The Fat Studies Reader

Esther Rothblum, Sondra Solovay

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780814776407
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of the 2010 Distinguished Publication Award from the Association for Women in Psychology

Winner of the 2010 Susan Koppelman Award for the Best Edited Volume in Women’s Studies from the Popular Culture Association

We have all seen the segments on television news shows: A fat person walking on the sidewalk, her face out of frame so she can't be identified, as some disconcerting findings about the "obesity epidemic" stalking the nation are read by a disembodied voice. And we have seen the movies—their obvious lack of large leading actors silently speaking volumes. From the government, health industry, diet industry, news media, and popular culture we hear that we should all be focused on our weight. But is this national obsession with weight and thinness good for us? Or is it just another form of prejudice—one with especially dire consequences for many already disenfranchised groups?

For decades a growing cadre of scholars has been examining the role of body weight in society, critiquing the underlying assumptions, prejudices, and effects of how people perceive and relate to fatness. This burgeoning movement, known as fat studies, includes scholars from every field, as well as activists, artists, and intellectuals. The Fat Studies Reader is a milestone achievement, bringing together fifty-three diverse voices to explore a wide range of topics related to body weight. From the historical construction of fatness to public health policy, from job discrimination to social class disparities, from chick-lit to airline seats, this collection covers it all.

Edited by two leaders in the field, The Fat Studies Reader is an invaluable resource that provides a historical overview of fat studies, an in-depth examination of the movement's fundamental concerns, and an up-to-date look at its innovative research.

Part I
What Is Fat Studies? The Social and Historical Construction of Fatness

Welcome to Part I of The Fat Studies Reader

What Is Fat Studies? The Social and Historical Construction of Fatness

This section serves as an invitation to think about the framing of fatness in its historical context and to understand the central tenets of the field of fat studies. The authors pose challenges regarding approaching this field with the needed rigor despite vehement anti-fat attitudes and indoctrination.

After reading these chapters consider the following discussion questions:

What is the field of fat studies?

Why does this area of academic inquiry exist?

How have mainstream attitudes toward fat changed over the last fifty years? Over the last ten years?

How have mainstream attitudes toward fat people changed over the last fifty years? Over the last ten years?

What, if anything, is wrong with the mainstream approach to fatness?

What market forces have shaped societal attitudes regarding fat and fat people?

Who is privileged by the current construction of fatness?

Who is disadvantaged by the current construction of fatness?

Is a person’s weight, generally, within the control of the individual? What relevance does this question have for the social construction of fatness?

Identify a significant experience in your life (or in the life of a friend or loved one) and explain how it would have been different if the mainstream attitude toward fat was one of acceptance.

1
The Inner Corset

A Brief History of Fat in the United States

Laura Fraser

Once upon a time, a man with a thick gold watch swaying from a big, round paunch was the very picture of American prosperity and vigor. Accordingly, a hundred years ago, a beautiful woman had plump cheeks and arms, and she wore a corset and even a bustle to emphasize her full, substantial hips. Women were sexy if they were heavy. In those days, Americans knew that a layer of fat was a sign that you could afford to eat well and that you stood a better chance of fighting off infectious diseases than most people. If you were a woman, having that extra adipose blanket also meant that you were probably fertile, and warm to cuddle up next to on chilly nights.

Between the 1880s and 1920s, that pleasant image of fat thoroughly changed in the United States. Some began early on to hint that fat was a health risk. In 1894, Woods Hutchinson, a medical professor who wrote for women’s magazines, defended fat against this new point of view. “Adipose,” he wrote, “while often pictured as a veritable Frankenstein, born of and breeding disease, sure to ride its possessor to death sooner or later, is really a most harmless, healthful, innocent tissue” (Hutchinson, 1894, p. 395). Hutchinson reassured his Cosmopolitan readers that fat was not only benign, but also attractive, and that if a poll of beautiful women were taken in any city, there would be at least three times as many plump ones as slender ones. He advised them that no amount of starving or exercise—which were just becoming popular as means of weight control—would change more than 10 percent of a person’s body size anyway. “The fat man tends to remain fat, the thin woman to stay thin—and both in perfect health—in spite of everything they can do,” he said in that article.

But by 1926, Hutchinson, who was by then a past president of the American Academy of Medicine, had to defend fat against fashion, too, and he was showing signs of strain. “In this present onslaught upon one of the most peaceable, useful and law-abiding of all our tissues,” he told readers of the Saturday Evening Post, “fashion has apparently the backing of grave physicians, of food reformers and physical trainers, and even of great insurance companies, all chanting in unison the new commandment of fashion: ‘Thou shalt be thin!’” (Hutchinson, 1926, p. 60).

Hutchinson mourned this trend, and was dismayed that young girls were ridding themselves of their roundness and plumpness of figure. He tried to understand the new view that people took toward fat: “It is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual disgrace, of laziness, of self-indulgence,” he explained in that article, but he remained unconvinced. Instead, he longed for a more cheerful period in the not-so-distant past when a little fat never hurt anyone, and he darkly warned that some physicians were deliberately underfeeding girls and young women solely for the purpose of giving them a more svelte figure. “The longed-for slender and boyish figure is becoming a menace,” Hutchinson (1926, p. 60) wrote, “not only to the present, but also the future generations.”

And so it would. But why did the fashion for plumpness change so dramatically during those years? What happened that caused Americans to alter their tastes, not only to admire thinner figures for a time, but for the next century, culminating in fin de siècle extremes of thinness, where women’s magazines in the 1990s would print ads featuring gaunt models side-by-side with photo essays on anorexia?

Many things were happening at once, and with dizzying speed. Foremost was a changing economy: In the late 1800s, for the first time, ample amounts of food were available to more and more people who had to do less and less work to eat. The agricultural economy, based on family farms and home workshops, shifted to an industrial one. A huge influx of immigrants—many of them genetically shorter and rounder than the earlier American settlers—fueled the industrial machine. People moved to cities to do factory work and service jobs, stopped growing their own food, and relied more on store-bought goods. Large companies began to process food products, distribute them via railroads, and use refrigeration to keep perishables fresh. Food became more accessible and convenient to all but the poorest families. People who once had too little to eat now had plenty, and those who had a tendency to put on weight began to do so. When it became possible for people of modest means to become plump, being fat no longer was a sign of prestige. Well-to-do Americans of northern European extraction wanted to be able to distinguish themselves, physically and racially, from stockier immigrants. As anthropologist Margaret Mackenzie notes, the status symbols flipped: it became chic to be thin and all too ordinary to be overweight (personal communication, June 12, 1996).

In this new environment, older cultural undercurrents suspicious of fat began to surface. Europeans had long considered slenderness a sign of class distinction and finer sensibilities, and Americans began to follow suit. In Europe, during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, many artists and writers—the poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and authors Emily Brontë, Edgar Allan Poe, and Anton Chekhov—had tuberculosis, which made them sickly thin. Members of the upper classes believed that having tuberculosis, and being slender itself, were signs that one possessed a delicate, intellectual, and superior nature. “For snobs and parvenus and social climbers, TB was the one index of being genteel, delicate, [and] sensitive,” writes essayist Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor (1977, p. 28). “It was glamorous to look sickly.” So interested was the poet Lord Byron in looking as fashionably ill as the other Romantic poets that he embarked on a series of obsessive diets, consuming only biscuits and water, or vinegar and potatoes, and succeeded in becoming quite thin. Byron—who, at five feet six inches tall, with a clubfoot that prevented him from walking much, weighed over two hundred pounds in his youth—disdained fat in others. “A woman,” he wrote, “should never be seen eating or drinking, unless it be lobster salad and champagne, the only truly feminine and becoming viands” (quoted in Schwartz, 1986, p. 38). Aristocratic European women, thrilled with the romantic figure that Byron cut, took his diet advice and despaired of appearing fat. Aristocratic Americans, trying to imitate Europeans, adopted their enthusiasm for champagne and slenderness.

Americans believed that it was not only a sign of class to be thin, but also a sign of morality. There was a long tradition in American culture that suggested that indulging the body and its appetites was immoral, and that denying the flesh was a sure way to become closer to God. Puritans such as the minister Cotton Mather frequently fasted to prove their worthiness and to cleanse themselves of their sins. Benjamin Franklin, in his Poor Richard’s Almanack, chided his readers to eat lightly to please not only God, but also a new divinity, Reason: “Wouldst thou enjoy a long life, a healthy Body, and a Vigorous Mind, and be acquainted also with the wonderful works of God? Labour in the first place to bring thy Appetite into Subjection to Reason” (Franklin, 1970, p. 238). Franklin’s attitude toward food not only reveals a puritanical distrust of appetite as overly sensual, but also presaged diets that would attempt to bring eating in line with rational, scientific calculations. “The Difficulty lies, in finding out an exact Measure;” he wrote, “but eat for Necessity, not Pleasure, for Lust knows not where Necessity ends” (p. 238).

At the end of the 19th century, as Hutchinson observed, science was also helping to shape the new slender ideal. Physicians came to believe that they were able to arrive at an exact measure of human beings; they could count calories, weigh people on scales, calculate “ideal” weights, and advise those who deviated from that ideal that they could change themselves. Physicians were both following and encouraging the trend for thinness. In the 1870s, after all, when plumpness was in vogue, physicians had encouraged people to gain weight. Two of the most distinguished doctors of the age, George Beard and S. Weir Mitchell, believed that excessive thinness caused American women to succumb to a wide variety nervous disorders, and that a large number of fat cells was absolutely necessary to achieve a balanced personality (Banner, 1983, p. 113). But when the plump figure fell from favor, physicians found new theories to support the new fashion. They hastily developed treatments—such as thyroid, arsenic, and strychnine—to prescribe to their increasing numbers of weight loss patients, many of whom were not exactly corpulent, but who were more than willing to part with their pennies along with their pounds.

As the 20th century got underway, other cultural changes made slenderness seem desirable. When many women ventured out of their homes and away from their strict roles as mothers, they left behind the plump and reproductive physique, which began to seem old-fashioned next to a thinner, freer, more modern body. The new consumer culture encouraged the trend toward thinness with fashion illustrations and ads featuring slim models; advertisers learned early to offer women an unattainable dream of thinness and beauty to sell more products. In short, a cultural obsession with weight became firmly established in the United States when several disparate factors that favored a desire for thinness—economic status symbols, morality, medicine, modernity, changing women’s roles, and consumerism—all collided at once.

Thinness is, at its heart, a peculiarly American preoccupation. Europeans admire slenderness, but without our Puritanism they have more relaxed and moderate attitudes about food, eating, and body size (the British are most like us in both being heavy and fixating on weight loss schemes). In countries where people do not have quite enough to eat, and where women remain in traditional roles, plumpness is still widely admired. Other westernized countries have developed a slender ideal, but for the most part they have imported it from the United States. No other culture suffers from the same wild anxieties about weight, dieting, and exercise as we do because they do not share our history.

The thin ideal that developed in the United States from the 1880s to 1920s was not just a momentary shift in fashion; it was a monumental turning point in the way that women’s bodies were appraised by men and experienced by women. The change can be traced through the evolution of three ideal types: the plump Victorian woman, the athletic but curvaceous Gibson Girl, and the boyishly straight-bodied flapper. By 1930, American women knew how very important it was for them to be thin. From then on, despite moments when voluptuousness was admired again (e.g., Marilyn Monroe), American women could never be too thin.

NOTE

This chapter is adapted from the book Losing It: America’s Obsession with Weight and the Industry That Feeds on It (New York: Dutton, 1997). © Laura Fraser. Hillel Schwartz’s Never Satisfied provided a good deal of background material for this chapter, and is an excellent resources on the history of dieting. Lois Banner’s meticulously researched American Beauty traces American beauty ideals, and was also very helpful in preparing this chapter.

REFERENCES

Banner, L. (1983). American Beauty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Franklin, B. (1970). The Complete Poor Richard Almanacks, Vol. 1: 1733–1747. Barre, MA: Imprint Society.

Hutchinson, W. (1894, June). “Fat and Its Follies.” Cosmopolitan. 395.

Hutchinson, W. (1926, August 21). “Fat and Fashion.” The Saturday Evening Post. 60.

Schwartz, H. (1986). Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies, and Fat. New York: The Free Press.

Sontag, S. (1977). Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

2
Fattening Queer History

Where Does Fat History Go from Here?

Elena Levy-Navarro

Until recently, fat studies has been largely dominated by an interest in contemporary politics of fatness. Although such work has been and continues to be important, other social justice movements teach us that we need to turn to history as well. The turn to history, if performed in a self-conscious way, can sustain a fat-positive movement even as it helps us to imagine, and thus to create, alternatives to what sometimes seems like an all-too-oppressive present. In this chapter, I draw on the field of queer historiography to suggest some of the ways that histories can work with fat activism to intervene constructively in our own historical moment. I realize that the gay and lesbian community is not free from fat-phobia; indeed, those especially interested in assimilation are often even vociferously fat-phobic. The queer historiography that I discuss here embraces a more expansive definition of “queer” that is more expressly inclusive of all who challenge normativity, including fat people. In what follows, I consider what I believe should be the two main tasks of fat histories. First, we need fat histories to look to the past in order to critique the constructs that oppress us now. We should, for example, give “obesity” a history so that we make it clear that the category currently applied to our bodies is not natural or “real.” Second, we need more creative historical interventions to complement such genealogical ones because only the latter can help us imagine new relationships with our bodies and the bodies of others.

I can begin to reflect on the role that history can play in creating fat-positive communities because there already exist a significant body of fat histories, including constructionist fat histories. Recent interest in the subject in the United States is fueled by the contemporary fat-panic that has taken hold, especially since the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Bureaucrats and public officials draw on our own generalized fear and anxiety, warning us that the “obesity epidemic” poses the greatest threat to the national security of the United States. U.S. Surgeon General Koop has repeatedly called it the “terror within” (Carmona, 2003).

Within this atmosphere, fat histories have proliferated: Bodies Out of Bounds, a collection of essays that includes some on historical topics, edited by Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco (2001); Peter Stearns’s Fat History (1997), Sander Gilman’s Fat Boys (2004); and Christopher E. Forth’s and Ana Carden-Coyne’s Cultures of the Abdomen (2005). Despite their methodological diversity, these works cumulatively expose the extent to which “obesity” is a cultural construction. As a whole, they constitute the beginnings of what must be a larger project to provide a genealogical history of oppressive concepts, especially biomedical ones like “obesity.” Just as the queer-inflected studies in the history of sexuality have given a history to concepts, like “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality,” that are oppressive insofar as they are taken to be universal and transhistorical, so too fat histories must give a history to oppressive constructs such as “obesity” and the broader construct of “health.” To give such concepts a history is to consider when they were invented, when they began to have broad appeal, and how they have changed through the years.

A fat history should explore the reasons why these categories are emotionally appealing to many in our culture. The category “obesity” is appealing because from its inception it has played a central role in reinforcing hegemonic power relations. More particularly, “obesity” has helped to define what it was and is to be “white” or “American,” just as it helped to define what it was to be nonwhite or ethnic. This area has yet to be explored, although several histories touch briefly on the way that “obesity” has helped to define the nonwhite, the non-western, and the non-American. As Sander Gilman explains, nineteenth-century racialized discourse distinguished between the type of the Jew and non-Jew by the “fact” that the former was fat (Gilman, 2004, p. 49). Hillel Schwartz suggests a similar relationship in Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies, and Fat (1986). Widespread fear of “obesity” coincided in the United States with a cultural anxiety over the influx of immigrant groups, espec...