Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

5:30PM: Doors Open

5:40PM: Introduction

5:50PM: Tit's Up Book Reading & Presentation

6:20PM: Q&A

6:40PM: Book Signing

Riotous and galvanizing, Tits Up excavates the diverse truths of mammary glands from the strip club to the operating room, from the nation’s oldest human milk bank to the fit rooms of bra designers.

Thornton draws insights from plastic surgeons, lactation consultants, body-positive witches, lingerie models, and “free the nipple” activists to explore the status of breasts as emblems of femininity. She examines how women’s chests have become a billion-dollar business, as well as a stage for debates about race, class, gender, and desire. Everywhere she turns, Thornton encounters chauvinist myths about this elemental body part that quietly justify deficits in women’s bodily autonomy and endorse shortfalls in their political status.

Blending sociology, reportage, and personal narrative with refreshing optimism and wit, Thornton has one overriding ambition―to liberate breasts from centuries of patriarchal prejudice.

Sarah Thornton is a sociologist who writes about art, design, and people. Formerly the chief art market correspondent for The Economist, Thornton is the author of three critically acclaimed books. A Canadian who went to the UK on a Commonwealth Scholarship, Thornton was once hailed as “Britain’s hippest academic.” Now based in San Francisco, Thornton is better known as “the Jane Goodall of the art world.”

Dr. Lisa Stellwagen is a pediatrician at UC San Diego who has specialized in newborn medical care, breastfeeding medicine and human milk science. Her work in human milk feeding of well and sick newborns at UC San Diego led to the concept of starting a local milk bank. A generous philanthropic gift from the Kohlberg Johnson family in 2016 led to the opening of the University of California Health Milk Bank just four years later. In 2024, the milk bank collected more than 300,000 ounces of milk and provided pasteurized donor human milk to feed the smallest premature infants in neonatal intensive care units across our state.