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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 September 2023
The nineteenth century was pivotal in shaping contemporary Western attitudes toward fat. Victorian representations of fatness participated in the construction of knowledge about bodies in general, intersecting with economic, medical, gendered, and racial discourses. Fatness was thought to make manifest those hidden consumer appetites lurking within all bodies. It thus provided a visual grounding for the impetus toward bourgeois self-management. At the same time, representations of fatness were complicated by intersecting discourses of class, gender, and race. This essay argues for the adoption of new directions for research that foreground the role played by perceptions of body size in the construction of Victorian bodies. Fattening Victorian studies requires an interrogation of the ways in which the normative ideologies and practices associated with bourgeois body management have structured a society that was, and remains, hostile to fat bodies.
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