<p>Writing as a competitive athlete, an academic, and a woman, Leslie Heywood merges personal history and scholarship to expose the "anorexic logic" that underlies Western high culture. She maneuvers deftly across the terrain of modern literature, illustrating how this logic—the privileging of mind over body, of hard over soft, of masculine over feminine—is at the heart of the modernist style. Her argument ranges from Plato to women's bodybuilding, from Franz Kafka to Nike ads.<br><br>In penetrating examinations of Kafka, Pound, Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Conrad, Heywood demonstrates how the anorexic aesthetic is embodied in high modernism. In a compelling chapter on Jean Rhys, Heywood portrays an author who struggles to develop a clean, spare, "anorexic" style in the midst of a shatteringly messy emotional life. As Heywood points out, students are trained in the aesthetic of high modernism, and academics are pressured into its straitjacket. The resulting complications are reflected in structures as diverse as gender identity formation, sexual harassment, and eating disorders.<br><br>Direct, engaging, and intensely informed by the author's personal involvement with her subject, <i>Dedication to Hunger</i> offers a powerful challenge to cultural assumptions about language, gender, subjectivity, and identity.</p>

Dedication to Hunger: The Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture

Literature & Fiction

Heywood, Leslie

History & Criticism

University of California Press

<p>"<i>Unbearable Weight</i> is brilliant. From an immensely knowledgeable feminist perspective, in engaging, jargonless (!) prose, Bordo analyzes a whole range of issues connected to the body―weight and weight loss, exercise, media images, movies, advertising, anorexia and bulimia, and much more―in a way that makes sense of our current social landscape―finally! This is a great book for anyone who wonders why women's magazines are always describing delicious food as 'sinful' and why there is a cake called Death by Chocolate. Loved it!"―Katha Pollitt, Nation columnist and author of <i>Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture</i> (2001)</p>

Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, Tenth Anniversary Edition

Bordo, Susan

<p><div>Writing as a competitive athlete, an academic, and a woman, Leslie Heywood merges personal history and scholarship to expose the "anorexic logic" that underlies Western high culture. She maneuvers deftly across the terrain of modern literature, illustrating how this logic--the privileging of mind over body, of hard over soft, of masculine over feminine--is at the heart of the modernist style. Her argument ranges from Plato to women's bodybuilding, from Franz Kafka to Nike ads.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>In penetrating examinations of Kafka, Pound, Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Conrad, Heywood demonstrates how the anorexic aesthetic is embodied in high modernism. In a compelling chapter on Jean Rhys, Heywood portrays an author who struggles to develop a clean, spare, "anorexic" style in the midst of a shatteringly messy emotional life. As Heywood points out, students are trained in the aesthetic of high modernism, and academics are pressured into its straitjacket. The resulting complications are reflected in structures as diverse as gender identity formation, sexual harassment, and eating disorders.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>Direct, engaging, and intensely informed by the author's personal involvement with her subject, Dedication to Hunger offers a powerful challenge to cultural assumptions about language, gender, subjectivity, and identity.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.</div></p>

Reference

<p>A riveting memoir of one young woman's experience as a top flight track runner exposes how a destructive relationship with her coach and a refusal to acknowledge her own limits, finally led to a physical and emotional breakdown. 25,000 first printing.</p>

Pretty Good for a Girl

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Free Press

Bodymakers: A Cultural Anatomy of Women's Body Building

<p>"A highly unique and refreshing contribution. Heywood not only theorizes the relationships among feminism, activism, and bodybuilding but also provides what so many works on built female bodies lack-a feminine historical context. . . . Heywood concludes with a call for women to 'feel our muscles, our power, our terrible, wonderful, monstrous strengths' by leaving behind aerobics, replacing light weights with heavy ones, and claiming our right to take up space. . . . Like all influential and groundbreaking works, this book raises new and important questions that should provide grist for much feminist debate and scholarship in coming years."-Signs "Bodymakers is most ambitious in terms of its engagement with feminist cultural criticism and its unconventional scope. Heywood comments on film, novels, magazine pictures, popular criticisms of feminism, the J. Crew catalog, [and] the concept of power feminism."-Gender and Society "In this brilliantly insightful and immensely readable book, Leslie Heywood makes us think about women's body building in an entirely new way. She argues persuasively that, far from being an individualistic, apolitical act, it is a powerful form of resistance, empowering women to overcome their victim status and heal past abuse." -Myra Dinnerstein, University of Arizona "Bodymakers has a power and an honesty that is unusual in a book with its theoretical sophistication." -Susan Bordo, author of Unbearable Weight and Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. "With clarity, force, and passionate investment grounded in both theory and her own experience, Heywood understands that women can strengthen body, mind, and spirit through everyday practice. Her argument that body building is this kind of activist practice is as inspirational as it is poignant." -Joanna Frueh, author of Erotic Faculties "Flexing her muscles through autobiographical, theoretical, and spectacular acts, Heywood insists that we read the muscular female body not as an 'extreme oddity' but as a 'form of activism' through which we can understand anew larger cultural issues and trends, including the American romance with individualism and the relationship of second and third wave feminisms. Muscular female bodies will never be read in the same way again." -Sidonie Smith, University of Michigan Women with muscles are a recent phenomenon, so recent that, while generating a good deal of interest, their importance to the cultural landscape has yet to be acknowledged. Leslie Heywood looks at the sport and image of female body building as a metaphor for how women fare in our current political and cultural climate. She argues that the movement in women's body building from small, delicate bodies to large powerful ones and back again is directly connected to progress and backlash within the abortion debate, the ongoing struggle for race and gender equality, and the struggle to define "feminism" in the context of the nineties. She discusses female body building as activism, as an often effective response to abuse, race and masculinity in body building, and the contradictory ways that photographers treat female body builders. Engaging and accessible, Bodymakers reveals how female body builders find themselves both trapped and empowered by their sport.<br></p>

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Exercise & Fitness

Rutgers University Press

Sports & Outdoors

<p>The women and men writing here are activists, teachers, cultural critics, artists, and journalists. They distinguish themselves from a group of young, conservative feminists, including Naomi Wolf and Katie Roiphe, who criticize second wave feminists and are regularly called on to speak for the "next generation" of feminism. In contrast, Third Wave Agenda seeks to complicate our understanding of feminism by not only embracing the second wave critique of beauty culture, sexual abuse, and power structures but also emphasizing how desires and pleasures such as beauty and power can be used to enliven activist work, even while maintaining a critique of them.</p>

Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Univ. of Minnesota Press

<p>The sculpted speed of Marion Jones. The grit and agility of Mia Hamm. The slam-dunk style of Lisa Leslie. The skill and finesse of these sports figures are widely admired, no longer causing the puzzlement and discomfort directed toward earlier generations of athletic women. Built to Win explores this relatively recent phenomenon-the confident, empowered female athletes found everywhere in American popular culture. </p>
<p>Leslie Heywood and Shari L. Dworkin examine the role of female athletes through interviews with elementary- and high school-age girls and boys; careful readings of ad campaigns by Nike, Reebok, and others; discussions of movies like Fight Club and Girlfight; and explorations of their own sports experiences. They ask: what, if any, dissonance is there between popular images and the actual experiences of these athletes? Do these images really "redefine femininity" and contribute to a greater inclusion of all women in sport? Are sexualized images of these women damaging their quest to be taken seriously? Do they inspire young boys to respect and admire female athletes, and will this ultimately make a difference in the ways gender and power are constructed and perceived? </p>
<p>Proposing a paradigm shift from second- to third-wave feminism, Heywood and Dworkin argue that, in the years since the passage of Title IX, gender stereotypes have been destabilized in profound ways, and they assert that female athletes and their imagery are doing important cultural work to that end. Important, refreshing, and engrossing, Built to Win examines sport in all its complexity. </p>
<p>Leslie Heywood is professor of English at Binghamton University. She is the author of Pretty Good for a Girl: An Athlete's Story (Minnesota, 2000), Bodymakers (1998), and coeditor of Third Wave Agenda (Minnesota, 1997). A former track and cross-country runner who is currently a competitive powerlifter, Heywood is a vice president of the Women's Sports Foundation. </p>
<p>Shari L. Dworkin is a sociologist and works as a research fellow at the HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies at Columbia University.</p>

Built To Win: The Female Athlete As Cultural Icon (Volume 5) (Sport and Culture)

Dworkin, Shari L.

<p>The sculpted speed of Marion Jones. The grit and agility of Mia Hamm. The slam-dunk style of Lisa Leslie. The skill and finesse of these sports figures are widely admired, no longer causing the puzzlement and discomfort directed toward earlier generations of athletic women. Built to Win explores this relatively recent phenomenon--the confident, empowered female athletes found everywhere in American popular culture. Leslie Heywood and Shari L., Dworkin examine the role of female athletes through interviews with elementary- and high school-age girls and boys; careful readings of ad campaigns by Nike, Reebok, and others; discussions of movies like Fight Club and Girlfight; and explorations of their own sports experiences. They ask: what, if any, dissonance is there between popular images and the actual experiences of these athletes? Do these images really "redefine femininity" and contribute to a greater inclusion of all women in sport? Are sexualized images of these women damaging their quest to be taken seriously? Do they inspire young boys to respect and admire female athletes, and will this ultimately make a difference in the ways gender and power are constructed and perceived? Proposing a paradigm shift from second- to third-wave feminism, Heywood and Dworkin argue that, in the years since the passage of Title IX, gender stereotypes have been destabilized in profound ways, and they assert that female athletes and their imagery are doing important cultural work to that end. Important, refreshing, and engrossing, Built to Win examines sport in all its complexity.</p>

<p>"Just in time for the upsurge in 'girl power' books comes this insightful yet disturbing sports memoir of a former Arizona high-school track and cross country star who soars to first place in races but spirals downward in her battle to win acceptance among her male peers, and to avoid eating disorders and exercise compulsion, to overcome an unhappy home life (an alcoholic father) and a destructive, sexual relationship with an unethical coach. This is a well-written account of the pressures teenage athletes face that can lead to self-abuse and destruction." Booklist</p>

Pretty Good for a Girl: An Athlete's Story

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Heywood, Leslie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Heywood, Leslie

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Heywood, Leslie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Dedication to Hunger: The Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture

Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, Tenth Anniversary Edition

Dedication to Hunger: The Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture

Pretty Good for a Girl

Bodymakers: A Cultural Anatomy of Women's Body Building

Bodymakers: A Cultural Anatomy of Women's Body Building

Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism

Built To Win: The Female Athlete As Cultural Icon (Volume 5) (Sport and Culture)

Built To Win: The Female Athlete As Cultural Icon (Volume 5) (Sport and Culture)

Pretty Good for a Girl: An Athlete's Story