The Well-Tempered Breast: Fostering Fluidity in Breastly Meaning and Function

Abstract

This article looks at the phenomena of induced lactation and adult nursing. While maternity is understood to perform a certain kind of body modification, it is little known that lactation can also work independently of the pregnant body, or even of the female sex to modify the breast and its function. Induced lactation allows for a splitting away of breastfeeding from maternity, opening up possibilities for elaborating on the cultural meanings and uses of breastmilk as a substance, breastfeeding as a practice, and lactation as a process. Finally, by introducing lactation into sexual play, it offers the opportunity for a mutual confluence of bodily flows which may help to disassemble the binaries of sexual difference. The author would like to thank Petra Bueskens and the anonymous referees to this issue of Women's Studies for their helpful comments on drafts of this essay. “… how are we to prevent the very unconscious (of the) ‘subject’ from being … diminished in its interpretation, by a systematics that re-marks a historical ‘inattention’ to fluids? In other words: what structuration of (the) language does not maintain a complicity of long standing between rationality and a mechanics of solids alone? Luce Irigaray, “The Mechanics of Fluids” in This Sex Which is Not One 1 1Translated by Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke. New York: Cornell UP, 1985, p.107 “Breastfeeding is a partial expression of female sexuality and yet there is no awareness or understanding of it today, no culture attached to it and not even an inkling of its rank as a sexual potentiality … even the history of the female species formulated by women themselves, however fragmentary, maintains a seldom-interrupted silence over this special sexual experience.” Barbara Sichtermann, “The Lost Eroticism of the Breasts”2 2In Femininity: The Politics of The Personal. Ed. H. Gyer-Ryan. Translated by J. Whitlam. Cambridge: Polity, 1986, pp. 55-68, p. 56. “Would you like to try some?” “Thank you.” She swallows her last bit of cake. “I would.” So we go through the process again. This time when I have bared my breasts I lean over and put the nipple between her lips. After a few tugs from her mouth, surprisingly strong, I have to put my hand on the wall to brace myself. She seems to pull clear through me. “You are flushed,” she says when she comes away. “You are fleshed,” I reply. Susann Cokal, Mirabilis 3 3Sydney: Hodder Headline, pp.78–9