Sabrina Strings is Chancellor’s Fellow and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. She was a recipient of the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship with a joint appointment in the School of Public Health and Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.
"This accessible academic title... makes a heavily cited case that
modern society’s idolization of thinness is less rooted in medical
science than in racist ideas born during the Enlightenment."
*The New York Times*
"Strings seeks to illuminate how our current fat phobia is rooted,
specifically, in a fear of black women. [She] persuasively shows
that ... the link between fatness, racial otherness and,
especially, female blackness, looms prominently in the American
cultural imagination."
*Times Literary Supplement*
"A much-needed examination of the racism and colonialism embedded
within society’s imagined dangers of fat (black) bodies."
*Library Journal*
"Once upon a time, fat bodies were celebrated in art, in newspapers
and magazines, and in medical journals, but that all changed during
the Enlightenment Era of the 18th century when fatness was
purposefully intertwined with the idea that people of color were
racially inferior savages. Sabrina Strings’s incredible book
analyzes how that shift continued to plague Black women. . . .
Fearing the Black Body makes the convincing argument that the thin
ideal has always been racist."
*Bitch Media*
"Fearing the Black Body is a joy to read, smooth and erudite. And
it is also a joy to experience, to feel Strings pulling the strands
of the historical web closer and closer so that their knots and
tangled intersections are clear to see. Most important, though, is
the intellectual satisfaction it provides in giving a clear and
well-argued convincing rationale for the origins, reach, and
astonishing success of a bias whose history, as it had previously
been presented, was patchy and inadequate."
*Nursing Clio*
"Traces centuries of racist pseudoscience up to the 20th century,
demonstrating that today’s ideal of thinness is inherently both
sexist and racist."
*Colorlines*
"[A] thoroughly researched exploration of the historical
relationship between race-and weight-related prejudices...This
fascinating and carefully constructed argument persuasively
establishes a heretofore unexplored connection between racism and
Western standards for body size, making it a worthy contribution to
the social sciences."
*Publishers Weekly*
"As a sociologist with a rich understanding of social history and
cultural studies, Sabrina Strings asks and answers new and
immensely generative questions about the ways of thinking that rule
the world. Her astute analyses reveal the ways in which seemingly
innocent aesthetic judgments about womens bodies register the
effects of deep historical currents of thought and practice."
*George Lipsitz, author of How Racism Takes Place*
"In Fearing the Fat Black Body, Sabrina Strings fills what has long
been a gaping hole in scholarship on fatness and body size. Her
careful historiographical exploration of the racialized roots of
anti-fat, pro-thin bias should figure prominently in any academic,
medical, political, or popular discussion of the contemporary
American 'Obesity Epidemic.' In looking at the complex
intersections of race, gender, class, and morality in current
American framings of fatness and size, Strings does not simply add
race to the conversation but shows that any analysis of body size
that does not center race is necessarily incomplete."
*Natalie Boero,Author of Killer Fat: Media, Medicine and Morals in
the American Obesity Epidemic*
"This is an important, deeply-researched study of the racialized
roots of fat denigration. It should be a must-read for scholars
whose work focuses on the history of race, of gender, and of the
bodyas well as by anyone who is interested in our deeply
problematic contemporary culture of dieting and body shame."
*Amy Erdman Farrell,Author of Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in
American Culture*
"A meticulous work that puts the past in conversation with the
future and demonstrates how the desires of a few can be forcefully
encroached upon others until they hold true for many ... reminds
readers that policing weight, a la Foucault’s 'biopolitics,' is
almost always about control as much as it is about a 'preferred
size.'"
*American Journal of Sociology*
"Strings uses the methods of process-tracing and historical
narrative to create a work of impressive scope that moves beyond
the consensus of feminist scholars ... [Strings] has shifted the
chronology of gendered and racialized anti-fatness, inviting
scholars to discover sources that can amplify non-white and
non-elite voices in this longue durée of fat history."
*Journal of Interdisciplinary History*
"Fearing the Black Body participates in a critical discourse that
exposes the convergence of anxieties about race and fatness as it
manifests in our current fat phobia. The text successfully
demonstrates how the Black body has been subject to ongoing
surveillance, and more specifically how it has been co-opted as a
site where struggles around race and class issues play out."
*Fat Studies*
"Dr. Sabrina Strings analyzes with keen insight and critical nuance
the origins of anti-fatness and its relationship to racial
subjugation ... a groundbreaking work."
*Resources for Gender and Women’s Studies: A Feminist Review*
"Fearing the Black Body demonstrates how black women’s bodies have
historically been marked controversial…Strings’ work is also
relevant to the awareness of black women in feminism, given how
heavily women’s body positivity factors into it."
*The Journal of Core Communication*
"Strings’s work is deeply interdisciplinary, and some of the most
compelling arguments for the relevance of these final chapters can
be found off the page. In this way, Fearing the Black Body opens
the possibility for us to consider how present-day attitudes toward
race, health, and wellness are connected to older and complex
historical narratives."
*Early American Literature*
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