks at the historical evolution of body and beauty standards and how they coincide with the degradation of Blackness. String unpacks the inherent racism behind notions such as the aesthetic hierarchy and challenges standards such as the idea of a "normal weight" which did not originate as a medical phenomena.
I pre-ordered this book and was eagerly awaiting its arrival. The topic and description lured me in and I was excited to better understand how fatfobia was bred out of racism. Unfortunately, when the book did arrive, I struggled to read it. The text is incredibly dry and I kept having to force myself to come back to it. Another comment mentioned that the beginning and conclusion were the most engaging parts of the book and I wholeheartedly agree. I enjoyed and gained a lot from the beginning and concluding chapters which were framed more succinctly. Perhaps this text is better suited as an assigned reading for a Women's Studies class than casual leisurely reading.
Rating: really liked it
This book sets out to explain the racial origins of fatphobia, but does not exactly do this. It's challenging at times to tell if the book is actually well-researched because the research and evidence are not always well-handled. In fact, the book is primarily structured as a series of biographies, mostly of White men (with occasional White and Black women thrown in). In addition, and as other reviewers have noted, there is a general lack of analysis, so evidence is provided but connections are not always made.
This book focuses primarily on Europe and the US. A major takeaway in this book is that throughout the ages (in Europe and the US), assessments of body size, shape, and proportion have almost always been men's assessments of women's bodies (and sometimes of other men's bodies). In this sense and based on the evidence provided, the book actually traces the patriarchal origins of fatphobia in various White communities. This is a major finding! With added analysis, the book could demonstrate how different White men at different points in time were given social recognition as experts on what counted as "good" feminine bodies (e.g. at one point, these were artists; then socialites; then social scientists; then doctors and medical scientists... that is a significant finding). Given that, and based on the current evidence provided in this book, it's not that fatphobia has racial origins; it's actually that men have used preference about feminine presentation and "good bodies" as a driver in pushing forward racist agendas (like white supremacy), as well as capitalist, ableist, patriarchal, and other agendas.
A few things that surprised me about this book: (a) the author distinguishes between different groups of White people and shows how they used agendas around body size to demonstrate superiority among each other--in fact, the author describes relationships between these White groups as "interracial," and that becomes one of the primary demonstrations of racialized fatphobia; (b) because of the biographical structure of evidence, people of color are often left out of certain chapters completely; (c) it seems like there are lots of missed opportunities to examine evidence of fatphobia in non-White cultures (e.g. the connections between starvation and spirituality show up in other religions and regions); (d) there is a lot of fatphobic language in the book without much qualification or clarity on why it is chosen (and at times, fat people are not given the same dignity in the retelling as thin people), and in that way, it's challenging to know whether the book problematizes fatphobia or weaponizes it.
Rating: really liked it
Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia contains many interesting stories about historic, artistic, aesthetic, religious and medical views of the "ideal" human [usually female] body, but I'm not sure the examples presented actually add up to the book's stated conclusion. It can be dry reading - large swaths read more like a term paper than a book for popular audiences. From the introduction: "I used two comparative historical methods: process tracing and historical narrative. In process tracing, I used multiple sources of data to shed light on key individuals and events contributing to the growing anti-fat, pro-thin biases in the West. I used historical narrative to weave a tapestry illustrating the impact and interrelationship of these events." I'd have a hard time recommending this to someone unless I knew they were particularly interested in body image conversations, though there were plenty of stories that intersected with my interests.
The timespan covered is ambitious, ranging from the 1400s to present. Author Sabrina Strings begins with a long look at art history, visiting artists known for their depictions of and musings about ideal female proportions. I wasn't aware that this was a particular obsession of Albrecht Dürer, and it was interesting to see him play so prominent a role, along with artists we might expect (Raphael, Titian, Botticelli and - of course - Peter Paul Rubens, famous for his "Rubenesque" women). Everyone wanted to wax poetic about what
he saw as the ideal figure, elevating personal preference to universal dictum. Strings draws a connection between the adoption of slavery and depictions of Black people. European countries that hadn't participated in slavery drew Black people seldom, poorly (for a lack of models), or never. When slavery was new, Black women were sometimes considered exotic and beautiful, and depicted carefully. Their well-proportioned bodies might be compared favorably to the ideal "Venus" of the time. Dürer is quoted as saying about African women in 1528, "I have seen some amongst them whose whole bodies have been so well-built and handsome that I never beheld finer figures, nor can I conceive how they might be bettered, so excellent were their arms, and all their limbs." Strings posits that as slavery became a fixture in a culture, Black bodies increasingly were seen as lowly, corpulent, libidinous and atavistic. She believes that beauty ideals were driven towards thinness in an effort to preserve and define white beauty so that Black women were excluded. While this sounds plausible, I don't think it is demonstrated to the extent that one could rule out a host of other factors.
Strings covers various ideas and thinkers in the intervening years. Some speculated that Black people branched from a pre-Adamic race of human beings. Once Darwinism was introduced, they found ways to wield the new science in support of their racism. No less than Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, coined the term eugenics. There's a lot of information about the term "Hottentot" - a derogatory term for the Khoikhoi of the southern tip of the African continent that was eventually applied to anyone with sufficiently dark skin. European thinkers would alternately imagine Black people as small and scrawny or large, indolent and corpulent. Saartjee "Sara" Baartman was an African woman who, judging by illustrations, possessed an ample posterior and was first used to delight horny soldiers and then paraded around England as something of a sideshow freak.
Next, we finally look at men's bodies and the rising perception that heaviness in men was a sign of stupidity and laziness. Religious movements similarly began to encourage parishioners to eschew gluttony and strive for purer, holier thinness. This led to various figures who devised weight loss techniques, such as George Cheyne, who lost roughly 230 pounds and began preaching his modified diet (mostly cow's milk). His ideas spread around the world, including to America, where they influenced such figures as John Harvey Kellogg, who (when he wasn't busy with his prominent role in the very new Seventh Day Adventist Church or giving women enemas) experimented with ways to process and toast wheat, rice and corn to create the cereals (originally intended to suppress sexual desire) that we all know and love today. Kellogg was a eugenicist, but believed the darker folks would naturally die off and solve the "problem" themselves.
It is in our modern world that the standard-bearing for thinness shifts to the medical world and the actuarial tables of insurance salesmen. Strings points out some of the problems with BMI as a measure of weight, and how the numbered ranges were created for white bodies and have been only tightened to fit preconceived notions of health and enforce thinness. She contests various studies that link obesity and mortality, engaging in a couple rounds of "I see your expert and research paper and raise you mine".
There are plenty of interesting stories and figures related to the history of body perception, but the preponderance of information is about white culture and white bodies, and often times the role or influence of Black people and their bodies feels like an afterthought. Strings could do more to prove the connections she's hinting at and drive home the promise of the book's title. There's no neat bow to tie everything together. However, if you enjoy this as a collection of historical facts, you can craft your own theories and take away some fascinating (and often horrifying) insights.
Rating: really liked it
This was informative, but it was quite dry. If history is your jam, you'll be more likely to appreciate and enjoy this, and I'm grateful for the things that I learned (even if I only manage to retain a small fraction of the information), but I'm not sure I would widely recommend it. I also realized while I was nearing the end of the book that I had trouble picking the book back up because it felt like I was being slapped in the face while reading the quotes from letters, magazines, newspapers, artists, and physicians that were so incredibly fatphobic and racist.
Rating: really liked it
A fascinating book,
Fearing the Black Body explores how fatness became linked to Blackness in Western popular discourse from the sixteenth century onwards, and how intersecting racial, gender, and religious (primarily Protestant) structures shaped discourses about fat phobia and thin fetishism in nineteenth and twentieth century America. Sabrina Strings does an excellent job of deconstructing medical discourses about weight which are often understood as neutral and evidence-based but often are anything but. Strings' central argument is well made, but I do have some questions about the theoretical framework she uses (primarily why she relies so much on Bourdieu and Foucault), and as a medieval historian I don't think of the Italian Renaissance as quite the social watershed moment that she does. Still, a thought-provoking study of interest to anyone interested in the history of the body.
Rating: really liked it
I really wanted more from this book. It was a great series of historical events laid out, but less commentary and analysis than I wanted. From what I understand it was written for academic purposes, so the lack of commentary may be intentional, but I thought it was a missed opportunity for a book that she acknowledges is the first to address this exact subject.
Rating: really liked it
A must read especially in our present time. When will we stop seeing the black body as something to be feared but one to be uplifted. This book is one that I will recommend for my book club.
Rating: really liked it
If you’ve ever wondered where America’s past and current beauty standards originated from, you really need to read this book.
It’s very clinical in nature, definitely not a light and breezy read. But it’s so important. The lengths artists, insurers and the medical community have gone through to ensure that whiteness is upheld as the standard for beauty, intelligence and overall worthiness is society is sickening. The book also explains how patriarchy has kept women in a perpetual state of chasing ever-changing ideals for the approval of our male counterparts. I found the book very insightful.
My only issue with the book is that it failed to fully connect historical anecdotes with today’s representation of blackness. It was easy enough to draw conclusions, but I would’ve preferred more irrefutable links to fatness and society’s mistreatment of blackness. The final chapter helped, but I think the author could’ve gone much deeper into that particular subject.
Rating: really liked it
Need to reread and annotate in the future when I'm not trying to cram in stuff for a readathon!
The first and last chapters of this book should be essential reading for everyone, and this whole book should be essential reading for all med students too. The correlation of thinness to health and beauty is derivative of white supremacy rather than science, and this book examines this fact from a truly historically and scientifically sound way. Manufactured consent has really left a deep impact on public perception and understanding of fatness; I could not help but apply a Marxist superstructure analysis to everything I was learning from this book, because it so clearly outlined the delineation of fatphobia from larger systems of oppression!
Rating: really liked it
A comprehensive historiography on the origins of fatphobia in racism, eugenics, and puritanical ideals. By no means a casual read; I would have been interested in hearing more about the implications for the modern world. My main takeaways: BMI is stupid. Dieting (and cornflakes) are anti-sex. White people are real keen on dehumanizing black and brown folks and we need to STOP. Seriously. Capitalism wants to manage, control, and medicalize our bodies (especially women's bodies) and this brand of thinking has its origins in eugenics and is evil.
Rating: really liked it
This book is fascinating!!! I had been meaning to read it having heard it discussed in so many places. I hadn't resisted the idea at all, but just figured I had understood the thesis and arguments from all the podcasts and reviews out there. But it was so much richer and more interesting than I had anticipated. And it's like is there anything at all in our culture that doesn't go back to theories that justified enslavement and exploitation? Certainly not our obsession with thin. I highly recommend reading this and then re-reading again Tressie McMillan Cottom's THICK and Roxane Gay's Hunger.
