DD: Holding Up the Girls

“DD: Holding Up the Girls”, Journal of Architecture: Special Issue on Jennifer Bloomer, vol 28, no 6, 2023, pp. 925-946.

This two-part essay bridges the gap, at the clasp, and gasp, of thesternum, the cleavage, a hollow — between the lived and dynamicreality of having breasts and that of imagining, creating, and navigatingcomplex, fluid spaces. Such spaces are constructed, delineated, prescribed,and housed by an architecture — literally and metaphorically.An engineers’ mathematical calculations, modelling tools, static loads,posts and beams, and moments of inertia are inadequate to upholdthese fleshy, fatty, leaky, budding, aroused, and sagging glandulartissues — a pair of amorphous and asymmetric orbs cantilevering offone’s pectorals. Not even the elastic-ridden ‘separating’, ‘uplifting’,and ‘disciplining’ structure of the brassiere can squelch the life-longrelationship between my ‘girls’ and the rest of the world.