the creation of anne boleyn- public lecture by susan bordo
Thursday 8th March 2012 5:30PM (2 months, 2 weeks ago)
Event Details
In honor of Women’s History Month, Susan Bordo will present the lecture “The Creation of Anne Boleyn,” which will trace changing historical ideas about and popular representations of Anne, from early partisan views of her as a religious martyr, to 19th century understandings of her as a victim to a tyrannical Henry, followed by the contemporary “temptress” image (as seen in the TV series The Tudors and the film The Other Boleyn Girl), up to the most recent interpretation of Anne as a “third wave” feminist heroine for young girls today (Bordo calls this “Viral Anne”).
A groundbreaking philosopher and prominent cultural analyst, Susan Bordo has made major contributions to feminist, cultural, and gender studies as well as to psychology, sociology, history, and media studies. Her most well‐known book is Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body (1993), which looks at the impact of popular culture (including advertisements and television) in shaping expectations for the female body, and analyzes disorders such as anorexia, hysteria, and agoraphobia in relation to these representations, seeing them as “complex crystallizations of culture.” Unbearable Weight was one of the New York Times’ Notable Books of 1993, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and received a Distinguished Publication Award from the Association for Women in Psychology.
She has also authored three other books: The Flight to Objectivity, Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (1987), Twilight Zones: the Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. (1997), and The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private (1999). Bordo’s paradigm‐shifting interpretation of Descartes earned her a place as a feminist “archetype of wisdom” in Douglas Soccio’s philosophy textbook Archetypes of Wisdom. Her numerous articles and books on contemporary culture and the body have been translated into many languages and have been highly influential in many disciplines. She is included as one the six major theorists who have shaped literary studies in Michael Spikes’ Understanding Contemporary American Literary Theory, and she is widely credited with having established the field of “body studies.”