Reading the Ballerina's Body: Susan Bordo Sheds Light on Anastasia Volochkova and Heidi Guenther

2005 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 38
Author(s):  
Wendy Oliver
Keyword(s):  
Susan Bordo

Thinking Birth Differently

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 23-46
Author(s):  
Alison Happel-Parkins ◽  
Katharina A. Azim
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Narrative Inquiry ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Metropolitan City ◽  
First Child ◽  
Susan Bordo ◽  
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

This feminist narrative inquiry discusses the experiences of two women in a metropolitan city in the Midsouth of the United States who each intended to have a drug- and intervention-free childbirth for the birth of their first child. This data came from a larger study that included narratives from six participants. Using Alecia Y. Jackson and Lisa A. Mazzei's concept of “plugging in,” we read and analyzed the data through three feminist theorists: Sara Ahmed, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Susan Bordo. This allowed us to push the limits of intelligibility of women and their narratives, challenging the dominant, medicalized discourses prevalent in the current cultural context of the United States.

Reading the Ballerina's Body: Susan Bordo Sheds Light on Anastasia Volochkova and Heidi Guenther

2005 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 38-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy Oliver
Keyword(s):  
Ice Cream ◽  
Ballet Dancer ◽  
The Press ◽  
Strict Diet ◽  
Susan Bordo ◽  
Bolshoi Ballet ◽  
Spinach Leaves ◽  
Male Dancers

In September of 2003, Bolshoi Ballet dancer and media star Anastasia Volochkova, 27, was fired from her job. The main reason given was that at 5′7″ and 110 lbs., she was too tall and too heavy for her partners to lift. Yekaterina Norikova, spokeswoman for the Bolshoi, said: “The problem is that male dancers complained of her height and weight and refused to dance with her” (quoted in Isachenkov 2003). Yevgeny Ivanchenko, her former partner, publicly declared her too heavy to lift, saying that he risked injury in working with her. The Russian newspaperVremya Novosteiused the headline “Not even bears could hold [her]” (Kishkovsky, 2003, A1).In her interviews with the press, she said that she is in excellent shape and follows a strict diet. “I don't eat ice cream now,” said Ms. Volochkova, who once told a Russian interviewer that she adores it. “I eat spinach leaves and vegetables.” She also declared that “Height and weight are not the test of a great ballerina” (2003, A1).

Gender Identity without Gender Prescriptions

1998 ◽  
pp. 104-111
Author(s):  
Janet C. Wesselius
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gender Identity ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Emancipatory Politics ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gender Categories ◽  
Susan Bordo

The feminist philosopher Susan Bordo suggests that the dilemma of twentieth-century feminism is the tension between a gender identity that both mobilizes a liberatory politics on behalf of women and that results in gender prescriptions which excludes many women. This tension seems especially acute in feminist debates about essentialism/deconstructionism. Concentrating on the shared sex of women may run the risk of embracing an essentialism that ignores the differences among women, whereas emphasizing the constructed natures of sex and gender categories seems to threaten the very project of a feminist politics. I will analyze the possibility of dismantling gender prescriptions while retaining a gender identity that can be the beginning for an emancipatory politics. Perhaps feminists need not rely on a reified essentialism that elides the differences of race, class, etc., if we begin with our social practices of classification rather than with a priori generalizations about the nature of women.

scholarly journals Menopause and Methodological Doubt

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheila Spence
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Rene Descartes ◽  
The Self ◽  
Cartesian Dualism ◽  
Hermeneutic Approach ◽  
René Descartes ◽  
Susan Bordo ◽  
Experiences Of Women ◽  
The Way

Menopause and methodological doubt be gins by making a tongue-in- cheek comparison between Descartes' methodological doubt and the self- doubt that can arise around menopause. A hermeneutic approach is taken in which Cartesian dualism and its implications for the way women are viewed in society are examined, both through the experiences of women undergoing menopause and through the commentary of several contributors in Feminist Interpretations of Réné Descartes by Susan Bordo (1999). This examination is located inside the story of the paper, which was written over the duration of a university hermeneutics course, and reflects the author's evolving understanding of hermeneutic interpretation within qualitative research.

Becoming-Rhythm: A Rhizomatics of the Girl

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-399
Author(s):  
Leisha Jones
Keyword(s):  
At Risk ◽  
Risk Model ◽  
Feminist Analysis ◽  
Carol Gilligan ◽  
Politics Of Difference ◽  
Gendered Bodies ◽  
Susan Bordo ◽  
Insight Into

I appropriate Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the refrain for a feminist analysis of the girl because it offers more insight into the ways girls construct themselves as performative networks than the death-by-culture or at-risk model preferred by such feminists as Jean Kilbourne, Carol Gilligan, and even Susan Bordo. I proffer that it costs women everything to practise a politics of difference that is by definition reactionary, a reaction to the cultural refusal of leaky gendered bodies that must be overcome. Girl is mapped through such alternations as powerful aggregates of the tremulous, roaming emissions of monstrous particles most desired and desirous.

Feminine famishment: Graphic medicine and anorexia nervosa

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (5) ◽  
pp. 518-534
Author(s):  
Sathyaraj Venkatesan ◽  
Anu Mary Peter
Keyword(s):  
Eating Disorders ◽  
Anorexia Nervosa ◽  
Body Dissatisfaction ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Self Esteem ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Cultural Attitudes ◽  
Graphic Medicine ◽  
Susan Bordo ◽  
Shape And Size

Socio-cultural rigidities regarding the shape and size of a woman’s body have not only created an urgency to refashion themselves according to a range of set standards but also generated an infiltrating sense of body dissatisfaction and poor self-esteem leading to eating disorders. Interestingly, through an adept utilisation of the formal strengths of the medium of comics, many graphic medical anorexia narratives offer insightful elucidations on the question of how the female body is not merely a biological construction, but a biocultural construction too. In this context, by drawing theoretical postulates from Susan Bordo, David Morris and other theoreticians of varying importance, and by close reading Lesley Fairfield’s Tyranny and Katie Green’s Lighter than My Shadow, this article considers anorexia as the bodily manifestation of a cultural malady by analysing how cultural attitudes regarding body can be potential triggers of eating disorders in girls. Furthermore, this article also investigates why comics is the appropriate medium to provide a nuanced representation of the corporeal complications and socio-cultural intricacies of anorexia.

scholarly journals Mulheres atletas: re-significações da corporalidade feminina

2003 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 445-465 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miriam Adelman
Keyword(s):  
Judith Butler ◽  
Susan Bordo

A participação esportiva das mulheres contribui para uma re-significação da corporalidade feminina? Lembrando da idéia de Susan Brownmiller, para quem a feminilidade representa, na sociedade moderna, uma "estética da limitação", e trabalhando com noções de gênero e corporalidade advindas particularmente da produção recente de Susan Bordo e Judith Butler, procuro identificar mudanças nas práticas e representações do corpo feminino que decorrem da atividade esportiva. Analiso depoimentos de atletas brasileiras profissionais, algumas praticantes de um esporte de elite (hipismo) e, outras, de um esporte mais popular (o vôlei). Incorporo também a análise de imagens culturais da atleta, como veiculadas nos meios de comunicação. Evidências de pesquisa de campo mostram que, se, por um lado, as atletas de fato participam da "desconstrução" de certos elementos da mencionada "estética da limitação", por outro, continuam em uma cultura na qual a atividade esportiva das mulheres pode 'comprometer a feminilidade' da atleta.

Feminism, Objectivity, and Analytic Philosophy

Hypatia ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 138-156
Author(s):  
Sara Worley
Keyword(s):  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Western Science ◽  
Susan Bordo ◽  
Evelyn Fox Keller

Evelyn Fox Keller and Susan Bordo are often cited as sources for the claim that the notion of objectivity found in Western science and analytic philosophy is male-biased. I argue that even if their arguments that objectivity is male-biased are successful, the bias they establish is not a sort which should worry any feminist analytic philosophers (or scientists). I also examine their suggestions for reconceiving objectivity and find them inadequately motivated.

Philosophy and Feminism: The Case of Susan Bordo

Hypatia ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 188-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Bernick
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Susan Bordo

In this paper I lay out what 1 take to be the crucial insights in Susan Bordo's “Feminist Skepticism and the ‘Maleness’ of Philosophy” and point out some additional difficulties with the skeptical position. I call attention to an ambiguity in the nature or content of the “maleness” of philosophy that Bordo identifies. Finally, I point out that, unlike some feminist skeptics, Bordo never loses sight in her work of women's lived experiences.

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