cultural normative practices, expressed through popular media, work to influence femininity (and gendered bodies in general) into homogeneity while at the same time seeming freely chosen. "Like Foucault, [Bordo] focuses on the discourses through which society produces, understands, defines, and interprets the female body." Writing The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (1987) The Flight to Objectivity represents what Bordo refers to as a "fresh approach" to Descartes' Meditations. She critiques the stable notion of objectivity and knowledge inherent in Cartesian thought, notions that, in our contemporary society, have become critically distanced, for "[t]he limitations of science and the interested, even ideological nature of all human pursuits now seem unavoidable recognitions". Bordo suggests that rather than viewing Descartes from a "coherent abstract or ahistorical" perspective, we need to approach Descartes' philosophical arguments within "the context of the cultural pressures that gave rise to them". Susan Hekman notes that Bordo's The Flight to Objectivity, while not overtly dealing with theorizations of the body, does point to the fact that "the origin of our culture's text for the body, and particularly the female body, is the work of Descartes". The Cartesian division of the mind and the body, where the body is the "prison that the mind must escape to achieve knowledge", guides Bordo's further analyses of culturally influenced bodies and the shaping of the female body in particular. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (1993) Bordo's Unbearable Weight presents a collection of essays that focus on the body's situatedness and construction in Western Society and offers "a cultural approach to the body". Bordo looks at "obsessive body practices of contemporary culture" and claims that her aim "is not to portray these obsessions as bizarre or anomalous, but, rather, as the logical (if extreme) manifestations of anxieties and fantasies fostered by our culture". Practices such as cosmetic surgery, obsessive dieting and physical training represent, for Bordo, how cultural "representations homogenize" and how "these homogenized images normalize". Unbearable Weight also traces the connection between culture and female disorders and Bordo emphasizes the fact that disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia cannot simply be defined from medical and psychological standpoints but must be viewed from within a cultural context, as "complex crystallizations of culture". It is through such female disorders that resistance to dominant ideological constructs are seemingly played out; however, such a resistance reveals the devastating effects of