Your Questions About Anti-Fat Bias Answered
Content Note: This piece discusses forced medical examinations on women and the inhumane treatment of women of color. As a result, this piece may be triggering to some.

On a whim the other day, I asked Twitter if they had any questions about anti-fat bias that I might be able to answer for them, and we got some really interesting ones that I wanted to share.
So emilymadly on Twitter asks:
“what the fuck being fat has to do with a fat person’s character or personality”
Good question! It actually has to do with, believe it or not, phrenology!
Let’s talk about Cesare Lombroso and his 1893 book Criminal Women. Lombroso is sometimes praised as one of the foundation minds in criminology, which I do not get at all. My dude was a true believer in phrenology. By the late 1800’s, phrenology had gained a number of critics who didn’t believe that you could tell someone’s personality from the size and shape of their skull. Lombroso wanted to show that you could read criminality on a person’s body, that certain traits of the body would also reflect personality traits.
So, in Criminal Women, this super creep wanted to prove that there was a way to read atavism, or throwbacks to an earlier evolutionary stage, in women’s body-types and that this atavism made them more likely to be criminals. He concluded, according to Farrel in Fat Shame, that “white criminals exhibited behavior that was commonplace among lower levels of civilization.” That is to say, Lombroso believed sex work was simply a fact of life among non-white cultures (which, to be clear, are what he believed to be “lower levels of civilization”) and argued that, among white people, it appeared as a “morbid and retrograde phenomenon in a certain class of people.”
According to Lombroso, fat was a telltale sign of atavism.
To this end, he expanded his measurements, focusing on way more than just the size and shape of the skull. Lombroso categorized hair texture and color, jaw shape, eye formation, breast size and shape, and the contours of the vulva, ear lobes, and thighs. He compared the measurements of so-called “normal” women with criminal women. Horrifyingly, when he could not get anyone to consent to the measurements of the vulva and thighs, he opted to do forced exams on “criminal” women. Lombroso concluded that you could read a sex worker’s criminality on their body through their weight, writing, “Prostitues’ greater weight is confirmed by the notorious obesity of those who grow old in their unfortunate trade and gradually become positive monsters of fatty tissue,” and claimed that their “thighs, too, are bigger than normal women’s.”
Lombroso was also a racist and liked to connect the idea of fat and race. He wrote that there was a “marked development of connective and fatty subcutaneous tissues so often found in inferior races.” He was also super sexist, saying that one of the reasons women are inferior to men is our “greater wealth of connective and fatty tissue.” So, y’know, cool guy, definitely makes sense that Google Books calls him the “founder of the field of criminology.”
But there was more problems than just Lombroso. Fat was also being tied to the idea of the “primitive savage” (read: non-white body, generally leveled against black people, but also historically used against a variety of immigrants including Italian, Jewish, and German. Really.) by others. In Fat Shame, Farrell notes, “One of the key bodily signs of inferiority for scientists and thinkers of the 19th and early 20th centuries was fatness. Interestingly, this has gone relatively unremarked in the literature on 19th- and early 20th-century thinking on evolution and civilization. Yet much of the writing in this time period described in detail the fatness of “primitive” people and of all women, using that trait as evidence of inferior status.” (pg. 64)
Which brings us to the sad case of Sarah Baartman, known as the Venus Hottentot.
“Hottentot” was a derogatory term used for the Khoikhoi people of South Africa. Baartman was one of the Khoikhoi women sold into slavery to the Dutch. We have no evidence of her real name. From there, she was sold to Hendrick Cezar, who exhibited her like an animal for four years. Baartman was not the only Khoisan woman exhibited in this fashion at the time but her treatment post-death warrants attention to the ways in which racism and fatmisia played together.
Georges Cuvier, a ‘scientist’ I guess, was fascinated with Baartman. He observed her naked for three days at the Muséum national d’Histoire. After her death, Cuvier and his colleagues had her body transported immediately to the museum for autopsy, ignoring or bypassing all the normal laws that would have otherwise protected her from this invasion post-death. To quote Farrell, “He dissected her body, focusing on her brain, her genitals, her breasts, and her buttocks, writing up the results in an essay that provided “definitive” evidence of her low-level status on the scale of civilization.” (pg. 65)
See, the thinking at the time was that fatness was linked inextricably to ethnicity, class, and gender, growing out of beliefs about phrenology, where the shape and size of the skull was supposed to be linked to this level of “civilization.”
Though this isn’t the only reason. We continue to pathologize fatness. To this day, we believe we can read something about a person, usually an “atavistic” trait such as a lack of reason or control, or an emotional trauma that we believe is the cause of their fatness in their bodies. While the eminent scholar Le’a Kent points out that fat is not necessarily a sign of bad health, it is distressing the way this rhetoric divorces the individual self from the body, and suggests instead that when we talk about this issue, we find a way to use counterabjection to find the perception of fat as abject so that fat identity can be fully embraced.
I’ll get into abjection, counterabjection, fat identity, Kristeva, and the horror of embodiment next time. If you enjoyed this, think about tipping me, and feel free to leave any questions in the comments!
Kiva Bay isn’t paid by Medium. You can tip her through paypal, ko-fi, squarecash, or patreon or ask questions here or on twitter @ Kivabay.
