Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. [Paperback]

Susan Bordo (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 10, 1999 | ISBN-10: 0520211022 | ISBN-13: 978-0520211025 | Edition: 1

Considering everything from Nike ads, emaciated models, and surgically altered breasts to the culture wars and the O.J. Simpson trial, Susan Bordo deciphers the hidden life of cultural images and the impact they have on our lives. She builds on the provocative themes introduced in her acclaimed work Unbearable Weight--which explores the social and political underpinnings of women's obsession with bodily image--to offer a singularly readable and perceptive interpretation of our image-saturated culture. As it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between appearance and reality, she argues, we need to rehabilitate the notion that not all versions of reality are equally trustworthy. Bordo writes with deep compassion, unnerving honesty, and bracing intelligence. Looking to the body and bodily practices as a concrete arena where cultural fantasies and anxieties are played out, she examines the mystique and the reality of empowerment through cosmetic surgery. Her brilliant discussion of sexual harassment reflects on the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill controversy as well as the film Disclosure. She suggests that sexuality, although one of the mediums of harassment, is not its essence, and she calls for the recasting of harassers as bullies rather than sex fiends. Bordo also challenges the continuing marginalization of feminist thought, in particular the failure to read feminist work as cultural criticism. Finally, in a powerful and moving essay called "Missing Kitchens"--written in collaboration with her two sisters--Bordo explores notions of bodies, place, and space through a recreation of the topographies of her childhood. Throughout these essays, Bordo avoids dogma and easy caricature. Consistently, and on many levels, she demonstrates the profound relationship between our lives and our theories, our feelings and our thoughts.

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews

An attentive critique of both mass-media and philosophical ideologies gets trapped somewhere between the personal and the theoretical. Bordo intermittently lives up to her claim to limn a ``hidden'' life of images--as when she pursues the underlying meanings attached to slenderness in the recent wave of ultra-skinny models, or in her analyses of the representation of sexual harassment and of the continuing sub rosa ghettoization of feminism within ``advanced'' postmodern scholarship. Often, though, as when Bordo (Philosophy/Univ. of Kentucky; Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, 1993) turns to cosmetic surgery or the O.J. Simpson case, she is content with more obvious interpretations, wordily entangled in a suffocating self-narration. The cultural landscape Bordo paints consists largely of the world of produced images in the background and her own reactions in the foreground, and although she pays lip service to the intervening complexity of actual lives and social forces, it has no substantial presence in the book. Thus, a ubiquitous advertising campaign like ``Just Do It'' can be simply read as an encompassing ``ideology'' embraced by contemporary society--exaggerating its real importance and thereby, perhaps, that of criticism like her own. It becomes positively depressing to realize that it's likely, judging by an excruciating essay on the role of theory in her work, that she is in fact among the academic cultural critics who are relatively dedicated to the connection of their work to the real world. A final chapter expanding on the personal references that inflect the whole book's tone, a collective memoir by Bordo and her sisters, is strangled at birth by the mandated topics of ``bodies, place and space.'' As ripe for scrutiny as the avalanche of images around us is, it seems that the prolific academic cultural-studies industry is capable of blowing up nearly as much snow as it clears away. (31 b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"Engaging, lucid and accessible. . . . A persuasive argument, and effectively alarming. . . . A readable meditation on popular culture."--Indira Karamcheti, "Women's Review of Books

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Product Details

• Paperback: 252 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (February 10, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520211022
• ISBN-13: 978-0520211025
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,368,730 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I'm the author, and I've never done this before...., December 10, 2001

By 

S. Bordo (Lexington, Ky USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. (Paperback)

That is, publicly comment on other people's evaluations of my work. I'm usually happy to let others decide the value of my writing...which is why I'm writing this--to encourage readers to judge "Twilight Zones" for themselves rather than on the impression created by the Kirkus Review and the second customer comment on this page. I don't care about the "stars" (I only rated myself because I was asked to.) But I do care about the misleading prominence of comments written by people whom I believe are not in touch with current cultural trends or their impact on our lives. Essays from "Twilight Zones" are being reprinted in first-year textbooks for undergraduate students. Yet the perception that this is an obscure, irrelevant, self-indulgent tome dominates this page. I think that's an extreme misrepresentation....

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The critical implications of everyday life, January 9, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. (Paperback)

Bordo's Twilight Zones continues the powerful critical trajectory set up by her award-winning Unbearable Weight, showing how media impacts our daily lives in the most intricate ways. More than any other public intellectual writing today, Bordo's writing is a compelling and passionate analysis that clears up many forms of mystification, academic and cultural. This book provides new and complicated ways of understanding contemporary events and how they are created/represented in the mass media, and how these creations in turn work to shape our lives.

4.0 out of 5 stars Saves the Day, December 8, 2010

By 

Phyllis P. Pie - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. (Paperback)

Whenever I feel like quitting graduate school and going to do something *useful* with my life I turn to Bordo. She shows us the practicality of cultural criticism in an accessible way. I find that scholarship, especially of this kind, is often obscurely written with no wider breadth or purpose than appealing to the readership of an obscure academic press.

In this particular work, Bordo shows us why cultural criticism matters and makes a strong case for the applicability of the field in everyday life. While I feel that the work itself has too much Bordo in it (she speaks at length of her own experiences, her own body type, her own students, etc), it is nevertheless insightful, funny, and engaging. It is in many ways a breath of fresh air in an academic field that seems stale and rotten.