Fearing the Black Body

Fearing the Black Body PDF Author: Sabrina Strings
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479831093
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Winner, 2020 Body and Embodiment Best Publication Award, given by the American Sociological Association Honorable Mention, 2020 Sociology of Sex and Gender Distinguished Book Award, given by the American Sociological Association How the female body has been racialized for over two hundred years There is an obesity epidemic in this country and poor black women are particularly stigmatized as “diseased” and a burden on the public health care system. This is only the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat black women, which Sabrina Strings shows took root more than two hundred years ago. Strings weaves together an eye-opening historical narrative ranging from the Renaissance to the current moment, analyzing important works of art, newspaper and magazine articles, and scientific literature and medical journals—where fat bodies were once praised—showing that fat phobia, as it relates to black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of “savagery” and racial inferiority. The author argues that the contemporary ideal of slenderness is, at its very core, racialized and racist. Indeed, it was not until the early twentieth century, when racialized attitudes against fatness were already entrenched in the culture, that the medical establishment began its crusade against obesity. An important and original work, Fearing the Black Body argues convincingly that fat phobia isn’t about health at all, but rather a means of using the body to validate race, class, and gender prejudice.

Fearing the Black Body

Fearing the Black Body PDF Author: Sabrina Strings
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479831093
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book

Book Description
Winner, 2020 Body and Embodiment Best Publication Award, given by the American Sociological Association Honorable Mention, 2020 Sociology of Sex and Gender Distinguished Book Award, given by the American Sociological Association How the female body has been racialized for over two hundred years There is an obesity epidemic in this country and poor black women are particularly stigmatized as “diseased” and a burden on the public health care system. This is only the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat black women, which Sabrina Strings shows took root more than two hundred years ago. Strings weaves together an eye-opening historical narrative ranging from the Renaissance to the current moment, analyzing important works of art, newspaper and magazine articles, and scientific literature and medical journals—where fat bodies were once praised—showing that fat phobia, as it relates to black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of “savagery” and racial inferiority. The author argues that the contemporary ideal of slenderness is, at its very core, racialized and racist. Indeed, it was not until the early twentieth century, when racialized attitudes against fatness were already entrenched in the culture, that the medical establishment began its crusade against obesity. An important and original work, Fearing the Black Body argues convincingly that fat phobia isn’t about health at all, but rather a means of using the body to validate race, class, and gender prejudice.

Killing the Black Body

Killing the Black Body PDF Author: Dorothy Roberts
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0804152594
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Killing the Black Body remains a rallying cry for education, awareness, and action on extending reproductive justice to all women. It is as crucial as ever, even two decades after its original publication. "A must-read for all those who claim to care about racial and gender justice in America." —Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow In 1997, this groundbreaking book made a powerful entrance into the national conversation on race. In a media landscape dominated by racially biased images of welfare queens and crack babies, Killing the Black Body exposed America’s systemic abuse of Black women’s bodies. From slave masters’ economic stake in bonded women’s fertility to government programs that coerced thousands of poor Black women into being sterilized as late as the 1970s, these abuses pointed to the degradation of Black motherhood—and the exclusion of Black women’s reproductive needs in mainstream feminist and civil rights agendas. “Compelling. . . . Deftly shows how distorted and racist constructions of black motherhood have affected politics, law, and policy in the United States.” —Ms.

Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912

Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912 PDF Author: Thomas S. Kuhn
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226458008
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
"A masterly assessment of the way the idea of quanta of radiation became part of 20th-century physics. . . . The book not only deals with a topic of importance and interest to all scientists, but is also a polished literary work, described (accurately) by one of its original reviewers as a scientific detective story."—John Gribbin, New Scientist "Every scientist should have this book."—Paul Davies, New Scientist

Black is the Body

Black is the Body PDF Author: Emily Bernard
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0451493028
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
"A collection of essays on race"--Provided by publisher.

Black Bodies, White Gazes

Black Bodies, White Gazes PDF Author: George Yancy
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442258357
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Following the deaths of Trayvon Martin and other black youths in recent years, students on campuses across America have joined professors and activists in calling for justice and increased awareness that Black Lives Matter. In this second edition of his trenchant and provocative book, George Yancy offers students the theoretical framework they crave for understanding the violence perpetrated against the Black body. Drawing from the lives of Ossie Davis, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as his own experience, and fully updated to account for what has transpired since the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, Yancy provides an invaluable resource for students and teachers of courses in African American Studies, African American History, Philosophy of Race, and anyone else who wishes to examine what it means to be Black in America.

The Black Body in Ecstasy

The Black Body in Ecstasy PDF Author: Jennifer C. Nash
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822377039
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
In The Black Body in Ecstasy, Jennifer C. Nash rewrites black feminism's theory of representation. Her analysis moves beyond black feminism's preoccupation with injury and recovery to consider how racial fictions can create a space of agency and even pleasure for black female subjects. Nash's innovative readings of hardcore pornographic films from the 1970s and 1980s develop a new method of analyzing racialized pornography that focuses on black women's pleasures in blackness: delights in toying with and subverting blackness, moments of racialized excitement, deliberate enactments of hyperbolic blackness, and humorous performances of blackness that poke fun at the fantastical project of race. Drawing on feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, and media studies, Nash creates a new black feminist interpretative practice, one attentive to the messy contradictions—between delight and discomfort, between desire and degradation—at the heart of black pleasures.

Black Body

Black Body PDF Author: Radhika Mohanram
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816635436
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
From Algeria to the Antipodes, the female black body, when viewed through the colonial lens, represents all that is dangerous and unknown in an alien land. Its true significance can be understood only through the concept of space, because a "black body" is understood as "black" only outside of its context, its "place" -- and a female black body is doubly out of place. Yet for all its importance to racial identity, Radhika Mohanram argues, space has been submerged and overlooked in postcolonial theory. Accordingly, she develops in Black Body a theory of identity situated within space and place rather than the more familiar models of identity formation that emphasize time. Mohanram's emphasis on space brings out the connections among various strands in postcolonial studies: the politics of displacement, the concept of diasporic identity versus indigenous identity, the identity of woman in the nation and the spatial construction of femininity, the association of the black body with nature and landscape and the white body with knowledge. Drawing on the work of Fanon. Merleau-Ponty, and Levi-Strauss, Black Body interrogates theories produced in the Northern Hemisphere and questions their value for the Southern Hemisphere. The relationship between the female black body and the white male body effectively and tellingly parallels the relationship between the two hemispheres.

Scripting the Black Masculine Body

Scripting the Black Masculine Body PDF Author: Ronald L. Jackson
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 0791466256
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Traces the origins of Black body politics in the United States and its contemporary manifestations in hip-hop music and film.

Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities

Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities PDF Author: Melvin G. Hill
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498583814
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
This collection explores the Black body in the context of transhuman realities from a variety of literary and artistic perspectives. Contributing to broader thought about Black transcendence of subjectivity in a posthuman framework, the chapters explore interpretations of the “old” and visions of the “new” human.

Punishing the Black Body

Punishing the Black Body PDF Author: Dawn P. Harris
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820351717
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Punishing the Black Body examines the punitive and disciplinary technologies and ideologies embraced by ruling white elites in nineteenth-century Barbados and Jamaica. Among studies of the Caribbean on similar topics, this is the first to look at the meanings inscribed on the raced, gendered, and classed bodies on the receiving end of punishment. Dawn P. Harris uses theories of the body to detail the ways colonial states and their agents appropriated physicality to debase the black body, assert the inviolability of the white body, and demarcate the social boundaries between them. Noting marked demographic and geographic differences between Jamaica and Barbados, as well as any number of changes within the separate economic, political, and social trajectories of each island, Harris still finds that societal infractions by the subaltern populations of both islands brought on draconian forms of punishments aimed at maintaining the socio-racial hierarchy. Her investigation ranges across such topics as hair-cropping, the 1836 Emigration Act of Barbados and other punitive legislation, the state reprisals following the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica, the use of the whip and the treadmill in jails and houses of correction, and methods of surveillance, policing, and limiting free movement. By focusing on meanings ascribed to the disciplined and punished body, Harris reminds us that the transitions between slavery, apprenticeship, and post-emancipation were not just a series of abstract phenomena signaling shifts in the prevailing order of things. For a large part of these islands’ populations, these times of dramatic change were physically felt.