ABSTRACT
By exploring the utopian and transcendent yearnings that informed Western body cultures during the early twentieth century, this chapter shows that ideas about slender and muscular bodies unfolded at the juncture of several developments. Manifested in a variety of domains, from modernist art and literature to modern athletics and high—performance sports to shifting ideas about beauty, health, and aging, anti-fat prejudice accelerated as part of a generalized cultural yearning for forms of transcendence in which frustration with the messy limitations of conventional physicality—as well as an ever—expanding set of challenges posed by the conventions and institutional structures of modernity—encouraged collective dreaming of alternative forms of embodiment. While such dreams may have ancient antecedents, the twentieth century offered the tantalizing technological possibility of bringing them closer to reality. While some of these visions were expressed in the more overtly utopian projects of communism and fascism, this chapter focuses on how mainstream body aspirations reflected these overt dreams of creating perfect worlds. Early twentieth century culture thus crystallized centuries of Western misgivings about fat, fatness, and fattening, marshaling and weaponizing them to create the fat phobia of our current world.
