Thinking through breasts

Abstract

This article begins by wondering how the writer’s transformation into motherhood affects her practice of reading, writing and research: how maternities are made academic. Specifically, this article is interested in thinking through lactating breasts, as a particularly complex and potentially subversive ‘performance’ of maternity. In addition, this article reframes ‘maternal thinking’ through 1990s theories of embodiment and corporeality, and asks how embodied practices like breastfeeding might be theorized, as well as how ‘embodied theory’ might be practised. In looking at various cultural texts about breasts and breastfeeding, the article is scripted into a series of connective and reflexive scenes around performance, space, language and knowledge, coming to rest in the imaginative project of an epistemology of breasts. It sets reflexive accounts of lived experience alongside theoretical reflections to create a dynamic and thoughtful reading of breasts, entwining personal and public discourses, maternal and academic writing, theorizing and cultural practices.

Writing feminity: case of Anastasia

“…by Alison Bartlett (2000) and "The Mismeasure of Women" by Carol Tavris (1993) News of similar nature had been published several days in succession also in other Internet media, which will not be discussed here.…”

“…If so much effort is made to find a woman in a human being, then no doubt woman is a secondary/deviative manifestation of a human being. For feminists as a food for thought can become toilets (West andZimmerman, 1987, Lorber, 1993), breast (Bartlett, 2000), womb and birth-giving (Croghan, 1991, Mullin, 2002, Beckett, 2005, chromosomes and hormones (Tavris, 1993, Roberts, 2002, and brain (Tavris, 1993). Theorists are preoccupied with the idea to prove that differences between a man and a woman are not so essential to legitimise the ontological separation of both genders, or these differences may be considerable but social inequality should not be justified anyway.…”

Spaces between: Elaborating the theoretical underpinnings of the ‘WPR’ approach and its significance for contemporary scholarship

“…Carol Johnson's (2002) analysis of heteronormativity and touch offered another important contribution to the analysis of embodied subjectivity, as did studies of breastfeeding mothers (Stearns 1999;Reiger 1999;Bartlett 2000) and of persons with disabilities (Seymour 1998; Meekosha and Dowse 1997).…”

“…Often concern is expressed that men may be distracted by the activity and possible display of a woman's breast. As Alison Bartlett (2000) points out, breastfeeding puts bodies onto the agenda in no uncertain terms. Since 1995, some changes have eventuated.…”

Maternal sexuality and breastfeeding

“…While the representation of pregnancy in the 1990s became something chic and fashionable for celebrities (see Matthews & Wexler, 2000), the same attention has not attended breastfeeding. Annie Liebovitz's controversial portrait of Jerry Hall breastfeeding (1999) is exceptional in its emphasis on sexual semiotics (see Bartlett, 2000), and makes us ask why lactating breasts are sequestered from cultural discourses of sexuality.…”