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
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, and Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. (UC Press, 1997).

Table of Contents

Foreword: Reading Bordo, by Leslie Heywood
In the Empire of Images: Preface to the
Tenth Anniversary Edition
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Feminism, Western Culture, and
the Body

PART ONE DISCOURSES AND CONCEPTIONS OF THE BODY
Whose Body Is This? Feminism, Medicine, and the
Conceptualization of Eating Disorders
Are Mothers Persons? Reproductive Rights and the
Politics of Subject-ivity
Hunger as Ideology

PART TWO THE SLENDER BODY AND OTHER CULTURAL FORMS
Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the
Crystallization of Culture
The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity
Reading the Slender Body

PART THREE POSTMODERN BODIES
Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender Skepticism
"Material Girl": The Effacements of Postmodern
Culture
Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern Bodies,
Postmodern Resistance

Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

"This excellent study links the fear of women’s fat with a fear of women’s power and shows that as opportunities for women increase, their bodies dwindle."

New York Times

"Original, stimulating, and witty."

San Francisco Chronicle

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