Reviews tagging 'Eating disorder'

Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings

15 reviews

brigottabooty's review against another edition

challenging informative reflective slow-paced

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Eating disorder and Body shaming

kpeps's review against another edition

informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

This book was a great intersectional analysis on the role racism and white supremacy played in creating and emphasizing the fat-phobia is modern society. There is so much information in this text that you can’t help but learn something every chapter, yet it’s colloquial enough to understand and entertain.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Medical content, Religious bigotry, Body shaming, and Fatphobia

Moderate: Racism, Infertility, Classism, Fatphobia, Sexism, and Slavery

Minor: Eating disorder and Pandemic/Epidemic

katharina90's review against another edition

informative reflective medium-paced

3.0

A history of fatphobia that above all else highlights the patriarchal origins of fatphobia and how it was always white men (from artists to doctors) who determined what a "good" body, and especially a good female body, ought to look like. Over the course of several centuries this entailed various forms of body shaming, incl. skinny shaming. 

The author does connect some dots between fatphobia and racism, classism and other forms of oppression but the vast majority of the text centers around white men's attempts to control white women's bodies. I wish there was a much heavier emphasis on the intersectional analysis.

While some of the language feels outdated overall, there's also a lot of fatphobic language throughout this book with no acknowledgement or explanation, so I can't tell if these terms are used intentionally (and if so, why?) or if the author's own fatphobia might be showing. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Fatphobia and Body shaming

Moderate: Classism, Racism, Slavery, Colonisation, and Eating disorder

meganmalonefranklin's review against another edition

challenging informative

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Religious bigotry, Slavery, Infertility, Bullying, Colonisation, Classism, Eating disorder, Fatphobia, Body shaming, Alcoholism, Antisemitism, Racism, Alcohol, Racial slurs, and Misogyny

mandkips's review against another edition

challenging informative reflective slow-paced

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Racism, Body shaming, and Fatphobia

Moderate: Misogyny and Eating disorder

Minor: Sexism and Ableism

naturallybgrace's review against another edition

challenging informative slow-paced

5.0

Incredibly thorough, well descriptive and information driven. The origins of anti-fat thought, believes, policies and action is traced to anti-Blackness through the years. 

Quotes—
“…the current anti-fat bias in the United States and in much of the West was not born in the medical field. Racial scientific literature since at least the eighteenth century has claimed that fatness was ‘savage’ and ‘black.”

“The legacy of Protestant moralism and race science as it related to fat and thin persons loomed large. Indeed, many early to mid-twentieth-century physicians relied on moral and racial logics to rail against persons deemed too fat or too thin. But over time, a growing number did so specifically, and exclusively, to condemn fatness.”

“…Revealing race to be the missing element in many of these analysis’ indeed the racial discourse of fatness as coarse, immortal, black and other, not only denigrated Black women but it also served as the driver for the creation of slenderness as the proper form of embodiment for elite white christian women. In other words the fear of the black body was integral to the creation of the slender aesthetic amount fashioned white Americans.”

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Fatphobia, Religious bigotry, Misogyny, Eating disorder, Body shaming, Slavery, Sexual violence, and Racism

Because of the nature of this topic may potentially triggering things are mentioned and discussed. I’d encourage folks check in with themselves and others while reading as the content is heavy, but none the less necessary.

nyoom's review against another edition

informative medium-paced

0.75

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Drug use, Kidnapping, Murder, Adult/minor relationship, Classism, Confinement, Cultural appropriation, Death, Death of parent, Fatphobia, Rape, Ableism, Alcoholism, Body shaming, Colonisation, Deportation, Forced institutionalization, Gaslighting, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Alcohol, Child death, Eating disorder, Emotional abuse, Child abuse, Sexual violence, Slavery, Trafficking, Violence, Xenophobia, Drug abuse, Genocide, Medical content, Misogyny, Pregnancy, Torture, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Racism, and Transphobia

Moderate: Medical trauma, Gore, and Blood

forrestalexander's review against another edition

informative medium-paced

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Body shaming, Misogyny, Fatphobia, and Racism

Moderate: Eating disorder

Minor: Ableism, Infertility, and Sexism

k_perry's review against another edition

challenging informative medium-paced

5.0

A great introduction to the ways in which fatphobia and racism/white supremacy are intertwined. 

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Ableism, Body shaming, Eating disorder, Fatphobia, Medical trauma, and Misogyny

zombiezami's review against another edition

challenging informative reflective medium-paced

4.5

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Eating disorder, Medical content, Racism, Fatphobia, Religious bigotry, Injury/Injury detail, Body shaming, Xenophobia, Colonisation, Slavery, and Classism

Moderate: Misogyny, Sexual harassment, Sexism, Sexual content, Ableism, Antisemitism, and Genocide

Minor: War, Infertility, and Alcohol

Eugenics