The evolution of Venus

[bloodygranuaile]

For the politics book club (currently the only one I’m still trying to participate in at least semi-regularly–there’s a lot going on right one) we’re reading Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia. I was initially worried the material would be too heavy for the amount of brain I have right now (which is not much), but it’s really not–it does obviously cover quite a lot of very unpleasant subject matter, as it is about racism and body policing and fatphobia and dodgy medical shenanigans, but it’s pretty accessibly written and the material is really fascinating. It’s a particularly interesting journey through not just the changes in beauty ideals but also the changes in who sets them–the earlier part of the book is largely art history, where discourse about ideal beauty was largely the province of (overwhelmingly male) painting masters. From there we move into the philosophers that invented “race science,” the rise of women’s magazines, and eventually the establishment of the medical field as a main modern authority on bodily ideals and the invention of the “obesity epidemic.” The main thread followed here, which differentiates it from some of the other writing I’ve read on fatphobia, is the way in which it follows the evolution of ideas about white women’s bodies and black women’s bodies specifically, and the ways in which they have been played off each other to pathologize black women and discipline white women. Overall I found it a really fascinating read, and I think we’ll have an interesting discussion about it next weekend.