Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

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.”