The Metamorphoses of Fat
A History of Obesity
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- 26,99 €
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- 26,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
Georges Vigarello maps the evolution of Western ideas about fat and fat people from the Middle Ages to the present, paying particular attention to the role of science, fashion, fitness crazes, and public health campaigns in shaping these views. While hefty bodies were once a sign of power, today those who struggle to lose weight are considered poor in character and weak in mind. Vigarello traces the eventual equation of fatness with infirmity and the way we have come to define ourselves and others in terms of body type.
Vigarello begins with the medieval artists and intellectuals who treated heavy bodies as symbols of force and prosperity. He then follows the shift during the Renaissance and early modern period to courtly, medical, and religious codes that increasingly favored moderation and discouraged excess. Scientific advances in the eighteenth century also brought greater knowledge of food and the body's processes, recasting fatness as the "relaxed" antithesis of health. The body-as-mechanism metaphor intensified in the early nineteenth century, with the chemistry revolution and heightened attention to food-as-fuel, which turned the body into a kind of furnace or engine. During this period, social attitudes toward fat became conflicted, with the bourgeois male belly operating as a sign of prestige but also as a symbol of greed and exploitation, while the overweight female was admired only if she was working class. Vigarello concludes with the fitness and body-conscious movements of the twentieth century and the proliferation of personal confessions about obesity, which tied fat more closely to notions of personality, politics, taste, and class.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Folks tend to forget that at one point in human history, big was in. Fat was fashionable. Get a load of the Venus of Willendorf. Even into the Middle Ages characterized as they were by hunger and deprivation obesity "incarnate abundance, denote wealth, and symbolize health." But of course things have changed. Relying primarily on art and literature of the past 600 years, French historien du corps Vigarello (A History of Rape) demonstrates how developments in science and medicine have transformed our understanding of the functioning of the human body, and as a result, social and individual perceptions of obesity. His wide-ranging cultural analysis is compelling, but Vigarello draws many oversized conclusions, as when he lumps all overweight individuals into one "obese person" who "pushes to the extreme a central paradox of contemporary identity: to be led to identify entirely with one's own body while this body is at once both foreign and oneself." He essentially ignores the possibility of a psychologically happy obese person, and there's little talk of the many modern industries that thrive on the stigma of obesity. Cultural historians will find plenty to sink their teeth into, but general readers will find Vigarello's dense prose too tough to swallow.