Fiona Giles

'Relational, and strange': A preliminary foray into a project to queer breastfeeding

I’m a white, 42-year-old, ample bodied, single, never married, unattached, 38DD female seeking a consistent nursing partner. I have not yet produced milk, but have achieved colostrum. I’ve been using a pump three to four times a day for 30 minutes on each breast. I think if I had a warm willing consistent mouth, I could get my milk to come in. At that point, you would be welcome to become my permanent nursing partner or move on to another. I would also be willing to consider a female nursing partner. I just need some help here in Tulsa and have yet to find it. Trust, me, I’ve looked. Please email me at [address provided].

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

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 Womens 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

Theme: Meanings of breastmilk: New feminist flavours Guest editors: Alison Bartlett and Fiona Giles Introduction: Taking our breasts to work

This thematic issue of Australian Feminist Studies brings together a collection of articles which represent a new wave of feminist theoretical analysis about breastfeeding. It has been a truism that ‘feminism’ has had ambivalent relations to maternity, but breastfeeding seems to have manifested its own set of lived exigencies and theoretical debates. It was in the mid-1980s that Valerie Fildes published her book Breasts, Bottles, and Babies, and then Gabrielle Palmer’s The Politics of Breastfeeding emerged two years later. These are probably the first books which provide sociological analyses of breastfeeding and its shifting practices and politics, although Sheila Kitzinger’s groundbreaking work The Experience of Breastfeeding was available in 1979. In the mid-1990s there was another groundswell of books: Pam Carter’s Feminism, Breasts and Breastfeeding, Naomi Baumslag and Dia Michel’s Milk, Money and Madness, and a collection of anthropological essays, Breastfeeding: Biocultural Perspectives, edited by Pat Stuart-Macadam and Kathy Dettwyler, were all published in 1995. Linda Blum’s At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary U.S. was added in 1999, and last year in 2003 two of the contributors to this issue had books released: Fiona Giles’s Fresh Milk: the Secret Life of Breasts and Bernice Hausman’s Mother’s Milk: Breastfeeding Controversies in America. So what more can be said about breastfeeding and feminism? It seems quite a lot. The articles in this issue continue to respond to movements in contemporary social and feminist theory in so far as they utilise queer theory, corporeal feminism, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, postcolonial theory and fictocriticism. They are also firmly indebted to traditional disciplines like philosophy, literature, and economics. Many—but not all—of the contributors have been prompted to write through their own interpellation into the discursive domain and lived experience of breastfeeding; as Iris Young points out, however, ‘breasted experience’ affects all women, whether or not they breastfeed. All of these articles function to bring what is often regarded as a personal or privatised experience into the public domain of politics, theory, social analysis and the national Gross Domestic Product: in this sense, we all bring our breasts to work.

Towards Social Maternity: Where’s the Mother? Stories from a Transgender Dad as a Case Study of Human Milk Sharing

This chapter provides a reading of Where’s the Mother? (2016), a memoir by Trevor MacDonald, a transgender man who gave birth following chest surgery and committed to exclusively breastfeeding his son until he was ready to accept solid food. Producing some milk of his own, and providing expressed donor milk through an at-the-breast supplemental nursing system, MacDonald succeeded in his objective. In the process, he and his partner became part of a bridging network of donors and supporters, building relationships with people they might never have otherwise met. The chapter provides a detailed case study of how a sharing economy of breastmilk donation builds relational frameworks of embodied care and argues for a hybrid system enabling informal, unremunerated milk sharing alongside payment through formal banking networks.