"Unbearable Weight" Susan Bordo - 1993

"But what remains the constant element throughout historical variation is the construction of body as something apart from the true self (whether conceived as soul, mind, spirit, will, creativity, freedom...) and as undermining the best efforts of that self)." (p.5)

Bordo is concerned with gender's role in the mind body/dualism notion, saying the body has been gendered female, weighing down the male/spirit etc. Women as the femme fatales are the temptresses, causing men to lose control of their bodies. Women internalized this ideology leading to shame and self-loathing. Bordo considers issues of race (unlike the other readings) citing that "all black men are potential rapists [animal-like] by nature" and black women are stereotyped "as immoral Jezebels who can never truly be raped, because rape implies and invasion of personal space of modesty and reserve that the black woman has not been imagined as having." (p.9)

Representations homogenize and normalize, creating a standard. Yes readers can have multiple interpretations (lesbian vs. straight woman seeing Madonna), but there is an "everyday deployment of mass cultural representations of masculinity, femininity, beauty or success." (p.24) Aging in Hollywood is subject to endless plastic surgery to look 10-15 years younger.

Bordo – embodied post-structuralism. Like Bartky she picks and chooses aspects of post-structuralism, but doesn’t buy it all. Resistance isn’t priority because how to do you fight a decentralized power, diffused over a network? "Within a Foucauldian/feminist framework, it is indeed senseless to view men as the enemy: to do so would be to ignore, not only power differences in the racial, class and sexual situations of men, but the fact that most men, equally with women, find themselves embedded and implicated in institutions and practices that they as individuals did not create and do not control - and they frequently feel tyrannized by." (p.28) How to woman come to terms with agency and power that causes them to fall within the paradigm of a repressive system? It is the system that causes women (and men) to feel that they are lacking and must obsess over their bodies to be empowered.