Heather Radke: A Profile.

“This is a book about the cheeks, not the hole!” exclaims Heather Radke, author of a book on that very topic, Butts: A Backstory, released late last year, when deciding what she would include about the expansive — pun intended! — topic.

“One of the things I really had to do was [determine that] this is a book about women’s butts; it’s not about men’s butts,” she tells me via Zoom from her home in Brooklyn. “This is a book that takes place in the last two centuries throughout the U.S. and western Europe.”

Don’t let that fool you, prospective reader: Butts encompasses everything from evolutionary biology to fashion to race, topics that took Radke on a research tour of the UK and France, by way of her radio producing and museum background at the Jane Adams Hull-House Museum in Chicago, where she was a curator for eight years before getting her MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia, where she now teaches.

“A lot of the ways I think about doing research were really honed during that period of time,” she says.

So how did Radke go from curating exhibitions about crock pots (“There’s this weird eugenics history of the crock pot because eugenicists get involved in everything!”) at a historical house museum to writing about asses, of all things?

Like many girls of a certain age who were brought up on Joan Didion and Sex and the City, Radke had always dreamed of being a writer, so she “took a big swing” to see if she could make it come true. With essays in The Paris Review Daily, The Believer and Longreads and a debut book at one of the big five publishers touted by TIME as one of this year’s must-reads, I’d say she has.

So, butts: “I had a big butt and always felt bad about it.” Not eating disorder bad, but “mundane[ly] shame[ful],” which was a topic Radke was interested in exploring during her MFA.

“I thought there might be a way to investigate the meaning a butt or a body can hold and how those meanings can change over time and in different places,” she says.

And thus, Butts: A Backstory was spawned.

Radke spent several years working on it, completing much of this in-person archival research pre-COVID, during the summer of 2019, which took her to Yale, the V&A Museum in London and the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. When I assert that the pandemic was a blessing in disguise for sitting down and crystalizing the wide-ranging research she had accumulated, she disagrees.

Because each chapter is on a niche topic that Radke didn’t necessarily have much prior knowledge about, she had to take a crash course in each, learning as much as she could, deciding which stories were of most interest, reporting them out and writing the chapter before moving onto the next one. “I spent the whole time [I was writing that chapter] trying to understand evolutionary biology,” she says. “I still think I only get about 90% of it!”

One such chapter that takes readers and Radke on a journey through France and the past two centuries is that about Sarah Baartman, perhaps better known as the Hottentot Venus. Baartman was a Khoikhoi woman who was exhibited as a freak show attraction in 19th-century Europe both in life, when she was made to perform for aristocratic society, and in death, when her body parts were displayed at the very natural history museum in Paris where Radke went to learn more about her. (Baartman’s remains were repatriated to South Africa in 2002.)

“I knew a little bit about Sarah Baartman before I started writing the book but I had not heard about [the connection between her and the rise of the bustle],” Radke says. “The story about the bustle and the way that it may have been a visual echo of Sarah Baartman’s body was one of the earliest bits of research that I did and it was how I knew that this could be a book project because it was so complex.”

Radke tells me that the link between wealthy, mostly white women who lived around Baartman’s time being able to “play around in” Black women’s features by “taking off and putting on” the bustle has direct links to the current cultural appropriation of everything from Brazilian butt lifts to “brownie glazed lips” — and the apparent turning of the tide back to the heroin chic norm of the nineties, if The New York Post is to be believed.

“Right now, as of this conversation, [this trend is] three weeks old!” she laughs, seeing it more of an apparent exaltation of what Radke likens more to a “Paris Hilton”-like figure that relies more on Photoshop and the Y2K resurgence rather than the embrace of the grunge subculture or a Susan Sontag-coined “tubercular body”.

“To some extent, no matter what the ‘correct’ body is [for the time], it’s still this idea that women need to be in control of them. They need to be doing a certain set of exercises or eating a certain way or having a certain kind of plastic surgery in order to create the body that somebody else has deemed to be the correct and most beautiful one,” she says.

To return to Baartman, many people might be most familiar with her today through Kim Kardashian’s pilfering of her visage for her infamous 2014 “Break the Internet” Paper magazine cover.

Ahh, Kim Kardashian, possessor of perhaps the world’s most famous butt, despite the mythos around it and her whole family’s schtick being cribbed from Black women.

Quite a lot of real estate in Butts is dedicated to Kardashian (rightly so, I think) and, surprisingly, Miley Cyrus, whose rebranding around the same time as a white woman of color ruffled quite a few feathers.

“It’s a marker of white femininity, this desire to take on the stereotype of Black femininity and then just take it right off,” Radke said of Cyrus’ subsequent reembrace of her white ethnicity.

Radke seems quite captivated by Miley, to the exclusion of someone like Megan Thee Stallion, perhaps the person most recently associated with the body part and its reclamation (the title of one of the book’s final chapters), so much so that it seems like butt culture ended in 2014 when the events of Butts abruptly halt.

“Why didn’t I [include her]?!” she ponders. “I think my cultural metabolism is a little bit slow… So much of [this book] is historical and then it’s like bringing it up to this moment — but it’s not really this moment, it’s a moment a few years ago!”

Radke is quick to proffer that this is just one cultural history of the posterior, hence the subtitle: A Backstory.

“I hope very much that there would be room on any shelf for other versions of this book by other writers; writers of color and writer’s with different gender identities,” she says.

Radke also desires that, by the time her baby daughter comes of age, she will have an acceptance of her body that took Radke far too long to come to.

“It’s not like now I have no bad feelings about my body [after writing this book] — it can’t undo the entirety of Western culture! But it can give [readers] a way to think more expansively about your body and other people’s bodies so you can hopefully shift away from stereotypes that you’re carrying unconsciously. I guess that’s what I would hope for [my daughter], too.”