THE WEIGHT OF WILDERNESS: FAT HISTORIES, EUGENICS IDEALS, AND THE TERMS OF BELONGING IN AMERICAN NATURE

Abstract

Contemporary outdoor culture in the United States continues to privilege bodies imagined as thin, athletic, rugged, and self reliant. These norms are rooted in white Western constructions of nature and shape who feels welcome in outdoor spaces and who is represented in environmental narratives. This dissertation examines how these inequities persist by tracing the historical and ideological development of “fit” and “unfit” bodies in American environmental thought. Through an interrogation of whiteness, eugenics, and body size, this dissertation reveals how these idealized corporeal categories produced notions of nature and outdoor culture from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Chapter 2 analyzes late nineteenth and early twentieth century wilderness discourse to show how elite white men’s anxieties about urban “overcivilization” helped reimagine wilderness as a purified antidote to the city. Through corporeal analysis, this chapter demonstrates how fatness became a culturally salient marker of environmental unfitness, anchoring an idealized fit body in opposition to racialized, gendered, and classed others. By tracing the socio historical construction of environmental bodies, I illuminate the assumptions that naturalize exclusion and sets the groundwork for elitism in present outdoor culture. Chapter 3 situates eugenics within the concurrent rise of the American conservation movement, profiling prominent conservation figures whose leadership bridged both movements. I use decolonial theory to critique the epistemic foundations of Western science and settler colonial analysis to highlight the logics of elimination and superiority evident in both eugenics and conservation. I argue that eugenic notions of bodily and population fitness were not incidental but constitutive of American conservation’s foundational ethos as it is birthed at the beginning of the twentieth century. This chapter contends that these logics aimed to engineer futures privileging white settler dominance over land and life, thereby normalizing environmental governance through the sorting of eugenically “fit” and “unfit” bodies. Chapter 4 turns to contemporary culture, presenting a reflexive thematic analysis of interviews with sixteen fat outdoorists who regularly engage with nature. From their experiences, I created five themes that situate their individual stories inside of a larger fatphobic American cultural context: systemic exclusion, social exclusion, self accommodation, active resistance and change making, and imagining fat affirming futures. These themes document how anti-fat bias structures outdoor access and belonging, while highlighting the creation of new materials, spaces, and cultures that expand participation beyond narrow Western ideals. This chapter centers embodiment and community organizing to show how people contest the demarcation of environmental unfitness and build alternative infrastructures of belonging. Together, these chapters show how Western environmental thought has historically tethered nature to idealized, thin, and racially normative bodies and how these constructions continue to shape outdoor belonging today. I argue that fitness/unfitness functions as a normative technology in U.S. environmental history to police who counts as natural, who belongs outdoors, and which bodies are deemed worthy of conservation. This dissertation foregrounds fatness as an analytic and lived site of these environmental politics, advancing theoretical tools for fat studies and the inclusion of the fat identity in environmental justice. By examining the historical roots and contemporary consequences of environmental “fitness,” the dissertation offers critical insight into the cultural politics of nature and highlights pathways toward more inclusive and equitable outdoor futures.