Fearing the Black Body

The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia

Sabrina Strings

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781479831098
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

How the female body has been racialized for over two hundred years
There is an obesity epidemic in this country and poor black women are particularly stigmatized as "diseased" and a burden on the public health care system. This is only the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat black women, which Sabrina Strings shows took root more than two hundred years ago.
Strings weaves together an eye-opening historical narrative ranging from the Renaissance to the current moment, analyzing important works of art, newspaper and magazine articles, and scientific literature and medical journals—where fat bodies were once praised—showing that fat phobia, as it relates to black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of "savagery" and racial inferiority.
The author argues that the contemporary ideal of slenderness is, at its very core, racialized and racist. Indeed, it was not until the early twentieth century, when racialized attitudes against fatness were already entrenched in the culture, that the medical establishment began its crusade against obesity.
An important and original work, Fearing the Black Body argues convincingly that fat phobia isn't about health at all, but rather a means of using the body to validate race, class, and gender prejudice.

How the female body has been racialized for over two hundred years
There is an obesity epidemic in this country and poor black women are particularly stigmatized as "diseased" and a burden on the public health care system. This is only the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat black women, which Sabrina Strings shows took root more than two hundred years ago.
Strings weaves together an eye-opening historical narrative ranging from the Renaissance to the current moment, analyzing important works of art, newspaper and magazine articles, and scientific literature and medical journals—where fat bodies were once praised—showing that fat phobia, as it relates to black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of "savagery" and racial inferiority.
The author argues that the contemporary ideal of slenderness is, at its very core, racialized and racist. Indeed, it was not until the early twentieth century, when racialized attitudes against fatness were already entrenched in the culture, that the medical establishment began its crusade against obesity.
An important and original work, Fearing the Black Body argues convincingly that fat phobia isn't about health at all, but rather a means of using the body to validate race, class, and gender prejudice.

PART I

The Beauty of the Robust

1

Being Venus

I have seen some amongst them whose whole bodies have been so well-built and handsome that I never beheld finer figures, nor can I conceive how they might be bettered, so excellent were their arms, and all their limbs.

—Albrecht Dürer on the African physique, 1528

Her name was Katharina. In her portrait, drawn in 1521, she wears a simple headdress with a single jewel in the center. Her youth is skillfully captured in the roundness and fullness of her cheeks. Her plump body is covered by an unadorned V-neck shirt and a modest, high-collared frock. The entire effect is one of demure and unassuming beauty. Katharina’s eyes are downcast, giving the twenty-year-old an air of solemnity and gravity that might have seemed out of place were she not a slave.1

Katharina lived in Antwerp, Belgium. She was one of two slaves owned by João Brandão, the trade representative to the king of Portugal. Albrecht Dürer, the renowned Renaissance artist, happened to be passing through Antwerp in 1521, creating sketches and woodcuts that he sold around the city. On a brief visit with the Brandão family, he encountered Katharina, and was sufficiently moved by her comeliness to immortalize her in silverpoint.

The artist’s decision to draw the young African woman may have seemed inconsequential at the time. Hers was one of many sketches of Africans that Dürer completed during his lifetime. Nevertheless, his depiction of Katharina was a momentous event. Portrait of an African Woman, Katharina became the first known portrait of a black person in Antwerp. And it was produced at a time in Dürer’s illustrious career during which, after years of studying the human form, he had come to the conclusion that what made something beautiful could never be fully comprehended or definitively laid out. For reasons he could not describe, Katharina too was a beauty.2

Figure 1.1. Albrecht Dürer, Portrait of an African Woman, Katharina, 1521. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

A great deal has been written about the aesthetic standards for women that prevailed during the Renaissance. While much of this literature shows that larger, fleshier physiques were prized, it also shows that what was considered attractive was not just about the size of the body, but also its shape. Proportionate and well-rounded physiques were revered, as they were believed to reveal something of the beauty and mystery of divinity. A woman might find herself being considered “too thin” or “too fat,” given the prevailing preference for proportionate—often implying “medium”—physiques. But if a lady had to err on one side of the scale, a fat woman was generally preferred to one who might be derisively labeled “lean” or “bony.”

Comparatively fewer works, however, have explored how the growing population of black women who came to Europe as part of the slave trade affected representations of female beauty during the High Renaissance (late fifteenth to mid-sixteenth centuries). This is not a minor oversight; the most famous artistic expressions of female beauty during this period derived from northern and western Italy and the Low Countries. The major cities in these regions simultaneously served as key ports of the expanding slave trade. Consequently, black women often appear in meditations on beauty by the era’s most important artists.

The burgeoning population of African women as slaves and domestic servants in northern and western Europe between 1490 and 1590 frequently led to the incorporation of black women into the lexicon of what was defined as “perfect female beauty.” The inclusion of black women as beautiful in both high art and aesthetic discourse was neither simple nor without problems. African women were described as well-proportioned and plump, and consequently viewed as physically appealing. Yet the burgeoning discourse about Africans suggested that their purported distinctive facial features made them facially unattractive. Black women were further denigrated due to their servile status. Therefore, despite black women’s reputation as well-formed beauties, their purported African physiognomy and status as slaves became the early basis of “social distinctions” between low-status African women and their high-status European counterparts.3

What follows is a discussion of notions of perfect female beauty in three of the most trafficked centers of artistic ingenuity: western Italy, northern Italy, and the Low Countries. In all three, the correct model of female beauty was a central topic of conversation. Well-apportioned female figures were venerated throughout these areas. However, in two locations—Antwerp, Belgium, and Venice, Italy—the mushrooming population of black women led to their inclusion as beauties of low status and questionable facial allure, but having the right proportions and just enough embonpoint to titillate European sensibilities.

* * *

Katharina was known by Dürer simply as the “Mooress.”4 His journal tells us almost nothing about what motivated him to sketch the young African woman, nor do we learn about the duration or substance of their encounter. What we do learn from the journal is that Dürer regarded himself as an artist and philosopher of the human form. As such, he took an exceptional interest in the growing numbers of Africans arriving in northern Europe as part of the slave trade.5

By the mid-fifteenth century, African slaves were being shuttled to European ports by the hundreds. The Portuguese, who in the 1440s became the first European nation to enter the African slave trade, maintained a dominant position until 1492, when Columbus made contact with the Americas.6 Although Spanish and Flemish traders mounted a challenge to the Portuguese slave-trading monopoly between the 1450s and 1470s, by the end of the century most of the Africans making their way into Europe did so in the holds of vessels manned by Portuguese traders. The Portuguese were thus largely responsible for introducing African slaves into northern Europe, and some of the earliest Africans to be seen in the Low Countries arrived as slaves to Portuguese merchants.7 This appeared to be the case with Katharina and her owner, João Brandão. Antwerp, where they were settled, had been a key trading hub in the fifteenth century. By the sixteenth century, the city became “the center of a new global economy of luxury goods.”8 Slaves themselves were an important form of luxury commodity in the new economy and were common among wealthy merchants.

Dürer’s interest in Katharina within this sociocultural milieu was galvanized by his long-professed desire to understand the contours of human beauty. By the time he visited Antwerp in the early sixteenth century, Dürer had abandoned the idea of locating a singular ideal, concluding that beauty was found in the differences between the various peoples of the world. This conception of beauty-in-difference was inspired, in part, by the gospel. In Dürer’s reading of the scripture, God had made all of mankind equal. And yet the Creator produced a tremendous amount of human biodiversity. The task of the portraitist, Dürer believed, was to identify the “big differences” between the various nations of mankind. Doing this would help the artist grasp the beauty of humanity in all its fullness and richness. According to Dürer, “The Creator fashioned men once and for all as they must [sic] be, and I hold that the perfection of form and beauty is contained in the sum of all men.”9

These sentiments were articulated about the time that Dürer wrote what was titled an “Aesthetic Excursus” detailing the major difference between Africans and Europeans. This document, written sometime between 1512 and 1515, was eventually tacked on to the end of the third book of his Four Books on Human Proportion, published posthumously in 1528. At that time, the artist claimed that the major difference between blacks and whites was to be found in the features and attractiveness of the face.

Thus thou findest two families of mankind, white and black; and a difference between them is to be marked.… Negro faces are seldom beautiful because of their very flat noses and thick lips.10

This tract was written before Dürer’s encounter with Katharina in Antwerp. It is likely that the artist relied on stereotypical accounts of “African physiognomy” that were in circulation during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.11 These accounts served to underscore the African’s inferior social position as the slave trade expanded.12

Indeed, there is reason to believe that Dürer’s disdain for African features in the “Aesthetic Excursus” was at least partly motivated by the general tone of European high art and philosophy at the time. In another of his sketches, the Berlin Study Sheet, made during the same period, Dürer drafted a row of humanity that shows “prototypical” faces of the various nations of mankind. The artist placed his version of the “ideal” or “normative” European face at the forefront of humanity.13 The final “African” visage with its exaggerated features, which some scholars argue represented a cross between a Negro and an ape, looks back warily at the rest of humanity. Historians suggest that Dürer was likely inspired by Leonardo’s and other artists’ haunting renderings of grotesque wild men.14

After his visit to Antwerp, however, Dürer appeared to revise this position. In his Portrait of Katharina and his sketch of Rodrigo, a black man and another of João Brandão’s slaves, the artist portrayed the models’ faces with dignity and solemnity. They also held a type of beauty that the artist suggested he couldn’t quite specify.15

If Dürer wavered on the question of the black face, he was resolute when it came to the beauty of the black body. Like many artists, Dürer believed that God had bestowed upon Africans a bevy of physical blessings. The limbs of Africans, he claimed, were shapely and well formed. And there was an elegance to be found in their well-apportioned physiques. In the “Aesthetic Excursus,” alongside his derision of the African face, the artist intoned,

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