B R E a S T W O

BREASTWORK ALISON BARTLETT ‘BREASTWORK is a beautifully written and accessible guide to the many unexplored cultural meanings of breastfeeding in contemporary society. Of all our bodily functions, lactation is perhaps the most mysterious and least understood. Promoted primarily in terms of its nutritional beneﬁ ts to babies, its place – or lack of it – in Western culture remains virtually unexplored. Bartlett’s travels through this neglected maternal terrain are both intriguing and inspiring, as she shows how breastfeeding can be a transformative act, rather than a moral duty. Looking at breastfeeding in relation to medicine, the media, sexuality, maternity and race, Bartlett’s study BREASTWORK provides a uniquely comprehensive overview of the ways in which we represent breastfeeding to ourselves and the many arbitrary limits we place around it. BREASTWORK makes a fresh, thoughtful and important contribution BARTLETT to the new area of breastfeeding and cultural studies. It is essential reading for ‘Bartlett’s travels through this neglected all students of the body, whether in the health professions, the social sciences, maternal terrain are both intriguing or gender and cultural studies – and for and inspiring . ’ F IONA GILES all mothers who have pondered the secrets of their own breastly intelligence.’ FIONA GILES author of Fresh Milk: The Secret Life of Breasts UNSW PRESS ISBN 0-86840-969-3 � UNSW RETHINKIN G BREASTFEEDING 9 780868 409696 � PRESS BreastfeedingCover2print.indd 1 29/7/05 11:44:52 AM BreastWork04 28/7/05 11:30 AM Page i BREASTWORK ALISON BARTLETT is the Director of the Centre for Women’s Studies at the University of Western Australia. Previously she taught literature at the University of Southern Queensland. Her books include Jamming the Machinery: Contemporary Australian Women’s Writing (1998) and, as co-editor, Australian Literature and the Public Sphere (1999). BreastWork04 28/7/05 11:30 AM Page ii This book is for Isobel and Gillian and Jessie. BreastWork04 28/7/05 11:30 AM Page iii BREASTWORK RETHINKING BREASTFEEDING ALISON BARTLETT UNSW PRESS BreastWork04 28/7/05 11:30 AM Page iv A UNSW PRESS BOOK Published by University of New South Wales Press Ltd University of New South Wales Sydney NSW 2052 AUSTRALIA www.unswpress.com.au © Alison Bartlett 2005 First published 2005 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Bartlett, Alison, 1961– . Breastwork: rethinking breastfeeding. Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 0 86840 969 3. 1. Breastfeeding promotion. 2. Women’s studies. 3. Women’s health services. I. Title. 649.33 Cover design Di Quick Text layout Ruth Pidd Printer Griffin Press The author has made every effort to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book. Any copyright holders who feel that they have been overlooked are welcome to contact the author and/or the publisher. BreastWork04 28/7/05 11:30 AM Page v CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 ONE Performing breastfeeding: rethinking nature 12 TWO Medicalising breastfeeding: headwork versus breastwork 41 THREE Publicising breastfeeding: scandal in the city 66 FOUR Sexualising breastfeeding: science to kink 84 FIVE Pictorialising breastfeeding: models of maternity 110 SIX Racialising breastfeeding: black breasts, white milk 136 SEVEN Advocating breastfeeding: choice, choice, choice 159 Conclusion 187 References 191 Index 205 BreastWork04 28/7/05 11:30 AM Page vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For their intellectual support and sharing, I particularly thank Fiona Giles, Jo Lampert and Louise Whitaker, who have in their various ways nourished this project. I am grateful to everyone who generously told me their breastfeeding stories, to colleagues who alerted me to breasted resources, to my breastfeeding buddies in Toowoomba, and to Joy, who was one of the five per cent. This book was enabled by the generous provision of academic leave from the University of Southern Queensland during 1999 and again in 2003, as well as research funding from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Southern Queensland. My thanks go to the staff at the Lactation Resource Centre at the Australian Breastfeeding Association in Malvern, who were always extremely helpful and ‘resource-full’. I received valuable feedback during the formation of my ideas from the anonymous referees of journals that published work from this project. An early version of what is now chapter 1 was published in Feminist Theory 1(2), 2000: 173–88, some of which was reprinted in Fresh Milk: the Secret Life of Breasts by Fiona Giles (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2003: 151–61), and translated by Babette Müller-Rockstroh for Hebammen Zeitschrift 4, 2003: 47–52. Other parts of chapter 1 appeared in Birth Issues (2005). Part of chapter 2 appeared in Women’s Studies International Forum 25(3), 2002: 373–82; part of chapter 3 in Continuum: Journal of Media and Culture 16(1), 2002:111–21; part of chapter 4 in Sex Education 5(1), 2005: 1–11; part of chapter 6 in BreastWork04 28/7/05 11:30 AM Page viii viii • B REASTWORK Australian Feminist Studies 19(45), 2004: 341–56; and part of chapter 7 in Hecate 29(2), 2003: 153–65. The poem ‘Physical Examination’ is reproduced with kind permission from Alicia Ostriker. Excerpts from ‘Breasts’ are used with permission from Kate Llewellyn. Finally, my thanks to Paul for providing spaces to write, and to Isobel for her continual jouissance. BreastWork04 28/7/05 11:30 AM Page 1 INTRODUCTION Breastmilk has always meant more than ‘just’ breastmilk. It has always been used to represent other things: nurturing, nature, even knowledge and creation, or simply comfort. Ancient goddesses were frequently depicted suckling children or cupping their breasts in their hands in a gesture of nurturance that affirmed life, and granted favours. The earth’s galaxy is named the Milky Way, and even the word galaxy is from the Greek/Latin, gala, meaning mother’s milk. The mythological origins of the galaxy from all over the world attribute it to plentiful milk spraying out from the breast of a goddess – variously Hera who suckled Hercules, Rhea who suckled Zeus, Gaiea, Europa, the Queen of Heaven, the Moon-Cow, Hathor-Isis. These entities also converge in various names and forms to create the oceans, the Nile and the ‘Nile in the Sky’ (Walker, p. 659). Historian Barbara Walker even documents that ‘the Milky Way was regarded as the Goddess’s star-milk, which formed curds to create worlds and creatures’ (p. 658), such were the symbolic powers invested in breastmilk. In Christian tradition breastmilk is attributed with the symbolic power of nurturing the body of the church and all of its followers through the figure of either the Virgin Mary or her son Jesus, lactating. In these stories of origins, breastmilk is a vital essence and its life- sustaining powers are cornucopious. Rousseau claimed breastfeeding to be the first ingredient to sustain the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century, and monuments of the time depicted the new French Republic in the allegorical figure of the mother breastfeeding BreastWork04 28/7/05 11:30 AM Page 2 2• B REASTWORK her child (Jacobus). But what does breastfeeding represent in contemporary Western culture at the start of the twenty-first century? How is breastfeeding figured symbolically and spoken of colloquially? What sorts of stories do we spin around breastfeeding today? In what ways does it socially differ from lactation, which carries the language and values of science and medicine? Furthermore, how do these cultural meanings relate to women’s lived practices of breastfeeding today? As an academic trained in literature, I love looking for narratives and how they function as stories through which we imagine our lives. I also look to books to make sense of my own social position and how I might function in the world. When I began breastfeeding, I looked to books to help make sense of my changed maternal self and how I might fit into this new identity. I was mostly appalled by what I read about breastfeeding. There was very little that appealed to me, and much that made me want to resist its very moralistic and prescriptive tone, and so I began thinking about what sort of narratives I was seeking. I collected some poetry and bits out of novels, carved out phrases of theory and philosophy, inserted some of my own frustrations and fantasies, and wrote an academic paper about breastfeeding narratives as my daughter entered her second year of serious attachment to my breasts. I did this secretly, as I was supposed to be working on an Australian writer whose gender was rather fluid and ambiguous. But I was immersed in a new and decidedly gendered role of mothering and found I needed to make sense of my own changed subjectivity. I was particularly curious about how this transformation of my identity could be (properly) taken to work: how does a woman academic incorporate her maternal self into her professional work? How does her work affect her maternity? For some years I had been working with French feminist theories about women’s writing, which declared that the body of the writer indelibly marks their writing, that women’s writing is marked by their bodies, their histories, their lives as women. So it was necessary for me to think through my writing as a newly maternal academic. This need to theorise from experience has been a preoccupation of feminist scholars over the last twenty years: Jane Gallop’s style in Thinking Through the Body, and more recently in Anecdotal Theory BreastWork04 28/7/05 11:30 AM Page 3 I NTRODUCTION •3 (p.

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