Over five, sometimes fascinating, sometimes frustrating chapters, each examining mammaries in a different context, Tits Up asks readers to reimagine the bosom, no matter its size and shape, as a site of empowerment and even divinity ... It’s to Thornton’s credit that, her polemical tone notwithstanding, she is open-minded enough to entertain paradoxes ... [A] deceptively trenchant if inconsistently argued treatise.
Thornton’s goal in Tits Up is not to neutralize breasts but to affirm them. Give ’em a semantic lift, so to speak ... Regarding herself as a mere vessel, Thornton insists, in an aside on method, that 'judgment gets in the way of vigorous research.' Her academic training, though, at times gets in the way of her aspirations to the role of, as she puts it, 'titty connoisseur' ... There is a conspicuous lack of big boobs among the specimens Thornton examines, as though they were too tainted by lascivious looks and porn for scholarly inspection.
The book is often hilarious, but it’s consistently grounded in research and a nuanced understanding of intersectionality ... Required reading that expertly covers the ways in which social constructions, sexualization, and economic viability influence people’s views of bodies, their own and others’.
