Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, Tenth Anniversary Edition

"__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)

"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

Publishers Weekly

Bordo explores women's obsessions with appearance, their struggles to control food and hunger, and the pressures brought on by a society that worships the ideal female figure. (Mar.)

""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)" " 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) In this Tenth Anniversary Edition, Susan Bordo examines how women's fantasies of transcending their material existence have led to narcissistic efforts to reinvent themselves. Infatuated with youth, surrounded by homogenous representations of beauty, they surrender themselves to plastic surgeons in ever greater numbers for larger breasts, smaller noses, collagen-plumped lips and wrinkle-free faces. The author's preface brings the book up to date in 2003 and Leslie Heywood's foreword places Susan Bordo's work in the front ranks of the research on women and their bodies. In this Tenth Anniversary Edition, Susan Bordo examines how women's fantasies of transcending their material existence have led to narcissistic efforts to reinvent themselves. Infatuated with youth, surrounded by homogeneous representations of beauty, they surrender themselves to plastic surgeons in ever greater numbers for larger breasts, smaller noses, collagen-plumped lips and wrinkle-free faces. The author's preface brings the book up to date in 2003 and Leslie Heywood's foreword places Susan Bordo's work in the front ranks of the research on women and their bodies By the 1983 meetings of the New York Center for the Study of Anorexia and Bulimia, palpable dissatisfaction was evident-largely among female clinicians-over the absence of any theoretical focus on gender issues.