Fat Liberation Book Club - FEARING THE BLACK BODY by Sabrina Strings

We’re back for book club! This will be a monthly occurrence with regular breaks so there’s plenty of time to read the source material before coming along to an accessible, safe discussion with fellow fats and fat allies. If you’re new to fat liberation, curious about what it is or looking to see how it differs from body positivity, this is the place for you.

We’ll be exploring a mix of non-fiction, fiction, poetry, comic books and everything in between, with supplementary material from fat academics, essayists, tik tokkers, podcasters and more.

For this month's book club we’re looking at FEARING THE BLACK BODY: THE RACIAL ORIGINS OF FATPHOBIA by Sabrina Strings.

Grab your copy here.

We are switching it back to non-fiction for April, a great opportunity for us to build on our understanding of the ways race and fatness intersect. This insightful book will take us into the past for an eye-opening and in-depth observation on the history of anti-fatness, anti-blackness and gender prejudice.

This is quite a dense text and expect this book club to be saturated with valuable and necessary discussion that we want to make sure we leave enough time for. So we've split it into two parts. We'll be looking at Chapters 1-4 for this month, and May's book club will look at Chapters 5-9, finishing the tome.

From Goodreads:

‘Sociologist Strings (sociology, Univ. of California, Irvine) explores the historical development of pro-thin, anti-fat ideologies deployed in support of Western, patriarchal white supremacy. Beginning in the aesthetic ideals circulated by Renaissance thinkers and artists and bringing her narrative up into the 1990s, Strings charts how white Europeans and Anglo-Americans developed ideals of race and beauty that both explicitly and figuratively juxtaposed slim, desirable white women against corpulent, seemingly monstrous black women.’

For information on how to obtain the audiobook version of this book, please contact us on Insta @fatliblondon or @fatclubbtn!

We have found a new spot together for Book Club: London LGBTQ+ Community Centre, and as always, you can join online via Zoom.

The Fat Liberation London and Fat Club Brighton Teams x

Host or Publisher Fat Liberation London