About Ava Purkiss:

apurkiss@umich.edu

Ava Purkiss is an historian and assistant professor in the departments of American Culture and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. Her book-in-progress examines how African American women used physical exercise to demonstrate their literal and figurative fitness for citizenship in the first half of the twentieth century.  Purkiss’ research interests include black women’s history, public health, fitness culture, and the history of medicine.  Her forthcoming article, ‘“Beauty Secrets: Fight Fat’: Black Women’s Aesthetics, Exercise, and Fat Stigma, 1900-1930s,” will be published in the Summer 2017 issue of the Journal of Women’s History.

Articles by the author:

(Re)examining Fat Stigma through Black Women’s History

Posted on by Ava Purkiss

Through my research on black women’s exercise and fitness culture from 1900 to the 1930s, I discovered a little-known history of black fat shaming. While I expected to find that black women engaged in exercise for general health, I never imagined that some black women would craft their exercise programs for weight loss and at the same time participate in fat stigmatization. My surprise stemmed from common-sense assumptions about black people’s fat acceptance and flexible standards of beauty. Popular culture, academic studies on body image, and news outlets help to perpetuate these assumptions. R&B and Hip Hop is known for celebrating black women’s voluptuous bodies, including Drake who rapped famously he likes women “so thick that everybody else in the…

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