Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/24680
be equal, respected and autonomous cannot be realized within a media culture interested in keeping girls as savvy shoppers. Surf the Internet and the message is clear: Beneath the title “Girl Power—Empowering Girls Worldwide,” the company Girl.com.au touts “Super Sunglasses” for all those young “trendsetters who want to leave an impression.” JENNIFER COGNARD-BLACK is a professor of English and coordinator of women, gender and sexuality at St. Mary’s College of Maryland; she is also the mother of a girl-power tween. WEIGHING IN Jessica Holden Sherwood The Fat Studies Reader Edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay NYU Press WITH A WINNING AUDACITY, THE Fat Studies Reader announces its intention to serve as the foundation of a new academic field. Its editors present convincing voices from law, medi- cine, social sciences and the humanities, making it difficult to dismiss their case that the time has come for fat studies. As the stu- dent authors of one essay note, the subject overflows disciplinary boundaries the same way their bodies over- flow the desks in their college classrooms. Most Americans have accepted the health-focused conventional wisdom that obesity is a medical condition de- manding prevention or intervention because of its risk of causing various other conditions, including diabetes www.msmagazine.com or even premature death. Whether or not one questions the concept that “normal” weight is better and health- ier, The Fat Studies Reader demon- strates that this powerful assumption does deserve analysis. Yes, research has found some connections between weight and health, but these correla- tions do not, the book argues, justify the stigmatization of an entire group of people. It’s certainly possible to be heavy and healthy, just as it’s possible to be thin and unhealthy. The United States has a unique history of anti-fat bias, generated in the early 20th century by a conflu- ence of factors: industrialization, which increased the availability of food; a puritanical ethic of denying desires; and scientific and pseudosci- entific study of human improvement, as in eugenics. These factors coincid- ed with perceived social threats from suffragists and from non-European immigrants. Thanks to certain scien- tific and medical professionals of the time, fatness became associated with “other” ethnic groups, the lower classes and those women who couldn’t control their carnality. Things look sur- prisingly unchanged today: classism and racism live on in anti- fat discourse. Helping “them” make better choices remains a common mode of in- tervention in fat peo- ple’s lives, and just as it was a century ago, whole economic sec- tors thrive on selling services and products specifically to fight fat. Too many health professionals and community health programs focus not directly on well-being, but on weight loss and “obesity prevention.” In The Fat Studies Reader, there is inevitably some disjuncture among FALL 2009 | 57