Susan Bordo Popular Books

Susan Bordo Biography & Facts

Susan Bordo is an American philosopher known for her contributions in the field of contemporary cultural studies, particularly in the area of feminist theory. Bordo specializes in contemporary culture and its relation to the body, focusing on eating disorders which primarily affect females, such as anorexia and bulimia; cosmetic surgery; beauty; and evolutionary theory. She also explores racism and the body, masculinity, and sexual harassment. Overview Bordo's writing contributes to a body of feminist, cultural and gender studies, linking modern consumer culture directly to the formation of gendered bodies. Her work includes "Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body" (1993), a text that looks at the impact of popular culture (television, advertisements, and magazines, for example) in shaping the female body while also looking at typical female disorders such as hysteria, agoraphobia, anorexia nervosa and bulimia as "complex crystallizations of culture." Bordo has also garnered attention for her more recent book "The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private"(1999), a text which Bordo describes as being "a personal/cultural exploration of the male body from a woman's point of view." According to her University of Kentucky profile, the book has appeared in magazines such as Mademoiselle and Vanity Fair. Education and career Susan Bordo was raised in Newark, New Jersey. Bordo received her high school diploma in 1964 from Weequahic High School. She received her Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1982. She currently holds the Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities at the University of Kentucky, where she teaches English and Women's studies. Theoretical context Philosophical discourse While Bordo's writing works to "reach outside the academic world," her prose and critiques of modern culture in relation to subject, gender, and body formations are nonetheless grounded in theoretical frameworks. Bordo's work reflects a background in philosophical discourse in which issues of rationality, objectivity, and Cartesian dualism are explored and used to situate the body within culture historically. Bordo claims that "[w]hat remains the constant element throughout historical variation is the construction of body as something apart from the true self (whether conceived as soul, mind, spirit, will, creativity, freedom . . .) and as undermining the best efforts of that self." She traces the "body" as a concept and as a material "thing" back to Plato, Augustine, and the Bible revealing how the body has been viewed as "animal, as appetite, as deceiver, as prisoner of the soul and confounder of its projects." She also traces the dualistic nature of the mind/body connection by examining the early philosophies of Aristotle, Hegel, and Descartes, revealing how distinguishing binaries such as spirit/matter and male activity/female passivity have worked to solidify gender characteristics and categorization. Bordo proceeds to point out that while men have historically been associated with the intellect and the mind or spirit, women have long been associated with the body, the subordinated, negatively imbued term in the mind/body dichotomy. Materialism Bordo argues that "knowledge is 'embodied,' produced from a 'standpoint,' by a body that is located as a material entity among other material entities." She is therefore situated within a materialist framework, for, as Susan Hekman points out, "Bordo's emphasis on the materiality of the body, what most of us would call the 'real' body, is a function of her central theoretical conviction." Situating Bordo within a feminist and materialist theoretical context, her work is often compared and contrasted with Judith Butler's writing, which deals with gender formation and the body. Hekman provides analyses of Bordo's situatedness within materialist discourse and suggests both differences and similarities in the theoretical concerns of Bordo and Butler. While Bordo at times implies the body is a text to be inscribed upon and interpreted, she also emphasizes the materiality and locatedness of bodies within Western culture, whereas Butler's work on the body reflects a greater affiliation with postmodern thought in "treat[ing] the body as pure text." Bordo questions such a purely textual body for "If the body is treated as pure text, subversive, destabilizing elements can be emphasized and freedom and self-determination celebrated; but one is left wondering, is there a body in this text?" For Bordo, it is the "cultural definitions of the body and its materiality as they are given to us" that must be resisted, and therefore "real" bodies "must be the focus of feminist analysis and, significantly, feminist resistance." Feminism Bordo's critique of gendered, and particularly feminine, bodies stems from both feminist and gender studies methodologies. She critiques, re-evaluates, and reconfigures old and new feminist methodology, not excluding certain earlier feminist concerns that focused on the dichotomies of oppressor/oppressed and victimizer/victim, but re-evaluating their effectiveness and application to contemporary feminine concerns. As Bordo points out, feminism of the late 1960s and 1970s viewed "the female body [as] a socially shaped and historically 'colonized' territory." Such a view, she claims, classifies women and the female body predominantly as victims, living passively/submissively within a patriarchal society, a tabula rasa awaiting inscription. Intending to go beyond such a classification, Bordo writes that new feminist critiques looked more towards "racial, economic and class differences among women" while also looking at "both women's collusions with patriarchal culture and their frequent efforts at resistance." Cultural studies While situated within feminist and gender studies frameworks, Bordo's theories also stem from a cultural studies approach where the power of cultural phenomena such as television, advertising and popular magazines are analyzed in terms of means of domination and of resistance. While certain cultural theorists, for example John Fiske, who wrote Television Culture (1990), see elements of culture like television as "demonstrating the way representational codes and techniques shape our perception" but also as a means for resistance, where audience members could "decode" such messages and thus be able to "think resistantly about their lives," Bordo sees cultural coding as a more pernicious, binding and overwhelming force. For Bordo "the rules of femininity have come to be culturally transmitted more and more through the deployment of standardized visual images"; cultural transmitters such as television and print media work insidiously to "impose models of bodily beauty that get construed as freely chosen options by those victimized by them." Post structuralism The notions of culture, power and gender/subject formation that dominate Bordo's writing arise i.... Discover the Susan Bordo popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Susan Bordo books.