The Butt: Its Politics, Its Profanity, Its Power
by Erin Aubry

I have a big butt. Not wide hips, not a preening, weightlifting enhanced butt thrust up like a chin, not an occasionally saucy rear that throws cooquettish glances at strangers when it's in a good mood, and withdraws like a turtle when it's not. Every day, my butt wears me--tolerably well, I'd like to think--and has ever since I came full up on puberty about twenty years ago and had to wrestle it back into the Levi's 501s it had barely put up with anyway. My butt hollered, I'm mad! at that point, and it hasn't calmed down since.

My butt refuses to follow the current trend of black marginalization, nor does it care that we are heading into the millennium with the most collective uncertainty as a people since we first stumbled out of the dark holds of the slave ships and onto American soil. Unlike hair and skin, the butt is stubborn—it can't be hotcombed or straightened or bleached into submission. It does not assimilate—it never took a slave name.

I have come to realize that my butt makes much more than a declaration at parties and small gatherings. Its sheer size makes it politically incorrect in an age in which everything is shrinking--government, computers, distances between people. In a new, small-world order, it is hopelessly passe. Of course, not fitting--literally and otherwise--has always been a fact of life for black women, who unfairly or not are regarded as archetypes of the protuberant butt, or at least the spiritual heir to its African origins.

Erin Aubry is a staff writer for the L.A. Weekly. She was previously a staff writer for the New Times Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Times as well as a contributing writer for the paper's City Times section. Her new stories, arts features, essays, interviews and reviews have appeared in many other sections of the Times, including Metro, Calendar, Life & Syle, Book Review and the Sunday Magazine. She has also freelanced for such magazines as Black Enterprise, VIBE, Contemporary Art and UCLA Magazine. A Los Angeles native, Ms. Aubry is a poet and fiction writer whose work has appeared in Spectrum. She received her Bachelor of Arts in English and Master of Fine Arts from UCLA.