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This was bolstered by the post-Reformation context in which self-regulation became key to cultivating morality, in which gluttony was one sin to be avoided.īut it wasn’t until the late seventeenth century that fat became a resource for racial categorization. Intellectuals from Shakespeare to Descartes dismayed corpulence as indicative of dim-wittedness, with excessive consumption being primarily viewed as an obstacle to higher thought. It is during the early Enlightenment that we first see the thinness admired as a sign of male rationality. The reconfiguration of European diets and the mass accessibility of the “white gold” meant changing body shapes and sudden anxieties around fat, particularly among the male population.
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Black women became increasingly present in artist’s renderings, but were represented as thin, sickly servants, seen as lowly and inferior.īy the sixteenth century, with slavery and colonization in full force in the Americas, extracted labor gave way to extracted resources, especially sugar. But aesthetic preferences began to shift alongside the changing landscape of European cities like Antwerp and Venice, which were undergoing dramatic demographic and economic transformations with the rising slave trade. How did we get here?īeginning with High Renaissance painters like Albrecht Dürer and Peter Paul Rubens, Strings introduces us to the period just before enslavement reshaped the European social imaginary, where shapely white Venuses were prized and plumpness preferred. In today’s context, fat is synonymous with everything from disease to laziness. But it wasn’t always this way, as a stroll through the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York would reveal countless images of voluptuous women idealized by the early moderns as the epitome of beauty. What Strings demonstrates is that the subsequent waves of racial formation in which whiteness emerged and was consolidated, not only involved the demonization of Black skin, but also relied on the identification of fat with Black femininity, seen as simultaneously excessive and inferior. The enslavement and forced removal of Africans to Europe and the Americas necessitated a new form of “racecraft,” to create whiteness as distinct from Blackness. Strings traces the roots of fatphobia in anti-Blackness by weaving together seamless analysis of art, history, literature, philosophy, and science, offering exceptionally wide-ranging evidence of the emergence of our modern hatred of fat in the historical wake of colonization and the transatlantic slave trade. A major contribution to scholarship on racial formation, the politics of colonial knowledge production, and the history of medical discourse, Strings takes us from Descartes to CNN, from John Calvin to Cosmopolitan, to tell us the story of how our world has come to be dominated by fatphobia, or a fear of fatness, and the deeply anti-Black roots that this fear entails.
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In her award winning book, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia (2019), sociologist Sabrina Strings presents a meticulously researched history of the transformation of Euro-American ideologies toward fat from the Renaissance to the present day. Studying Gender and Sexuality at Other Institutions.Co-authorship and Collaboration: Resources for Feminist Scholars.Reports on Equity at UCLA and in Academia.Thinking Gender 2022: Transgender Studies at the Intersections.Women’s Social Movement Activities in Los Angeles.Feminism + the Senses: Weaving Generations Together.Feminism + the Senses: Nonny de la Peña.Feminism + the Senses: Breaking the Silence on Hooking Up.Edible Feminisms: On Discard, Waste, and Metabolism.Dishing: Food, Feminism, and the Way We Eat.Faculty and Graduate Student Working Group.Survey: Fragranced Products on the UCLA Campus.Oral Histories of Environmental Illness.Policy Brief: Addressing Sexual Violence, Reshaping Institutions, Achieving Justice: Shelter, Intersectionality, and Sexual Harassment Policy.
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Thinking Gender 2020: Sexual Violence as Structural Violence….Thinking Gender 2019: Feminists Confronting the Carceral State.Special Circumstances Conviction Project.Elizabeth Blackwell, MD, Undergraduate Award.Penny Kanner Dissertation Research Fellowship.Jean Stone Dissertation Research Fellowship.Elizabeth Blackwell, MD, Graduate Award.Black Feminism Initiative Graduate Fellowships.Research Excellence Award for UCLA Associate Professors.Accessible Spaces: A Fragrance-Free Toolkit.