{"id":9609,"date":"2010-02-15T00:22:59","date_gmt":"2010-02-15T07:22:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=9609"},"modified":"2010-02-15T00:22:59","modified_gmt":"2010-02-15T07:22:59","slug":"virtuous-versus-disgusting-bodies-then-and-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=9609","title":{"rendered":"Virtuous Versus Disgusting Bodies, Then And Now"},"content":{"rendered":"

Historiann <\/a>makes the most interesting comment I’ve seen on Michelle Obama’s dreadful anti-fat “Let’s Move” campaign, pointing out parallels to 18th century cleanliness campaigns:<\/p>\n

\"Headless…nineteenth-century bourgeois reformers identified the clean body as a site of virtuous citizenship. But of course clean clothing and clean bodies, and the means and ability to achieve them, were above all a marker of one\u2019s class status, since it was only the middle-class who could afford to do laundry weekly (and\/or have a \u201chired girl\u201d in to do it), and only the wealthy who had running water, bathtubs, and the means to travel to fashionable spas for soaking in and drinking up healing mineral waters. Brown also tracks the convergence in the later eighteenth century and early nineteenth century between discourses on spiritual or moral cleanliness, and bodily and household cleanliness. Early in the nineteenth century particular attention was paid first to children\u2019s bodies as an index of their mother\u2019s moral worth, and then later in the century as the bodies of poor and\/or immigrant children came into contact on a regular basis with the bodies of middle-class and even elite children in public schools.<\/p>\n

If we replace the words \u201cunclean\u201d with \u201cfat,\u201d and \u201ccleanliness\u201d with \u201cthinness,\u201d we\u2019ll come very close to the rhetoric and language of the \u201cLet\u2019s Move\u201d campaign.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Reading that reminded me of this quote about the politics of disgust from Martha Nussbaum<\/a> (last quoted on this blog in 2004<\/a>):<\/p>\n

Thus throughout history certain disgust properties \u2014 sliminess, bad smell, stickiness, decay, foulness \u2014 have repeatedly and monotonously been associated with, indeed projected onto, people by reference to whom privileged groups seek to define their superior human status. The stock image of the Jew, in anti-Semitic propaganda, was that of a being with a disgustingly soft and porous body, womanlike in its oozy sliminess, a foul parasite inside the clean German male self. Hitler described the Jew as a maggot in a festering abscess, hidden away inside the apparently clean and healthy body of the nation.<\/p>\n

Similar disgusting properties are traditionally associated with women. In more or less all societies, women have been vehicles for the expression of male loathing of the physical and the potentially decaying. Taboos surrounding sex, birth, menstruation \u2014 all express the desire to ward off something that is too physical, that partakes too much of the secretions of the body.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Thanks to Maia for pointing out the Historiann article on her google reader feed!)<\/p>\n

For a more straightforward response to Michele Obama’s campaign, I’d recommend Kate Harding’s article on Salon<\/a>, and Paul Campos’ article in the New Republic<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Historiann makes the most interesting comment I’ve seen on Michelle Obama’s dreadful anti-fat “Let’s Move” campaign, pointing out parallels to 18th century cleanliness campaigns: …nineteenth-century bourgeois reformers identified the clean body as a site of virtuous citizenship. But of course … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fat-fat-and-more-fat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9609\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}