Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body - Softcover

Bordo, Susan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520088832 ISBN 13: 9780520088832

Publisher: University of California Press, 1995

Synopsis

In this provocative book, Susan Bordo untangles the myths, ideologies, and pathologies of the modern female body. Bordo explores our tortured fascination with food, hunger, desire, and control, and its effects on women's lives.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

"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

About the Author:

Susan Bordo is Professor of Philosophy and Singletary Chair of Humanities at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (1987) and co-editor of Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing (1989).

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0520088832
• ISBN 13: 9780520088832
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 362