Susan Bordo
Encyclopedia
Susan Bordo is a modern feminist
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...

 philosopher known for her contributions to the field of contemporary cultural studies
Cultural studies
Cultural studies is an academic field grounded in critical theory and literary criticism. It generally concerns the political nature of contemporary culture, as well as its historical foundations, conflicts, and defining traits. It is, to this extent, largely distinguished from cultural...

, particularly in the area of “body studies.”

Overview

Bordo’s writing contributes to a body of feminist, cultural and gender studies
Gender studies
Gender studies is a field of interdisciplinary study which analyses race, ethnicity, sexuality and location.Gender study has many different forms. One view exposed by the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir said: "One is not born a woman, one becomes one"...

, linking modern consumer culture directly to the formation of gender
Gender
Gender is a range of characteristics used to distinguish between males and females, particularly in the cases of men and women and the masculine and feminine attributes assigned to them. Depending on the context, the discriminating characteristics vary from sex to social role to gender identity...

ed bodies. She is known for her Unbearable weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (1993), a text that looks at the impact of popular culture
Popular culture
Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...

 (television, advertisements, and magazines, for example) in shaping the female body while also looking at typical female disorders such as hysteria
Hysteria
Hysteria, in its colloquial use, describes unmanageable emotional excesses. People who are "hysterical" often lose self-control due to an overwhelming fear that may be caused by multiple events in one's past that involved some sort of severe conflict; the fear can be centered on a body part, or,...

, agoraphobia
Agoraphobia
Agoraphobia is an anxiety disorder defined as a morbid fear of having a panic attack or panic-like symptoms in a situation from which it is perceived to be difficult to escape. These situations can include, but are not limited to, wide-open spaces, crowds, or uncontrolled social conditions...

, anorexia nervosa
Anorexia nervosa
Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder characterized by refusal to maintain a healthy body weight and an obsessive fear of gaining weight. Although commonly called "anorexia", that term on its own denotes any symptomatic loss of appetite and is not strictly accurate...

 and bulimia as “complex crystallizations of culture”. Bordo has also garnered attention for her more recent 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.”

Professional career

Bordo received her Ph.D.
Ph.D.
A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 from the State University of New York at Stony Brook
State University of New York at Stony Brook
The State University of New York at Stony Brook, also known as Stony Brook University, is a public research university located in Stony Brook, New York, on the North Shore of Long Island, about east of Manhattan....

 in 1982. She currently holds the Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities at the University of Kentucky
University of Kentucky
The University of Kentucky, also known as UK, is a public co-educational university and is one of the state's two land-grant universities, located in Lexington, Kentucky...

 where she teaches English
English studies
English studies is an academic discipline that includes the study of literatures written in the English language , English linguistics English studies is an academic discipline that includes the study of literatures written in the English language (including literatures from the U.K., U.S.,...

 and Women’s studies. Bordo specializes in contemporary culture and its relation to the body, focusing on modern female disorders such as anorexia and bulimia, cosmetic surgery, beauty and evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...

ary theory. She also deals with racism
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...

 and the body, issues of masculinity
Masculinity
Masculinity is possessing qualities or characteristics considered typical of or appropriate to a man. The term can be used to describe any human, animal or object that has the quality of being masculine...

 along with issues of sexual harassment
Sexual harassment
Sexual harassment, is intimidation, bullying or coercion of a sexual nature, or the unwelcome or inappropriate promise of rewards in exchange for sexual favors. In some contexts or circumstances, sexual harassment is illegal. It includes a range of behavior from seemingly mild transgressions and...

.

Philosophical discourse

While Bordo’s writing works to “reach outside the academic world”, her theoretical prose
Prose
Prose is the most typical form of written language, applying ordinary grammatical structure and natural flow of speech rather than rhythmic structure...

 and frank critiques of modern culture in relation to subject, gender and body formations are nonetheless grounded in theoretical
Literary theory
Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of...

 frameworks. Bordo’s work reflects a background in philosophical discourse
Discourse
Discourse generally refers to "written or spoken communication". The following are three more specific definitions:...

 in which issues of rationality
Rationality
In philosophy, rationality is the exercise of reason. It is the manner in which people derive conclusions when considering things deliberately. It also refers to the conformity of one's beliefs with one's reasons for belief, or with one's actions with one's reasons for action...

, objectivity
Objectivity (philosophy)
Objectivity is a central philosophical concept which has been variously defined by sources. A proposition is generally considered to be objectively true when its truth conditions are met and are "mind-independent"—that is, not met by the judgment of a conscious entity or subject.- Objectivism...

 and Cartesian dualism are taken up, 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
Soul
A soul in certain spiritual, philosophical, and psychological traditions is the incorporeal essence of a person or living thing or object. Many philosophical and spiritual systems teach that humans have souls, and others teach that all living things and even inanimate objects have souls. The...

, mind
Mind
The concept of mind is understood in many different ways by many different traditions, ranging from panpsychism and animism to traditional and organized religious views, as well as secular and materialist philosophies. Most agree that minds are constituted by conscious experience and intelligent...

, spirit
Spirit
The English word spirit has many differing meanings and connotations, most of them relating to a non-corporeal substance contrasted with the material body.The spirit of a living thing usually refers to or explains its consciousness.The notions of a person's "spirit" and "soul" often also overlap,...

, will, creativity
Creativity
Creativity refers to the phenomenon whereby a person creates something new that has some kind of value. What counts as "new" may be in reference to the individual creator, or to the society or domain within which the novelty occurs...

, freedom . . .) and as undermining the best efforts of that self”. She traces the “body” as a concept
Concept
The word concept is used in ordinary language as well as in almost all academic disciplines. Particularly in philosophy, psychology and cognitive sciences the term is much used and much discussed. WordNet defines concept: "conception, construct ". However, the meaning of the term concept is much...

 and as a material “thing” back to Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...

, Augustine
Augustine of Hippo
Augustine of Hippo , also known as Augustine, St. Augustine, St. Austin, St. Augoustinos, Blessed Augustine, or St. Augustine the Blessed, was Bishop of Hippo Regius . He was a Latin-speaking philosopher and theologian who lived in the Roman Africa Province...

 and the Bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

 revealing how traditionally 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
Dualism
Dualism denotes a state of two parts. The term 'dualism' was originally coined to denote co-eternal binary opposition, a meaning that is preserved in metaphysical and philosophical duality discourse but has been diluted in general or common usages. Dualism can refer to moral dualism, Dualism (from...

 nature of the mind/body connection by examining the early philosophies of Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...

, Hegel and Descartes, revealing how such distinguishing binaries such as spirit/matter
Matter
Matter is a general term for the substance of which all physical objects consist. Typically, matter includes atoms and other particles which have mass. A common way of defining matter is as anything that has mass and occupies volume...

 and male activity/female passivity have worked to solidify gender characteristics and categorization. Bordo goes on 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
Dichotomy
A dichotomy is any splitting of a whole into exactly two non-overlapping parts, meaning it is a procedure in which a whole is divided into two parts...

.

Materialism

The “material” body is of concern for Bordo; her writing reflects the notion 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
Materialism
In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance...

 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
Feminist theory
Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, or philosophical discourse, it aims to understand the nature of gender inequality...

 and materialist theoretical context, her work is often compared and contrasted with Judith Butler
Judith Butler
Judith Butler is an American post-structuralist philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley.Butler received her Ph.D...

’s writing, writing that deals with gender formation and the body. Hekman provides enlightening analyses of Bordo’s situatedness within materialist discourse and suggests both differences and similarities in the theoretical concerns of Bordo and Butler. While Bordo does at times imply that the body is a text to be inscribed upon and interpreted, she also emphasizes the materiality and locatedness of bodies within Western culture
Western culture
Western culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization or European civilization, refers to cultures of European origin and is used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, religious beliefs, political systems, and specific artifacts and...

, 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
Gender studies
Gender studies is a field of interdisciplinary study which analyses race, ethnicity, sexuality and location.Gender study has many different forms. One view exposed by the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir said: "One is not born a woman, one becomes one"...

 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, 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, though, classifies women and the female body predominantly as victim, living passively/submissively within patriarchal society, a tabula rasa
Tabula rasa
Tabula rasa is the epistemological theory that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and perception. Generally proponents of the tabula rasa thesis favour the "nurture" side of the nature versus nurture debate, when it comes to aspects...

 awaiting inscription. Going beyond such a limiting 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
Patriarchy
Patriarchy is a social system in which the role of the male as the primary authority figure is central to social organization, and where fathers hold authority over women, children, and property. It implies the institutions of male rule and privilege, and entails female subordination...

 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
Cultural studies
Cultural studies is an academic field grounded in critical theory and literary criticism. It generally concerns the political nature of contemporary culture, as well as its historical foundations, conflicts, and defining traits. It is, to this extent, largely distinguished from cultural...

 approach where the power of cultural phenomena such as television
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...

, advertising
Advertising
Advertising is a form of communication used to persuade an audience to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering, although political and ideological advertising is also common...

 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 in some degree from poststructuralist thought. Susan Hekman points out that “[l]ike an increasing number of contemporary feminist theorists [Bordo] argues for a selective use of postmodern theories” and one way Bordo’s work can be seen in a poststructuralist/postmodernist light is through her usage of Foucauldian methodology. Bordo appropriates the ideas of Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...

 in critiquing, analyzing and bringing to light “the normative feminine practices of our culture”. As Bordo points out, Foucault saw power not “as the possession of individuals or groups” but “as a dynamic or network of non-centralized forces”, and such a depiction of power relations is therefore useful in a critique of gender formation/regulation. If, in a Foucauldian sense, power works from below, then “prevailing forms of selfhood and subjectivity (gender among them) are maintained, not chiefly through physical restraint and coercion (although social relations may certainly contain such elements), but through individual self-surveillance
Panopticon
The Panopticon is a type of building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe all inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether or not they are being watched...

 and self-correction to norms”. Foucault’s theories of power and discipline along with theories on sexuality
Human sexuality
Human sexuality is the awareness of gender differences, and the capacity to have erotic experiences and responses. Human sexuality can also be described as the way someone is sexually attracted to another person whether it is to opposite sexes , to the same sex , to either sexes , or not being...

 serve contemporary feminist aims in revealing how cultural normative practices, expressed through popular media, work to influence femininity (and gendered bodies in general) into homogeneity while at the same time seeming freely chosen. “Like Foucault, [Bordo] focuses on the discourses through which society
Society
A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...

 produces, understands, defines, and interprets the female body.”

The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesian ism and Culture (1987)

The Flight to Objectivity represents what Bordo refers to as a “fresh approach” to Descartes’ Meditations. She critiques the stable notion of objectivity
Objectivity (philosophy)
Objectivity is a central philosophical concept which has been variously defined by sources. A proposition is generally considered to be objectively true when its truth conditions are met and are "mind-independent"—that is, not met by the judgment of a conscious entity or subject.- Objectivism...

 and knowledge
Knowledge
Knowledge is a familiarity with someone or something unknown, which can include information, facts, descriptions, or skills acquired through experience or education. It can refer to the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject...

 inherent in Cartesian thought, notions that, in our contemporary society, have become critically distanced, for “[t]he limitations of science
Science
Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...

 and the interested, even ideological nature of all human pursuits now seem unavoidable recognitions”. Bordo sees that, rather than viewing Descartes from a “coherent abstract or ahistorical” perspective, we need to approach Descartes' philosophical arguments within “the context of the cultural pressures that gave rise to them”. Susan Hekman notes that Bordo’s The Flight to Objectivity, while not overtly dealing with theorizations of the body, does point to the fact that “the origin of our culture’s text for the body, and particularly the female body, is the work of Descartes”. The Cartesian division of the mind and the body, where the body is the “prison that the mind must escape to achieve knowledge”, guides Bordo’s further analyses of culturally influenced bodies and the shaping of the female body in particular.

Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (1993)

Bordo’s Unbearable Weight presents a collection of essays that focus on the body’s situatedness and construction in Western Society and offers “a cultural approach to the body”. Bordo looks at “obsessive body practices of contemporary culture” and claims that her aim “is not to portray these obsessions as bizarre or anomalous, but, rather, as the logical (if extreme) manifestations of anxieties and fantasies fostered by our culture”. Practices such as cosmetic surgery, obsessive dieting
Dieting
Dieting is the practice of eating food in a regulated fashion to achieve or maintain a controlled weight. In most cases dieting is used in combination with physical exercise to lose weight in those who are overweight or obese. Some athletes, however, follow a diet to gain weight...

 and physical training represent, for Bordo, how cultural “representations homogenize” and how “these homogenized images normalize”. Unbearable Weight also traces the connection between culture and female disorders and Bordo emphasizes the fact that disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia cannot simply be defined from medical and psychological standpoints but must be viewed from within a cultural context, as “complex crystallizations of culture”. It is through such female disorders that resistance to dominant ideological constructs are seemingly played out; however, such a resistance reveals the devastating effects of culture on the contemporary female body.

Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. (1997)

Twilight Zones represents Bordo’s continued preoccupation and study of cultural images and their saturation within contemporary culture. She utilizes Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...

’s parable of the cave, where images are projected onto the back of the cave presenting the illusion of a reality
Reality
In philosophy, reality is the state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they may appear or might be imagined. In a wider definition, reality includes everything that is and has been, whether or not it is observable or comprehensible...

 its inhabitants identify with and accept as real, claiming that such a metaphor
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...

 depicts a particular contemporary concern. She writes that “[f]or us, bedazzlement by created images is no metaphor; it is the actual condition of our lives”. Bordo alludes to constructed images of bodily perfection in contemporary consumer culture such as the portrayal of reconstructed physical bodies in magazines and advertisements as presenting false ideals for the viewers who identify with such images and use them as standards for their own bodies and lives. She writes that “we need to rehabilitate the concept of “truth” for our time . . . focusing on helping the next generation learn to critically see through the illusions and mystifications of the image dominated culture they have grown up in”. Twilight Zones also takes up, in various essays, the connection and conversation between academic and non-academic institutions, for while not anti-academic herself, Bordo sees academic and intellectual thought as proclaiming itself “‘outside’ the cave of cultural mystification,” as raised up onto “a loftier perch, scrutinizing the proceedings below”. Bordo wants to “bring theory down to earth”.

The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private (1999)

With The Male Body Bordo shifts her focus from looking specifically at female and feminized bodies to looking at the male body from a female perspective. She includes analyses of the male body that take into consideration the representation of the male body in popular cultural
Popular culture
Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...

 modes of communication such as movies, advertisements and literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...

, revealing how anxieties over bodily form and beauty are not limited to women but are of concern for men also. She also analyzes attitudes surrounding the penis
Penis
The penis is a biological feature of male animals including both vertebrates and invertebrates...

 and gay
Gay
Gay is a word that refers to a homosexual person, especially a homosexual male. For homosexual women the specific term is "lesbian"....

 culture in the twentieth century.

Personal life

Bordo lives in Kentucky
Kentucky
The Commonwealth of Kentucky is a state located in the East Central United States of America. As classified by the United States Census Bureau, Kentucky is a Southern state, more specifically in the East South Central region. Kentucky is one of four U.S. states constituted as a commonwealth...

 with her husband, Edward Lee, who is a pianist
Pianist
A pianist is a musician who plays the piano. A professional pianist can perform solo pieces, play with an ensemble or orchestra, or accompany one or more singers, solo instrumentalists, or other performers.-Choice of genres:...

 and a professor of Russian literature
Russian literature
Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia or its émigrés, and to the Russian-language literature of several independent nations once a part of what was historically Russia or the Soviet Union...

 at the University of Kentucky
University of Kentucky
The University of Kentucky, also known as UK, is a public co-educational university and is one of the state's two land-grant universities, located in Lexington, Kentucky...

. They have one daughter, Cassie, whom they adopted as a newborn in 1999.
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