Susan Bordo

Susan Bordo, Otis A. Singletary Professor in the Humanities at University of Kentucky, is the author of Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, a book that is still widely read and assigned in classes today. During speaking tours for that book, she encountered many young men who asked, "What about us?" The result was The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private. Her latest book is The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England's Most Notorious Queen.

From Bordo's Q & A with Erin Lyndal Martin for Bitch Media:

What is your favorite thing about Boleyn?

I’ve always been attracted to women who seem to have been misunderstood in their own times, but come to “speak” to later generations. Anne was surely one of those women! But if I had to name one quality that is most appealing to me, it would have to be what seems to have been an ironic, somewhat “dark,” and highly attuned sense of how political her world was. We only have fragments that suggest this—her sharp, skeptical reactions to Constable Kingston’s mealy-mouthed reassurances in the tower, and her amazing trial speech, in which she confessed only to not having had “perfect humility” with Henry—but these tiny bits speak volumes to me about what set her off from other women at court. She wasn’t a great beauty (the media said to the contrary) but she seems to have been so conscious, and so unwilling to remain silent about what she felt and thought. And from her trial speech, it appears that she knew that was one of the main reasons for her fall.

You also mention Henry being more egalitarian than his contemporaries. In what other ways was Henry different than other men of his time?

I don’t actually use that word, for I don’t think he was egalitarian according to any modern understanding of that word. What I do suggest is...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at the official The Creation of Anne Boleyn website.

My Book, The Movie: The Creation of Anne Boleyn.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Susan Bordo & Sean and Dakota.

--Marshal Zeringue