THE BREAST

Baring breasts.

German art historian Zimmerman examines ways that the breast—“an overdetermined body part”—has been highly politicized, evoking contradictory and impassioned responses across many areas of Western culture throughout history. Translated by Barfoot, Zimmerman’s well-researched study draws on a wide-range of disciplines, including anthropology, psychology, theology, feminist theory, gender studies, and art history, to illuminate the connection of breasts to assumptions about gender identity, race, ethnicity, and, above all, power. A particular image of breasts—white, small, firm—was long seen as ideal. Large, pendulous breasts, in contrast, were denigrated, associated with so-called primitivity. With her colossal breasts, the Venus of Willendorf, a statue from 25,000 B.C.E., later was deemed fat and ugly; Sarah Baartman, an African woman brought to London in 1810 and exhibited as the “Hottentot Venus,” was considered repulsive because of her large buttocks and pendulous breasts. Zimmerman considers changing assumptions about male breasts, controversy over transgender breasts, and the confusing messages women have received about breastfeeding: that infants should—or should not—be fed by a wet nurse and that the breast could be a potential source of poison, best replaced by the udder of a nanny goat. An object of lust, a target of medical scrutiny and intervention, the breast has had political symbolism: the naked breast seen as an allegory of freedom and breast baring as a form of feminist protest. No other body part, Zimmerman argues persuasively, has been so divisive: whether to “enlarge them, reduce them, restore them, replace them, remove them, push them up, bind them, get rid of them, and so on—are signs of people’s need to continually prove their femininity, masculinity, or even humanity.” Two dozen images depict breasts in cartoons, photographs, and artwork.

A perceptive social history.