Reviews tagging 'Racism'

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

31 reviews

eschorrlesnick's review against another edition

informative reflective fast-paced

4.25

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Medical trauma, Fatphobia, Misogyny, and Racism

taratearex's review against another edition

informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

This was excellent and infuriating. This is a concise history of fat phobia, laying out very clearly how it originated from racism. It also lays out how connected to religion it is, as well as just how manufactured by white women and white men it is and continues to be. It's infuriating to see how little has changed and how we continue to repeat history over and over.

This book is dense and does read somewhat like a history textbook, but it is also clear and concise and lays out the facts so well in only about 200 pages. Because it is more a presentation of the facts, there isn't much analysis so I would recommend reading this in addition to other books on anti-fat bias and racism for more of the analysis part, such as What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat Aubrey Gordon and Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness Da’Shaun Harrison. But this was an excellent book on the history of how we got to where we are now and well worth the read.

I listened to the audiobook in tandem with my physical copy so that I could highlight, this was also helpful as there are a lot of names and dates which I have a harder time with if it's just audiobook. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Fatphobia, Racism, and Body shaming

Moderate: Slavery, Sexism, Ableism, and Misogyny

leontyna's review against another edition

challenging informative medium-paced

4.0

It was very informative but I would have appreciated some summaries of the chapters, at times I was a bit lost what the point of particular stories/chapter was besides "people changed their mind all the time about what is dangerous, thinness or fatness, and anti-fatness has definitive racial origins". But I'm really glad I listened to the book and I plan to read more about the topic.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Racism, Fatphobia, and Slavery

Moderate: Antisemitism and Misogyny

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

ravennemain's review against another edition

slow-paced

4.0

Really interesting history, but it also felt like it accepted some of the myths about fatness at the same time.  This created an awkward tension through the text that was never resolved.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Misogyny, Fatphobia, and Racism

melindamaureen's review against another edition

challenging dark informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

An engaging study of fatphobia’s roots in white supremacy. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Fatphobia and Racism

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

kathrynhoss's review against another edition

challenging informative slow-paced

5.0

A must-read to understand anti-fat bias in the Western world and how it relates back to white supremacy. 

As we have seen, 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 18th century has claimed that fatness was savage and Black... because women are typically reduced to their bodies, fat stigma has commonly targeted racial ethnic Other women. Protestant moralism and the distain of indulgence contributed to the cacophony of pro-thin, anti-fat bias. The medical field has been the most recent institution to enter the fray.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Fatphobia, Body shaming, Xenophobia, and Racism