Feeding Desire: Fatness and Beauty in the Sahara

Book Description
While in the West it is said that women can never be too thin, semi-nomadic Arabs in Niger cherish a feminine ideal of extreme fatness. Feeding Desire seeks to explain this ideal by examining it in the context of Islamic faith, local concepts of health and the body, and, not least, notions of sexuality and desire.

From the Inside Flap
While the Western world adheres to a beauty ideal that says women can never be too thin, the semi-nomadic Moors of the Sahara desert have for centuries cherished a feminine ideal of extreme fatness. Voluptuous immobility is thought to beautify girls' bodies, hasten the onset of puberty, heighten their sexuality and ripen them for marriage. From the time of the loss of their first milk teeth, girls are directed to eat huge bowls of milk and porridge in one of the world's few examples of active female fattening. Based on fieldwork in an Arab village in Niger, Feeding Desire analyses the meanings of women's fatness as constituted by desire, kinship, concepts of health, Islam, and the crucial social need to manage sexuality. By demonstrating how a particular beauty ideal can only be understood within wider social structures and cultural logics, the book also implicitly provides a new way of thinking about the ideal of slimness in late Western capitalism. Offering a reminder that an estimated eighty per cent of the world's societies prefer plump women, this gracefully written book is both a fascinating exploration of the nature of bodily ideals and a highly readable ethnography of a Saharan people.

About the Author
Rebecca Popenoe is Visiting Lecturer in Anthropology at Uppsala University in Sweden. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has taught at the University of Virginia and Middlebury College in the U.S. as well as at Stockholm and Linköping Universities in Sweden.


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From the age of five or six, young Saharan Moor girls are required to eat several large bowls of grain or porridge with milk. The result is a voluptuousness thought to beautify girl's bodies, heighten their readiness for marriage, and protect them from health problems. While many of the world's societies have a vision of female beauty that tends toward plumpness, very few actively encourage their women to become as weighty as the Moors (formerly known as Tuaregs). The book explores how fattening is deeply grounded in wider structures of Moor life: devotion to Islam, adherence to patrilineal cousin marriage, and the investment of value produced by men into society's physical and affective center-women and their bodies. Rebecca Popenoe has produced a fascinating investigation of the total social context which produces such an unusual way of thinking about the body.


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