Despite the West's privileging of slenderness as an aesthetic ideal, the African Diaspora has historically displayed a resistance to the Western European and North American indulgence in 'fat anxiety.' The Embodiment of Disobedience explores the ways in which the African Diaspora has rejected the West's efforts to impose imperatives of slenderness and mass market fat-anxiety. Author Andrea Shaw explores the origins and contradictions of this phenomenon, especially the cultural deviations in beauty criteria and the related social and cultural practices. Unique in its examination of how both fatness and blackness interact on literary cultural planes, this book also offers a diasporic scope that develops previously unexamined connections among female representations throughout the African Diaspora.

By Andrea Elizabeth Shaw

Chapter 1 Introduction: Fatness and Blackness: A Compelling Coincidence of Erasure
Chapter 2 Reshaping Identity
Chapter 3 The Anatomy of Sexual Unruliness
Chapter 4 Bodily Abundance
Chapter 5 Spectacles of Size: The Performing Bodies of Fat Black Women
Chapter 6 Consumption and Control: The "Epidemic" of Fatness