Archive for Book Reference: Twilight Zones
Twilight Zones
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.
Twenty Years in the Twilight Zone
From Cosmetic Surgery: A Feminist Primer, January 1, 2009, PDF
Published by Routledge
Edited by Cressida J. Heyes and Meredith Jones
In a culture in which organ transplants, life-extension machinery, microsurgery, and artificial organs have entered everyday medicine, we seem on the verge of practical realization of the seventeenth-century imagination of body as machine. But if we have technically and technologically realized that conception, it can also be argued that metaphysically we have deconstructed it.
Missing Kitchens
From Twilight Zones, February 10, 1999, PDF
Published by University of California Press
On a February night, three days before the unveiling of our father's stone in a cemetery on Long Island, we three sisters (Mickey, fifty-eight, a clinical psychologist; Susan, forty-nine, a university teacher and writer; Binnie, forty-five, a clinical social worker) assembled around Mickey's dining table to diagram the apartments we lived in when we were growing up. The chairs we sat upon were familiar, but that night, as we tilted toward each other, excitedly scrutinizing each other's memories, they seemed perches more than seats. Like neighboring monarchs mapping disputed territory, we prepared to do a gentle battle with the truth, that is, each of our &dlquo;truths.&rlquo;
In an Empire of Images, the End of a Fairy Tale
The Chronicle of Higher Education
September 19, 1997
In the universe of mass culture, there is a world and a counterworld, in constant conversation with each other. One world is glossy. In posed fashion spreads and slick celebrity features, the glossy world feeds our eyes and focuses our desires on creamy skin, perfect hair, bodies that refuse awkwardness and age. It delights us like visual candy, but it also makes us sick with who we are and offers remedies that promise to close the gap — at a price.