I have been reading the book Fear the Black Body by Sabrina Strings, which was recommended by both Zulinka and one of the people I interviewed, and it has made many interesting points even though I have not finished it.
One of the main points that the book starts with is how doctors and philosophers could not understand why people were starving when there was plenty of money for people to be eating, and how the ideal body had changed since now the description of people’s bodies in the United States was thin and pale, and this was called an epidemic. There were two sides to the argument: some people thought slenderness was a matter of fashion, while others considered it an American shortcoming and linked it to subjects such as religion and morals.
One of the main issues we see is how roundness and a more volume-heavy body were connected to blackness. This is a history that starts to be explained in the sense that it was anti-African and that the fact that they had more volume in their body was considered ungodly because it must have meant that they were eating more and that was gluttonous. One of the ways they started this was by the fear of the fat black woman, and this came from religious ideals on how to go against a certain race but then discipline white women: “synchronized repression of ‘savage’ blackness and the generation of disciplined whiteness”. The idea behind this was to create a society where there were some people who were above others by telling them that the thin ideal was better because that was the reality of Europeans and Americans, and then degrade those who were not the same, even those who could be considered white (Irish, Russians).
This chapter starts with a story about a girl named Katharina, who was a slave in Antwerp and was drawn in 1521; she is described as having a round face and a plump body.
One of the main things that is interesting is that English women in the Elizabethan era did not just paint themselves as whiter, but actually painted themselves black to show the difference and make themselves look like the beauty ideal. This was definitely supremacy culture, and something that was very interesting was the fact that in England there was not a glamorization of black people like they were in other countries in Europe; there was, from the beginning, a deep disdain, but they did not enter the slave trade until later than the other European countries, such as Portugal. (page 55)
The slave trade had a tremendus effect in england and holland throught the creation of sugar and how it started to be so highly available that now people were having it as a daily luxury which ment a lot of people in england who were middle class were starting to become fat. (57) The word obesity was used for the first time in 1620 in Oxford from the investigation of people in England getting fatter. The growth of the wellness gout, this was called before as the king’s disease, robust habit
The main thing that we are able to see in the introduction is the fact that she talks about the fact that fatphobia is actually about racism and not actual health concerns, which is one of the main arguments which is said in the mainstream media today. (An example I thought about when reading this is Lv Schmit an influencer about weight loss who speaks of portion control and excessive steps in order to live in a perfect body and she does not speak of nutrients or muscle density just thinness and this might work while she is in her 20s but what will happen when she is older and has just been eating what she wants but with small quantities).
The way that she is explaining this is by mixing a lot of multidisciplinary ideas including history and her own analysis with what was going on at the historical time and the different resources we have from back when all of this started in the renaissance era when there started to be a mix of races in europe not just white europeans.
She asks the question of why, when people think of fat women, there are a lot of times when fatness is directly correlated with black bodies because of the stereotypes out there. (Is there a connection of this to Medellin? Do we not want to look anything different from Europeans?)
A large conversation or point that is made throughout the book is the fact that, mostly in America, there is a clear disdain for fat bodies, and women try to be as lean as possible. (I believe this comes to the point where it has become almost a sickness where they cannot rest and they have to be active all day and counting their food, even though they have tried to move on from this and have more food freedom is what it is called it is something that is constantly on women’s minds and it has even gone as far as to become a social media phenomenon were they speak about what they eat and the work outs they do daily).
One of the main things the author talks about is how this is a subject that has been constructed there was not always the idea that one has to be as thin as possible but it is something that has evolved and in her opinion it has evolved at the same time as racism, she also explains how there have always been different bodies in different societies and most of them at one time or another have been appreciated or admired, for example the fact that in mediaeval times a more voluminous body was preferred by many but as most things in this world this evolved and I believe that this evolution is the reason why we are in the ozempicedemic today.
I believe that this is a book that is not just written as a piece of academic work but that it was intended to be an intervention to help us understand why we view bodies the way they are viewed because as I have read in many sources about history repeating itself it is very important to understand our history in order to not keep on repeating it and this is a good way to start looking at our bodies differently and look more at the core problem than the overview. However I don’t think it got the attention it deserved and should be known more by different forms of media because I have found it a very hard book to read and I don’t think people who are specifically interested in this subject will actually sit down to read it for extended periods of time so it might have been interesting to have maybe a smaller more easy to read version of it in order to get it to be more widespread.
In this chapter, Strings goes back in time to the 15th and 16th centuries to examine the body ideals of the time and how they evolved. I think it is very important to look at why things started in order to understand their effect on today’s society.
One of the main things she looks into is religion and the way that in the 15th and 16th centuries there was mostly a wave of Christianity in Europe, but following the protestant reformation, specifically in England and France, and how this led to there being much more thought and energy being put into the body and what it looked like, as well as what it meant. However one of the main arguments to there being a preference to large bodies was the fact that society thought it represented wealth and this is something I hear in my family even today, saying that when someone looks to thin it means they look poor or as if they don’t have enough food however this is also a problem because even if discrimination or negativity and out hin bodies is not the same as Fatphobia it is still not right.
One of the main things that she does during the first chapter is the fact that she went back before there was exposure to black bodies in Europe, which started through the transatlantic slave trade, which was the reason that the distinction and preference for a certain body came from.
One of the main things that I find very interesting was the knee-jerk change that happened when black women were brought into the picture, because if they had been of a different shade, they would have been considered some of the most beautiful women and the standard to follow, but since they came in a different color, they needed to go against everything they believed in order to make themselves different. There was also a complete change in narrative, saying that the Africans had no self-control and were indulgent, and this was the reason for their bigger bodies, which is a complete hypocrisy because it was seen as a good thing in Europeans but as a terrible quality in black individuals.
There were a lot of words used by the travelers who were the ones that saw the most black bodies and they called this individuals as primitive, lazy, uncontrolled animals and this was just a way to rationalise to themselves that they were better than them and this was the reason why they could be enslaved and treated as less than which lead to there being a shift in dynamic and making two things that should have never been put together blackness and fatness and they were synonymous with each other.
The history of how this were represented were different in every country and there is a lot of history behind it because in a lot of catholic images there are pictures of black people as slaves or helpers to the superior as they would have been described white people however this was not something that happened in England until the start of the slave trade and at the beggining of black people being included and introduced into early european society through the slave trade they were a hot new fun commodity even so that even a de medici girl asked for the blackest girl they could find because she thought it was interesting however as time went by they stopped looking at them as curiosity and started looking at them with disdain and as if they were no longer interesting they had enough, however in England they did not go through this they immediately went to hatred and discrimination when they started arriving through the slave trade.
There was a lot of talk about gluttony, not just in food but also in alcohol, and this was widespread in letters travelers sent home and in authors’ writing during the Enlightenment.
During the eighteenth century in England, there was a change that many feared because it seemed to threaten how they described society, moral order, and organization, leading leaders and high-profile figures to change the rules about what should and should not be done. With these new social norms of etiquette, there were new ideas about how men and women should act in certain contexts, how they should eat and drink, and about having restraint when it came to food, and I think this was just another way to control what was considered the common masses.
Thomas Muffet was trained as a doctor, but his investigations led him more toward the idea of how to prepare food properly, what food should be consumed, and how to avoid needing or wanting food. Maybe looking at this could be connected to the current trend of fasting as a tool for weight loss.
The idea of the slender physique began as a notion of racial superiority; the aesthetic emerged in the eighteenth century, due to a new idea of the reappearance of religious movements. There was also a large amount of fear of immigration by people who were considered “part-Negroid”
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