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Obese people are the targets of discrimination in many forms in schools, at work, in social settings, in the media, etc. This chapter first addresses the question of why obese people should be protected by human rights laws from such mistreatment. It then discusses issues involving the obese in the larger context of appearance bias to gain a fuller understanding of the ways in which harmful norms privilege selected looks to the detriment of other. The chapter concludes with the question: what will be the effects of any laws designed to protect fat people from discrimination?

This chapter discusses the changing perceptions about obesity in 1920s. The overweight person was no longer seen as the glutton or the oaf, but the sneaky one who dodges the order to slim down and refuses to work on himself. His flaw is neglect, his intimate inattention a dereliction of duty. His passions attract less notice than his indifference; he is less culpable for getting carried away than for lack of control, the impossibility of self regulating and transforming oneself. Failure took on a new shape, one reinforced by the generalization of treatment and the increased significance of psychology. Narratives of suffering multiplied, just as self-evaluations, self-descriptions, and intimate memoirs in contemporary culture became increasingly common. The prestigious place accorded to the thin doubled the stigmatization of the fat. The obese were not just fat people but people who could change—thus an identity of defeat was stuck to them at a time when working on oneself and adaptability became obligatory criteria of value. Obesity declared a manifest failure to reform oneself.

This concluding chapter presents some final thoughts. It describes the changing stigmatization of the fat person over time, highlighting an important difference that traverses all these stigmatizations—the double standard between the male case where relatively big sizes are tolerated versus the female case where thinness is obligatory. It discusses the role played by differing conceptions of the body’s functioning that condition the vision of the fat person at different times. It concludes that the history of obesity is a history of intimate feelings, from the pain of obesity expressed by Jean-Baptiste Élie de Beaumont in the eighteenth century to the advent of feelings of loss of identity and of intimate relations with a rejected body in the twentieth century.

This chapter considers the transformation of the notion of fat in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Doctors used fat to accentuate their emphasis on a norm. Their examples become more precise and their repertory of symptoms becomes more diverse. The observations are more numerous even though they still avoid questions about possible “stages” of bigness and their possible gradations. While the image of fat remained strictly limited to intuitive markers, there were new attempts to specify its origin, its states, and its particularities. All arguments, statements, and even wild ideas confirmed a heightened preoccupation with bigness. Hydropsy and adiposity were distinguished, plethora and apoplexy became more precisely defined. Knowledge increased, though nothing proved its usefulness, and the traditional vision and treatment of the fat person did not change.

This chapter discusses how references to weight became ordinary and a widely understood indicator in people’s minds in the nineteenth century. This can be seen in the mention of weights in the literature of a bicycle manufacturer in the 1890s, whose sales pitch made an association between the ideal weight of the bike and the rider: 14–15 kilograms “minimum” for the bike, on condition that the cyclist weighed no more than 70 kilograms “maximum.” Bodily weights and measures became progressively more and more commonplace as technology moved into everyday life. Other practices encouraged an unprecedented attention to nuances. For example, people revealed their bodies more at the end of the nineteenth century, a new habit that incited watchfulness of the adipose, as did public and private pastimes as well as fashion and body care. Becoming big was also talked about in years younger than before, and as something generally unpleasant and ugly.

This chapter discusses the increased attention to degrees of bigness and more acute stigmatization of “excesses” during the Enlightenment. Eighteenth-century culture had a different vision of the body that was focused less on liquid humors and more on solid fibers, less on vapors and more on the tone and vibrancy of nerves. It wondered more about the origins of life force and had an unprecedented interest in muscle and nerve tensions and in the causes that might lead to softening or relaxation of fibers. A concern for lines and their interlacing displaced the earlier concern for liquids and sacks. In addition to the traditional focus on the compression of blood vessels by fat, there was now a similar alertness to the possible compression of the nerves. This is evident in Samuel Tissot’s study of nervous maladies from 1770. “Excess fat, despite being soft, will produce a compression strong enough to bother the nerves and produce regular swelling.” And conversely, a softening of fibers is said to favor the buildup of fat in tissues. There is one failing that weakens enormous bodies, namely, loss of “vibrancy,” an absence of “tonic force,” a major deficit of reactivity. Powerlessness, in the end, is the fate of the weighted down anatomy. This explains the focus at this time on what is most feared, namely, loss of reproductive faculties and loss of the faculty of reaction.

This chapter describes how criticism of the “heavy” and “enormous” person changed in the sixteenth century. Indolence displeased; the useless was disquieting; and laziness became “the plague of human understanding.” At a time of intense social segregation and the nobility’s contempt for manual labor, the idea of “inactivity,” doing nothing, and softness was stigmatized more than that of “work.” A more profound new development was that the intensification of contempt touched the language. A negative culture surrounding size was stated more than ever before, though still indifferent to precise indicators and quantifiable measurements. Those with wide waists are repeatedly spoken of in strongly negative terms as “lacking spirit,” “knowing very little,” and “displeasing.” The word heavy (lourd) elicited linguistic inventiveness, stigmatizing awkwardness and torpor.

This chapter describes how the judgment of contours changed in the Age of Enlightenment. Numerical measuring of weight appeared in the medical literature, and a ranking of volumes also appeared in the most ordinary circumstances. The social milieu depicted in engravings and paintings was signified and even ranked by, among other things, different physical “thicknesses,” even if the associated vocabulary that would explicitly define traits came late and remained imprecise. The history of the fat person was the history of this slowly arriving consciousness of the variety of forms and their possible progressions, while, at the same time, the will to weigh less was not necessarily intense. The culture of the Enlightenment was more attentive to the individual and therefore also to the individualization of size.

This chapter discusses the more objective perceptions of fatness in the early nineteenth century. Numbers and measurements accentuated a more precise reckoning of fatness while categories were established. Differences in size carried social consequences often defined through tolerances or rejections. Heavy profiles, male of course, may have a positive value that confirmed ascendancy, but may also be “deflated” with irony. Alongside this social dimension, the scientific work on pathologies, material identifications, and chemical changes resulted in a body of knowledge about fat that was increasingly distant from the spontaneous popular notions of earlier times. These new ideas led to very different ways of thinking about the causes and prevention of fatness. A turning point was clearly established once the mechanism of organic combustion began to be understood. Once the body was considered like a fire-powered engine, the source of fat was reconceived as “unburned” fuel. This redefinition entirely upended ideas about obesity as well as about its treatment, including slimming programs whose logic seems irrefutable.

This chapter explores the prestige associated with “bigness” in the Middle Ages. The vicious cycle of hunger, severe restrictions, and food shortages stemming from poor degraded soils, inadequate storage, slow and difficult transportation networks, and vulnerability to inclement weather all contributed to raising the accumulation of calories into an ideal. The collective imagination dreamt of accumulation. Health meant a full stomach and vigor was represented in the compact heft of flesh. Bigness, however, could also become excessive that it is perceived as deformed, the ultimate physical disgrace. There is no precise measure of this threshold, no definition, just the allusion hardly ever discussed in twelfth-century Latin chronicles that distinguish pinguis (“big”) and praepinguis (“very big”).

This chapter considers the social factors that influenced the evaluation of silhouettes at the beginning of the nineteenth century, particularly the changing codes of physical appearance stirred-up by the Revolution. From 1820–1830, travelers and observers reported being suddenly confronted with a more confusing world. “Castes” were said to have disappeared. The old borders erased. Resemblances multiplied once the society of orders was abolished, giving rise to the desire to “look” with greater precision, inventory more, single out specific looks and their maintenance, and fix “physiognomies, poses, gestures, and grimaces.” A publishing enterprise of a new sort also emerged: The English Depicted By Themselves, The French Depicted by Themselves, The Parisian Museum, etc., all of which inventoried society in pictures. There is no scientific sociology going on in these investigations, dominated by subjective observation. No overarching general vision either. What one observes is a new way of identifying physiques—their profiles, their possible original particularities—and this involves new evocations of the “fat person,” including new sharper techniques of self-description.

This chapter discusses the emergence of a new attitude in the 1920s. The transformation of the status of women brought with it a new thinness—an avoidance of references to breasts and other curves—and a new technically inspired imaginary that insists on fluidity, reactivity, agility, and lankiness. There was also a heightened expectation of control and affirmation of the self. A plain affirmation repeated more than once in Jean Prévost’s Essay on the Human Body (1925) sums up this new attitude: “Our bodies are mostly muscle.” The “athletic” look, with its coordinated lines, is for the first time the norm. It is certainly the case that the body of the 1920s is evoked differently than before. Its dynamic quality takes on an all-new importance. Another change that occurred is the stronger doubts as to whether certain types of obesity can be successfully treated. A number of cases seemed to lead toward the “martyr.” The introduction of this new “gravity” also prepared questions that persist today.

By the end of the medieval period, illuminated manuscripts and frescoes provided access to images with identifiable sizes for the first time, bringing about a slow but explicit attention to contours, including attempts to specify and stigmatize excess. This chapter discusses how this theme took on importance in the fifteenth century. Fat people who were now present in iconography for the first time gave rise to a new way of looking at them. A number of scenes placed figures here or there in a manner that drew attention to contours. With these new techniques of display, the body’s volumes existed differently, revealing “defects” and suggesting excess. There were, however, points of resistance. The force intuitively linked to quantities of food as well as the link between ascendancy and physical weight did not yield immediately to vigorous sermons and medical advice.

This chapter describes how a new curiosity about size expressed itself in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through more developed iconographies and a wider array of terms for thin and fat. Engravings and paintings attempted more than before to represent the heavy person, to give visible detail to the apparent shortening of the limbs, the squashed neck, and the flabby chin and cheeks. The associated terminology tried to suggest nuances in the absence of all quantified measurements. New words attempted to express degrees of profiles beyond the sorts of insults already mentioned. These gradations remained obscure and vague, however, and often of limited use. There were, at any rate, more terms available in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to specify levels of bigness, whereas they had been extremely rare in the medieval period, even if odd combinations did persist. For example, in his Diverses Leçons from 1604, Louis Guyon associated thickness and tallness as characteristics of “corpulence,” whereas he associated thinness and shortness with being skinny—as though for him no one could be both short and fat.

This chapter describes the emergence of original treatments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There were the very first steps toward an evaluation of weight based on physical signs: the tightness of clothes provoked by fatness and the tightness of rings and various other points of tension. There were diets, now more frequently mentioned in letters, customs, and stories, with their simple recommendation of the smallest nutritive quantities and drying substances all designed to restrain bigness—a condition still principally viewed as one of excess liquid. There were also the imagined drying agents: vinegars, lemons, and chalks that were thought to tighten the skin by dissolving the fatty waters. Finally there were “compression” techniques: circles, belts, and corsets whose use becomes more systematic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their deployment was pursued with the particular certainty of exerting a direct physical constraint so as to better “mold” forms and features with the expectation that they conformed to the desired shape.

This chapter discusses changing perceptions of bodily forms in the second half of the nineteenth century. These perceptions were influenced by the ascendancy of “free time,” the revolutionary changes in customs of dress, and the reorganization of private living spaces. An everyday obesity developed that relied on categorizing profiles; distinguishing hips, chest, belly, and abdominal muscles; differentiating male and female cases; and usually stigmatizing the second more than the first. A threshold of expectations of slenderness was also established even as a certain conviction held firm, namely, that “there were more obese people in the upper classes than in the working class.” Alongside this lay person’s vision of obesity, medical science advanced another view. Obesity now entered its “scientific period,” became the subject of experiments and calculations, was explored by means of “chemistry and physiology,” and acquired the status of a specific field of study as for other pathologies. New decisive sorts of “verifications” were introduced that no longer simply distinguished sizes but differentiated types of fattening.

This chapter describes eighteenth-century treatments for the fat person. New slimming programs focused on the image of powerlessness and the theme of a collapse that favored fat buildup. An illness explained as a slackening of tissues logically called for a remedy based on their reinforcement. This resulted in anti-obesity toning formulas and stimulants all designed to “fortify” the flesh in order to better eliminate all excess. This also led to a diversification of practices that gave greater importance to exercise and elevated the discovery of electricity and the promise of it improving the tone of limbs and skin. Diet now became the focus of numerous debates. Questions arose, for example, about the consumption of light, delicate, and juicy (de bon suc) meat. It was considered a tonic by some, but “dangerous” by others. Choices multiplied and options competed with each other. There were arguments with a “qualitative” approach to diet before modern chemistry eventually made them more “objective”.

In the middle centuries of the medieval period, a change in attitude occurred around the big person associated with excessive eating and daily rotundity. Criticism of the ordinary big person, no matter how vaguely defined, started to build and different criteria came into conflict. This chapter discusses how different groups accentuated what was for them anathema. It focuses on the views of clerics, the doctors, and the medieval courts. The clergy preached control and restraint. They emphasized the value of abstinence against the culture of feasts and condemned gluttony. Medieval doctors insisted on the dangers of fat even though there were no images or words to characterize what was “too big.” The medieval courts cultivated refinement but there was growing expectation that power and lightness be united, an association of big and slim, even though social ascendancy was still associated with alimentary accumulation.

This chapter discusses the increasing importance of figures in the early nineteenth century. Treatises on obesity had become common, although they continued to be strongly focused on extreme cases. The presentation of these cases, however, included something new—a flurry of numbers accompanied them as though suddenly all measurements were now considered useful. There was also an inexorable, subtle development of a new vision with regards to physical measurements as seen in literary descriptions. There was the allure of Balzac’s Grandet with his “five foot waist,” short and squat with calves twelve inches in circumference. There was also the unfortunate priest from Tours who, becoming painfully skinny, noticed one morning while putting on his “blue mottled stockings” that his calves had “lost over an inch in circumference.” Popular theatre productions in the 1830s began referring to bodyweight, thus revealing the notion’s penetration into broader segments of society.