Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body

Susan Bordo

University of California Press, 2004 - Philosophy - 361 pages

"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)

"This is a terrific book!"—Nancy J. Chodorow, author of The Power of Feelings: Personal Meaning in Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Culture (2001) and The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (California, 1999)

"Susan Bordo's Unbearable Weight is a masterpiece of complex and nuanced thinking not only about a significant problem that faces women but about our culture. A very valuable book."—Susan Griffin, author of The Book of Courtesans: A Catalogue of their Virtues (2001)

"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." —from the foreword by Leslie Heywood

What people are saying

UNBEARABLE WEIGHT: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body

User Review  - Kirkus

In dense, challenging, subtly argued philosophical essays, Bordo (Philosophy/LeMoyne College; The Flight to Objectivity, 1987- -not reviewed) offers a postmodern, poststructuralist feminist ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - rachaelster - LibraryThing

The linchpin of much of my thinking as a feminist for the past few years.

Contents

• Whose Body Is This? Feminism Medicine and: 45
• Are Mothers Persons? Reproductive Rights and: 71
• Hunger as Ideology: 99
• Psychopathology as: 138
• The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity: 165
• Reading the Slender Body: 185
• Feminism Postmodernism and Gender Skepticism: 215
• The Effacements of Postmodern: 245
• Postmodern Subjects Postmodern Bodies: 277
• Notes: 301
• Index: 343

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).

Bibliographic information

• Title: Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body; ACLS Humanities E-Book
• Author: Susan Bordo
• Contributors: Susan Bordo, Leslie Heywood
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: University of California Press, 2004
• ISBN: 0520240545, 9780520240544
• Length: 361 pages
• Subjects: Philosophy / General; Social Science / Gender Studies; Social Science / Sociology / General