buttocks

buttocks Also called the nates, ass, clunes, breech; they are formed by the gluteal muscles which cover the back of each pelvic bone and span the hip joint to be attached to the thigh bone. These huge muscles are mostly concerned with moving and stabilizing the hip joint. The largest is the gluteus maximus (‘biggest in the buttock’), which is important in locomotion. (See musculo-skeletal system.)

The history of the buttocks has been written either as the history of the physical buttocks or as the history of their symbolic function within cultural systems. Thus Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (building upon the work of earlier anatomists such as Georges Cuvier) assumes the relationship between the ‘natural’ form of the buttocks and the meaning associated with the human female pelvis. The pelvis was seen as the most prominent secondary sexual characteristic and the buttocks were read as the pelvis' visible sign. The buttocks became the visual sign of the reproductive system. The breasts came to be understood as a sign of the anomalous nature of the human body, as other mammals do not have prominent mammae: only human females do. The breasts came to be perceived as a form which mimicked the buttocks, the ‘real sign’ of the sexual. The debates about the meaning of the mammae and their defining force in determining the very nature of the ‘mammal’ has been well documented by Londa Schiebinger in her Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (1993).

Buttocks in racism

Beginning with the expansion of European colonial exploration, the form and size of the buttocks became a mode of describing and classifying the races. Thus Darwin's view is a further elaboration on the adaptivity of human form for reproductive purposes. The buttocks become associated with the reproductive organs of the female through the analogy with the form of the pelvis. This is a continuation of the cultural presupposition that ‘primitive’ races have ‘primitive’ sexuality, which is represented in their bodies by physical signs of their ‘true’ nature. Thus Khoikhoi (called the Hottentots by the first Dutch explorers) and San (named Bushman by early Anglophone explorers) women of southwestern Africa were represented from the sixteenth century by their exaggerated buttocks (steatopygia) and labia (Hottentot apron). While these images claimed a greater size for the buttocks, they also claimed that these women (once anatomized) had a smaller pelvic size. The steatopygia was seen as a pronounced, localized accumulation of fat or fatty-fibrous tissue on the upper part of the buttocks. It was understood as rarely manifested prior to puberty, and as an accumulation which enlarged gradually and was a normal physical characteristic in women who otherwise may not be obese. As greater pelvic size was understood, in analogy to increased cranial capacity, as a sign of ‘progress’, the small pelvic size of the ‘primitive’ was understood as proof of their actual place on the great chain of being. The exaggerated buttocks were understood as an attempt to ‘mimic’ the higher stages of evolutionary development. Similar representations can be found in the images of the native peoples of South America in early illustrated accounts of European exploration. Here too the breasts and the buttocks are seen as natural signs of the barbarism of the native. After their initial representation as the idealized ‘Roman’ types, these native inhabitants come to be seen as in need of domestication and conversion. Thus their body forms including their buttocks, come to be represented as grotesque.

Buttocks, gender and gait

In drawing the history of the physicality of the buttocks, works such as Havelock Ellis' multi-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex lay stress, following Darwin, on the history of the buttocks as a secondary sexual characteristic which is highly fetishized in European culture. Again Ellis associated the practice of whipping with the overemphasis on the buttocks in British culture. Ellis related this symbolic reading of the buttocks to the primary sexual characteristics (the genitalia) and other secondary sexual characteristics (such as the female breasts). In his case study of ‘Florrie’ (Volume 7: Eonism and Other Supplementary Studies) he showed how ‘Florrie’ comes to displace the meaning of the buttocks on to other body sites.

Ellis also stressed the function of gait as a manner of measuring the erotic nature of the buttocks. Quoting Virgil, he observed (Volume 4: Sexual Selection in Man) that ‘the goddess is revealed by her walk.’ As Cesare Lombroso and a number of other forensic scientists of the nineteenth century had argued for the relationship between gait and character, the notion that the buttocks could be defined by the appearance and attraction of the carriage is understandable. Thus non-Western women are represented as having a greater ‘vibratory movement of the buttocks in their women’. The primitive gait was a further sign of the less civilized (and therefore less self-conscious) sexuality of the ‘primitive’.

Buttocks and the Freudian model

Ellis' work on the meaning and the history of the buttocks was paralleled in Austria by Sigmund Freud's discussion of the meaning of the ‘anal phase’. First working it out in detail in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud understood the anal phase as the second of three stages of bodily fixation — beginning with the mouth, then moving on to the anus, and then the genitals. ‘Normal’ development proceeded along this path, but the development could be fixated at the earlier stages. Freud saw anal fixation as the origins of male homosexuality. Again, it is not the anus per se which comes to function as the symbolic reference in Freud's system, but rather the buttocks. Here it is not the proximity of the buttocks to the genitalia which is of interest, but rather their adjacent position to the anus. Freud's fascination with the buttocks can be seen in his note to the publication of the anthropologist John Gregory Bourke's Scatalogic rites of all nations. A dissertation upon the employment of excrementitious remedial agents in religion, therapeutics, divination, witchcraft, love-philters, etc., in all parts of the globe (1934).

For Freud, too, the question of the symbolic meaning of the buttocks was read in the erotic attraction of the gait. It is in his reading of Wilhelm Jensen's short story Gradiva (1903). Introduced to the text by C. G. Jung in the summer of 1906, Freud published his interpretation in 1907, shortly after his work on the stages of human development. It is the first complete study of a work of literature from Freud's pen. In this text the hero recognizes the heroine subliminally by her gait. The classical image, the ‘Gradiva’, was, according to Freud, a
sculpture [which] represented a fully-grown girl stepping along, with her flowing dress a little pulled up so as to reveal her sandaled feet. One foot rested squarely on the ground; the other, lifted from the ground in the act of following after, touched it only with the tips of the toes, while the sole and heel rose almost perpendicularly. It was probably the unusual and peculiarly charming gait thus presented that attracted the sculptor's notice and that still, after so many centuries, riveted the eyes of its archaeological admirer.

This description of the act of walking is, of course, also a detailed description of the erotic nature of the gait and therefore a reading of the erotics of the female buttocks in terms of Freud's contemporary discourse. Thus the symbolization of the buttocks as the erotic also has a place within Freud's system of representation.

Consciously building on the Freudian model, the American folklorist's Alan Dundes, in his Life is like a Chicken Coop Ladder (1982), stressed the study of the buttocks in terms of their symbolic value as the site of the production of the faeces. Thus anus and faeces become interchangeable. By relating the buttocks to other aspects of the body, Dundes, for example, examined the meaning of scatology in German cultural systems including child raising.

The buttocks are an ever-shifting symbolic site in the body. They are associated with the organs of reproduction, with the aperture of excretion, and with the mechanism of locomotion. Never do they represent themselves. Indeed the very problem of whether they are singular or plural is a sign of their nature as a floating signifier.

Sander L. Gilman

Bibliography

Gilman, S. L. (1985). Difference and pathology: stereotypes of sexuality, race, and madness. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY.
Hennig, J. L. (1995). The rear view: a brief and elegant history of bottoms through the ages, trans. M. Crosland and and E. Powell , Souvenir Press, London.