Harvard University Press Blog

Fat Talk Revisited

About a decade ago, we published a book called Fat Talk by Mimi Nichter, currently Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. The book, which one reviewer called “a tantalizing glimpse into the intimate world of adolescent girls,” was the result of years spent interviewing hundreds of teenage girls about the ways that they think and talk about their bodies. Nichter and her colleagues found that girls didn’t so much diet as talk about dieting, engaging together in “fat talk,” an ongoing, ritualistic dialogue that served to build solidarity among them.

Last week, dozens of college campuses across the country took part in an organized event called “Fat Talk Free Week,” which Professor Nichter supported by offering “A Brief History of Fat Talk.”  We invited Professor Nichter to comment here on the movement and its reference to her work.    

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A couple of weeks ago I was walking across my college campus and a colorful poster on the side of a building caught my eye. It read “Fat Talk Free Day.” As I read on, I learned that there was an upcoming sorority event on the college mall where women could “Take the Pledge” to free themselves from fat talk. There was also a Dove “Real Woman” speaker who was coming to campus to speak about “Embracing Real Beauty.” How curious to find a term I had coined ten years back having a new life. What was this fat talk revival all about? Googling the event as I walked, I found that a sorority had adopted “banning fat talk” as their “activity of the year” in an effort to free women, at least those on college campuses, from this common ritual.

I tried to wrap my head around Fat Talk becoming a social movement among sorority girls. And why was it occurring now? It seems to me that fat talk is as common today as it was when my colleagues and I first conducted our fieldwork. I still hear it everywhere, in the high schools and college campuses where I continue to do research, and among my own friends and colleagues.

So what purpose does fat talk serve? By the time a white middle class girl reaches adolescence, she has become a competent participant in this fat talk discourse. Saying “I’m so fat” or complaining about specific body parts (“I hate my thighs,” “Can you believe how big my butt is?”) is really much more than an observation about how a girl looks or feels. It’s a call for support from her peers. Comments like these evoke a response that the girl is not fat, that things aren’t as bad as they seem. Fat talk is a kind of social ritual among friends, an attempt to create solidarity. Saying that you dislike your body makes it clear that you don’t think you’re better than your friends, even if you are thinner than them. When the statement comes before eating, it provides an apology or excuse for what you’re about to indulge in (“I know I really shouldn’t but…"). In the household, there is also a lot of fat talk exchanged between mothers and daughters.

Fat talk is a popular idiom which results in support from friends and family, but at what cost? While it may seem innocuous, fat talk can result in slippage from an initial place of gathering support from friends to a self-destructive space. Commenting in a negative way about one’s body can have a host of ramifications including the lowering of self-esteem and the development of negative self-concept. It reinforces the message that you are far from “perfect” and constantly need to monitor and work on yourself. Further, by engaging in frequent self-deprecation, one can lose sight of who they really are and the enormous potential beneath the surface.

Standing By The Book

Susan Wallace Boehmer, our Editor-in-Chief, recently took part in a forum on scholarly publishing organized by Bookbuilders of Boston. The text below comes from her talk, which she informally called “What’s Changing and What’s Not as HUP Goes Digital.”

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What I like about books are not the usual things people mention as they wring their hands about the world going digital. It’s not the smell of ink on paper, the tactile turning of pages, the lending and giving of your favorite books to friends and family, the practicality of books for beach reading (no worries about sand, water, batteries). It’s not the usefulness of books as coasters for a cup of hot coffee, or the social cachet that comes from having a well-stocked library in your home.

Don’t get me wrong: I like the physicality of books quite a lot—as an avid book owner. But as an editor, and more important a reader, what I like about scholarly books is something else.

More than anything, I like their length. I prefer ideas and opinions and narratives that are just too complicated, too nuanced, to fit into a New Yorker article, or a Wikipedia entry, or a series of public lectures. But at the same time, I like the boundedness of books—the sense you get at the end of 300 or 400 pages that you really have a good firm grip on the subject. This is of course an illusion—there are dozens of other books out there that grab the subject in quite a different way. But the feeling that you’ve mastered something—however fleeting—is what keeps me going back to books. What you feel at the end of a good book is kind of like a runner’s high—though I guess we should call it a reader’s high.

Another thing I like about scholarly books is their table of contents. When I was a developmental editor, I’d sometimes tell authors that I wanted them to write three things for me. The first one was an ad: 250 words that would persuade readers that of all the books in all the bookstores in all the world, this is the one you must read next—buy it! Of course the true purpose of this writing exercise was to get authors to focus their own minds on what their book was all about.

The second thing I asked authors to write was a novel. Needless to say, I didn’t really want them to write a novel, but this was my way of telling authors that every book, nonfiction as well as fiction, must tell a good story—and they should never let an irrelevant truth get in the way of that.

The third thing I asked my authors to write was a poem. And this is what the table of contents is: it’s a little piece of verse that signifies and anticipates all kinds of mysterious, enlightening things to come. A table of contents, like a poem, has to be aware of meter and form, metaphor and echo, alliteration and allusion. It has to be lyrical. It has to sing.

The table of contents leads to another thing I like about nonfiction books, which is their division into chapters. Chapters are not like essays. Essays—in a magazine, let’s say—relate to one another sort of the way out-of-town first cousins relate at a family reunion. They have polite conversations, and maybe you’ll notice a little family resemblance, but mostly they come together briefly and then they go away to live their separate lives. Chapters in a book relate to one another the way siblings do: every one of them is looking around at every other one, all the time, sizing them up and figuring out when to play together and when to get out of the way. A book with chapters is a tight-knit little family: there’s tension in every relationship, but they’re still all in it together.

The Humanities and The Bottom Line

In a popular culture seminar a few years back, a classmate of mine was feeling a bit exasperated with some of the theory that we were working our way through. He said something to the effect of “This stuff is completely unintelligible to the average person on the street.” Our professor, already frustrated with our general reluctance, responded by explaining that nobody would ever walk into a graduate level math class and complain that a novice would be lost, helplessly overwhelmed by specialized terminology. Why should what we do be held to these higher standards of instant outsider comprehension?

I was reminded of that exchange, and the validation it brought, while reading a recent New York Times Opinionator column by Stanley Fish, who we’ve of course published several times over the years. Sparked by the crushing decision by SUNY-Albany to disband its French, Italian, Russian, Classics, and Theatre departments, Fish has written two columns in as many weeks on the “Crisis of the Humanities.” Towards the end of the second column, in the course of proposing a new approach to justifying the continuing existence of the humanities, he says:

“Turn an accusation — you guys don’t deliver anything we can recognize — into a banner and hold it aloft.”

It’s an approach well worth considering.

For the most part, though, the columns are Fish being Fish.  "An equal opportunity antagonist" is how we described him in the copy for The Trouble with Principle. Iconoclastic, a bit dismissive, and generally quite certain. Opinionated, like the column heading says. The bulk of the second piece is his response to the many, many comments generated by the first. The commenters who’d argued, against Fish, for the financial (rather than academic) value of the humanities cited a few articles repeatedly, he says. Two of them are the work of Christopher Newfield, author of Unmaking the Pubic University. To Newfield’s claim that “. . . English and Sociology make money on their enrollments, spend almost nothing on their largely self-funded research, and then . . . actually have some of their ‘profits’ from instruction transferred to help fund more expensive fields,” Fish responds: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Newfield, on his blog, Remaking the University, defended his take:

In this climate, it is particularly urgent to get the numbers right, and for everyone affected to inform themselves about what the numbers actually are. America's most prominent English professor, the New York Times blogger Stanley Fish, got into the act last week by commenting that the SUNY-Albany cuts could be rejected on professional grounds but not on budgetary ones, since the humanities "do not earn their keep." Fish was roundly criticized for this, and takes up a couple of pieces of mine (the one he doesn't link is here) and by the UCLA English professor Robert N. Watson (UCLA Today version). The good news is that Fish describes the much more aggressive stance university leaders need to take in relation to political and business leaders. On the other hand, the post unhelpfully reiterates the common misconceptions about university funding that Prof. Watson, I, and others, working independently, have been trying to undo.

Fish continues to describe research funding as "soft money" that adds to university budgets. In reality, extramurally funded research loses large amounts of money, e.g., $720 million in losses on $3.5 billion in gross research revenues at the University of California. This means that extramural research funding is not actually available as soft money to "shore up" the humanities or anything else, but requires large infusions of internal cash flow to keep going. These infusions, aka "cross-subsidies," can only come in large amounts from a combination of state funds allocated for instruction and/or student tuition, also generally paid with instruction as a primary goal. UC President Mark Yudof himself has acknowledged in a response to Prof. Watson that this means that "the humanities indeed can be seen as cross-subsidizing science, engineering, and similar departments."

Participating in the Circulation of Copies

Marcus Boon's In Praise of Copying, which we published this month, has been called a "road map through the deepest meanings of our age of mechanical reproduction." Well, the book is done, but Boon's still mapping. On his blog, and reproduced here, Boon walks through the thinking that led to our making a full text pdf of In Praise of Copying available for free download on our website.

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I am uploading my new book onto the internet. Yes, I am. The book is not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of commodification … OK, I’m copying again, from the introductory lines of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “Unpacking My Library”, which media theorist Julian Dibbell riffed on in his dawn of the downloading age essay “Unpacking My Record Collection”. Those two excellent essays were concerned with the figure of the collector. But what concerns me here is, to use the title of another of Benjamin’s essays, “the author as producer”, and the act of donating a book, “my book”, to a library, if library is the right word for the place where my text is being deposited.

While I was finishing In Praise of Copying, I became interested in the circulation of texts. I wondered whether it was hypocritical to write a book that celebrates copying, while still slapping a copyright notice to the front of the book. There are easy ways out of this: I could say that what I’m doing is presenting a critique of contemporary society but that obviously I have to work pragmatically within existing economic conditions, even though I disapprove of them. There’s some truth to that. In fact, the copyright notice to many academic books is in the name of the publisher, not the author. When I talked to people at Harvard, they pointed out to me that in signing a book contract, I had already signed away most of the rights to the book, and that it was therefore more honest for the publisher to claim and look after the copyright. I could have requested that I retain the copyright, as I did with my first HUP published book, but I thought there was something persuasive about their argument. And that I don’t need to own the copyright in order to feel some sense of agency in relation to what I’d written.

But I still wanted to explicitly allow people to make copies of my book about copying. I asked Harvard whether this was possible and they said yes. As of October 1, 2010, the book has been available from Harvard’s website as a pdf, free to download, but with a creative commons license that restricts the uses of the copy. I wrote the following text to accompany the web page:

“Given the topic and stance of In Praise of Copying, I wanted the text to participate openly in the circulation of copies that we see flourishing all around us. I approached Harvard to discuss options and they agreed to make the book available as a PDF online. The PDF is freely available to anyone who wants to download it, but it does come with a creative commons license that sets some intelligent restrictions on what you can do with it. Although generosity is a wonderful thing, this isn’t especially intended as a utopian gesture towards a world in which everything is free. It’s recognition of the way in which copies of texts circulate today, a circulation in which the physical object known as the book that is for sale in the marketplace has an important but hardly exclusive role. A PDF of a book is not an illegitimate copy of a legitimate original but participates in other kinds of circulation that have long flourished around the book-commodity: the library book; the photocopy or hand-written copy; the book browsed, borrowed or shared. We all know these modes of circulation exist, as they continue to do today with online text archives.

Perhaps these online archives just make visible and more “at hand” something that was happening invisibly, more distantly, but continuously before. At the same time, something new is going on. The physical book today is one copy, one iteration of a text among others. What that means for publishers, writers, readers and other interested parties is something that we are working out – on this webpage and elsewhere.” 

An Austen Annotation Grab Bag

In her introduction to Pride and Prejudice: An Annotated Edition, editor Patricia Meyer Spacks makes a confession: “Producing these notes taught me more than I thought I had left to learn about Pride and Prejudice,” she writes. “I have read the novel probably forty or fifty times. I have taught it, over the course of many years to undergraduates at every stage of their college educations, to graduate students, and to faculty seminars. Several times I have held forth about it in print. With real shame now, I confess that at the beginning of this project I thought I could annotate the book out of my head. I was wrong.” Even for somebody who knows this book as intimately as Spacks, there are still layers upon layers to be discovered about this much loved novel and the world in which it is situated. Here are just five fun facts about Pride and Prejudice and its world that Spacks unearths in her annotations.

1) Throughout Pride and Prejudice, much is made of the incomes of various characters. As soon as word gets out that Mr. Bingley has rented Netherfield, rumors begin to circulate estimating his income at “four or five thousand a year.” But how much is this, actually? While Spacks notes that it’s “virtually impossible to calculate equivalents, a yearly income of £5,000 would be equivalent to something between $340,000 and $500,000 in 2010 dollars.” This would put Mr. Darcy’s income at roughly one million.

2) Might there be a real-life Pemberley? Nobody knows for sure, but Derbyshire, the county where Darcy’s estate is located, is “famous for its great houses.” Some have speculated that Chatsworth, “the magnificent home of the dukes of Devonshire,” might be the model for Pemberley.

3) In Volume I, Chapter 6, Austen refers to the Bennets’ visit to Netherfield being returned “in due form.” What does “due form” involve? Spacks explains that the “etiquette of reciprocal visits belongs to an elaborate system of manners.” Social calls could only happen between certain hours—usually 11am and 3pm—and the “promptness with which a call was returned could be taken to measure the caller’s degree of enthusiasm for the acquaintance, as could the length of the formal visit.” Following the rituals of calling according to proper form was considered a status symbol in its own right.

4) In a fit of enthusiasm over his plans to throw a ball at Netherfield, Bingley proclaims, “[A]s for the ball, it is quite a settled thing; and as soon as Nicholls has made white soup enough, I shall send round my cards.” White soup, Spacks tells us, is “an elaborate soup based on veal stock, cream, and almonds.”

5) Despite that Elizabeth has just humiliatingly rejected his proposal, Mr. Darcy insists on delivering a letter to her the next day by hand. It’s an awkward encounter, but, Spacks reveals, a necessary one: “Because correspondence between a man and a woman was considered improper unless the couple were engaged, Darcy protects Elizabeth’s reputation by giving her the letter in person instead of mailing it to her.”

For more on indiscreet utterances, unreserve, impudence, repugnance, and marriages desirable in every respect, find yourself a copy of the book!

On Liu Xiaobo

Last Friday came word of the Nobel Peace Prize for Chinese political dissident and literary critic Liu Xiaobo, for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China. The world knew about the honor before the man himself. Currently imprisoned in northeastern China on an 11-year sentence, Liu learned of the prize only days later, after being granted a rare visit from his wife, the poet Liu Xia. Now comes news that Liu Xia herself has been placed under house arrest in Beijing. China reacted immediately to the news from Oslo, denouncing the award as blasphemy. Russia, too, is dismissing the prize as a “political tool of the west.”

Liu has been prominent since his role in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. His current detention stems from his part in the drafting and dissemination of Charter 08, a petition that called on China’s ruling Communist Party to usher in political reform. As detailed by Geremie R. Barmé, who researches Chinese culture and intellectual history, the petition was signed by leading public intellectuals and concerned citizens, gaining momentum until authorities intervened:

On Christmas Day 2009, as a momentous year of anniversaries drew to an end, the Beijing authorities announced that Liu Xiaobo had been sentenced to eleven years in jail for 'inciting subversion.’ According to media reports, this was the longest term given to any offender accused of this particularly nebulous crime since it was introduced in 1997. Ironically, for the two decades since the tragic denouement of the 1989 mass protest movement that pressed for media freedoms and basic rights Liu’s has been a voice of reason and decency. Like patriots who had agitated for the party to make China a modern and civil nation in the 1940s, activists like Liu, and the thousands who signed the Charter 08, have used peaceful means and public protest to appeal to Chinese authorities to respect their own constitution. (Barmé's full article is here.)

An essay written by Barmé in 1990 that presented Liu Xiaobo as a figure through which to understand the extraordinary energy and enthusiasm of the Protest Movement of 1989 was recently made available online by China Heritage Quarterly. In the essay, Barmé describes Liu's decision not to flee Beijing as echoing "the tragedy of individualistic and heroic Chinese intellectuals of the last century" who "travel a course from self-liberation to self-immolation."

At his recent trial, Liu gave a statement expressing the hope that he will be “the last victim of China’s endless literary inquisition.” As translated by Professor David Kelly of the China Research Centre, at the University of Technology in Sydney, Liu continued:

Freedom of expression is the basis of human rights, the source of humanity and the mother of truth. To block freedom of speech is to trample on human rights, to strangle humanity and to suppress the truth. I do not feel guilty for following my constitutional right to freedom of expression, for fulfilling my social responsibility as a Chinese citizen. Even if accused of it, I would have no complaints.  (The Guardian has the full text in english, here.)

We offer our congratulations to Liu Xiaobo on the great honor of this recognition from the Nobel committee. For some months now we have had a contract to publish a selection of Liu Xiaobo's writing, and we now hope to speed the process so as to have this book out by next fall, so that readers of English can judge for themselves the importance of his work. It is neither standard practice to announce a project this far before its publication, nor particularly graceful to advertise it on the heels of such a politically charged event. In this instance, though, and in the face of what appears to be increased persecution of Liu and his family, it does seem appropriate to share the news that we’ll soon do our part to help make Liu’s writing available.

 

Mario Vargas Llosa Awarded 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature

We at Harvard University Press would like to offer our fond congratulations to Mario Vargas Llosa on having been awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. Upon hearing the news this morning, HUP Editor-in-Chief Susan Wallace Boehmer understood, finally, why she’s sought to make permanent a piece of digital ephemera. 

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Almost exactly three years ago, I received a lovely message on my voice mail at HUP. “Hello Susan. This is Mario. Mario Vargas Llosa ...” I listened and then saved it, and I’ve resaved it every thirteen days since. Eighty-five times I’ve hit the 9 button on my phone, to keep Harvard from consigning this precious connection to some telephonic graveyard. 

Believe me, more than once I’ve asked myself where this obsessive-compulsive behavior was coming from. Today, with the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature, I got my answer. I don’t know how long “Mario. Mario Vargas Llosa” has been on the short list in Stockholm, but in Cambridge he’s been on my short list of Most Wonderful Authors I Have Ever Worked With for four years. 

 It started when I had the privilege of editing a book of his essays, Wellsprings, which grew out of the Richard Ellmann Lectures at Emory University in 2006. I—along with fourteen hundred others—packed into Atlanta’s Glenn Memorial Church to be captivated for three days, as Vargas Llosa spoke about the three masters whose literary voices resonated in his own work. Of one of them, Cervantes, he had this to say: “It is easy to forget, in the midst of all this critical acclaim, that Cervantes was a person like all of us, faced with the pitfalls of an uncertain destiny, whose work was not conceived miraculously or by chance but was achieved through determination, hard work, craftsmanship, and patience.” On a morning that brings Mario—and the world—such fabulous news, I can’t think of a better description of the soft-spoken, generous man I briefly came to know. 

So, to paraphrase my precious phone message: “Hello Mario. This is Susan. Susan Wallace Boehmer. I just wanted to tell you that I have heard about your Nobel Prize in Literature, and I like it very much. I think you have done a wonderful job. Thank you, Mario. I will call you later.”

Talking Book Design: Introducing "HUP Jackets"

The various people in a publishing house consider books in a lot of different ways. The people in the editorial department talk and think about projects one way, the people in production another, the people in sales and marketing yet another, and so on. 

Of all of these people talking about books in all of these different ways, my favorite crowd to listen to is the book designers. When designing the jacket for a new book, they have to figure out how to graphically represent ideas and   arguments that are often pretty complex, or even abstract. They sometimes have to create a design that does the heavy lifting for books whose titles are maybe a bit vague. They have to think about how a design would look face-out on a shelf, but also how it would look as a little rectangle on the Amazon page on your computer or even your phone. They have to treat books that cover similar material in ways distinctive enough to keep them from feeling like the same thing over and over. And they have to do all of that (and more) while still satisfying the author and all of those competing “ways of talking” in editorial, sales, production, etc. 

It’s amazing that they make it out of bed in the morning. But, they do, and they come to work, and at HUP they design some pretty great jackets. We wanted to provide you all with a little window into how they work, so we’ve put together an audio slideshow. Look for these to show up occasionally in the future. This first one features HUP Art Director Tim Jones explaining his design for Roosevelt’s Purge, a new book by Susan Dunn.

 

  

Facebook vs. Evolution

The Facebook movie is upon us.  "The Social Network" was directed by David Fincher ("Fight Club") and written for the screen by Aaron Sorkin ("The West Wing"), and by all accounts it's among the best work either has done. The review aggregating site Metacritic has it with a pretty staggering Metascore of 97 out of 100. 

The film is about the founding of the social networking-cum-world conquering site Facebook, which currently boasts over 500 million users around the world, most likely including you. Fincher and Sorkin’s version of the story has the site’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, making quite a few enemies for himself on his way to helping us all make more friends. So, is it working? Is it useful? Really, how many friends does one person need? 

150. 

That’s not me talking. That’s evolution. 

The number 150 has come to be accepted as the limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships. You may know it as “Dunbar’s Number,” named for Robin Dunbar, anthropologist, evolutionary biologist, and Professor of Psychology at the University of Liverpool. Dunbar describes the figure as the upper limit to the number of people with whom humans can actually form relationships strong enough to rely on. Put another way, it’s the circle of people who will do you a favor. We simply don’t have the cognitive capacity to maintain a greater number of relationships at the level of complexity required for a bond to be “real.” 

Dunbar arrived at the number by working outwards from the social intelligence theory of why primates have such large brains. The theory holds that the complex social world in which primates live spurred the evolution in brain size. Basically, primates are more dependent on their social bonds than other types of animals, and those bonds are also more complex and socially informed. This hypothesis, according to Dunbar and others, is supported by a strong correlation between the size of a group (and hence its social complexity) and the relative size of the neocortex. Dunbar examined these correlations, plotted the sizes of various primate brains against the sizes of their social groups, determined the relationship, plugged in the size of the human brain, and got 150.