This essay is part of a series of explainers to provide our audience with a foundational understanding of fascism in today's mass culture. It is a guide for the term body fascism. This is in no way an exhaustive exploration of the term, but a slice entry of a much wider discourse we hope may spark further reading and discussion.
Body Fascism: the promotion of an "ideal" body type as a symbol of patriotism—conceived of as the pinnacle of health, discipline, credibility, and worth—in service of a nationalist agenda, while "non-ideal" bodies experience increased violence and erasure.
We are living through a moment of intensified pressure on the body and flesh. In the afterlife of a mass disabling pandemic, COVID-19, the language of health and discipline has resurfaced with a vengeance. The rapid rise of GLP-1s, the cultural fixation on enhancements and bodily optimization, and the expansion of metrics used to measure fitness and productivity signal something larger than a wellness trend—which is, in itself, a benevolent form of anti-fatness. Together, these all reflect a political commitment: the elevation of a specific kind of body as the standard of safety—which can't be divorced from surveillance—and belonging.
The term "body fascism" names the promotion of thin/muscular, "productive," cisgender and heterosexual, white, militarizable bodies as a national and patriotic symbol. This body is projected through social institutions such as education, media, religion, medicine, and the government so that it stands out as the standard. Through this projection, the "ideal" body is given authority, credibility, and care, while bodies that deviate from it are not simply excluded but pushed and pulled toward erasure. The ideal body becomes a symbol of the nation, treated as competent and worthy—but only as long as it can perform for the state.
I write more about the creation of "the ideal body" in my book, Belly of the Beast:
Over two hundred years ago, a Belgian man named Adolphe Quetelet created what we now know as the BMI. Quetelet was not a physician, nor did he study medicine in any capacity; Quetelet was a mathematician and a sociologist, and it was that on which the BMI was created. Quetelet is known for his envisioning of l'homme moyen—an image of what he understood to be "the average man"—which he developed through "the measurement of human features with the deviation plotted around the mean." He began the development with the use of physical features of the human, who—at least as his work suggests—he understood to be cisgender white men. Those features included the chests of Scottish Highland regiment soldiers. After, he moved on to moral and intellectual qualities like suicide, crime, and madness. On Quetelet, Erna Kubergovic writes in the Eugenics Archive:
"For Quetelet, the average body presented an ideal beauty; the normal, conceived of average, emerged as an ideal type to be desired. It was Quetelet that formulated the BMI, initially through the measurement of typical weights among French and Scottish conscripts. Instead of labelling the peak of the bell-curve as merely normal, he labelled it 'ideal', with those deviating either 'overweight' or 'underweight' instead of heavier than average or lighter than average. Thus, while informed by statistics, Quetelet was still working within the medical context of the normal; that is, he envisioned the normal (i.e., typical) as the ideal or something desirable."
What he had created was the standard for male beauty and health, built only with white Europeans in mind and determined by something that measured whole populations and not individuals. By the twentieth century, Quetelet's work was being used as the basis of, and justification for, eugenics. And though all of his work in that time period was based in anti-Black race science, he was clear that the intent of the BMI was to measure populations to develop statistics.
Because we live within a libidinal economy, desire determines who is protected and valued. And one's proximity to desirability heightens their chances of survival and recognition. Once the ideal body becomes a national symbol, it settles into collective consciousness as both legible and untouchable. Desire, by way of body fascism, organizes the unequal distribution of care and violence. It determines whose bodies are worth aspiring to, whose are correctable, and whose are rendered killable through neglect—as well as whose never become recognized as having a body at all.
This distribution depends on a deeper distinction between body and flesh.
Following Hortense Spillers's distinction between body and flesh, the antiblack logic that situates blackness outside of human coherence thus raises the stakes of body fascism, rendering it a structure that operates globally, and its violence falls most heavily on black fat folks. Spillers argues that the distinction marks the difference between freedom and captivity. Those rendered as flesh are denied recognition as "fully human," or as people with bodies they were always already imagined to own. And in this way, bodily autonomy is produced through the violent disavowal of the flesh—the very apparatus through which fascism organizes its investment in control.
For black folks, whose lives have been structured through dispossession and property relations, the struggle is always against being reduced to flesh. To be dispossessed is, in effect, to be without a body. The "body," then, is not simply physical; it is a social and political status defined against the flesh, and blackness is always positioned outside of it.
Our current cultural moment follows a familiar pattern. History shows that after mass disabling events—pandemics, wars, or economic catastrophe—there is a rise in body fascist ideology and diet culture. We see this after World Wars I and II, in the development of fascist movements in Britain and Nazi Germany, and later during the Cold War with the creation of the U.S. President's Council on Youth Fitness. We see it in the political response to the HIV/AIDS crisis, in the so-called "obesity epidemic" of the 2000s, in the U.S. Task Force on Childhood Obesity, and in Israel's blockade of food into Gaza. To this point, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s "Make America Healthy Again" crusade is no surprise, as it's functionally a symptom of a capital crisis seeking resolution via moral panics and monetizing desire. The Western world and its colonial afterlives have a long history of waging war on fat flesh, with diet culture as a primary weapon.
Through body fascism, diet culture functions as a disciplinary technology used by imperial powers to punish, regulate, and control populations in the service of military strength and national image. From this perspective, the whiplash from the "body positive movement" to the current infatuation with GLP-1s (Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound, and Mounjaro) is an extension of this white nationalist, totalizing logic.
This process does not require overt authoritarianism. In fact, neoliberal democracies have perfected body fascism precisely by disavowing it and recasting coercion as care.
Body fascism advances through incremental mechanisms: the moralization of health precedes its weaponization; the construction of the ideal body precedes the punishment of deviation; covert metrics (e.g., BMI) replace overt classification systems (e.g., slave); worth and productivity become coterminous; optimization masquerades as care; and abandonment replaces spectacle. By the time explicit fascist violence appears, the structural work of building a fascist regime has already been done.
The blackening of flesh is central to this process. As Sabrina Strings shows in Fearing the Black Body, anti-fatness was only able to cohere alongside antiblack, white supremacist ideology. When Europeans encountered Africans, they marked blackness and fatness as signs of excess, impurity, and moral failure. By the nineteenth century, fatness had been revised as greed, laziness, and downright sinful—traits that cannot be divorced from blackness itself. Fatness became blackened, and thus marked.
Through body fascism, diet culture functions as a disciplinary technology used by imperial powers to punish, regulate, and control populations in the service of military strength and national image.
Black fatness is made meaningful through suffering, surveillance, and control. The policing of black fat flesh anchors entire systems of governance. Without a population to discipline, there would be no BMI, no "obesity epidemic," and no medical or scientific institutions organized around managing fatness.
The diet industry reflects this logic. It operates through what I once defined as formal and informal relationships among major food corporations, the medical industrial complex, and individual wealthy benefactors to sustain a social order in which fat people are monitored, restricted, guilted, stolen from, and punished. Diet culture has always linked food to morality, framing restraint as virtue and pleasure as danger through language like "guilty pleasure." Abstaining from pleasure becomes a way to train obedience, self-denial, and discipline in service of a broader political order.
Body fascism is not a relic of the past. It is an active feature of modern imperial regimes. Every time a government decides whose body must be protected and whose body must be erased for the sake of national imagery, this is body fascism; every time there is a call for sovereignty by state powers with the intent to maintain borders, this is body fascism; every time black flesh is wrangled, dismembered, abused, this is body fascism. Understanding this clarifies exactly how fascist ideologies operate through the body—not only by glorifying a narrow ideal but also by violently repressing the black fat.