Sabrina Strings

Absolutely necessary read at multiple intersections of fields of study and practice.

Personal trainers, nutritionists, feminists, humanists, biologists, sociologists, anthropologists, art historians, food historians (or just historians really), African American culture researchers, LGBTQ 'allies', all American political affiliations--- anyone who ever and will ever interact with someone who's skin has high melanin content, including those with high melanin content.

Any who want to be more aware of how they may subconsciously be demeaning, judging, or othering certain bodies needs to read this.… (meer)

History of Western ideas about beauty and about race, arguing that their interaction ultimately produced fatphobia, which serves both to “degrade black women and discipline white women.” Slavery produced a need for racial hierarchy, which led white Europeans to link fatness to “greedy” Black people, while religious concepts “suggested that overeating was ungodly.” Only after these developments did fatness become medicalized. This narrative may help to explain why the US was the primary source of fear of fat/valorizing thinness. One interesting bit: Strings argues that fatness was condemned in white men before it was condemned in white women, because men were supposed to be more self-controlled/rational. Also, she argues that racial classification systems often focused intensely on putative differences in women, because concerns about feminine aesthetics were always central to race-making projects.… (meer)

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 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.… (meer)

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.… (meer)