The second concept I wish to analyze is the body connected to the social connotations inscribed into it. The gendered relationship with food and health issues is supposed to reveal much about one as an individual (Murray, 2008). As everyone but especially artists, performers and all the professionals who make a career out of their physical persona are aware of, the body is a signifier for feelings, qualities, and affections. The fatness or the skinniness of one's body carries a multitude of social meanings that influence culture, religion, politics and even scientific and evolutionist thought. Thus, throughout history and civilizations, the beautiful, rich body was
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lean, overweight, morbidly obese, white or tanned according to that particular society's values and characteristics.
It was at the beginning of the XX century that the first connection between civilization and the body matter was drawn. In that period, non-white people were beginning to populate North America and Europe. White, acculturated men took to themselves the role to research and categorize the physical features considered savage, non-cultured and primitive. A racial policy took place in questionable research, books, and articles, accompanied by an accurate and strict selection of what consisted to be the superior body, which indeed was the white, male one. The whiteness superiority was born at that time, resulting from the XIX century democratic revolutions that fought and destroyed monarchies and nobilities. After this period of commotion, it was necessary to create new systems and new hierarchical arrangements, through which a selected minority of individuals could rule, live on and oppress the majority. New classes were formed. The civilized white man looked at corporeal clues to determine the status of a body, and consequently chose the fate of an entire category of individuals. One of the most instantaneous and easy features identified with inferiority was fatness. People below the evolutionary scale, Native Americans, African people etc. were fat and so considered savage. If it's for natural reasons that a physique is fat, then the body itself is inferior and unrestrained. If it was not because of health and food habits, the culture and the body were considered unworthy and unimportant (Farrell, 2011).
We usually think that the negative connotations of fatness derive from health reasons, but health factors came after and were intertwined with moral meanings (Farrell, 2011). The fat body was a space of laziness, deviance, and overconsumption, used to identify bodies of color, immigrants and working-class people, fat generates a new form of restraint to extend a racial and colonial system of control. The fat body was a challenge to social order (Gullage, 2014). In fact, in the beginning of the "fat problem", the concern about fatness showed up only in publications aimed at a white middle-class. It was when food was mass-produced and fatness was not the elite class prerogative that it started to be a cultural problem. It was not anymore a signifier of a higher status (Farrell, 2011).
Of course, the concern about the fat body was in the largest part a concern for the female fat body. In constructing new categories, the woman of any color was not exempt from a harsh
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judgment. While the male was a synonym of rationality, the female was connected with irrationality. She had to maintain civilization through strict control in behavior, clothes and her manners. While sexually active men were considered healthy, women were expected to show no evidence of sexual desire (Farrell, 2011). Always a step behind because of her uncontrollable, impulsive nature, the woman was considered to be intrinsically inferior to her male counterpart because always at risk of a fat body. For this reason, fat itself became to be connoted with the female (Farrell, 2011). By being thin and not attached to earthly desires, a woman could transcend not only the desire of the flesh but also the laboring, economic body. The thin woman was aristocratically cool and unconcerned with material survival. That is the reason why she had to resist fat and her impulsive nature. Likewise, while "savage" males were attracted to plump, morbid women because of ancestral memories of wars and famine, bourgeois gentlemen preferred those who were able to fight and control their nature. Only those worthy and closer to God could stay thin and fit (Farrell, 2011). Consequently, hatred for fat was generated as an impulse to control society through bodies and sex. As Eva was the sinner because she did not regulate her desires, the same faults are inscribed in women who came to be the scapegoat for cultural shame on appetites and inability to control them. The beauty ideal, which was impossible to achieve, gave the society the perfect opportunity to hate, police bodies, hence making women the perpetual sinners (Sheinin, 1997).
Woman's "primitive" and sexual nature inspired contradiction in a dangerous mix of attraction and repulsion (a contradiction that survived centuries), making the XX century women walk on a thin, strict line. They could not refuse their sexuality by becoming too thin and so without sexy curves, but at the same time, they were not allowed to give in their desires by being overweight. The right curves in the right place were essential to be considered a true woman because they would attract men and were a symbol of fertility.
In the beginning of the XX century, the image of the beautiful, white and refined woman was used by both the suffragettes and their opponents to symbolize the educated heterosexual attractive model. On the other side, the plump lady was the unrestrained, uneducated, out of control equivalent; not ready to be a full citizen or, paradoxically, not fit to be like a man, and thus to have his same privileges (Farrell, 2011). After the right to vote was obtained, the most popular female body type was the thin but feminine one. Women had to fight to keep the
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political, cultural and social rights they had struggled for. This means that they had to exercise a ferocious control over themselves. The lean but full physique became to be the ideal, civilized heterosexual alluring body, even for the feminists of that period, because of its independence, well-being, strength and white connotation.