Sabrina Strings

A meticulously researched intersectional feminist history of beauty and its relationship to weight. The author focuses primarily on female beauty as it was described throughout history by various male philosophers but there is also some examination of societal perspectives and judgements surrounding male weight.

Central to this history is the way white supremacy shaped Western cultural beauty standards. As Europeans encountered other races, they began to define racial characteristics as a way show more to draw a distinction between these races and the "white" race. Naturally, the racial characteristics assigned to non-white people were deemed inferior and animalistic.

Before long, fatness became associated with Africans and therefore became unseemly for white people, especially white women. Later, this racist theory morphed into a phobia of fatness as a harbinger of poor health. Afterall, white women must be careful to remain healthy so they can be counted on to bear many healthy white children so that the "white race" will endure.

This book was very thought provoking and infuriating. Although I knew racism was something people just made up and pretended was scientific later, I found it shocking to see evidence of European thinkers and philosophers just wildly speculating on the moral character of entire nations from their armchairs. This book helps to open the readers' eyes to the racist roots of fatphobia and the systemic societal repercussions that still continue today. show less

This was an interesting one. Excellently written, very good material, but at the end I felt it was lacking - or that I wanted it to be something other than what it was.

This is not a 101 level book, or probably even 201. The focus is on how beauty and cultural standards and expectations evolved regarding weight, and the information is pulled from primary sources. Primary sources only give us what data is available and what people chose to write and say. They don't provide analysis on what it show more means that that's what they chose to say or not say. The focus is on white women because that's who was considered worth writing about; we don't have a time machine to go back and yell at the people writing to be more inclusive. So reading what isn't written, reading for exclusion, all of these things become essential.

This is not a popular science or sociology book that will then tell you exactly what that primary source information means and why. The reader is going to have to have the requisite cultural knowledge to understand how systems of oppression work and make those leaps themself. This book is going to be (has already been and will continue to be) cited from here to breakfast by those works of analysis and synthesis. This is not a failing of this book, but it might be a failing of the title.

I found this book incredibly fascinating, very enlightening, wildly infuriating, and mostly useful at filling in the historical record of how female bodies were commodified in Western Europe and then the USA over the centuries. I found the critique of "healthy" bodies being required for the state and how that is an essential part of fascism a good refresher and a good intersection with disability writing and politics.

A very good read. Just know what it is you're reading. show less

This sociological history uncovers a rich amount of evidence to show that people have been saying shitty things about Black/fat/female people (woe betide you if you fit all three categories!) for hundreds of years. It is amazing and ultimately depressing that the slurs we hear today have been perpetuated, and accepted, for generations. The author does a fine job explaining how White Christian Americans tried to justify their own exceptionalism through fat phobia, entwined with racism and show more misogyny. Another interesting (read: horrifying) theme of this book is the long history of men objectifying women by defining "beauty" in regards to the female body. Often these opinions about beauty served to reinforce dominant social values, but I suspect that sometimes the men who devised these theories did so also to justify their own sexual preferences. Recommended for all readers. show less

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 show more 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. show less