The End of Love

American women are experiencing unprecedented problems within romantic relationships. Things were evidently never perfect, but now long-term relationships with men are on the decline. Emotionally deadened “situationships” are on the rise. While this is happening to women across race, Black women, who have long seen their romantic hopes dashed in America, are in particular distress. Their attempts at (hetero)coupledom are less fruitful than ever before. Women across the country can’t help but wonder: how did we get here, and what do we do about it? 

The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, & the Death of Romance provides much-needed insight into the problems of modern relationships between men and women. I show that women’s growing discontent has a lot to do with the recent explosion of “toxic” male behaviors. That men should suddenly become emotionally unavailable fuckboys—key elements of said toxicity—was neither inevitable, nor by chance. Instead, it has been a hidden consequence of 20th century racial and gendered integration.

This work shows that men are not innately toxic. Nor do they hate love or commitment. Instead, men across race have been working a new code to effectively deny loving partnerships to women who are not pliant, slim, and white. People across gender looking to get free from this romantic hell may best benefit from looking to new relational formations using insights from queer communities and scholars.

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Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia

There is an obesity epidemic in this country and poor black women are particularly stigmatized as “diseased” and a burden on the public health care system. This is only the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat black women, which Sabrina Strings shows took root more than two hundred years ago.

Strings weaves together an eye-opening historical narrative ranging from the Renaissance to the current moment, analyzing important works of art, newspaper and magazine articles, and scientific literature and medical journals―where fat bodies were once praised―showing that fat phobia, as it relates to black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of “savagery” and racial inferiority.

The author argues that the contemporary ideal of slenderness is, at its very core, racialized and racist. Indeed, it was not until the early twentieth century, when racialized attitudes against fatness were already entrenched in the culture, that the medical establishment began its crusade against obesity. An important and original work, Fearing the Black Body argues convincingly that fat phobia isn’t about health at all, but rather a means of using the body to validate race, class, and gender prejudice.