Susan Bordo

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.

Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body

Unbearable Weight

This biography reconstructs the life of the second wife of Henry VIII, drawing on scholarly studies and critical analysis to define an English queen who has been alternately viewed as a whore, martyr, feminist icon and cautionary tale over the centuries.

A New Look at England's Most Notorious Queen

The Creation of Anne Boleyn

A New Look at Men in Public and in Private

The Male Body

In a mere few months during the 2016 presidential campaign, the accomplished and poised former Senator and Secretary of State was turned into something unrecognizable. Hillary was 'flawed.' 'Historically unpopular.' 'Untrustworthy.' Not 'available' enough to the media or 'the people.' We heard it - and more - from our neighbours overseas, on social media, in our offices and our houses. What happened? In a week-by-week narrative of the campaign year - from the primaries through election day - Bordo deconstructs the various forces that contributed to Hillary Clinton's political destruction.

The Destruction of Hillary Clinton

"This is a superb collection that will expand the parameters of debate over Descartes's legacy for a long time to come. It includes discussions of multiple themes: the implications of Descartes's epistemology for feminists and feminist epistemology, the implications of his metaphysics for social constructions of women, the historical context of his intellectual relations with women, an exploration of reasons why his female critics have been so erased from contemporary history of philosophy, and others."

Feminist Interpretations of René Descartes

Part biography, part cultural history, 'The Creation of Anne Boleyn' is a fascinating reconstruction of Anne's life and an illuminating look at her afterlife in the popular imagination.

In Search of the Tudors' Most Notorious Queen

The months between the presidential election of 2016 and the summer of 2019 have been a wild ride, from the unexpected (and for many traumatic) results of the election to growing recognition of how profoundly the Trump presidency has changed our lives, from discoveries of corruption and foreign influence on our democratic institutions to fresh assaults on reproductive rights, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and the #MeToo movement, Robert Mueller’s long-awaited report and its aftermath, and the beginnings of the 2020 primary contest. Follow cultural historian and media critic Susan Bordo through those events as they happened, in a book whose format is uniquely designed to capture their immediacy. Notable pieces include “Reflections on Trump’s Inauguration,” inspired by an exchange of looks between Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton; “To the Core” recalls both the Anita Hill hearings and Bordo’s own experience with sexual harassment in the context of #MeToo; “Please Mr. Prosecutor Mueller” is a personal plea as well as an argument about the power of television; “My MSNBC Interview” finds the author perched on a high stool in a local TV studio, talking about her just-published book on the election, finding out what it feels like to be misunderstood on national television; “Imagine Bernie Sanders as a Woman” confronts the double-standards and double-binds faced not only by female politicians but by all women who are seen as “leaning in” too much, while “Two Elizabeths” explores how the Tudor queen and the presidential contender negotiate those challenges in their differing historical contexts. Combining full-length published pieces with spontaneous, unfiltered, never-before published posts, in a voice that is bracingly honest as well as critically penetrating, this collection goes beyond journalistic conventions to reveal the ways in which the political is indeed the personal.

And Other Writings on Politics and Media 2016-2019

Imagine Bernie Sanders as a Woman

Considering everything from Nike ads, amaciated models, and surgically altered breasts to the culture wars and the O.J. Simpson trial, author Susan Bordo deciphers the hidden life of cultural images and the impact they have on our lives. With compassion, honesty, and intelligence, Bordo questions the basis of our concepts of reality. 31 b&w photos.

The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J.

Twilight Zones

The first collection of its kind, Provocations: A Transnational Reader in the History of Feminist Thought is historically organized and transnational in scope, highlighting key ideas, transformative moments, and feminist conversations across national and cultural borders. Emphasizing feminist cross-talk, transnational collaborations and influences, and cultural differences in context, this anthology heralds a new approach to studying feminist history. Provocations includes engaging, historically significant primary sources by writers of many nationalities in numerous genres—from political manifestos to theoretical and cultural analysis to poetry and fiction. These texts range from those of classical antiquity to others composed during the Arab Spring and represent Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, Western Europe, and the United States. Each section begins with an introductory essay that presents central ideas and explores connections among readings, placing them in historical, national, and intellectual contexts and concluding with questions for discussion and reflection.

A Transnational Reader in the History of Feminist Thought

Provocations

"Personal memoir meets television history in a look back at how TV has changed, and how it has also changed us, over the past seven decades"--

Television

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Once upon a time, the news was only 15 minutes long and middle-class families huddled around a tiny black-and-white screen, TV dinners on their laps, awaiting weekly sitcoms that depicted an all-white world in which mom wore pearls and heels as she baked endless pies. If this seems a distant past, that's a measure of just how much TV has changed-and changed us. Weaving together personal memoir, social and political history, and reflecting on key moments in the history of news broadcasting and prime time entertainment, Susan Bordo opens up the 75-year-old time-capsule that is TV and illustrates what a constant companion and dominant cultural force television has been, for good and for bad, in carrying us from the McCarthy hearings and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet to Mad Men, Killing Eve, and the emergence of our first reality TV president. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

“If you want to understand not only what happened in 2016, but what’s going to happen tomorrow, this book is essential reading. Susan Bordo brings a scholar’s rigor and a lioness’ heart to this important work.” —Paul Begala “Among the best books I’ve read on the 2016 election . . . the perfect companion to Clinton’s What Happened.” —Peter Daou NOW WITH A NEW AFTERWORD The Destruction of Hillary Clinton is an answer to the question many have been asking: How did an extraordinarily well-qualified, experienced, and admired candidate—whose victory would have been as historic as Barack Obama's—come to be seen as a tool of the establishment, a chronic liar, and a talentless politician? In this masterful narrative of the 2016 campaign year and the events that led up to it, Susan Bordo unpacks the Rights' assault on Clinton and her reputation, the way the left provoked suspicion and indifference among the youth vote, the inescapable presence of James Comey, questions about Russian influence, and the media's malpractice in covering the candidate. Urgent, insightful, and engrossing, The Destruction of Hillary Clinton is an essential guide to understanding the most controversial presidential election in American history.

Untangling the Political Forces, Media Culture, and Assault on Fact That Decided the 2016 Election

Gossip is easy. Get to the deeper truth, with this in-depth look at the political forces and media culture that vilified and ultimately brought down Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential campaign. The Destruction of Hillary Clinton is an answer to the question many have been asking: How did an extraordinarily well-qualified, experienced, and admired candidate—whose victory would have been as historic as Barack Obama's—come to be seen as a tool of the establishment, a chronic liar, and a talentless politician? In this masterful narrative of the 2016 campaign year and the events that led up to it, Susan Bordo unpacks the Rights' assault on Clinton and her reputation, the way the left provoked suspicion and indifference among the youth vote, the inescapable presence of James Comey, questions about Russian influence, and the media's malpractice in covering the candidate. Urgent, insightful, and engrossing, The Destruction of Hillary Clinton is an essential guide to understanding the most controversial presidential election in American history.

Alison M. Jaggar

Susan R. Bordo

The essays in this interdisciplinary collection share the conviction that modern western paradigms of knowledge and reality are gender-biased. Some contributors challenge and revise western conceptions of the body as the domain of the biological and 'natural, ' the enemy of reason, typically associated with women.

Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing

Gender/body/knowledge

M. Cristina Alcalde

Ellen Rosenman

The Flight to Objectivity offers a new reading of Descartes' Meditations informed by cultural history, psychoanalytic and cognitive psychology, and feminist thought. It focuses not on Descartes' arguments as "timeless," culturally disembodied events, but on the psychological drama and imagery of the Meditations explored in the context of the historical instability of the seventeenth century and deep historical changes in the structure of human experience. The study includes textual and cultural material that together comprise a gradually unfolding psychocultural reading of the Meditations. Descartes' famous doubt, and the ideal of objectivity which conquered that doubt, are considered as philosophical expressions of a cultural "drama of parturition" from the medieval universe, a process that generated new forms of experience, new cultural anxieties, and ultimately, new strategies for control and mastery of an utterly changed and alien world. Themes that figure prominently in recent literature on seventeenth-century philosophy and science--the birth of the mind as "mirror of nature," and the "masculine" nature of modern science, the "death of nature"--are explored with reference to Descartes as a pivotal figure in the birth of modernity.

Essays on Cartesianism and Culture

The Flight to Objectivity

Considering everything from Nike ads, emaciated models, and surgically altered breasts to the culture wars and the O.J. Simpson trial, Susan Bordo deciphers the hidden life of cultural images and the impact they have on our lives. She builds on the provocative themes introduced in her acclaimed work Unbearable Weight—which explores the social and political underpinnings of women's obsession with bodily image—to offer a singularly readable and perceptive interpretation of our image-saturated culture. As it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between appearance and reality, she argues, we need to rehabilitate the notion that not all versions of reality are equally trustworthy. Bordo writes with deep compassion, unnerving honesty, and bracing intelligence. Looking to the body and bodily practices as a concrete arena where cultural fantasies and anxieties are played out, she examines the mystique and the reality of empowerment through cosmetic surgery. Her brilliant discussion of sexual harassment reflects on the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill controversy as well as the film Disclosure. She suggests that sexuality, although one of the mediums of harassment, is not its essence, and she calls for the recasting of harassers as bullies rather than sex fiends. Bordo also challenges the continuing marginalization of feminist thought, in particular the failure to read feminist work as cultural criticism. Finally, in a powerful and moving essay called "Missing Kitchens"—written in collaboration with her two sisters—Bordo explores notions of bodies, place, and space through a recreation of the topographies of her childhood. Throughout these essays, Bordo avoids dogma and easy caricature. Consistently, and on many levels, she demonstrates the profound relationship between our lives and our theories, our feelings and our thoughts.

Susan Bordo

Books

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