Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western culture and the Body
Women interested in understanding the cultural inscription
placed on women. Susan Bordo in her article, " Unbearable weight"
takes a very orthodox approach trying to explain and analyse hysteria,
anorexia, bulimia and agoraphobia primarily in western American culture. I
turned to her because many women of my age have decided to starve themselves.
As unbearable weight is made up of a series of inter-related
essays that analyze different aspects of how the female's body is viewed in the
contemporary western culture and while each essay approaches female embodiment
in somewhat different angle. She does have a main argument. She argues that the
psychopathologies such a s hysteria, anorexia and agoraphobia that arise within
a particular culture are protests against certain cultural values instead of
working to transform such values. Moreover, Bordo takes the psychologies that
develop within the culture far from being ' anomalies' or aberrations, to be
characteristic expressions of that culture i.e crystallization of a culture.
Though Bordo does express her ideas regarding the patriarchal
structure of society in relation to how men dominate women because women are
always taken as the weaker sex. She takes the claim that women are not just
host of the body but they are also a part of the body. Importantly, Bordo takes
a fully Foucoaulian perspective when talking about power, realizing that which
individuals may aspire tp wild power, real power is actually a systematic
norms. While Bordo's deployment of Foucoult's theories of power in her analysis
of cultural bodily discipline is skillful, she with other author identifies'
postmodernism' and 'post- structuralism'.
Most of the text has entitled to do with postmodernism at
all; it's a discussion of the body in western culture, particularly at the time
when it was written, though it also makes reference to earlier historical
periods. Much time of the text is focused discussing eating disorders as logical
outgrowths of contemporary society's conflicting attitudes towards hunger. At a
point this criticism is quite confusing as earlier she was so critical of
certain dualist perspectives. However, she seems to think that rejecting binary
categories of ' masculine' and 'feminine' dangerously shift the focus from partical
contexts to adequate theory.
Every women and men really should read this text and have
their minds torn apart.
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