Sarah Thornton on Tits Up: The Top Half of Women’s Liberation

Sarah Thornton's Tits Up: The Top Half of Women's Liberation explores the significance of breasts across radically different social worlds — a strip club, a human milk bank, a plastic surgeon's operating room, a bra design studio, and a feminist spiritual retreat.

 

There are 700 words in the English language for breasts, most coined by men. What does this say about who defines—and believes they own—women's bodies? Meanwhile, the slang most commonly used by women to describe their own top half is boobs, a synonym for idiots. Why are so many North American women dismissing an organ emblematic of womanhood—and essential to the survival and character of the human species—as dumb and/or irrelevant?

 

Thornton sets out to answer that question. The New Yorker commended her mission to "set these organs free," with the goal of deepening our understanding of and appreciation for the women to whom they are attached. The Economist declared that "owners and admirers will not look at breasts in the same way again.”

 

Dr. Sarah Thornton is a Canadian, who did her PhD in the UK on a Commonwealth Scholarship, and is now based in San Francisco. Best known for her ethnographies of elites—a body of work that earned her the label "the Jane Goodall of the art world”—Thornton is currently a contributing editor to the Financial Times HTSI magazine. She is the author of four books, all of which interrogate the dynamics of cultural value.

 

Jackman Humanities Institute

Department of Sociology

Centre for the Study of the United States at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy