'"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).
Foreword: Reading Bordo, by Leslie Heywood
In the Empire of Images: Preface to the
Tenth Anniversary Edition
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Feminism, Western Culture, and
the Body
PART ONE DISCOURSES AND CONCEPTIONS OF THE BODY
Whose Body Is This? Feminism, Medicine, and the
Conceptualization of Eating Disorders
Are Mothers Persons? Reproductive Rights and the
Politics of Subject-ivity
Hunger as Ideology
PART TWO THE SLENDER BODY AND OTHER CULTURAL FORMS
Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the
Crystallization of Culture
The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity
Reading the Slender Body
PART THREE POSTMODERN BODIES
Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender Skepticism
"Material Girl": The Effacements of Postmodern
Culture
Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern Bodies,
Postmodern Resistance
Notes
Index
