by Barbara Gingold

Fat is Still a Feminist Issue: Susie Orbach in Israel

THE WOMAN STEPPING UP to the lectern is Dr. Susie Orbach, world-renowned author of Fat Is a Feminist Issue (1978), The Impossibility of Sex (1999), and scores of other publications in between. Orbach needs neither makeup nor high heels to assert her authority. She takes the mike to tell some 400 Israeli women about women, body image, and eating problems.

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Fat Talk

The articles in this special section:

Fat is Still a Feminist Issue: Susie Orbach in Israel

by Barbara Gingold

The body itself, Orbach maintains, is a woman's form of language. Tier investigations of the unconscious reveal a host of symbolic meanings in body shape and size, in the way people eat or refrain. Despite rank social prejudice against obesity, the female unconscious may equate fat "with power, with presence, with a demand to be seen...A way to keep private vulnerabilities hidden while requesting acceptance for who one is. It is about an attempt to give to self."