Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body"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) |
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African American agoraphobia analysis anorectic anorectic's anorexia and bulimia Anorexia Nervosa anorexic appetite argue beauty become bodily Bruch Brumberg bulimics Chernin commercials construction contemporary context continually course critical critique culture deconstruction described desire diet discourse dominant dualism duality eating disorders effaced Ellen West embodied essay example experience fantasies feel female body femininity feminism feminist fetal fetus FIGURE Foucault gender girls Häagen-Dazs historical human hunger hysteria ideal identity ideology images imagined Jell-O Journal of Eating Kim Chernin lives look Madonna male masculinity material Material Girl meaning metaphor Michel Foucault mother nature nineteenth century normalizing norms notions Obsession Orbach perspective philosophy political postmodern poststructuralist practice pregnant race racial reading reality representations reproductive resistance role says sexual social struggle subjectivity suggest surgery Susan Susan Bordo Susie Orbach symbolic television theory tion Victorian weight Weight Watchers woman women York
Popular passages
Page 12 - The difference between men and women is like that between animals and plants. Men correspond to animals, while women correspond to plants because their development is more placid and the principle that underlies it is the rather vague unity of feeling.
Page 27 - There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorizing to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself.