The Fall for the Book audience was in for a treat this week, when Professor Susan Bordo visited campus to discuss her newest book, The Destruction of Hillary Clinton (Melville House, 2017).
Professor Bordo read from a brand new afterword she has just written for the forthcoming paperback edition of the book - the first time this had been shared with a public audience. A lively discussion ensued, about the role that gendered double-standards and stereotypes played in the 2016 election, the role of the media, and the challenges faced by women standing for political office moving forward.
But Professor Bordo's work on campus was not finished with her public talk: she went on to lead a 90 minute seminar for women and gender studies and philosophy students:
"The seminar she held after her talk was a great chance for us to talk to her about her early work in feminist philosophy and connect it with the political issues we are facing today," said philosophy major Summer Claveau, adding, "I'm so thankful that I got an opportunity not only to hear Susan Bordo speak, but also to interact with her on a personal level. Especially as a woman in philosophy, it was inspiring to talk to an extremely accomplished woman in philosophy and it gave me encouragement to move forward with my studies."
"It was great to see our students in philosophy and in women and gender studies interacting with Professor Bordo as well as with each other", noted Philosophy professor and department chair Dr. Rachel Jones, "in addition to exploring crucial questions about the role of gender in public and political life, the seminar showed how students' work in this area benefits from multi-disciplinary approaches, as Dr. Bordo has shown in her own research."
Dr. Susan Bordo is Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and holds the Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities at the University of Kentucky. Her books include The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (1987), which analyzes the way that Cartesian metaphysics gave rise to the modern ideal of the disembodied, objective knower; several major works examining the cultural representation of gendered embodiment, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body (1993) and The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private (1999); a wide-ranging analysis of contemporary image-saturated culture in Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O. J. (1997); and her most recent work on women in public and political life: The Creation of Anne Boleyn (2013) and The Destruction of Hillary Clinton (2017).
These events were co-sponsored by Women and Gender Studies and the Department of Philosophy.
October 13, 2017