Performing the Breastfeeding Body: Lactivism and Art Interventions

Abstract

“Performing the Breastfeeding Body: Lactivism and Art Interventions” addresses the ways in which three contemporary North American artist-parents position themselves and their work as potential agents of cultural change around the topic of breastfeeding. Their socially engaged works challenge the increasing social divisions, seen particularly in the United States, around the breastfeeding body. By employing collaboration, intervening in institutional spaces as well as moving outside of them, and creating works that actively counter societal treatment of the breastfeeding body, these artists create raise critical questions and alter public and private spaces in ways that make visible and challenge one of the many taboos still surrounding motherhood. In order to destabilize the perceived spectacle of the breastfeeding body, each of these artist-activists stages a spectacle of her own, placing the breastfeeding body front and center by enacting breastfeeding as a private / public performance and simultaneously confronting public discomfort and culturally normative behaviors.