Lucille Clifton's "Homage to my Hips" presents a refreshing perspective on body positivity and femininity. While the grand majority of past poetry focused on women has portrayed them as reserved, demure, and often silent, Clifton's poem is bold, self-assured, and powerful. The narrator not only describes her hips as "big" and "free," but also "mighty" and, finally, "magic." The narrator states that "they don't fit into little/ petty places," suggesting that the hips (and through synecdoche the woman herself), cannot be confined (4-5). Not only that, but the woman feels no shame in not fitting in, rejecting society's expectations as she says that her hips "go where they want to go" and "do what they want to do" (9-10). Further, not only does the poem display pride toward a part of the body that women were traditionally told to divert attention from, but Clifton's poem deliberately treats self-confidence as integral to the narrator's identity, and even as a magical force. These factors help the thematic concepts of power, confidence, identity, and pride to emerge. These concepts can be used together to express the theme that "self-assurance is very powerful" or that "a woman's strength lies not in her ability to fulfill society's expectations, but in her ability to fulfill her own."
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