Gender/Body/Knowledge

SUSAN BORDO is an internationally known cultural historian, feminist scholar, and media critic. Her first book, The Flight to Objectivity, is considered a classic of feminist philosophy. In 1993, increasingly aware of our culture's preoccupation with weight and body image, she published Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, a book that is still widely read and assigned in classes today. During speaking tours for that book, she encountered many young men who asked, "What about us?" The result was The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private (1999). Both books were highly praised by reviewers, with Unbearable Weight named a 1993 Notable Book by the New York Times and The Male Body featured in Mademoiselle, Elle, Vanity Fair, NPR, and MSNBC. Both books have been translated into many languages, and individual chapters, many of which are considered paradigms of lucid writing, are frequently re-printed in collections and writing textbooks. Her next book, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England's Most Notorious Queen, a controversial, ground-breaking examination of Boleyn's life and how it has been represented in histories, fiction, and film, was published to critical acclaim and popular enthusiasm in April, 2013. For the last four years, she has followed and blogged about the events, personalities and media coverage of the 2016 presidential election; her first book about the many aspects of the election--The Destruction of Hillary Clinton--was published in 2017 by Melville House Press. The paperback was published in 2018 with a new Afterword. Her post-election essays, Imagine Bernie Sanders as a Woman was published in 2020. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky with her husband, daughter, three dogs, a cat and a cockatiel, and is Professor Emerita at the University of Kentucky.