Abstract
In the past few weeks, I have been avidly reading articles and listening to podcasts from the New York Times’s 1619 Project. This project marks the 400th anniversary of American slavery by reframing our country’s history based on the understanding of the year 1619 “as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are” (New York Times Magazine 2019). Sabrina Strings’s groundbreaking book Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia would fit right into the 1619 Project. It demonstrates how the rise of the transatlantic slave trade—along with the spread of Protestantism—led to a “fetish for svelteness and a phobia about fatness” (p. 6).
Strings shows how it was not until the early nineteenth century, in the context of slavery, religious revivals, and the massive immigration of people deemed “part-Africanoid” (p. 6) that fatness became stigmatized as “both black and sinful” (p. 6). By the early twentieth century, the popular media increasingly promoted slenderness as “the correct embodiment for white Anglo-Saxon Protestant women” (p. 6). Only after the moral and social superiority of thinness was firmly entrenched did the medical profession identify “obesity” as a medical problem (see also Stearns 1997).
Centering race and racism in the story about fat phobia and the cult of slenderness represents an important and original contribution. While others have noted how public discussion of the “obesity epidemic” is racialized (Campos 2004; Farrell 2011; Kirkland 2008; Saguy 2013), none of this earlier work traces—as Strings does—the historical origins of the racialization of fat talk so far back, nor demonstrates how much it is at the core of the “cult of slenderness.” My own earlier writing on this topic (Saguy 2013) was greatly indebted to Strings’s dissertation, which first developed several of the central ideas of the book.
Fearing the Black Body makes important contributions to the sociology of gender, the sociology of race, and their intersections. Drawing on gender scholarship, Strings argues that because women are evaluated based on their looks more than men are, women’s body size is more likely than men’s to be subjected to scrutiny. Strings shows that the inextricably linked developments of the slender ideal and fat phobia affect both black and white women, albeit in distinct ways. Specifically, the fear of the imagined “fat black woman” is used to “both degrade black women and discipline white women” (p. 6). Based on this insight, Strings labels race a “double agent”—simultaneously repressing “savage” blackness, while producing “disciplined whiteness” (p. 6). This approach underscores both the intersectional and relational aspects of racism and patriarchy.
The book draws on comparative historical data to show how the slender ideal and fat phobia developed in the western world and in the United States specifically—in dialogue with understandings about race and gender—from the Renaissance onward. It pays particular attention to the views of artists, thinkers, and prominent Protestant proselytizers. It also examines how the ideas of these elites were transmitted to the public in newspapers and magazines in the eighteenth century onward. Finally, it examines the depiction of “overweight” and “obesity” in the medical literature from 1880 to 1930.
After reviewing the book’s central argument in the Introduction, Part I (including Chapters 1 and 2) examines how full feminine physiques were prized throughout much of western history before the emergence of a cult of slenderness. This is important for denaturalizing the slender ideal and pinpointing its origins. In Chapter One, we learn how—in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—black women were seen as socially inferior to white women, but equally beautiful when they possessed those same bodily features, including plumpness, that were prized in white women. Chapter Two shows how, by the early seventeenth century, black women were increasingly juxtaposed against white women to bring out the beauty of the latter by contrast to the former. If white female beauty was full bodied with silken blond locks, black women were portrayed as lean and small with short kinky black hair.
Part II (including Chapters 3 to 6) is the heart of the book. Chapter Three shows how, in the eighteenth century, fatness became denigrated as a sign of sloth and gluttony, as it was also increasingly associated with black women. Strings recounts how exhibits featuring Saartjie “Sara” Baartman—dubbed the “Hottentot Venus”—cemented the idea of black women as monstrously fat. Chapter Four shows how, just as fatness was being denigrated and pinned to black women, thinness was coming to be lauded as a sign of asceticism and thus the proper embodiment for Anglo-Saxon white women in England. Chapters Five and Six shift the focus to the United States, showing how racism—not only against blacks but also against non-Protestant immigrants, who were viewed at the time as part African—fed into the thin ideal and fat phobia.
Part III (including Chapters 7 and 8) examines how doctors jumped on the anti-fat bandwagon, especially when it came to women, but only after the moral and aesthetic superiority of thinness was already well established. An Epilogue explores how racism—more than health concerns—informs contemporary discussions of the “obesity epidemic.”
If I had to make one criticism of this excellent book, it would be that I sometimes found myself lost in the rich historical details. That said, the book’s myriad stories of the individual people who have contributed to our collective understandings of fatness, thinness, gender, and race are themselves compelling and engaging. Moreover, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia is a pathbreaking contribution to our understanding of the origins of the cult of slenderness and fat phobia. It will be of interest to sociologists of gender, sociologists of race, and medical sociologists. It is beautifully written and would be appropriate to assign in undergraduate, as well as graduate, courses. It also merits a broader readership, such as all those readers of the New York Times’s 1619 Project.