Fearing the Black Body The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia

Sabrina Strings, Allyson Johnson

eAudio - 2020

How the female body has been racialized for over two hundred yearsThere 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 E...nlightenment 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... more