A juicy new book explores the cultural history of the backside
Published 10th February 2023
Credit: Ray Tamarra/GC Images/Getty Images
A juicy new book explores the cultural history of the backside
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A juicy new book explores the cultural history of the backside
Culture Queue is an ongoing series of recommendations for timely books to read, films to watch, podcasts and music to listen to.
In the introduction to her book "Butts: A Backstory," journalist Heather Radke recalls being cat-called by two teenage boys while riding their bikes when she was 10 years old.
"'Nice butts!' they said," Radke writes. "The fact that they said something unprompted about our buttocks made me feel uncomfortable and strange...
I was aware that there were body parts that were considered beautiful and sexy and were coveted by others, but it had never occurred to me that the buttocks were one of them."
That episode was just one in a series that made Radke realize how important backsides are in not only our relationships with our bodies, but also in the cultural, social, and gender-specific experiences that define womanhood.
"Butts, as silly as they may appear at times, are tremendously complex symbols, laden with humor and sex, shame and history," she writes.
"The shape and size of a woman's buttocks has long been regarded as a barometer of her very nature — her morality, femininity, and even humanity."
"Butts," a thoroughly researched cultural history of the female butt, is inspired by these observations. The book, which weaves together memoir, science, history, and cultural criticism, addresses the physiological origins of our behinds, taking readers from the
Victorian era's cinched waists all the way to Kim Kardashian's Internet-breaking backside and the popularization of the Brazilian butt lift.
In the interim, Radke investigates the role of eugenics, fashion, fitness fads, and pop culture in shaping racial and misogynistic standards surrounding the butt.
"I only know what it's like to be a White woman with a big butt, which obviously has limitations," Radke explained over the phone. "It was important to me to listen to different voices in order to challenge our ideas about where bodies come from."
"Any discussion of the butt has always been tinged with racial undertones since the transatlantic slave trade's inception, and questions like "What is a feminine body?" have been approached from a gendered perspective.
What makes a body beautiful? How feminine is a gorgeous physique, exactly? "She went on.
The answers to those concerns have changed over time, but our intense preoccupation with this particular body part shows how the butt has traditionally been utilized as a tool to establish racial hierarchies, prescribe desires, and transfer authority.
Butt-based prejudice and appropriation
Saartjie "Sarah" Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus, appears frequently in "Butts" (the term Hottentot, now widely regarded as offensive, was historically used to refer to the Khoekhoe, an indigenous tribe of South Africa).
In the nineteenth century, Baartman, an Indigenous Khoe lady, was compelled to display her "big butt" before White audiences in Cape Town, London, and Paris.
A significant portion of the book's narrative is supported by Radke's account of Baartman's life and how her body came to be "a fantasy of African hypersexuality," in which she links the exploited Baartman to the prejudiced and skewed legacy of big-butted women as more highly sexual, especially Black women.
Radke met with Janell Hobson, an expert on Baartman who teaches women's, gender, and sexuality studies at the State University of New York at Albany.
Hobson connects the perpetuation of slavery in White civilization and the fostering of colonialism to the fetishization of Baartman's persona. Hobson writes in the book,
"(Baartman's) exhibition propagated stereotypes about African barbarism and primordial Black womanhood. Hence, when white people looked upon Sarah Baartman, they projected all that had already been ingrained in their culture.
In many ways, Baartman's story is still relevant today, according to Radke. She passed away in 1815, but "Up until the 1980s and once again in the 1990s, her body was on exhibit in Paris.
That shows you how quickly we converted her into a stereotype and exploitation symbol, turning her into something hideous to look at." Ra
Later, dke cites the bustle as a stark illustration of White appropriation of Baartman's form. The bustle was an undergarment that gained popularity in the late 19th century and was intended to make a woman's buttocks appear big.
Because it could be easily removed, Radke claimed that it served as a method for Victorian women to simultaneously assert their own whiteness and privilege and emulate Sarah Baartman. Through history, that action would be replicated repeatedly.
Miley Cyrus performs during her Bangerz tour at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on March 1, 2014 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Credit: David Becker/Getty Images
Shee examines the same butt-based cultural appropriation, as well as its monetary exploitation, by stars like Kim Kardashian and Miley Cyrus, whose well-known twerking routine at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards and during concerts on her "Bangerz Tour" that same year (where she used a large prosthetic butt as part of her choreography) was, according to Radke, a prop to "'play' in Blackness."
Aside with tackling the latest belfie (a combination of butt and selfie) fad, plastic surgery, and the visual culture of Black music videos, Radke also focuses on instances in modern history where trends went in opposite, opposing ways.
She uses the development of size and the 90s version of "heroin chic" popularized by supermodel Kate Moss to highlight the rise of "buttless women" in the 1910s, an appearance best exemplified by the stylish flapper. Such a style is "something that's actually never gone away," according to Radke.
Radke said, "I didn't aim to write an encyclopedia of the butt, but rather to give a historical context to the way it has been portrayed and viewed, and how women's attitudes about it have changed alongside it.
"Unknowingly or not, society as a whole and we have always focused on our butts, hiding, emphasizing, and fetishizing them.
Which is sort of weird when you consider that it's a body component we are unable to view without a mirror." "The butt belongs to the watcher more than the seen," she says in her book.
Reclaiming the butt
There is joy to be discovered despite the physical anguish that permeates many of the stories revealed in "Butts" (diets, constricting shapewear, surgical scalpels, etc.).
Radke profiled the fat fitness movement that emerged during the same decade, which reimagined "what was possible for people who often felt excluded from mainstream fitness culture" to offer a form of resistance to the extreme workout regimens of the 1980s, such as the "Buns of Steel" fitness craze that equated a sculpted butt to self-control and self-respect.
Before the NEPA PrideFest Royale drag pageant on June 25, 2022, at the Hilton Conference Center in Scranton, Pennsylvania, drag queens prepare by dressing in padding and stockings.
Photographs courtesy of Aimee Dilger/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images She spent time in Astoria, Queens, with a group of drag performers who create foam butt cushions to adorn their behinds, making the butt into something positive and judgment-free.
But I felt it was vital to also illustrate the opposite possibility: emancipation, according to Radke. "A history of bodies — especially female bodies — is always going to be a history of domination and oppression," she added.
"Those stories were some of the most enjoyable research I conducted, as well as some of the most unexpected, as they gave me the opportunity to meet people who had rejected conventional norms and embraced an alternative perspective on bigness, which also helped me reframe it.
" In the end, Radke claimed that the butt's lack of significance is perhaps what makes it most alluring.
"Butts have the capacity to make us feel so miserable or angry, especially when we're in a changing room trying on a pair of pants that just won't fit," she observed.
"Yet, centuries of history, culture, and politics are to blame for that anxiety. That was put on them; it is not a part of our bodies. We can realize that butts are merely a bodily component if we take a step back. They might be completely meaningless."
"Butts: A Backstory." Credit: Simon & Schuster
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The book provides an unflinching examination at the ways in which ugly has molded and challenged aesthetics and taste, analyzing everything from ancient Roman feasts to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as well as art, music, and Uglydolls.
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