Christopher E. Forth

The qualities of fat: Bodies, history, and materiality

This article proposes that, at various historical moments, stereotypes about fat people as being corrupt, weak, and stupid have been complemented and perhaps even informed by perceptions of fat as a material substance with definite properties and qualities. In an effort to understand the formation and longevity of these three longstanding stereotypes this article submits that the material properties of fat – particularly its unctuousness, softness, and insensateness – have played important roles in motivating some of the responses this substance has generated both with reference to human bodies and their material worlds. Due to the conceptual slipperiness of ‘fat’ in its various forms (whether ‘frozen’ as a solid or liquefied as oil or grease), this analysis uses examples from ancient Greek, Roman and Hebrew texts to track the ways in which this substance has been perceived across these registers, revealing the surprisingly mercurial and ambiguous ways in which ‘fat’ has been understood culturally.

Manhood Incorporated: Diet and the Embodiment of "Civilized" Masculinity

Employing an interdisciplinary framework, this article attempts to “think” the history of men and masculinities in a transnational way by connecting the distinctive experiences of specific national cultures to the broader anxieties about modern civilization that exercised Westerners generally. As a contribution to a more comprehensive analysis of the male body, it argues that the consumption of food and other ingesta was thought to have considerable consequences for the masculinity of Western elites, whether aristocratic or bourgeois, in a manner that promoted the cultural construction (literally, the “incorporation”) of certain forms of manhood both as social representations and embodied experiences. It thus encourages a deeper understanding of how the male body is materially as well as symbolically constructed, and how this construction relates to various masculine norms.

“Nobody Loves a Fat Man”: Masculinity and Food in Film Noir

This article uses the proverb “nobody loves a fat man” to examine the interplay between representations of masculinity, physique, and “appetite” in American culture during the first half of the twentieth century, with special attention to depictions of fat characters in Hollywood thrillers designated as “film noir.” By emphasizing how fluidly the concept of “appetite” facilitated connections between the sexual and the culinary, it argues that fat criminals in film noir embody long-standing yet contradictory ideas about manhood, consumption, and desire. To support this claim, the article (1) explicates film noir as a site for examining the instability of masculinity; (2) probes the historical background to perceptions of fat males as weak, impulsive, and perverse; (3) examines representations of fat criminals in select films noirs; and (4) reveals cinematic instances where the virtues of male domesticity smoothed out the perceived incongruence between manhood and fatness.

Adventures of the naked Truth: the Dreyfus Affair and the female form

Many thanks to Erika Esau, Sara Lloyd, Jill Matthews, Brian Rigby, and the anonymous referees of French Cultural Studies for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay. Thanks also to James Grieve and Dominique Thillaud for helping to solve the riddle of le puits. Aspects of this study were funded by a Faculty Research Grant from the Australian National University. Address for correspondence: School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia. E-mail: Christopher.Forth@anu.edu.au

Introduction: The Belly and Beyond

We live in a world obsessed with abdomens, where the “belly,” “tummy,” or “gut” are objects of vigilance and, quite frequently, sources of anxiety. If in modern Western societies post-Cartesian thought has often disqualified the body in favor of the mind, in everyday life the belly continues to bear considerable cultural weight. Embracing as it does much of the digestive system, physiologically the belly is the primary site of incorporation, where food is directly assimilated into the body, where it is literally made into flesh. This deceptively simple point is complicated by the many ways in which eating, digestion, and excretion have been understood, both as objects of medical and scientific knowledge as well as targets of personal bodily reform. After all, at the same time that it does the work of digestion, the belly is also considered the metaphorical location of appetite itself. Far from dying out, these concerns have persisted throughout the early modern period and well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and have included along the way anxieties about proper chewing, constipation, nutrition, exercise, and weight loss.

The Belly of Paris

In early 1898, the journalist Severine interviewed the renowned French novelist Emile Zola in his home shortly after he had published his essay “J’Accuse,” an event that helped transform the Dreyfus Affair into a national crisis. Describing the rather Spartan interior of Zola’s study, she detected a note of asceticism in her surroundings that seemed to conflict with her older impressions of the novelist, impressions that Severine obviously thought her audience would share. “Zola, an ascetic?” she asked. “Really? Yes. Don’t be too quick to smile or gasp.” Zola’s reputation as a successful novelist with a passion for fine food was quite well known, as was the rather considerable girth that he had acquired along the way. In fact, next to Sarah Bernhardt, Zola was the most frequently caricatured of French celebrities, so when some of his critics nastily dubbed him (after his novel of the same name) “the belly of Paris,” everyone knew what they meant. Contrary to these conventional images of Zola, Severine noted a profound change in the novelist that seemed to explain the heroic gesture he had just made. “And one should believe it when I say that this new Zola … reveals himself, asserts himself in such a way that I never noticed before.… He is not pleasing to look at; he is not ugly either; in any case, he is neither pudgy nor brutish. In the end he is simply well-shaped, like one of those hunting dogs of [the military academy at] Saint-Germain, of a superior race.”2

France and the fattened American: animality, consumption and the logic of gavage

Abstract This article uses the controversy sparked by the 2012 California foie gras ban as springboard for conceptualizing French and Francophone objections to US cultural imperialism and the so-called “obesity epidemic.” In particular, it explores the controversial practice of force-feeding or gavage as a way of examining how ideas about feeding and fattening animalize fat people in subtle ways. It argues that, as a form of consumption involving asymmetrical (and often sexualized, racialized and classed) relations of power, the logic of gavage invokes a plurality of practices for different ends – interpersonal as well as intrapersonal, cultural and cross-cultural – that frame the collective body of “America” as a fattened, but also fattening, “beast.” By probing the complex and unstable network of relationships that gavage signifies and enacts, it shows that animalized representations of the fat American pivots on issues germane to many discussions of “obesity” in general.

Masculinités en révolution de Rousseau à Balzac

Trimaille and Gasquet-Cyrus analyse the sociolinguistic effects of gentrification in Marseilles; Bulot considers use of and attitudes towards Gallo as an urban language in Rennes; finally, Gadet presents and analyses the Multicultural London English–Multicultural Paris French project, and in so doing raises a range of questions about the exception franc aise. The work concludes with an overview fromGibb and Lambert on how sociology and sociolinguistics have related to each other since the 1960s. They suggest that this volume has brought the two disciplines together, and opened up possibilities for further interdisciplinary work. This thought is reiterated by Pooley in the closing chapter, where he suggests a range of areas for further research. This volume is a valuable addition to the field of French sociolinguistics, introducing new approaches to old questions, and will be of great interest to anybody working in the field, as well as their students and other newcomers.

Introduction: Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France

As Marshall Berman so eloquently stated in All that is Solid Melts into Air (1982), paradox and contradiction define the modern experience. His definition still stands as one of the most useful for understanding the late nineteenth century as well as our own: Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish.1

Imagining Our Ancient Future

Gere explores how Arthur Evanss often-fanciful interpretations of Minoan civilization (as pacifist, matriarchal, and sexually free), religion, and architecture influenced 20th-century European writers, artists, and intellectuals. Gere explores how Arthur Evanss often-fanciful interpretations of Minoan civilization (as pacifist, matriarchal, and sexually free), religion, and architecture influenced 20th-century European writers, artists, and intellectuals.