Big Booty Beauty and the New Sexual Aesthetic

By Myra Mendible, American Sexuality Magazine. Posted January 6, 2009.

What are we to make of this apparent notice of what plastic surgeons call the "gluteal aesthetic?" Commenting on the popularity of Lopez's butt, Frances Negron Muntaner contends that it offers "a way of speaking about Africa in(side) America." In Muntaner's reading, a big butt is an "invitation to pleasures construed as illicit by Puritan ideologies, heteronormativity and the medical establishment through the three deadly vectors of miscegenation, sodomy and a high-fat diet." Further, Latinas are said to be embracing another standard of beauty and reclaiming, along with Lopez, "a curvaceous Latin body."

Several critics express this optimism, maintaining along with Mary Beltran that for Lopez "to declare beautiful and unashamedly display her well-endowed posterior ... could be viewed as nothing less than positive -- a revolutionary act with respect to Anglo beauty ideals." Frances Aparicio notes that the bodies of Jennifer Lopez and Selena (similarly marked by curvy bottoms) have become symbols of ethnic pride. Given JLo's status as Hollywood's most highly paid Latina actress, her abundant assets represent both figurative and literal booty. Thus while Lopez's remark that she likes to accentuate her "curvaceous Latin body" may express ethnic pride, it also signals the commercial viability of a voluptuous tush.

Racialized Bodies and Sexual Stereotypes

Buttocks have long been a source of cultural capital in the West, serving as emblems of sexual, racial or ethnic difference. As Gilman and others have noted, difference is that which threatens order and control, the polar opposite of our individual or group identity. Valdivia puts it this way: "We can go so far as noting that Jennifer is represented in terms of her butt, and that her butt represents ethnic difference."

It is therefore not surprising that all the gossip and craze inspired by the JLo butt reminded me of another infamous butt -- that 19th century colonized rump belonging to Saartje Baartman, dubbed by her masters and impresarios, the "Hottentot Venus." This young African woman's steatopygia -- large, protruding butt -- served as a sign of all that perplexed, fascinated and horrified Europeans in the early 1800s about their darker others. Displayed throughout Europe, Baartman's sign value as alien body persisted even after her death at age 25. Doctors dissected and preserved her genitals in glass jars, her large buttocks displayed for curious spectators eager to see bodily evidence of the African woman's propensity to excess, deviant sexuality.

We should not underestimate the symbolic value of buttocks. Butt metaphors helped European cultures categorize and describe their others, ascribing to bodily differences certain moral and intellectual attributes. Gilman argues that, "Beginning with the expansion of European colonial exploration, describing the forms and size of the buttocks became a means of describing and classifying the races. The more prominent the more primitive …" (Making the Body Beautiful). British culture, in particular, identified the buttocks with primitive or debased sexuality (Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex). Non-Western women were associated with the "lower regions" of the body and characterized in terms of their abundant backsides. Similarly, in American culture, the U.S.-Mexico border marked a figurative divide between Northern mind and Southern body, rationality and sensuality, domestic and foreign. This bodily trope culled associations between the lower body and the inferior, more primitive "under"-developed "torrid zones" south of the border; it often served to rationalize U.S. military interventions or corporate exploitation of Latin American labor and resources.

Brazilian Butt-Lifts and the Big Booty Look

But in today's transnational economy, the buttocks have become a precious commodity. Avital Levy's documentary film, Bootyful World, which explores social attitudes toward female butts, includes a brief interview with Dr. Anthony Griffin, a famous plastic surgeon who claims that requests for his "Brazilian butt-lift" surgery have surpassed all other surgeries in popularity, despite his $15,000-plus fee. Marketed as a sign of authenticity (of "real women"), big butts also help sell a range of products. Literally expanding their target demographic, Dove's "Real Beauty" advertising campaign featured full-bodied women in their underwear, prominent hips and thighs in proud display. Nike's "Just Do It" campaign included a "Big Butts" promotion; full-page ads featured a protruding female butt in profile. Big-butted models have even been gracing the pages of fashion magazines that once catered exclusively to Kate Moss wannabes. As a result, women without a sufficiently endowed behind are getting implants or buying butt reshaping cushions on eBay.

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Myra Mendible teaches media and culture studies at Florida Gulf Coast University, where she is chairwoman of the Literature and Languages Department. She has published widely in a variety of peer-reviewed journals and is the editor of an interdisciplinary collection of essays, From Bananas to Buttocks: The Latina Body in Popular Film and Culture (University of Texas Press, 2007).

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