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"The editors of "Cultures of the Abdomen" have assembled an
imaginative mix of social, cultural, and medical histories that
illuminate how past discussions of digestion, diet, and body shape
have informed modern gender ideals, health, selfhood, and personal
values. We learn here how the exterior form of the belly has come
to reflect not only what goes into and out of it, but has also
become a reliable sign of our inner nature. By adding corpulence
and character to the ancient connection between health and
dietetics, these essays literally tap into the guts of our
contemporary obsession with eating and body image."--Robert A. Nye,
Oregon State University"This is a stimulating excursion through the
human alimentary tract that explores the complex intertwinings of
Western attitudes toward eating and eliminating with the anxieties
generated by the growth of urban, industrial civilization. The
ideology of the abdomen is shown to have stimulated and responded
to contemporary notions of health, character, and intellect, and to
have sown confusion over gender identification and sexual appetite.
Physiology and medicine, philosophy and literature, even the world
of commerce, are probed to illuminate the preoccupation of the past
three centuries with the appearance and experience of the
belly."--James Whorton, Professor of Medical History, University of
Washington"If 'food' is the new 'sex' in cultural studies, then
this cultural history should be consumed as soon as possible.
Linking diet, the body, and the self in deeply and carefully
historicized ways, it spans the modern period from the
Enlightenment to the present, from 'weight loss in the age of
reason' to 'fat is a feminist issue.' It drawstogether key younger
and established scholars for whom culture, history, and the abdomen
yield intriguing and important insights into modern
sensibilities."--Alison Bashford, The University of Sydney
We live in a world obsessed with abdomens. Whether we call it the
belly, tummy, or stomach, we take this area of the body for granted
as an object of our gaze, the subject of our obsessions, and the
location of deeply felt desires. Diet, nutrition, and exercise all
play critical roles in the development of our body images and thus
our sense of self, not least because how we are made to feel about
bodies (both our own and those of others) is often grounded in
dietary and lifestyle choices. Cultures of the Abdomen traces the
history of social, cultural, and medical ideas about the stomach
and related organs since the seventeenth century, and demonstrates
that a focused study of the abdomen is necessary for understanding
the deep historical meanings that underscore our contemporary
obsessions with hunger, diet, fat, indigestion, and excretion. It
locates that history from dietary ideals in early modern Europe to
the vexing issue of American fat in the twenty-first century,
surveying along the way developments in Britain, France, Germany,
Italy, and Russia.
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