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.
In this provocative book, Susan Bordo untangles the myths, ideologies, and pathologies of the modern female body. Bordo explores our tortured fascination with food, hunger, desire, and control, and its effects on women's lives.
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.
For months we had been bombarded on television with horrendous, uncensored images of the war in Vietnam. In March, American soldiers massacred 347 at My Lai. Two weeks later, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, the target of anti-war rage, said he would not seek re-election. In April, Martin Luther King had been assassinated on the balcony of a Memphis Hotel, and the inner cities exploded. Just days later SDS students at Columbia barricaded themselves in the president’s office while black students occupied a separate building. In May, Parisian students went on strike, tearing up the cobblestones of Paris. A few weeks later, moments after victory in the California primary, Bobby Kennedy was murdered in the kitchen of a Los Angeles Hotel. A few days before, a marginal member of Andy Warhol’s circle, Valerie Solanas, also founder of SCUM, the Society for Cutting Up Men, shot him in the stomach. Prior to the shooting, she had written a manifesto calling for “systematically fucking up the system, selectively destroying property, and murder.”
Remember that charisma can be just as dangerous as it is compelling. Charisma is subjective. It’s also the appeal of cultists and authoritarians, as well as our greatest leaders. Jim Jones and Hitler, to their followers, were seen as charismatic. And Incredible as it may seem, Trump supporters see him as charismatic.
Gabby Giffords said that sometimes it’s a fight for her to find the words. That’s how I feel this morning. How to describe what I feel? It’s a struggle, and that’s unusual for me. But I can say some of what we were given last night.
Susan Bordo is the author of many books of cultural history, feminist thought, and media criticism; TV, a volume in Bloomsbury’s “Object Lessons” series, is forthcoming in 2021. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion articles on CNN. (CNN)For me and many others, HBO’s “Perry Mason” reboot has been a dark mirror — but after its season finale last week, an immensely satisfying one.
It really was just a debate. Ever since the Kennedy-Nixon debate, the debates have held an absurd amount of power in electoral politics. What happened then is legendary: Kennedy had been well-prepared with a set of talking points, and was instructed to turn the questions around (nowadays, we call this a “pivot”) in order to get them out no matter what the question was.
So I finished Mary Trump’s book late last night, and here’s what I think is so important about it.
It took the pandemic to show me “a room of one’s own” is much more than a spatial allocation