Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body / Edition 2

by Susan Bordo, Leslie Heywood

Overview

"Unbearable Weight is brilliant. From an immensely knowledgeable feminist perspective, in engaging, jargonless (!) prose, Bordo analyzes a whole range of issues connected to the body—weight and weight loss, exercise, media images, movies, advertising, anorexia and bulimia, and much more—in a way that makes sense of our current social landscape—finally! This is a great book for anyone who wonders why women's magazines are always describing delicious food as 'sinful' and why there is a cake called Death by Chocolate. Loved it!"—Katha Pollitt, Nation columnist and author of Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture (2001)

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520240544
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	01/01/2004
Edition description:	Second Edition, Tenth Anniversary Edition
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	1,053,305
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Susan Bordo is Singletary Chair in the Humanities and Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private (1999), and Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. (California, 1997).

Read an Excerpt

An excerpt from the foreword by Leslie Heywood:

"To read Susan Bordo is to take a wild ride through the cultural images that form our daily lives, and to see them with a startling X-ray vision that reveals their blood and guts and bones, a vision that reveals us, finally, to ourselves. . . Piece by piece, strand by careful strand, she shows the sources of our deepest anxieties in the history of philosophy, in gender and race ideologies and the way these get expressed in the cultural images that surround us.

Unbearable Weight is, in its essence, a profound gift of insight, generosity, understanding. Though this edition marks the tenth anniversary of Unbearable Weight, these pages are as uncanny, insightful, and welcoming now as they were then. In living with us in the crazy, fast-moving world that is contemporary media

culture, Susan Bordo is our guide, our companion, and our friend."

Table of Contents

	Foreword: Reading Bordo	ix
	In the Empire of Images: Preface to the Tenth Anniversary Edition	xiii
	Acknowledgments	xxxvii
	Introduction: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body	1
Part 1	Discourses and Conceptions of the Body
	Whose Body Is This? Feminism, Medicine, and the Conceptualization of Eating Disorders	45
	Are Mothers Persons? Reproductive Rights and the Politics of Subject-ivity	71
	Hunger as Ideology	99
Part 2	The Slender Body and Other Cultural Forms
	Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the Crystallization of Culture	139
	The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity	165
	Reading the Slender Body	185
Part 3	Postmodern Bodies
	Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender Skepticism	215
	"Material Girl": The Effacements of Postmodern Culture	245
	Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern Bodies, Postmodern Resistance	277
	Notes	301
	Index	343

Editorial Reviews

Bordo explores women's obsessions with appearance, their struggles to control food and hunger, and the pressures brought on by a society that worships the ideal female figure. (Mar.)

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