Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Title Page -- Imprint Page -- Contents -- Introduction: Life in the Wrong Place -- One: The Stuff of Life: Thinking and Doing with Fat -- Two: Fertile Ambiguities: The Agricultural Imagination -- Three: Ancient Appetites: Luxury and the Geography of Softness -- Four: Christian Corpulence: The Belly and What Lies Beneath -- Five: Noble Fat? Corpulence in the Middle Ages -- Six: The Fat of the Land -- or, Why a Good Cock is Never Fat -- Seven: Spartan Mirages: Utopian Bodies and the Challenges of Modernity -- Eight: Grease and Grace: The Disenchantment of Fat? -- Nine: Savage Desires: 'Primitive' Fat and 'Civilized' Slenderness -- Ten: Bodily Utopianism: Modern Dreams of Transcendence -- Conclusion: Purity, Lightness and the Weight of History -- References -- Select Bibliography -- Acknowledgements -- Photo Acknowledgements -- Index.

The turn of the twentieth century represented a crossroads in the French experience of modernization, especially in regard to ideas about gender and sexuality. Drawing together prominent scholars in French gender history, this volume explores how historians have come to view this period in light of new theoretical developments since the 1980s

Materially as well as metaphorically, fat is seemingly ubiquitous in Donald Trump's America. Rather than simply a rude comment to make about someone's appearance or capacity for self-control, the word refers to a form of matter and style of metaphor that helps structure divisions between America and the world, as well as among Americans themselves. To support this claim, this article outlines a broad cultural imagination relating to fat—a fat imaginary—that structures common global perceptions of Americans and America, as well as assessments of Trump himself. With sources traceable to traditional agricultural motifs, metaphors relating to fat often connote processes of fattening that evoke ideas about consumption, as well as devouring and animality. To see how the fat imaginary informs contemporary political discourses, the article probes the "fat American" as a consuming figure on the world stage, as well as media representations of Trump as a devouring monster.

This article uses the proverb "nobody loves a fat man" to examine the interplay between representations of masculinity, physique, and "appetite" in American culture during the first half of the twentieth century, with special attention to depictions of fat characters in Hollywood thrillers designated as "film noir." By emphasizing how fluidly the concept of "appetite" facilitated connections between the sexual and the culinary, it argues that fat criminals in film noir embody long-standing yet contradictory ideas about manhood, consumption, and desire. To support this claim, the article (1) explicates film noir as a site for examining the instability of masculinity; (2) probes the historical background to perceptions of fat males as weak, impulsive, and perverse; (3) examines representations of fat criminals in select films noirs; and (4) reveals cinematic instances where the virtues of male domesticity smoothed out the perceived incongruence between manhood and fatness.

Employing an interdisciplinary framework, this article attempts to "think" the history of men and masculinities in a transnational way by connecting the distinctive experiences of specific national cultures to the broader anxieties about modern civilization that exercised Westerners generally. As a contribution to a more comprehensive analysis of the male body, it argues that the consumption of food and other ingesta was thought to have considerable consequences for the masculinity of Western elites, whether aristocratic or bourgeois, in a manner that promoted the cultural construction (literally, the "incorporation") of certain forms of manhood both as social representations and embodied experiences. It thus encourages a deeper understanding of how the male body is materially as well as symbolically constructed, and how this construction relates to various masculine norms.