Stearns, provost and professor of history at George Mason University, has written that plumpness was once associated with ''good health in a time when many of the most troubling diseases were wasting diseases like tuberculosis.'' He traces the equation of obesity and moral deficiency to the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Now, says Peter Stearns, a leading historian in the field, the rising concern with obesity ''is triggering a new burst of scholarship.'' These researchers don't condone morbid obesity, but they do focus on the ways the definition of obesity and its meaning have shifted, often arbitrarily, throughout history. ''People are saying, 'Fat is the doom of Western civilization.' ''
Gilman, distinguished professor of liberal arts, sciences and medicine at the University of Illinois in Chicago and the author of ''Fat Boys: A Slim Book,'' published last month by the University of Nebraska Press. ''We are in a moral panic about obesity,'' said Sander L. Insidious attitudes about politics, sex, race or class are at the heart of the frenzy over obesity, these scholars say, a frenzy they see as comparable to the Salem witch trials, McCarthyism and even the eugenics movement. Just this week, VH1 announced a new reality show called ''Flab to Fab,'' in which overweight women get a personal staff to whip them into shape.īut a growing group of historians and cultural critics who study fat say this obsession is based less on science than on morality. Almost every day, it seems, there is another alarming study about the dangers of being fat or a new theory about its causes and cures.
0 kommentar(er)
