The Fat American in European Eyes: Feeding, Fattening, and Animality

The global representation of the “typical” American as fat is a relatively recent development, emerging after more than a century of depicting the American body as fit and slender. Despite its relative novelty, the figure of the fat American as a symbol of the corporate body of the nation, as well as a representation of how “ordinary” Americans may appear, fits well into long-lasting European stereotypes about “America.” For roughly a century, the United States has been at times presented as a kind of “animal” on the world stage that imposes itself in a predatory way while mindlessly “devouring” resources. Such animalized representations have been further enhanced through cultural distinctions whereby the consuming practices of Americans (whether of food or commodities) are cast as crass, crude, and less properly “human” when compared to “European” standards of “civilization” developed in the eighteenth century. Finally, animalization has long been a central method of ridiculing the bodies, character, and behavior of fat people who, in recent decades, have come to be seen as symptoms and causes of a “global obesity epidemic” whose epicenter is usually located in the United States. This paper examines how perceptions of global obesity have structured European, specifically French and Francophone, objections to American cultural and alimentary imperialism since the 1980s. By showing how ideas about feeding and fattening tend to animalize fat people in subtle ways, it argues that representations of the Fat American articulate a spectrum of concerns about national sovereignty and cultural identity that are interpersonal as well as intrapersonal, cultural and cross-cultural. This convergence of factors helps to explain how recent European stereotypes about “the Fat American” appropriate stereotypes about fat individuals in order to level them at a target that seems to “deserve” it.