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Fat

By Hanne Blank
Series: Object Lessons
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Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
Fat by Hanne Blank explores the complex and multifaceted nature of fat, moving beyond stereotypes to reveal its roles as a state, possession, metaphor, symptom, and object of desire. Part of the Object Lessons series, the book delves into fat's diverse meanings in culture, medicine, cuisine, sexuality, and economics, offering a rich examination of how fat shapes and is shaped by society.
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Format: Paperback / softback
$2199
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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

Ideal for readers interested in arts and culture, social studies, and food politics, especially those who appreciate nuanced discussions on identity, body politics, and cultural narratives.

Book Hero thinking about your next read

"Fat combines the cultural imaginary about fat as object of fear, pathology, and obsession with the material realities of fat as it intersects with the human body"--

Fat combines the cultural imaginary about fat as object of fear, pathology, and obsession with the material realities of fat as it intersects with the human body.

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Public enemy. Crucial macronutrient. Health risk. Punchline. Moneymaker. Epidemic. Sexual fetish. Moral failing. Necessary bodily organ. Conveyor of flavour. Freak-show spectacle. Never mind the stereotype, fat is never sedentary: its definitions, identities, and meanings are manifold and in constant motion.

Demonised in medicine and public policy, adored by chefs and nutritional faddists (and let’s face it, most of us who eat), simultaneously desired and abhorred when it comes to sex, and continually courted by a multi-billion-pound fitness and weight-loss industry, for so many people β€œfat” is ironically nothing more than an insult or a state of despair.

In Hanne Blank's Fat we find fat as state, as possession, as metaphor, as symptom, as object of desire, intellectual and carnal. Here, β€œfeeling fat” and literal fat merge, blurring the boundaries and infusing one another with richer, fattier meanings.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Series: Object Lessons

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  • Bicycle
    Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. These days the bicycle often appears as an interloper in a world constructed for cars. An almost miraculous 19th-century contraption, the bicycle promises to transform our lives and the world we live in, yet its time seems always yet-to-come or long-gone-by. Bicycle by...
    By Dr Jonathan Maskit
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  • Rust
    Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. It’s happening all the time, all around us. We cover it up. We ignore it. Rust takes on the many meanings of this oxidised substance, showing how technology bleeds into biology and ecology. Jean-Michel RabatΓ© combines art, science, and autobiography to share his...
    By Professor Jean-Michel RabatΓ©
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  • Bookshelf
    Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Every shelf is different, and every bookshelf tells a different story. One bookshelf can creak with character in a bohemian coffee shop, while another can groan with gravitas in the Library of Congress. Bookshelf by writer and historian Lydia Pyne explores these differences...
    By Lydia Pyne
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  • Burger
    Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The burger, long the All-American meal, is undergoing an identity crisis. From its shifting place in popular culture to efforts by investors such as Bill Gates to create the non-animal burger that can feed the world, the burger’s identity has become as malleable...
    By Carol J. Adams
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  • Cigarette Lighter
    Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Smokers, survivalists, teenagers, collectors… The cigarette lighter is a charged, complex, yet often entirely disposable object that moves across these various groups of people, acquiring and emitting different meanings while always supplying its primary function, that of ignition. While the lighter may seem...
    By Jack Pendarvis
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  • Earth
    Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. In Earth, a planetary scientist and a literary humanist explore what happens when we think of the Earth as an object viewable from space. As a β€œblue marble,” β€œa blue pale dot,” or, as Chaucer described it, β€œthis litel spot of erthe,” the...
    By Professor Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Profsesor Linda T. Elkins-Tanton
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  • Egg
    Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. This book is about a strange objectβ€”strange in part because it is something that we all have been, and that many of us eat. Nicole Walker's Egg relishes in sharp juxtapositions of seemingly fanciful or repellent topics, so that reproductive science and gustatory...
    By Dr. Nicole Walker
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  • Eye Chart
    Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Desert nomads tested their vision by distinguishing a pair of stars. But we have since created more disquieting ways to test the strength of the eyes. Reading the eye chart is an exercise in failure, since it only gets interesting when you cannot...
    By Professor William Germano
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  • High Heel
    Best Fifteen Books of March 2019, Refinery29Best Nonfiction Books of 2019, Paste Magazine Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Fetishized, demonized, celebrated, and outlawed, the high heel is central to the iconography of modern womanhood. But are high heels good? Are they feminist? What does it mean for a...
    By Summer Brennan
    Paperback
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  • Hood
    Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. We all wear hoods: the Grim Reaper, Red Riding Hood, torturers, executioners and the executed, athletes, labourers, anarchists, rappers, babies in onesies, and anyone who’s ever grabbed a hoodie on a chilly day. Alison Kinney’s Hood explores the material and symbolic vibrancy of...
    By Alison Kinney
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  • Jet Lag
    Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Jet lag is a momentary condition resulting from the human body and its inner clock being pitched against the time-leaping effects of modern aviation. But more than that, it is a situation that explains time, technology, and the human body. Jet lag epitomises...
    By Dr. Christopher J. Lee
    Paperback
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  • Mushroom
    Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. They are the things we step on without noticing and the largest organisms on Earth. They are symbols of inexplicable growth and excruciating misery. They are grouped with plants, but they behave more like animals. In their inscrutability, mushrooms are wondrous organisms. The...
    By Dr. Sara Rich
    Paperback
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Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?

Critics praise Fat for its inventive and insightful approach. It disrupts conventional ideas of fat, inviting readers to reconsider its meanings and implications. The book is described as both scholarly and engaging, combining honesty, creativity, and humour to present a compelling ethnography of an everyday phenomenon.

Book Hero reading reviews

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781501333286

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 12 November 2020

Country: United States

Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 12.0mm

Width: 118.0mm

Height: 164.0mm

Weight: 137g

Pages: 144

Collections

Arts & Culture Education & Reference Hanne Blank Non-Fiction Philosophy & Psychology Philosophy & Stoicism Series: Object Lessons

About the Author

Dr. Hanne Blank is a cultural historian who works in the intersections of gender and sexuality, history of medicine, bioethics, and politics. Her books include Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality (2014) and Virgin: The Untouched History (Bloomsbury, 2007). She currently serves on the faculty for Women’s & Gender Studies at Denison University, USA.

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