Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body by Susan Bordo

not come easily to me. Instead, I try to preserve the critical edge of the "old" feminist discourse, while incorporating a more postmodern appreciation of how subtle and multifaceted feminist discourse must be if it is to ring true to the complex experiences of contemporary women and men and provide systemic perspective on those experiences. Rather than attempt to "explain" eating disorders through one or another available model, I construct what Foucault has called a "polyhedron of intelligibility." I explore facets and intersections: cultural representations of female hunger and female eating, the role of consumer culture, long standing philosophical and religious attitudes toward the body, similarities to other predominantly female disorders (agoraphobia, hysteria), connections with other contemporary body obsessions, continuities with "normal" female experience in our culture, and so forth. Each of these explorations is systemically located. I do not want the reader to lose sight of the fact that the escalation of eating disorders into a significant social phenomenon arises at the intersection of patriarchal culture and postindustrial capitalism.

    My analysis is in this way "political." It is not, however, reductionist, and I hope it will help dispel the misperception, fostered by Joan Brumberg 36 and others, that the feminist cultural model reduces eating disorders to a simple pursuit of slenderness. Rather, such feminist/cultural analysis as Susie Orbach's Hunger Strike and Kim Chernin's The Obsession and The Hungry Self has always stressed
    the intersection of culture with family, economic, and historical developments and psychological constructions of gender. 37 Insofar as what Chernin first named the "tyranny of slenderness" has been seen as crucial to understanding eating disorders, that tyranny has rarely been viewed by feminists simply as a matter of arbitrary media images but has, rather, been seen as requiring cultural and historical analysis and interpretation. I deal more fully with the feminist paradigm, competing models, and ongoing resistance to the cultural perspective on eating disorders in the essay "Whose Body Is This?"

Nature, Culture, and the Body

    Taken together, the feminist critiques of gendered representations and of the politics of the material body can also be seen as an extended argument against the notion that the body is a purely biological or natural form. In this way, American feminism has contributed significantly to what is arguably a major transformation in Western intellectual paradigms defining and representing the body. Within the traditional paradigms, despite significant historical variations certain features have been constant. First and foremost, the body is located (whether as wild beast or physiological clockwork) on the nature side of a nature/culture divide. As such, it is conceived as relatively historically unchanging in its most basic aspects, and unitary. That is, we speak of "the Body" as we speak of "Reason" or "Mind"—as though one model were equally and accurately descriptive of all human bodily experience, irrespective of sex, race, age, or any other personal attributes. That model is assumed to be a sort of neutral, generic core.

    Over the past hundred and fifty years, under the influence of a variety of cultural forces, the body has been forced to vacate its longterm residence on the nature side of the nature/culture duality and encouraged to take up residence, along with everything else that is human, within culture. Karl Marx played a crucial role here, in reimagining the body as a historical and not merely a biological arena, an arena shaped by the social and economic organization of human life and, often, brutalized by it. Marx cut the first great slice into the unitary conception of "the Body" assumed by those who preceded him. It makes a difference, he insisted, whose body you are
    talking about—one that tills its own field, or one that works on an