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Feeding Desire: Fatness, beauty, and sexuality among a Saharan people

2004 Rebecca Popenoe ;ISBN: 0415280966 ;ISBN: 9780415280952 ;ISBN: 0415280958 ;ISBN: 9780415280969 ;EISBN: 0203603524 ;EISBN: 1135140855 ;EISBN: 9780203603529 ;EISBN: 9781135140854 ;EISBN: 9781135140779 ;EISBN: 1135140774 ;EISBN: 9780415280952 ;EISBN: 0415280958 ;DOI: 10.4324/9780203603529 ;OCLC: 821174409

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  • Title:
    Feeding Desire: Fatness, beauty, and sexuality among a Saharan people
  • Author: Popenoe, Rebecca
  • Subjects: Anthropology - Soc Sci ; Body image in women ; Body, Human ; Muslim women ; Muslims - Niger - Social life and customs ; Overweight women ; Sex customs ; Women, Arab
  • Description: While the Western world adheres to a beauty ideal that says women can never be too thin, the semi-nomadic Moors of the Sahara desert have for centuries cherished a feminine ideal of extreme fatness. Voluptuous immobility is thought to beautify girls' bodies, hasten the onset of puberty, heighten their sexuality and ripen them for marriage. From the time of the loss of their first milk teeth, girls are directed to eat huge bowls of milk and porridge in one of the world's few examples of active female fattening. Based on fieldwork in an Arab village in Niger, Feeding Desire analyses the meanings of women's fatness as constituted by desire, kinship, concepts of health, Islam, and the crucial social need to manage sexuality. By demonstrating how a particular beauty ideal can only be understood within wider social structures and cultural logics, the book also implicitly provides a new way of thinking about the ideal of slimness in late Western capitalism. Offering a reminder that an estimated eighty per cent of the world's societies prefer plump women, this gracefully written book is both a fascinating exploration of the nature of bodily ideals and a highly readable ethnography of a Saharan people.
  • Publisher: Oxford: Routledge
  • Creation Date: 2004
  • Format: 256
  • Language: English
  • Identifier: ISBN: 0415280966
    ISBN: 9780415280952
    ISBN: 0415280958
    ISBN: 9780415280969
    EISBN: 0203603524
    EISBN: 1135140855
    EISBN: 9780203603529
    EISBN: 9781135140854
    EISBN: 9781135140779
    EISBN: 1135140774
    EISBN: 9780415280952
    EISBN: 0415280958
    DOI: 10.4324/9780203603529
    OCLC: 821174409
  • Source: Ebook Central Academic Complete
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