Ezra's Bookshelf

Fearing the Black Body

by Sabrina Strings · 292 pages · ~5.5 hrs

HistoryRace & IdentityHealth & Medicine

Recommended on

buy on bookshop.org →
Fat phobia did not emerge from medical science but from racial science, argues sociologist Sabrina Strings. Tracing the history of Western beauty standards, she shows that the thin ideal developed alongside the slave trade as a way to distinguish European bodies from African ones. Fatness became associated with the savagery and lack of control that colonial ideology attributed to Black people; thinness became a marker of white civilization and self-discipline. Strings, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, examines art, medical texts, and popular culture from the Renaissance through the twentieth century. She shows how body size became a racial category, how diet culture emerged from Protestant anxieties about fleshly indulgence, and how the thin ideal was imposed on Black women as a condition of respectability. The book challenges the assumption that current weight stigma is based on health concerns; the historical evidence suggests that racial and moral judgments came first, with health rationales added later. Strings does not argue that health is irrelevant to weight, only that the current obsession with thinness cannot be explained by health alone. Readers interested in body image, race, or the history of ideas will find her argument provocative and well-documented.

For fans of

Reviews