Feeding Desire: Fatness and Beauty in the Sahara

Book Description
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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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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