Fat in a time of slim: The reinscription of race in the framing of fat desirability in post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

This article critically examines the way in which the reported sexual desire of black African men for fat women is contained and managed in South African media representations of fat. While sexual desire for fat women represents a potential challenge to the dominant framing of fat as diseased/dysfunctional/disgusting, the article shows how the reduction of this desire to one of two (racialized) ‘explanations’ – either evidence of racial primitivism or a (black male) strategy to avoid infection with HIV – emasculates the potentially powerful oppositional framing of fat as sexy. It is a mark of the dominant frame’s influence that it is capable of co-opting oppositional frames and recasting them in its own image. From the point of view of critiques of the fat-as-disease orthodoxy, the claim to the existence of an alternative norm of fat as sexually desirable in ‘black culture’ emerges as a problematic oppositional frame – saturated with raced assumptions in the way in which it is reported. The counter framing of the (black) fat body as sexually desirable is given column space to be derided and dismissed as an instance of deviant black sexuality, as a mistaken belief in need of ‘correction’, or it is subsumed under a medicalized frame as a strategy for the avoidance of disease rather than an expression of genuine sexual desire.