Unbearable Weight, 1
4 September 2008
by: Susan Bordo
Instead of my usual blunt final impression, for Susan Bordo’s book Unbearable Weight I will conduct a series of personal responses. The book is too dense and eludes any summation; too valid today, ten years later; and much too personal. I imagine I haven’t come across the title yet because I haven’t been ready; picking apart my “eating disorder” if even of the past, will be no simple task. As a writer, a person, a woman, I owe this exploration to myself. I do not want these “personal responses” to echo a therapy session, but sometimes they might; I want good ol’ deconstruction. . . let me reach for my knife.
. . . the hunt for biological explanations can only be understood as blind allegiance to the medical model.
However, even in those areas where biology may play a 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.
We live in scary times. Susan Bordo understands “eating disorders as a complex crystallization of culture.” As a female who identifies herself above all with intellect, my first and most diligent efforts to “prove,” what will still be a long run towards “success,” was through starvation. I saw all that was female as a choice: either one gives in or one doesn’t. I can not regret my near ten years of food-based discipline, for it gave me a strength-like power, which has led to much mental surety; though now, fourteen years later, I am left searching in vain for the woman I could have become.
By playing out the drama of culturally issued ideals of femininity to the extreme has freed me, to some extent, of the daily battle wrought out by most women, fat, diet, diet, fat, look, to look, don’t look. I do not worry about fat, I do not really care how I look; my hunger may have been about fat in the first place, but that’s not how it retained its death-grip. Power, Control. Big words. Big sensations. Susan Bordo understands to the T.
Where power works “from below,” prevailing forms of selfhood and subjectivity are maintained…through individual self-surveillance and self-correction to norms.
In my own work, [Foulcault’s ideas] have been extremely helpful both to my analysis of exercise and diet and to my understanding of eating disorders as arising out of and reproducing normative feminine practices of our culture, practices which train the female body in docility and obedience to cultural demands while at the same time being experienced in terms of power and control.
But I thought I was in control? I was in that I said no to sexual objectification, to menstruation, to breasts and curves, to a normal sex drive and yes to a perpetually unbearable weight which fluctuated into extreme; but within the hunger I was not in control. The hunger controlled me. To remember the last time and all times: I had eating down to a science of limitation and once inside the continuous denial, always no no no, it was very difficult to pull myself back out. No, I was not in Control. No, that was a false sense of Power. But, my god, I thought I could do anything. . .
Sometimes, on dreamy occasions of present satiation, I wonder about that woman I’m searching for. In my extreme throws of duality she scares me still; I need to remind myself, I need her: my body. I wonder if she’s shaped more round than me; if she can step confident with the figure she cuts no matter what cultural (read sexual) messages she sends; I wonder at how she maintains boldness against harsh atmospheres daily; at how she laughs in spite of it all.
I do expect this book to give answers to questions I have ignored. I do not expect miracles. I will find the miracles I need within myself. I owe myself this indulgence. I owe myself many.
Bracciano, Italy
September 2008
« Shikasta
Unbearable Weight, 2 »