Background
Susan Bordo was born on January 24, 1947 in Newark, New Jersey, United States, in the family of Julius and Regina (Siegal) Klein.
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1987
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1999
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2000
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2004
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2014
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2018
Susan Bordo was born on January 24, 1947 in Newark, New Jersey, United States, in the family of Julius and Regina (Siegal) Klein.
Susan earned Bachelor of Arts at Carleton University in 1972. Bordo also received her Doctor of Philosophy from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1982.
Susan currently holds the Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities at the University of Kentucky where she teaches English and Women's studies. In 1989 she was a visiting associate professor at Duke University, and also an associate professor of philosophy at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York, United States. Moveover, in 1991 - 1994 she held the position of Joseph C. Georg professor there.
Susan is known for her "Unbearable weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body", a text that looks at the impact of popular culture (television, advertisements, and magazines, for example) in shaping the female body while also looking at typical female disorders such as hysteria, agoraphobia, anorexia nervosa and bulimia as "complex crystallizations of culture." Bordo has also garnered attention for her more recent "The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private", a text which Bordo describes as being "a personal/cultural exploration of the male body from a woman's point of view."
Susan Bordo is a feminist philosopher, who also paints out the importance of rasism issues in the society, and also issues of masculinity along with issues of sexual harassment. She takes up the issues of rationality, objectivity and Cartesian dualism. As Bordo points out, feminism of the late 1960s and 1970s viewed "the female body [as] a socially shaped and historically 'colonized' territory". For Bordo "the rules of femininity have come to be culturally transmitted more and more through the deployment of standardized visual images."
She traces the "body" as a concept and as a material "thing" back to Plato, Augustine and the Bible revealing how traditionally the body has been viewed as "animal, as appetite, as deceiver, as prisoner of the soul and confounder of its projects". She also traces the dualistic nature of the mind/body connection by examining the early philosophies of Aristotle, Hegel and Descartes, revealing how such distinguishing binaries such as spirit/matter and male activity/female passivity have worked to solidify gender characteristics and categorization.
Bordo argues that "knowledge is 'embodied,' produced from a 'standpoint,' by a body that is located as a material entity among other material entities".
Susan married in 1968, but then divorced in 1971. Bordo lives now in Kentucky with her second husband, Edward Lee, who is a pianist and a professor of Russian literature at the University of Kentucky. They have one daughter, Cassie, whom they adopted as a newborn in 1999.
