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

effects involved) can only be understood as blind allegiance to the medical model. However, although I am convinced that anorexia and bulimia (as mass phenomena, not as the isolated cases that have been reported throughout history) have been culturally produced, I resist the general notion, quite dominant in the humanities and social sciences today, that the body is a tabula rasa, awaiting inscription by culture. When bodies are made into mere products of social discourse, they remain bodies in name only. Unless, as Richard Mohr argues, we are willing to grant that our corporeality is more than a "barren field," an "unchalked blackboard," "ineffective" apart from the social forces and discourses that script and shape it, then those forces are the "true body," and they—let's face it—look suspiciously more like ''mind" than body, "emanating" (as Mohr describes it) "from the gas cloudlike social
    mind—or whatever it is that speaks social 'discourses'—as it brushes across the tabula rasa of the body." 38 In some areas biology may play a very great role in our destinies, and it always informs our lives to varying degrees. However, even in those areas where biology may play a more formidable role, its effect is never "pure," never untouched by history. We are creatures swaddled in culture from the moment we are designated one sex or the other, one race or another.

Transcendence, "Difference," and Cultural Transformation

    Many feminists remain agnostic or ambivalent about the role of biology and sexual "difference"; justifiably fearful of ideas that seem to assert an unalterable, essential female nature, they are nonetheless concerned that too exclusive an emphasis on culture will obscure powerful, and potentially culturally transformative, aspects of women's experience. Is pregnancy merely a cultural construction, capable of being shaped into multitudinous social forms? Or does the unique configuration of embodiment presented in pregnancy—the having of an other within oneself, simultaneously both part of oneself and separate from oneself—constitute a distinctively female epistemological and ethical resource? Is PMS merely one more deployment in the everadvancing medicalization of the body? Or is it also an opportunity (as Emily Martin argues) to access reserves of emotion, understanding, and creativity that normally remain dormant, repressed? 39
    One could reasonably answer that the female body is both construction and resource. It is important to recognize, however, that these ideas carry heavy ideological and personal freight. Women who suffer from blinding headaches, incapacitating back pain, and violent mood swings just before their periods may resent any suggestion that PMS is to the slightest degree culturally constructed. Women who have minimal or no symptoms but whose male partners and employers continually sneer or make jokes about women's behavior being dominated by their ovaries (ideas that hark back to nineteenthcentury notions that women's physiology and psychology are ruled by their reproductive systems) may find themselves arguing that PMS is simply a cultural myth perpetuating male dom
    inance in the public workplace. Moreover, the polarizing effects of the outbreak of phobias about "essentialism" have often found feminists lining up (or being lined up) on different sides of a divide. Joan Peters, in her witty account of the long, slow slide into menopause, sardonically describes this divide. On the one side are the "Transcenders"—for whom the female body, undetermined by nature or history, can be recreated anew by feminism. On the other side are the ''Red Bloomers"—for whom the female body is a source of pleasure, knowledge, and power, to be revalued rather than remade. Of course, Peters intends these terms as caricatures. 40 But they are useful in highlighting, within the specific context of perspectives on the female body, the tension that Ann Snitow describes as being "as old as Western