Black Music, White Bodies, Paul Whiteman’s Body

Drawing on the fields of fat studies and disability studies, this chapter investigates how Whiteman’s body shaped his public image. At a time when fatness accrued moral stigma, Whiteman’s weight was both problematic and essential to his persona as the king of jazz. Whiteman did not match the dominant slim-and-fit masculine ideal, and his body inspired numerous caricatures, animated cartoons, and comic publicity. This chapter reveals how racism intersected with images of the ideal masculine body. Contemporaneous white antijazz campaigns denounced jazz as racially and sexually threatening. Whiteman’s size placed him too close to Black musical bodies during a period in which fatness was increasingly associated with Blackness, while his size also suggested he had neutralized jazz’s erotic dangers.