Susan Bordo, professor emerita in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky, has been elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences — one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honorary societies.
Founded in 1780, the Academy honors excellence and convenes leaders to examine new ideas, address issues of importance to the nation and the world, as well as advance the public good.
“It’s wonderful to have this kind of recognition, and alongside such distinguished company. I think of it as more than just a personal honor, but also an acknowledgment of the value of public, interdisciplinary scholarship. Crossing intellectual borders is what my work has always been about,” Bordo said. “I’ve never been limited by traditional divisions, and one of my central missions as an author has been to ‘translate’ academic research into writing that is accessible to a more general readership. When I was teaching, I encouraged my students to think, write and teach that way too. It’s been a joy to see them succeeding so brilliantly. And now this — I’m truly thrilled.”
The fact that Tony Soprano, in 1999, inaugurated a new version of masculinity—one that boldly refuses to soften and make more palatable the violence that often goes along with the sexual (or any other) appeal of the raw—isn’t apparent until the fifth episode of the first season of the show, called “College.” The writer David Chase knew it would be transgressive.
Powerful women have never been that hard to find in the movies or on television.
"Television and I grew up together." As a baby boomer born in 1947, Susan Bordo is roughly the same age as our beloved gogglebox, which began life as a broad box with a ten-inch screen, chunky and clunky and encased in wood. With the rapid changes in technology in the years since, "television", as Bordo points out, has become estranged from its material status.
Every book on the history of television has a chapter (or more) on sports. Mine doesn’t. The reason is simple: I can’t watch a sports event without smelling my father’s cigar.
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.
In 2017, when Hillary Clinton emerged after a well-deserved hiatus to resume public service, the calls for her to quietly leave the stage and take up gardening or knitting began to pour forth.
Are you surprised? Do you imagine that because I am a critic of popular culture I wouldn’t be caught dead watching Dance Moms? If so, you’ve been reading too many academics who came to popular culture only after it became Europeanized and hot. When I was in graduate school, the voracious maw of theory had only begun to invade and chew up the objects of everyday life into unrecognizable form. There were as yet no popular culture departments, the closest you could get was film studies—within which you could study Nosferatu but not Jaws.
Want more political Bordo? This follow-up and companion collection to The Destruction of Hillary Clinton travels the years from 2016-2019 through pieces and posts on the people, events, and issues that marked that momentous period, from Trump's inauguration to the beginnings of the 2020 Democratic primary contest.
As we near a hugely consequential election, I present a tribute to Georgia via “Designing Women,” excerpted from my forthcoming book on growing up with television.