Bodies
Why so many people treat their own bodies as a problem to fix, and who profits when they do.
Susie Orbach, the psychotherapist who wrote Fat Is a Feminist Issue, looks at how the body became a project to be worked on and improved. Drawing on her clinical practice, she traces how anxiety about weight, shape and appearance is passed from mothers to daughters, spread around the world by media and marketing, and sold back to us by the diet and cosmetics industries.
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Renata Salecl
Susie Orbach is a so-called relational psychoanalyst, and she wrote this book, Bodies, where she looks at how the body is perceived in post-industrial, late capitalism. Again we have the idea of body as a product, something that you work on and that is completely in your power. Of course, the cosmetics and dieting industries have hugely contributed to this, so she makes a social critique, pointing out that in some way capitalism relies on our unhappiness with the body.
Interview · October 2012
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