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

assembly line all day, or one that sits in an office managing the labor of others.

    Gender and race, too, make a difference. The "generic" core is usually in reality a white or male body passing as the norm for all. For example, when the department of health lists "dairy products" as one of the four major food groups essential to health for all people, it excludes from its conception of the human norm those populations (African American, Mexican American, Asian Americans) among whom large numbers of individuals are lactose intolerant. (Advising the inclusion of calcium in the diet would be less ethnocentric.) The definition of the "normal" human body temperature as 98.6 excludes most women during their fertile years for about two weeks every month (before ovulation, when progesterone levels should be low and body temperature below 98.6). Even the representation of groups who are themselves frequently rendered invisible in cultural constructions—as, for example, in assumptions of heterosexuality in discussions of sexuality, marriage, and
    parenthood—exhibit additional effacements of race and gender. Controversial findings on possible genetic factors in male homosexuality, for example, have continually been misrepresented in massmedia headlines as proposing a genetic basis for all homosexuality. A 1992 Newsweek cover story, for example, depicts two men holding hands; but the bold type asks the uninflected question, "Homosexuality: Born or Bred?"

    The old metaphor of the Body Politic presented itself as a "generic" (that is, ostensibly human but covertly male) form. (It is interesting to note, however, that when the natural world was likened to a body—as it is in Plato's Timaeus and in many other ancient creation stories—it is gendered, and frequently female. It is only when a manmade rational form like the state is symbolized, a cultural invention imagined to bring order to the chaos of the "natural," that the fiction of genderlessness comes into play.) A good deal of feminist scholarship has focused on exposing such fictions and revealing their specificity (as white, male, historically located in various ways, and so forth). Others have focused on the cultural construction and historical experiences of the female body. The critique of cultural representations, discussed in the first section of this introduction, has also contributed to the feminist relo
    cation of the body to the culture side of the nature/culture dualism. For one effect of this critique of the pervasive dualisms and metaphors that animate representations of the body is to call into question the assumption that we ever know or encounter the body—not only the bodies of others but our own bodies—directly or simply. Rather, it seems, the body that we experience and conceptualize is always mediated by constructs, associations, images of a cultural nature.

    In various ways, all the essays in this volume exemplify a cultural approach to the body. My analysis of eating disorders, most explicitly, offers such a cultural perspective. The relevant essays span almost a decade of my thinking about anorexia, bulimia, and related issues and reflect different stages of information and understanding (both my own and the culture's). But although my analysis came to incorporate new elements over time (for example, my earliest essay, "Anorexia Nervosa," reflects my initial lack of knowledge about nineteenthcentury anorexia), my understanding of eating disorders as complex crystallizations of culture has remained unaltered. Indeed, the more we learn about eating disorders and about women and their eating problems, both in the nineteenth century and today, the more the cultural model has been borne out, as I argue in "Whose Body Is This?"

    In the case of eating disorders, the cultural evidence is by now so overwhelming, and by itself so overdetermines the phenomena, that the hunt for biological explanations (I do not deny that there are biological dynamics and