CAHSS Faculty Books and Book Chapters

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

Chapter Title

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

Department

Department of Literature and Modern Languages

Files

Link to Full Text

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Document Type

Book

Description

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.

ISBN

9780739114872

Publication Date

7-28-2006

Publisher

Lexington Books

City

Lanham, MD

Keywords

African diaspora, black women, body image, fat, fat-anxiety, female representation, political bodies

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | Social and Behavioral Sciences

First Page

1

Last Page

162

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