Throughout, Radke sharply challenges white women to examine how “women’s butts have been used as a means to create and reinforce racial hierarchies,” describing Miley Cyrus’s twerking “as an almost cartoonish example of cultural appropriation.” Marked by Radke’s vivacious writing, candid self-reflections, and sophisticated cultural analyses, this is an essential study of “ideas and prejudices” about the female body. Butts: A Backstory Heather Radke 3.80 1,440 ratings310 reviews Want to read Kindle 14. Radke also explores the physiology of running and various biological explanations for why humans developed butts, and interweaves recollections on her own early struggles to accept her “generous butt” with details about historical shifts in preferred posterior proportions. Thanks to NetGalley and Avid Reader Press for the eARC in exchange for a review.

She has written for publications including The Believer, Longreads, and The Paris Review, and she teaches at Columbia University’s creative writing MFA Program. Heather Radkea curvy, queer white womanwanted to know why we’re so hooked on butts, and because she’s a journalist, naturally she wants all of us to know why too. Radiolab reporter Radke delves into the eugenicist underpinnings of Sarah Baartman’s performances as the “Hottentot Venus” in 19th-century London, the giant faux posteriors of Victorian bustles, Jane Fonda’s butt-centered aerobics in the 1970s, the “lineage of butts in mainstream hip-hop,” and the concurrent rise of fashion’s flat “Kate Moss” butt and the Brazilian butt lift in the 1990s, among other milestones in cultural attitudes toward women’s rear ends. Heather Radke is an essayist, journalist, and contributing editor and reporter at Radiolab, the Peabody Award-winning program from WNYC.

Andrew Semans The life-sized plaster casts made by Dickinson and Belskie were dubbed Normman and Norma and helped create standardized. (Andrew Semans) Much of our complicated relationship with butts has to do with race. This whip-smart history charts the changing symbolism and meanings associated with the female bottom in “mainstream, hegemonic, Western culture” over the past two centuries. Heather Radke, the author of 'Butts, a Backstory'. Journalist and Radiolab contributor Heather Radke is the author of Butts: A backstory.

Butts by Heather Radke