By describing culture and eating disorders in these terms, she explains the urgency of creating a cultural discourse about eating disorders that will lead to significant change. To further stress the magnitude of cultural impact and the seriousness of eating disorders, Bordo writes, “We may be producing a generation of young, privileged women with severely impaired menstrual, nutritional, and intellectual functioning” (Unbearable Weight 61). In cultures such as ours, in which food is abundant, resisting hunger is associated with control and will power-qualities linked to success in Western societies. In cultures in which food is scarce, the thought of depriving oneself of it is incomprehensible. Culture inevitably shapes our conception of attractiveness and has the power to define our perceptions of our bodies and ourselves and inscribe these ideals onto the body. In Unbearable Weight, Bordo quotes Michael Foucault: “The body is also directly involved in a political field power relations have an immediate hold on it they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs” (136). More specifically, how she dresses as well as the way she feels about her body size and shape is reflective of her cultural and historical context. The body and a woman’s relationship to her own body reflect the ways in which culture has molded her body.

While she does treat eating disorders with great sensitivity, she runs the risk of over-simplifying these illnesses in her assertion that they are protests against societal norms.Ī pivotal theme in Bordo’s work is that the personal is political. Her writing is refreshingly un-academic, and she brings gender studies out of the confines of academic discourse into a more personal discussion of culture and how our culture of “thinness” deeply affects women.

Bordo asserts that the prevalence of eating disorders among today’s women parallels the pervasiveness of hysteria among Victorian women. She argues that hysteria, a mental illness that afflicted women in the Victorian Era and described at length by Freud, was as much a symptom of women’s internal struggles as it was indicative of a greater cultural conception of femininity. Handle=0.NA/10.1525 index=200 Į Bordo’s Unbearable Weight describes the enormous pressures placed on women and the ways in which women protest and struggle against these pressures using their bodies as a “text,” both embodying the feminine ideals while simultaneously fighting against them.

Unbearable weight bordo