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

of culture they are themselves transformed, and transforming. Bell hooks (see "Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern Bodies, Postmodern Resistance" in this volume) provides the example of the African American philosopher Cornel West, who—by presenting a theoretical, academic talk in a passionate, dramatic sermon mode popular in black communities—concretely deconstructed, on that occasion and for that audience, the oppositions between intellect and passion, substance and style. Did he also deconstruct the gendered duality which has dominantly reserved the sermon mode for men? No. That challenge requires other occasions, other players.

    If we do not struggle to force our work and workplaces to be informed by our histories of embodied experience, we participate in the cultural reproduction of dualism, both practically and representationally. The continuing masculinism of our public institutions (manifest not only in the styles of professionalism that they require but in their continued failure to accommodate and integrate the private—for instance, parenting—into the public sphere) has been exploited, clearly, in what Susan Faludi describes as the media concocted fiction of a massive "flight" of unhappy women from those institutions and back to the home—the only place we can truly realize our feminine nature and completely fulfill our maternal responsibilities. 43 Most women, of course, could not afford to leave their job even if they wanted to. And whatever actual flight there has been, Faludi argues, is largely the result of panic caused by the media campaign rather than the other way around. But whatever the causality, the old dualities are clearly being culturally reinscribed. Glossy magazines and commercials are currently filled with images of domestic, reproductive bliss, of home as a cozy, plant filled haven of babies, warmth, and light, skillfully managed and lovingly tended by women. The realm of the material, the care and reproduction of the
    body, we are reminded, is appropriately woman's. Only men, as Hegel said, are designed for the "stress" and ''technical exertions" of the public domain.

PART ONE
DISCOURSES AND CONCEPTIONS OF THE BODY
Whose Body Is This? ‌
Feminism, Medicine, and the Conceptualization of Eating Disorders

The Feminist Challenge

    By the 1983 meetings of the New York Center for the Study of Anorexia and Bulimia, palpable dissatisfaction was evident—largely among female clinicians—over the absence of any theoretical focus on gender issues. In 1973, when Hilde Bruch published her landmark work Eating Disorders, she made little use of the concept of gender in her interpretation of anorexia. Kim Chernin, in The Obsession, was the first to note that the vivid descriptions Bruch provides of the anorectic's "battle" against the adult development of her body consistently lack one crucial element: recognition of the significance of the fact that this is a female body whose development is being resisted 1 Following Bruch, the etiological models that dominated over the next decade emphasized developmental issues, family problems, and
    perceptual and/or cognitive "dysfunction." In each, the understanding of the role played by the construction of gender and other social factors was, at best, shallow and unsystematic.

    Developmental and family approaches conceptualized interactions between mother and child as occurring outside cultural time and space; the father's role was simply ignored. Perceptual/cognitive models theorized the role of "sociocultural factors" solely in terms of "the pressure toward thinness," "indoctrination by the thin ethic''; what passed for cultural analysis were statistical studies demonstrating the dwindling proportions of Playboy centerfolds and Miss America winners throughout the 1980s. And, in all of this, transactions were imagined as occurring only between media images and females, or females and other females (peer pressure to
    conform; criticisms from the mother);