TWILIGHT ZONES

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)