Fat, Desire and Disgust in the Colonial Imagination

Bibliographic Data

ID4494529
AuthorsChristopher E Forth (University of Kansas, corresponding author)
Year2012
Volume73
Issue1
Pages211-239
Publication date2012-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHistory Workshop Journal (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1363-3554 • E-ISSN: 1477-4569
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/hwj/dbr016
PMID22830096
OpenAlexW2111952108
LanguageEN
Citations received25
References cited14

This article tracks the relatively unexamined ways in which ethnographic, travel and medical knowledge interrelated in the construction of fat stereotypes in the nineteenth century, often plotted along a temporal curve from ‘primitive’ corpulence to ‘civilized’ moderation. By showing how the complementary insights of medicine and ethnography circulated in beauty manuals, weight-loss guides and popular ethnographic books – all of which were aimed at middle-class readers and thus crystallize certain bourgeois attitudes of the time – it argues that the pronounced denigration of fat that emerged in Britain and France by the early twentieth century acquired some of its edge through this ongoing tendency to depict desire for and acceptance of fat as fundamentally ‘savage’ or ‘uncivilized’ traits. This tension between fat and ‘civilization’ was by no means univocal or stable. Rather, this analysis shows, a complex and wide-ranging series of similarities and differences, identifications and refusals can be traced between British and French perceptions of their own bodies and desires and the shortcomings they saw in foreign cultures. It sheds light as well on those aspects of their own societies that seemed ‘primitive’ in ways that bore an uncomfortable similarity to the colonial peoples they governed, demonstrating how a gendered, yet ultimately unstable, double standard was sustained for much of the nineteenth century. Finally it reveals a subtle and persistent racial subtext to the anti-fat discourses that would become more aggressive in the twentieth century and which are ubiquitous today.

Aesthetics · Anger · Art · Asceticism · Beauty · Bourgeoisie · Civilization · Colonialism · Disgust · Ethnography · Literature · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Subtext · Anthropology · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Gender Studies · Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology

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