Why did Leora love this book?
I track instances on Instagram of dress-coding—when girls and women are disciplined for wearing clothes considered “too” revealing. This occurs in schools with rules, for example, forbidding tank tops or crop tops, and on airplanes (for some reason, the sight of a woman wearing comfortable clothes is a trigger for many travelers). Black women are singled out as sexualized most often.
To find out why, I turned to this eye-opening book. Strings demonstrates a connection between racism and anxiety over fatness. She traces how Black and white women’s bodies came to be seen as essentially different from each other. Fatness became stigmatized to make the case that white women’s bodies were superior.
This book showed me how to regard health concerns from a racial and gendered lens.
6 authors picked Fearing the Black Body as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Winner, 2020 Body and Embodiment Best Publication Award, given by the American Sociological Association
Honorable Mention, 2020 Sociology of Sex and Gender Distinguished Book Award, given by the American Sociological Association
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…