Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body

Bordo argues that anorexia nervosa and bulimia are logical, if extreme, manifestations of anxieties and fantasies fostered by a culture that worships the slender, fit body as a symbol of ``virile'' mastery over bodily desires. In her diagnosis, hysteria, anorexia and agoraphobia ``develop out of the practice of femininity itself''; the female is defined by society as a passive, primitive object, while the male is seen as an active, conscious, striving subject. This philosophy professor at Le Moyne College in New York views women's addiction to plastic surgery, and both men's and women's body fetishism, in terms of a consumerist culture that attempts to deny inevitable bodily decay and death. Elsewhere in these brilliant, scholarly yet accessible essays, she analyzes images of men and women in advertisements, interprets the current abortion debate as an assault on the personhood of women and charts pop star Madonna's metamorphosis from voluptuous rebel to slender, taut, muscular icon. Illustrated. (Sept.)