and the female body predominantly as victims, living passively/submissively within patriarchal society, a tabula rasa awaiting inscription. Intending to go beyond such a classification, Bordo writes that new feminist critiques looked more towards "racial, economic and class differences among women," while also looking at "both women's collusions with patriarchal culture and their frequent efforts at resistance". Cultural studies While situated within feminist and gender studies frameworks, Bordo's theories also stem from a cultural studies approach where the power of cultural phenomena such as television, advertising and popular magazines are analyzed in terms of means of domination and of resistance. While certain cultural theorists, for example John Fiske, who wrote Television Culture (1990), see elements of culture like television as "demonstrating the way representational codes and techniques shape our perception" but also as a means for resistance, where audience members could "decode" such messages and thus be able to "think resistantly about their lives", Bordo sees cultural coding as a more pernicious, binding and overwhelming force. For Bordo "the rules of femininity have come to be culturally transmitted more and more through the deployment of standardized visual images"; cultural transmitters such as television and print media work insidiously to "impose models of bodily beauty that get construed as freely chosen options by those victimized by them". Post structuralism The notions of culture, power and gender/subject formation that dominate Bordo's writing arise in some degree from poststructuralist thought. Susan Hekman points out that "[l]ike an increasing number of contemporary feminist theorists [Bordo] argues for a selective use of postmodern theories" and one way Bordo's work can be seen in a poststructuralist/postmodernist light is through her usage of Foucauldian methodology. Bordo appropriates the ideas of Michel Foucault in critiquing, analyzing and bringing to light "the normative feminine practices of our culture". As Bordo points out, Foucault saw power not "as the possession of individuals or groups" but "as a dynamic or network of non-centralized forces", and such a depiction of power relations is therefore useful in a critique of gender formation/regulation. If, in a Foucauldian sense, power works from below, then "prevailing forms of selfhood and subjectivity (gender among them) are maintained, not chiefly through physical restraint and coercion (although social relations may certainly contain such elements), but through individual self-surveillance and self-correction to norms". Foucault's theories of power and discipline along with theories on sexuality serve contemporary feminist aims in revealing how