NotNormativelyHuman 197
One salient sample of such "looking good" norms are those which
stipulate that a body have certain contours and a defined weight. While
such norms have always been wholly arbitrary, recent research has also
highlighted their historical contingency. In the context of
industrialization and urbanization in the U.S., the cultural semiotics of
bodilyappearanceshiftedconsiderably:
Cultural secularization, the rise of a national consumer culture, the
popularization of commercial entertainment and the expansion of the
visual media industries led to an increased emphasis on fashion,
superficial appearances,and "personality," or one's pleasing appearance
to others, which replaced older, Victorian notions of "character" as a
covetedpersonaltrait.(Barbas1121)As a result, the valuation of fatness and thinness reversed. While
previously well-fed bodies had signified prosperity, since roughly the
1880s, slimness became the public marker of prosperity and privilege
(M. Lowe). A thin body became the calory-based version of the
American self-made man, or in many instances, the self-regulating
woman.Accordingly, the topics of dieting and female body image have
received more and more attention from American cultural and social
historians(Barbas),oftenascomponentofafeministcritiqueoffashion
andbeautynormsinU.S.history.^43 Inthesecontextsaselsewhereinthe
general culture, corpulence acquired connotations of indulgence or
overall indecision (Braziel and LeBesco). Being overweight has in the
meantime become one of the historically most demonized categories of
biological non-normativity, even while more and more Americans are
overweight. Fat male characters are now often symbols of corporate
culture's marginalization and emasculation of blue-collar and midlevel
white-collar workers at the end of the twentieth century (Mosher 168)
while overweight women, of which the Precious character in the novel
(^43) One of the key texts here is obviously Banner, Lois.AmericanBeauty. New
York: Knopf, 1983. Print.; cf. also Stearns, Peter.Fat History: Bodies and
Beauty in the Modern West. New York: New York UP, 1997. Print.; Peiss,
Kathy.Hope in a Jar: The Making of Americas Beauty Culture. New York:
MetropolitanBooks,1998.Print.