In this provocative book, Susan Bordo untangles the myths, ideologies, and pathologies of the modern female body. Bordo explores our tortured fascination with food, hunger, desire, and control, and its effects on women's lives.

Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body

This article offers objectification theory as a framework for understanding the experiential consequences of being female in a culture that sexually objectifies the female body. Objectification the...

Objectification Theory: Toward Understanding Women's Lived Experiences and Mental Health Risks:

I want to say a little about the way ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality’ was originally conceived
and the context in which we are now living. It was written in part to challenge the erasure of
lesbian existence from so much of scholarly feminist literature, an erasure which I felt (and
feel) to be not just anti-lesbian, but anti-feminist in its consequences, and to distort the experience of heterosexual women as well. It was not written to widen divisions but to encourage
heterosexual feminists to examine heterosexuality as a political institution which disempowers
women – and to change it. I also hoped that other lesbians would feel the depth and breadth of
woman identification and woman bonding that has run like a continuous though stifled theme
through the heterosexual experience, and that this would become increasingly a politically
activating impulse, not simply a validation of personal lives. I wanted the essay to suggest
new kinds of criticism, to incite new questions in classrooms and academic journals, and to
sketch, at least, some bridge over the gap between lesbian and feminist. I wanted, at the very
least, for feminists to find it less possible to read, write, or teach from a perspective of unexamined heterocentricity.

Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence

http://users.uoa.gr/~cdokou/RichCompulsoryHeterosexuality.pdf

In this innovative book, a well-known feminist and sociologist-who is also the founding editor of Gender & Society-challenges our most basic assumptions about gender. Judith Lorber argues that gender is wholly a product of socialization, subject to human agency, organization, and interpretation, and that it is a social institution comparable to the economy, the family, and religion in its significance and consequences. Calling into question the inevitability and necessity of gender, she envisions a society structured for equality, where no gender, racial ethnic, or social class group is allowed to monopolize positions of power.

Paradoxes of gender

In this famously provocative cornerstone of feminist literature, Susan Griffin explores the identification of women with the earth--both as sustenance for humanity and as victim of male rage. Starting from Plato's fateful division of the world into spirit and matter, her analysis of how patriarchal Western philosophy and religion have used language and science to bolster their power over both women and nature is brilliant and persuasive, coming alive in poetic prose.Griffin draws on an astonishing range of sources--from timbering manuals to medical texts to Scripture and classical literature--in showing how destructive has been the impulse to disembody the human soul, and how the long separated might once more be rejoined. Poet Adrienne Rich calls "Woman and Nature" "perhaps the most extraordinary nonfiction work to have merged from the matrix of contemporary female consciousness--a fusion of patriarchal science, ecology, female history and feminism, written by a poet who has created a new form for her vision. ...The book has the impact of a great film or a fresco; yet it is intimately personal, touching to the quick of woman's experience."

Susan Griffin

Papers

Woman and nature : the roaring inside her

Pornography and Silence: Culture's Revenge Against Nature

Rape: The Power of Consciousness

The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender and Society

Woman and Nature