Fat Shame Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture [Hardcover]

One of Choice's Significant University Press Titles for Undergraduates, 2010-2011

To be fat hasn’t always occasioned the level of hysteria that this condition receives today and indeed was once considered an admirable trait.Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Cultureexplores this arc, from veneration to shame, examining the historic roots of our contemporary anxiety about fatness. Tracing the cultural denigration of fatness to the mid 19th century, Amy Farrell argues that the stigma associated with a fat body preceded any health concerns about a large body size. Firmly in place by the time the diet industry began to flourish in the 1920s, the development of fat stigma was related not only to cultural anxieties that emerged during the modern period related to consumer excess, but, even more profoundly, to prevailing ideas about race, civilization and evolution. For 19th and early 20th century thinkers, fatness was a key marker of inferiority, of an uncivilized, barbaric, and primitive body. This ideathat fatness is a sign of a primitive personendures today, fueling both our $60 billion “war on fat” and our cultural distress over the “obesity epidemic.”