Have you noticed the rear of the Kardashian women? And have you realized that this is cultural appropriation? Well, not me at all, until, coinciding with Roald Dahl’s quinoa factory, I came across a review of Butts: a backstory, that is, a history of behinds: in a new chapter of the deconstruction of the human being starting with the brain, the North American essayist Heather Radke traces a tour of our back. Quite an interesting study, until he enters the world of fashion. The fashion to enlarge one’s buttocks, but above all that of turning any matter into a pointing finger. And accusing.
Heather Radke is based on the story of Sarah Baartman, a Khoe woman captured in South Africa in the 1770s and taken to Great Britain, where she was forced to show off her huge behind “turned into a fantasy of African hypersexuality.” So far, she is truly instructive. Unfortunately, however, she steps into moral high ground and turns the matching bustle fashion into “an accessory to both whiteness and blackness,” allowing her to “imitate a body she sees as undeniably black and then undeniably black.” reaffirm their whiteness by removing the disguise”.
Really? It is not to contradict him, Radke has undoubtedly studied a lot, but the female body has suffered from everything, from corsets to chastity belts, nor do I think that women when they put on the bustle thought of another continent, nor men neither men, for that matter.
But things get unstitched, let’s say, when he complains that Kim Kardashian or Jennifer López have “monetized” this attribute of black women, the big behind – let’s not say fat, look what has happened to Dahl -, with its increases. The truth is that this type of body modification has always seemed to me 1) unnecessary 2) horrible 3) dangerous (for health), but never “monetized”, unless we refer to the plastic surgeon’s bill.
So, every time someone gets a Brazilian straightening, more common and less expensive, is he also appropriating the hair of other cultures?
