Reviews with content warning for Slavery - Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia

Reviews tagging 'Slavery'

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

16 reviews

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.

Content Warnings

leontyna's review against another edition

Go to review page

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.

Content Warnings

kpeps's review against another edition

Go to review page

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.

Content Warnings

katharina90's review against another edition

Go to review page

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.

Content Warnings

meganmalonefranklin's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging informative

5.0

Content Warnings

therecoveringbookworm's review against another edition

Go to review page

funny informative reflective medium-paced

4.0

Content Warnings

naturallybgrace's review against another edition

Go to review page

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.”

Content Warnings