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.
- Contents
- Introduction
- PART 1: THE MEDIEVAL GLUTTON
- 1. The Prestige of the Big Person
- Spontaneous Vigor
- What Insults?
- From Big to Very Big
- 2. Liquids, Fat, and Wind
- Matters of Fat
- The Deviations of Wind and Water
- Gout and Gout Sufferers
- The "Simplicity" of Evacuations
- 3. The Horizon of Fault
- The Clerical Model
- The Medical Model
- The Courtly Model
- 4. The Fifteenth Century and the Contrasts of Slimming
- The Ascendancy of Images
- A Social Distinction?
- Lifestyles and Conflicts
- The "Laborious" Place of Beauty
- PART 2: THE "MODERN" OAF
- 5. The Shores of Laziness
- "Modern" Activity and Passivity
- From Private Insult to Pulic Code
- Resistances and Fascinations
- The Refusal of All Skinniness
- 6. The Plural of Fat
- Dramatizing the Threat
- Fear of Apoplexy
- Fat Talk, an Abstract Discourse
- Specifying Hydropsy
- Specifying the Excess of Gout
- 7. Exploring Images, Defining Terms
- Images and Realism of Features
- The Choice of Rubens
- The Power and Powerlessness of Words
- 8. Constraining the Flesh
- The Beginning of an Evaluation
- Only the "High" Size
- Drying Out
- Vinegar and Chalk
- Belts, Blades, and Corsets
- PART 3: FROM OAFISHNESS TO POWERLESSNESS: The Enlightenment and Sensibility
- 9. Inventing Nuance
- "Tireless" Measuring and "Fruitless" Measuring
- Waist or Weight?
- Inventing the Means
- The First Specifications of Forms
- Masculine "Gravity" and Social "Gravity
- 10. Stigmatizing Powerlessness
- Introducing a New Word, Obesity
- The Bad Symptom: Insensitivity
- The Criticism of the Affluent
- The Big Bad Husband
- 11. Toning Up
- The Virtue of "Tonics"
- The Virtue of "Excitants"
- Electric Dreams
- The Nerve Regimen
- Plants or Meats?
- The Chemistry Revolution
- PART 4: THE BOURGEOIS BELLY
- 12. The Weight of Figures
- The Presence of Numbers
- Figuring the Waist-Weight Relation
- The Question of Self-Weighing
- 13. Typology Fever
- "Gastrophoric" Men, Adipose Women
- The Bourgeois and the Avowed Belly
- The Bourgeois and the Lampooned Belly
- Romantically Thin?
- 14. From Chemistry to Energy
- The Aqueous and the Adipose: New Distinctions
- Fat and Fire
- Fat and "Morbid Imminence"
- 15. From Energy to Diets
- The Consequences of Energy
- The Question of Creating an "Art of Living Well"
- The Archaic and the Modern
- The "Misfortunate" and Me: The New Status of Obesity
- PART 5: TOWARD THE "MARTYR"
- 16. The Dominance of Aesthetics
- The Spread of Weighing
- The First Conflicts Between Charts
- The Exposure of Bodies
- The Ascendancy of Women's Hips
- From the Masculine Waist to the Muscular "Discovery"
- From Aesthetics to the Conflict of Images
- 17. Clinical Obesity and Everyday Obesity
- Forms and Numerically Measured Degrees
- Retarding Nutrition and Excess Nutrition
- The Degenerative Obsession
- The Explosion of Diets
- The Socializing and Chemistry of Spa Life
- The Ascendancy of Advertisers
- 18. The Thin Revolution
- The "Defect of Civilization"
- The Dashing Slender Male
- The Dashing Slender Female
- The "Graduated" Anatomy
- The Creation of the "Monstrous"
- 19. Declaring "the Martyr"
- Revolutionizing the First Degrees
- The Multiplication of Pathologies
- The Multiplication of Therapies
- The Evidence of Therapeutic Failures
- Between Trial and Martyr
- PART 6: CHANGES IN THE CONTEMPORARY DEBATE: An Identity Problem and Insidious Evil
- The Affirmation of "Epidemic"
- "Conterattacks"?
- The Dynamics of Thinness, The Dynamics of Obesity
- The Effects of Thinness
- A "Multifactor" Universe
- The Self, the Trial, and Identity
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
- PART 4: THE BOURGEOIS BELLY
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