In Sabrina Strings’s 2018 release Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia she traces the beginnings of our fear of fat bodies back to the proliferation of Protestant religious dogma in North America and African chattel slave trade, offering that not until theology converged with an influx of African bodies in America did fatness become part of a medicalized public health ideology. She states, “The phobia about fatness and the preference for thinness have not, principally or historically, been about health. Instead, they have been one way the body has been used to craft and
...more
