As University of California, Irvine, sociologist Sabrina Strings, author of Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, writes in a recent issue of Bust magazine, fat tissue (and, by crass extension, gluttony and hypersexuality) had been linked with blackness in the popular European and American imagination at least since Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman from Cape Town, South Africa, was exhibited by showmen in France and London as the “Hottentot Venus” in the late 19th century.
 
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