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Are Lucille Clifton's Poems Promote Self Love And Body Positivity?

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Beginning on the day we are born, we start having a perception of the world around us. As we get older, this perception begins to encompass judgment, especially in terms of public appearance. In many plus-size women, the way they are perceived publicly becomes one of their biggest insecurities. Published in 1980, Lucille Clifton’s poem, “homage to my hips” that describes a woman’s pride in her curvy figure and Meghan Trainor’s pop song, All About That Bass, hitting the charts in 2014 to encourage women to accept the way they look, both promote self love and body positivity. Clifton’s poem and Trainor’s song both advocate for self love and body positivity among women through their unique lines or lyrics in their pieces. While the two works …show more content…

In her poem Clifton displays this confidence throughout the entire poem, but it is extremely evident in the lines, “i have known them [these hips]/ to put a spell on a man and/ spin him like a top '' (Clifton, lines 13-15). These lines carry a confident tone in which the writer believes her hips have power to take control of man. Megan Trainor’s song, “All About that Bass' ' also carries this confidence when she sings, “Cause I got that boom boom that all the boys chase, And all the right junk in all the right places”(8-9). Trainor’s lyrics share the same confidence as the poem by also describing her body as something men desire. The poem and the song also portray confidence through specific word choice. By using unique diction for the specific topic, Clifton describes her hips as “mighty,” “magic,” and “free”(Clifton, 6, 11-12). The reader is likely to cling to their descriptors because they are a unique and positive way to describe a plus size figure in which many women are self conscious of. Similar to the poem, “All About That Bass” uses the words “beauty” and “perfect” to show this confidence. The confident tone and wordchoice displayed throught the poem and song help support the shared theme of pieces by encouraging self love and body

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Similar to Chudleigh, Clifton also uses metaphors throughout the poem but she does so with the purpose of conveying her acceptance of her own body and advise other women to accept their own. We see Clifton’s metaphor stating that “these hips have never been enslaved/ they go where they want to go/ they do what they want to do” (8-10). In these lines, the Speaker is able to reject the narrowness of society and culture and its obsessive concern with women’s body image.

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These lines symbolize an unrestrained freedom from guidance and censorship that enable women to lead their own lives. Finally at the end of the poem, Clifton give her hip an enchanted power and supernatural character to her hips “these hips are mighty hips./ these hips are magic hips.” (ln 10-11). She mentions the influence of her hip that can use over men “I have known them to put a spell on a man and spin him like a top” (13-15).

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Thus, “homage to my hips” is a war cry for women to learn to rise up against oppression through expressing love for their own body, which in the poem allows for the speaker to be free. These images of oppression spread negativity, however, by Clifton connotating “hips” with positivity and self-respect she is trying to reinstate confidence and pride in women and their unique body types. Through the usage of images of female oppression both poets try to instill into female across the globe that remaining subjugated is not a

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