Summary of Butts By Heather Radke: A Backstory

By Willie M. Joseph

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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of Butts By Heather Radke: A Backstory

 

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• Chapter astute outline of the main contents.
• Fast & simple understanding of the content analysis.
• Exceptionally summarized content that you may skip in the original book

Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke is one of the most anticipated books of 2022. Radke explores how butts have come to signify so much more than sex, desire, comedy, shame. She also examines the central importance of race through figures like Sarah Bartmann, Josephine Baker and Jennifer Lopez.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: Dec 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215730386

Willie M. Joseph

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Introduction

As a young girl, my mom's was the only naked adult body I had ever seen. She was beautiful and free as she went about her morning ablutions. Butts have been used as a means to create and reinforce racial hierarchies. They are laden with humor and sex, shame and history. The shape and size of a woman's butt has long been a perceived indicator of her very nature.

The fact that they are on our backside means they are somewhat alien to us, even as they are visible to others. To see your butt, you need the cocoon of mirrors of a dressing room or awkwardly held smartphone. In the UK they call it a bum, in Yiddish it's a tuchus, and in France it's called a derrière. There are many other terms that refer to the physical positioning of the body part in question: behind, backside, posterior, rear end, bottom. Butts are capricious in what they symbolize and can tell us a tremendous amount about many other things.

The feelings we have about butts are almost always indicative of other feelings. Butts are a bellwether for our feelings about race, gender, and sex. Butts were not a body part I thought could be nice. It felt like they'd caught us with our pants down, as though they'd seen our actual butts. My body was slowly turning into a youthful approximation of my mother's.

In high school, I was confronted with even more concrete evidence that my body was somehow wrong. Since high school, her butt had grown ever larger. Every pair of pants seemed to t me strangely, gaping at the waist even as they stretched tightly across my butt. During those years, she dated both men and women but felt most judged by straight men. Lemmon: It felt good to be wanted by people who had once made her feel ashamed.

Butts: A Backstory is an attempt to trace some of the threads of thought and meaning surrounding this enigmatic body part, and explore how they evolved and continue to resonate in the present. The approach is largely historical and chronological but begins with the basics:. What, exactly, is a butt? In my book, I focus on the history and symbolism of women's butts for the simple reason that I am a woman. I am exploring how straight people, white people, and men have (mis)understood