The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women's Unruly Political Bodies

by Andrea Elizabeth Shaw

Despite the West's privileging of slenderness as an aesthetic ideal, the African Diaspora has historically displayed a resistance to the Western European and North American indulgence in "fat anxiety." The Embodiment of Disobedience explores the ways in which the African Diaspora has rejected the West's efforts to impose imperatives of slenderness and mass market fat-anxiety. Author Andrea Shaw explores the origins and contradictions of this phenomenon, especially the cultural deviations in beauty criteria and the related social and cultural practices. Unique in its examination of how both fatness and blackness interact on literary cultural planes, this book also offers a diasporic scope that develops previously unexamined connections among female representations throughout the African Diaspora.

Genres: Nonfiction, Fat Studies, Fat, Anti Racist, Feminism, Race, Academic

162 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Kimberly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting. I don't really agree with all of the author's points, but they are worth giving some thought to.

[Java · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was floored to learn in traditional African,Polynesian and Tunisian cultures,sending young soon to be brides to “fattening camps” was how you not only put a surplus value on yourself but it was a commodity and ritual.This alone just shows how preposterous the prejudice of fat shaming is and these western Eurocentric beauty ideologies are a hoax.

[Claire Abs]

to-read