The Empire Of Bodies Susan Bordo Analysis

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Like a blueprint or instruction manual, the objective of a rhetorical analysis is to dissect a written argument, identify its many parts, and explain how all of them come together to achieve a desired effect. Susan Bordo, a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky, wrote “The Empire of Images in Our World of Bodies”, published in 2003 in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Her essay examines how the media plays a pervasive role in how women view their bodies to the point where we live in an empire of images and there are no protective borders. In “The Empire of Images in Our World of Bodies”, Bordo not only effectively incorporates numerous facts and statistics from her own research and the research of others; she also appeals to emotional realities of anxiety and inadequacy felt by women all over the world in regards to their body image. Ultimately, her intent is to critique the influence of the media on self-confidence and body image, and to remind her audience of the overt as well as subconscious messages they are receiving on a daily basis.
Bordo’s intention is to inform the audience of how destructively pervasive the …show more content…

She claims that it is “in our Sunday news. With our morning coffee…the endless commercials and advertisements we believe we pay no attention to” (149) By referring to background examples of the media’s omnipresent influence, she allows the reader to understand how easy it is for many women to get lost in the world of images. In addition, she notes that as a feminist professor of gender studies even she is not immune from the negative impacts of media culture. She organizes her argument in what seems to be almost a list; one by one, she gives her readers a multitude of examples detailing the many ways women and girls are being bombarded with various stimuli influencing ways they should act, dress, and

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