Breastfeeding and sexual difference: Queering Irigaray

Abstract

It is commonly assumed that only women, and in particular women who have recently given birth, are able to breastfeed. However, through induced lactation, adoptive mothers, fathers and trans people have begun breastfeeding with greater frequency. Although breastfeeding is often regarded as a paradigmatic example of sexual difference, it actually exposes the instability of binary categories of sex. Luce Irigaray insists that sexual difference demands a new poetics, a language that is dynamic and fluid, capable of expressing difference while always keeping open the possibility of transformation and change. This article extends Irigaray’s work in order to theorise breastfeeding from a perspective that is both feminist and queer.

Keywords

Breastfeeding Irigaray queer theory sexual difference

Breastfeeding highlights one of the central conflicts of feminism: should women attempt to minimise gender differences as a path to liberation or should they embrace gender differences by fighting to remove patriarchal constraints (Carter, 1995; Lorber, 2000)? Although Sara Ruddick (1995) and others suggest that mothering can potentially be degendered in order to equally distribute the work of childrearing, breastfeeding presents an obstacle to gender-neutral childcare (McCarter-Spaulding, 2008), as breastfeeding can inhibit fathers’ and other caregivers’ participation in caring for babies (Coltrane, 1996; Blum, 2000; Fox, 2009: 97). This leads Friedman to question whether certain goals of feminism – to de-rigidify gender roles and reconstruct parenting as work that is shared equally – conflict with the deeply gendered and therefore unequally shared activity of breastfeeding (2009).¹

Breastfeeding has historically been used to construct the class of mammalia and the categories of female and male. Breastfeeding, and specifically the presence of the mammary gland, has been an integral component in the evolution and taxonomic classification of animal species. Carolus Linnaeus established the mammary gland as the defining feature of the classification of mammals in 1758. However, this classification was political: Linnaeus focused scientific attention on the mammae because he was strongly engaged in support for breastfeeding and the struggle against wet nursing (Schiebinger, 1993). This broad struggle against wet nursing (including a 1794 Prussian law mandating that all healthy mothers must breastfeed) emerged contemporaneously with the undermining of women’s public power and the revaluing of women’s domestic role (Schiebinger, 1993: 383). As Gayle Rubin has pointed out, gender requires the suppression of similarities between men and women (1975: 180). The ways in which discourses of lactation are implicated in the constitution of gender are political and directly affect the lived experiences of women (Bartlett, 2002). Although it has been used to shore up classificatory categories, breastfeeding actually demonstrates how these categories are fluid and subject to cultural and political influences.

Breastfeeding is an important feminist issue but it is not only an issue for women (Carter, 1995; Blum, 2000). The association of breastfeeding with cis-women,² specifically those who have recently given birth, has increasingly been put into question, as adoptive mothers, fathers and trans people begin breastfeeding (Hormann, 2007; Szucs et al., 2010; Tapper, 2012a). Although it is commonly assumed that only women, and in particular women who have recently given birth, are able to breastfeed, men are capable of breastfeeding, and males have been discovered to be capable of lactating in at least two other species of mammals (Kunz, 2009; Thomsen, 2011). Adoptive mothers, grandmothers and transgender and transsexual people can also breastfeed their children (Diamond, 1995; Hormann, 2007; Emmersen, 2008; Shanley, 2009; Rainbow Health Ontario, 2012; Wilson et al., 2015). Breastfeeding also takes place in adult nursing relationships, wet nursing and cross-nursing. Although lactation operates as a cultural signifier of both sexual difference and maternity, then, strictly speaking it is not necessarily tied to either (Bartlett, 2002: 375).³

Lactation can be induced in individuals who have not recently given birth through a combination of nipple stimulation and hormone supplementation, but the process requires substantial time and effort (Diamond, 1995; Hormann, 2007; Swaminathan, 2007; Shanley, 2009). In some cases exclusive breastfeeding can be accomplished, but induced lactation rarely produces the same amount of milk as that of a woman who has recently given birth, and supplementation with donor milk or formula is usually required, using a bag or bottle which is worn suspended on the parent’s chest, with silicone feeding tubes taped to the nipple with surgical tape.

Suckling, manual stimulation and mechanical breast pumps are all ways of providing the necessary nipple stimulation. Prolactin, the milk-making hormone, and oxytocin, the milk-releasing hormone, are both produced in response to nipple stimulation (Neville, 2013). Drugs may be taken in order to help induce lactation, such as high doses of birth control pills to simulate the effects of pregnancy. Estrogen is administered to simulate the state of pregnancy. The estrogen is then abruptly withdrawn to mimic the rapid hormonal changes following delivery. A course of a prolactin-enhancing drug is then instituted. Suckling stimulation is begun at this point (Wittig and Spatz, 2008). The drug domperidone, a medication used for increasing the supply of biological mothers’ milk, can in some countries (though it is illegal or unobtainable in others) be prescribed (off-label) for use in inducing and increasing milk production. Research indicates that domperidone poses minimal risk to healthy individuals without a history of cardiac problems and does not appear to pose risks to infants since it does not cross the blood-brain barrier and is secreted in only small amounts into breast milk (Zuppa et al., 2010; Grzeskowiak and Amir, 2014). Herbal and natural supplements are also sometimes taken in order to boost milk production. Although these natural supplements have largely unknown toxicity profiles, many individuals prefer them to drugs such as domperidone (Sim et al., 2015).

Technological and medical interventions such as the growing popularity of breast pumps (Rasmussen and Geraghty, 2011) and emerging practices of milk banking, exchange and sale (Boyer, 2010; Ryan et al., 2013) expose how breastfeeding is not merely natural, but is also deeply cultural.⁴ Although the materiality of sexed bodies matters deeply, breastfeeding is also inherently cultural and performative. Breastfeeding is often regarded as a paradigmatic example of sexual difference, but instead it exposes the instability of the sex/gender binary.

As a preeminent theorist of sexual difference, Luce Irigaray is singularly helpful in exploring the relationship between breastfeeding and sexual difference. Individuals besides cis-women are increasingly engaging in the practice of breastfeeding, thereby destabilising normative conceptions of femininity and masculinity (Longhurst, 2008; Giles, 2010; MacDonald, 2012); therefore it is necessary to develop a queer reading of breastfeeding.⁵ As Bartlett has shown, breastfeeding can be a complex and potentially subversive performance (2000). This article draws on Irigaray’s work in order to theorise breastfeeding from a perspective that is both feminist and queer (Giles, 2004, 2016).⁶ Although breastfeeding is most commonly carried out by women, it cannot, I argue, be reduced to an activity that is natural to women. In order to explore breastfeeding in a way that is both feminist and queer, I draw on Irigaray’s insistence that sexual difference demands a new poetics, a language that is dynamic and fluid, capable of expressing difference while always keeping open the possibility of transformation and change.

Irigaray and sexual difference

Irigaray views sexual difference as relational because it develops through relationship with the other who differs from me sexually. The encounter with the other is fundamental to how Irigaray understands sexual difference. For Irigaray, the nature of woman must involve radical sexual difference: rather than defining it in opposition to the masculine, this sexual difference must have its own autonomous meaning. Woman has historically been understood in relation to man, as an object of pleasure or nurture that is there for men, and through the ways men perceive her. Instead, Irigaray argues that the nature of woman must be understood as equal to, but radically different from the nature of man. Only then does Irigaray think society can be just and true communication possible (2000).

Irigaray argues that sexual difference must be understood as negative because it represents a limitation on universal humanity. Our perspectives are always sexual and therefore always partial. The incompleteness of our perspectives is what allows for difference and communication between the sexes. Irigaray does not see sexual difference as a property inherent in individuals; rather, it relies on the interval between differing individuals, a difference that is within their bodies but is not reducible to any single part of their bodies.⁷ She advocates for a third term (described variously as the angel, mucous, demon, etc.) in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Irigaray, 1993a), and continues this linguistically in I Love to You (Irigaray, 1995). Through this interval or third term, communication between sexually differing individuals can take place. Sexual difference exists only in and through the interval between the two who are different; therefore sexual difference is not reducible to the masculine or the feminine (Irigaray, 1993a: 14). This relation to the difference of the other is emphasised in Irigaray’s use in her later works of the term ‘sexuate difference’, which describes how men and women differ sexually from each other in and through their relation to each other’s difference. Irigaray argues that this gap between sexually differing individuals allows for the autonomy that is necessary for ethical relations in society: in order to recognise sexual difference, both women and men must have freedom and separation from each other so as to be properly connected.

The sex/gender distinction has been very important in Anglo-American feminism, with sex being understood as referring to male or female bodily experience, involving biology and anatomy, while gender refers to masculinity or femininity as involving social and cultural constructions. The division of childcare is often read as gendered and as at least potentially distinct from the supposedly sexed (or biological) division of reproductive labour such as breastfeeding and pregnancy. This distinction has been challenged by many feminists, with Butler notably problematising any possibility of a sustained distinction between biological sex and socially constructed gender (1990). However, Irigaray’s work, along with that of other French feminists, does not map onto the sex/gender binary. This is a consequence of linguistic issues, but also a result of a commitment to undoing the dualistic oppositions of mind and body and nature and culture. Irigaray’s conception of sexual difference does not correspond with either side of the sex/gender binary, but instead explores how biological differences are represented, and the social and cultural values they are given. Irigaray’s use of the term genre demonstrates how her work cannot be mapped onto the sex/gender distinction, since genre translates as both sexual kind and gender (Jones, 2011). Genre refers to a process of becoming without being passively determined by one’s body, and is linked to a creative poetics.

Following Irigaray’s understanding of sexual difference as a form of relational, creative transformation is key to understanding how breastfeeding can be rethought beyond binaries of sex and gender in order to make space for creative reinterpretations of the practice. Irigaray understands difference not as difference from another sex but rather as different modes of being. Although Irigaray focuses on the heterosexual relation between men and women, in her later work she explores sexuate difference that is not dependent on the heterosexual relation. Sexuate difference exists not only between men and women but also between women, and between mothers and their children.

Sexual difference between mothers and children

Irigaray focuses particular attention on sexual difference between mothers and daughters, arguing for the reclaiming of what she calls a ‘secondary homosexuality’, or the love of women for other women that results from having their mothers as their first love objects (1993b: 20). She believes that the love women have as children for their mothers needs to be maintained in order for women to reconnect with the (non-phallic) sexual pleasure that is properly theirs, of which Irigaray claims they are robbed when forced to give up original love of their mothers (1993b: 20).

Sexual difference is involved in the breastfeeding relationship between mother and child, since Irigaray reminds us that the child is always sexed, never neuter. Irigaray points out that the mother is also an other for the child and that the encounter with the mother is different depending on the sex of the child: ‘the first other which I encounter is the body of the mother, and this encounter differs depending upon whether I am a girl or a boy’ (2001: 30). For Irigaray, in the breastfeeding dyad the child is always sexed; the relationship to the child in breastfeeding is always one of sexual difference, across an interval of irreducible alterity. Thus, the discussion of sexual difference always applies to the relationships between mothers and the children they breastfeed as well as to the relationships between men and women.

Irigaray presents an alternative way of understanding breastfeeding as involving both the receptivity and independence of the woman, and in which both infant and mother must be understood as distinct (although connected) individuals. In the breastfeeding relationship the child is dependent on the mother, though Irigaray would argue that the two must remain distinct even in their intimate connection. She writes that:

the mother’s world is constituted in a different way from the world of the child with whom she is pregnant, whom she breastfeeds, whom she helps to enter the world. The ‘who’ of the mother and the ‘who’ of the child do not inhabit the same world … There is a sharing of worlds in a sense, but of different worlds where each has different cares towards the other. (Irigaray, 2008a: 114–115)

The relationship between mother and child is ethical because it involves simultaneous independence and interconnection through responsiveness to each other’s alterity.

Irigaray argues that mothers must also be women: they cannot disappear into self-sacrificing care for their children but must maintain their own distinct identity (1999: 18). Maternity must include a space for women to return to themselves, apart from their caring responsibilities for their children. Irigaray warns that women are at risk of losing their self-affection or ability to care for themselves (2008a: 104). This risk is especially high under currently dominant models of breastfeeding in which women are collapsed into self-sacrificing care for the child. Irigaray points out that giving food can be suffocating for the child if the mother does not retain any space for her own enjoyment (1981). As a result of the absence of positive representations of female identity, we have become caught in extremely damaging understandings of motherhood. For example, we see the mother as being forced to submit to the blind consumption of her breast and womb by the child (Irigaray, 1993b: 15). Or, we see suffocation of the daughter with the ‘ice’ of the mother’s self-sacrificing nourishment (Irigaray, 1981). In both of these examples, one side of the mother-child dyad overwhelms the identity of the other: the ‘devouring monster we have turned the mother into is an inverted reflection of the blind consumption that she is forced to submit to’ (Irigaray, 1993b: 15). But Irigaray argues that both extremes are the consequence of our culture’s inability to properly cognise the sexual difference of women. By developing and protecting women’s sexual difference we could instead view the relationship between mother and child quite differently, as positively connected rather than overwhelming each other (Irigaray, 1993b: 17). Following Irigaray, breastfeeding can be reconceptualised as a reciprocal process in which the separation of both mother and daughter is maintained so that they can have a relationship that is not suffocating or self-denying but instead involves mutual pleasure.

Protecting the simultaneous relationality and difference between mothers and children requires maintaining sexual difference, which for Irigaray is the principal form of alterity. Women must have an interiority of their own that is distinct from the caring and nurturing relations they have with others. This actually allows them to connect better with those close to them, according to Irigaray, since the apparent conflict between upholding women’s difference and intimacy with others is fundamentally the result of a misguided understanding of subjectivity. According to Irigaray, this original interconnection with the mother has been forgotten in Western culture, leading to a masculinist understanding of subjectivity and a denial of sexual difference.

Women have been valued primarily for their procreative power, and men have been identified with the symbolic, divorced from body and flesh (Irigaray, 1993b: 179). Irigaray attempts to rectify this historical imbalance through developing a culture of sexual difference, reintegrating sexuality and creativity. Irigaray asserts that all women are mothers, because women give birth to many things besides children including love, language, art, politics and religion (1993b: 18). She argues that giving birth to children should be discussed in the context of other kinds of birthing, such as creating images and symbols and attempts to reintegrate procreation and creation, arguing that both are carried out by women. Breastfeeding must not be understood as a merely mechanical process; instead we need to recognise that mother and child co-create a world together.

Irigaray conceives of sexual difference as natural, but this does not overlook the influence of culture in understanding this difference since she argues that nature is always read through and understood through culture. Although Irigaray bases her argument on the nature of women, this is not a naïve essentialist conception of sexual nature (although the question of essentialism in Irigaray’s work has been long debated, for example: Whitford, 1991; Stone, 2004). According to Irigaray, conceiving of the feminine in terms of something conceptual that is possible to abstract from the embodied experiences of women would ‘allow oneself to be caught up again in a system of “masculine” representations, in which women are trapped in a system of meaning which serves the auto-affection of the masculine subject’ (1985: 122–123). The division between nature and culture is the basis for the association of masculinity with culture and femininity with nature. Challenging these divisions requires recognising that sexual difference is both natural and cultural: it cannot be abstracted from the body, but neither is it merely reducible to the body. This means that sexual difference does not have a fixed meaning but must be continually created and transformed. As Irigaray states in an interview, ‘I was born woman, but I still have to become the woman who I am by birth. In other words: I am a woman by nature but I must develop the culture appropriate to this woman’ (2008b: 155–156). Sexual difference has not yet had a chance to develop, according to Irigaray. The nature of woman is not fixed and unchanging but rather is open to change, in fact involves an imperative to change, because current and historical understandings of what it means to be a woman have always been defined against what it means to be a man. Irigaray notes that, ‘The becoming of women is never over and done with, is always in gestation’ (1993b: 63). Irigaray understands sexual difference in terms of becoming and change, which poetics has the capacity to express without foreclosing on future alternative possibilities.

The relationship between breastfeeding and sexual difference exemplifies Irigaray’s understanding of sexual (or sexuate) difference as something that is made meaningful through the interval between differing individuals. As Irigaray argues, sexual difference is not something fixed, but is instead a relationship to those who are sexed differently. Sexual difference is a relationship to the other more than it is any biological facticity (Irigaray, 2001: 33). The nature of women, and the nature of breastfeeding, therefore remains open to ongoing, intersubjective creation. Examining how breastfeeding is carried out by individuals not usually considered capable of it opens up new ways of understanding the practice. What appear to be necessary relationships between breastfeeding, femaleness and giving birth should instead be recognised as potential sources for reinterpretation and transformation.

Queering breastfeeding, queering Irigaray

Irigaray’s work remains largely absent from queer theory probably because it fails to account for a broader spectrum of sexual difference, including trans, genderqueer, gender fluid, and intersex individuals (Huffer, 2010).⁸ This absence is not surprising given that Irigaray often appears to argue for the irreducibility of male/female sexual difference, for instance asserting that ‘I will never be in a man’s place, never will a man be in mine. Whatever identifications are possible, one will never exactly occupy the place of the other – they are irreducible one to the other’ (1993a: 13). Irigaray understands sexual difference between men and women to be the ontologically prior form of difference (2001: 34). Women also relate to other women as others, but Irigaray nevertheless postulates a shared identity among women. Nevertheless, she does not see sexual difference as binary, asserting that: ‘[w]e are not complementary or supplementary to each other. Rather, the question is how to think an identity which is different from the one we know, an identity in which the relationship with the other is inscribed in the pre-given of my body’ (Irigaray, 2001: 34).

Irigaray views sexual difference as relational, not biological: being a sexuate individual means being a partial subject, with a partial experience and partial point of view. Sexuate individuals are necessarily in relationship with other individuals who differ from them sexually.

Van Leeuwen points out that Irigaray’s conception of sexual difference can be read as subject to différance, or endless deferral, of what it means to be male or female (2010). This is important given that lactation can be induced by individuals besides women who have recently given birth. Recognition of this leads Giles to argue that induced lactation has the potential to separate breastfeeding from maternity and to destabilise the binary of sexual difference (2005). This would require a conceptualisation of sexual difference that goes beyond Irigaray’s work, although it could build on it. Potential for Irigaray’s work in responding to the multiplicity of sexual difference demonstrated by transsexual, transgender, genderqueer and gender fluid individuals has been explored by some queer theorists and I will draw on their work in order to discuss how we might understand breastfeeding as practiced by individuals other than cis-women.

Despite Irigaray’s privileging of the difference between man and woman, I expand her understanding of sexual difference in order to make space for sexual difference across a multiplicity of genders. Although Irigaray does not make this argument herself, I find resources in her work for doing so; for example, Irigaray argues that sexual difference does not correspond to a ‘juxtaposition of one + one subject. It has to do with a relationship between’ (2001: 35). This interpretation is supported by her exploration of sexual difference between women, as discussed in the preceding section. Sexual difference for Irigaray is not binary but relational, opening up understandings of masculinity and femininity. I apply this insight to a spectrum of genders that are not reducible to male and female. Alfonso (2011) and Poe (2011) provide support for this interpretation. Alfonso argues that we can expand Irigaray’s conception of wonder as a space between sexual difference. Relying on queer theory, she argues that we can have wonder across multiple types of difference, not just that of the other sex. As well, Poe notes that accounts of transsexual and transgender experience challenge any conception of sexual difference as binary (2011: 111). Although Irigaray does not include in her work a discussion of moving between and within the difference between male and female that could directly inform an understanding of trans identity, Poe argues that because Irigaray understands sexual difference as a nature that is deeply cultural she is not guilty of sexual essentialism and does not view being transsexual or transgender as impossible. Poe describes how transsexual individuals’ accounts often describe feeling born into the ‘wrong’ body and needing to change one’s body, and the way others see it, in order to recognise oneself. Irigaray argues that we need to cultivate the body we are born with. However, Poe argues that for trans individuals, more conscious cultivation of the body is required, including altering the body we are born with in ways that go beyond the cultivation carried out by cis-individuals (2011: 122). Poe argues that transitioning can be understood as consistent with Irigaray’s broader claim that we need to cultivate sexual difference, allowing us to use Irigaray’s work to discuss sexual difference in a broader, more inclusive way, even as we acknowledge that Irigaray resists such an expansion of her work.

Although Irigaray does not herself explore her term ‘genre’ in relation to gender fluid, genderqueer, intersex or trans individuals, the concept leaves open the possibility for modes of being beyond the binary of masculine and feminine. In I Love to You, Irigaray states that genre needs to be cultivated ‘for each person in his or her own singularity’, leaving open the possibility that genre might be unique for each individual, with a multiplicity of possible expressions (1995: 27).

Irigaray often appears to have a dualistic understanding of sexual difference incompatible with a queer reading of breastfeeding. However, she understands what it means to be masculine or feminine as ultimately indeterminable, always in a state of becoming. She writes that, ‘Fidelity to one’s own gender opens the way to another becoming: a becoming woman, a becoming man, a becoming together’ (Irigaray, 2001: 55). Extending this assertion allows for recognition that we are all sexuate individuals, beyond dualistic sexes; that is, we are all ‘becoming together’ by developing in relation to the sexual difference of others. Irigaray recognises that sexual difference is always relational, as is gender identity, and insists that sexual difference involves the renunciation of unity, recognising that each subject position is partial and incomplete and that no whole or complete perspective is possible (2001: 57). Between the two (man and woman) there must be a third, which Irigaray calls by many names, including silence. Silence affirms the irreducibility of one to the other but is also the source of both man and woman’s becoming and the becoming of their relationship (Irigaray, 2001: 63). By pushing Irigaray’s work further, thinking the third or silence between the two genders could allow us to recognise the proliferation of gender identities, expressed through new kinds of language, beyond the limited pronouns we currently employ

Irigaray’s analysis of fluidity opposes binary thinking and rigid classificatory schemas, thereby opening up new possibilities for reading breastfeeding. She recognises that sexual difference is not biologically fixed or unchanging, and yet serves as the foundation for radical alterity. She does, however, treat men and women as the foundational categories of sexual difference, an assumption that is problematised by breastfeeding. Induced lactation in individuals other than cis-women means that sexual difference is both expressed in, and complicated by, the activity of breastfeeding.

Breastfeeding that is carried out by individuals who were not socially assigned the identity of female at birth challenges how we understand the relationship between breastfeeding and sexual difference. While all lactation involves cultivation of the body, induced lactation in individuals who have not recently given birth can be seen as an example of more conscious cultivation of the body (Poe, 2011: 122).

Trans parents who breastfeed subvert assumptions about the natural role of mothers in feeding and caring for children. For example, Trevor MacDonald, a breastfeeding trans man from Winnipeg, recently tried to become a La Leche League leader. Although he was able to attend meetings, the League refused to allow him to lead them on the grounds that only mothers could be leaders and only women could be considered mothers (Tapper, 2012a). In challenging the La Leche League’s decision, he received vocal support from the breastfeeding promotion group INFACT Canada and other parenting groups (Tapper, 2012b), and eventually the La Leche League removed the gendered language in its leadership policy to allow anyone to become a leader who has nine months of breastfeeding experience (Tapper, 2014). This case demonstrates the tension that exists between feminist and queer understandings of breastfeeding, with echoes of the Kimberly Nixon versus Vancouver Rape Relief Society case. However, its resolution points the way to a more inclusive understanding of breastfeeding, with a feminist/queer rapprochement that grounds breastfeeding expertise in lived bodily practice.

Creative transformations of breastfeeding practice

The practice of breastfeeding does not have a fixed meaning when we read it through the lens of Irigaray’s work, since the relationship between the lactating breast and linguistic interpretation is fluid and generative. Following Irigaray, I explore ways of destabilising current understandings of breastfeeding in order to promote the dynamic, creative expression of sexual difference, a project that is important from both feminist and queer perspectives. Expressing sexual difference requires language that is alive and transformative, that can inhabit the interval, connecting sexually differing individuals without collapsing the space between them. The nature of breastfeeding has yet to be determined, and so sexual difference should be understood as flowing in and through the intervals between differing bodies.

Irigaray argues that to think and live sexual difference would result in a new renaissance in ‘thought, art, poetry, and language: the creation of a new poetics’ (1993a: 5). Recognising sexual difference would result in new forms of creativity and communication. In The Way of Love Irigaray writes that, ‘[i]n this world otherwise lived and illuminated, the language of communication is different, and necessarily poetic: a language that creates, that safeguards its sensible qualities so as to address the body and the soul, a language that lives’ (2004a: 12). While emphasising the importance of language, Irigaray also understands poetics in the broader sense that Nietzsche points to when he exhorts us to be poets of our own life (1974: 240). For Irigaray, poetics is never reducible to words on a page but involves taking our own lives and our relations with others as works of art.

Irigaray asserts that ‘[t]he work of art that a human is invited to carry out is first the blossoming of self in its own singularity, which presupposes a still unknown cultivation of space and time’ (2004a: 127). Each of us is an artist in this sense of transforming reality or creating a new reality in which we can live in a more beautiful and happy way. Through this art of living, we can cultivate ourselves and our relations with others, becoming what we are by nature. Irigaray describes art as a daily task for each of us, with sexual difference being the most important area that art must work out (2004b: 98). We need to be both artist and work of art, transforming ourselves as well as the world, and we do this through safeguarding and cultivating our affects, particularly our self-affection. We need to develop an art of interiority in order to both remain faithful to ourselves and to welcome the other’s difference. This art of living is what allows us to construct a world that we can share, through creating ourselves and helping to create others (Irigaray, 2008b: 135–136). Huntington maintains that both Heidegger and Irigaray mimetically recollect what has been lost as the poetic basis for social transformation (1998: 186). But even though Irigaray seems to implicitly reference Heidegger in formulating her understanding of poiesis (Ziarek, 2006: 74; Miller, 2007: 116; Jones, 2011), she is nevertheless deeply critical of Heidegger’s masculinist bias, arguing that he privileges exteriority (2001: 76). For Irigaray, in contrast, the poetic transformation of culture depends upon sexual difference. Irigaray describes men and women as needing to carry out a work of creation together, exiting the merely natural in order to develop a cultural community that respects sexual difference (1999: 109). For her art has the ability to create another reality by transforming us and the world we live in (Irigaray, 2004a: 98).

Without art, Irigaray believes that sexual difference falls into merely mechanical reproduction. Irigaray argues that art transmutes individual, bodily matter into affective relationships that are not merely limited to reproduction but that express a truly cultural form of sexual difference: one that is creative and open to ongoing transformation (1993b: 165). She argues that art is necessary in order to cultivate ethical relations, particularly sexual ones, since it provides a way for sexual difference to be transformed and sublimated (Irigaray, 2004a: 121–122).

The expression of sexual difference requires language that is dynamic and fluid, remaining open to transformations without being reduced to literal meanings. Irigaray therefore wants to rethink philosophy and poetry as related; she attempts to write philosophy in such a way that it reconnects with poetry (1999: 134). She poetically reconstructs the material of the female body as philosophical reason’s silent and invisible ground. For Irigaray, ethics requires language that maintains difference, although she considers sexual difference to be the primary mode of alterity. She argues that if an experience of speaking ‘can take place in poetic language and in the articulation of thinking and poetic saying, it first of all exists in a present dialogue with an other different from myself’ (Irigaray, 2004b: xi).

In her analysis of literary texts written by men and women, Irigaray concludes that women have difficulties representing themselves, thinking of themselves as subjects, respecting their mothers and other women as individuals apart from themselves and providing themselves with their own plans and ideals (Irigaray, 2004a: 109). She argues for the evolution of language by including women’s sexuality in it, which would have the effect of radical changes through all symbolic systems including art, religion and law. Irigaray provides us with a powerful imperative to create art as well as to live it in order to respect and give birth to sexual difference. Through cultivating ourselves and our differences from others, we can transform the symbolic systems of the world we share.

Irigaray recognises that mother and child co-create each other through their connection and their difference. In order to combat the reduction of women to mere producers of food, she asserts that mothers need to share language with their children and not only give them food (Irigaray, 1999: 20). Mothers create a world for their children, through which language becomes possible (Irigaray, 2008a: 122–3). Connection to mothers is necessary for the creation of ‘images and symbols’, namely artistic and intellectual creations (Irigaray, 1994: 19–20).

Although Irigaray focuses on how mothers create worlds for their children, other individuals may also create new worlds through breastfeeding. A literary example of this can be seen in Louise Erdrich’s novel The Antelope Wife in which a man breastfeeds a child (1999). In the novel, a young American cavalry soldier enthusiastically participates in the slaughter of members of an Ojibwe village but then deserts, following a baby borne on a dog’s back, and begins to care for the child. In response to the baby’s cries, the soldier, Scranton Roy, puts her to his nipple: ‘[s]he seized him. Inhaled him. Her suck was fierce. His whole body was astonished, most of all the inoffensive nipple he’d never appreciated until, in spite of the pain, it served to gain him peace’ (Erdrich, 1999: 7). Following continued suckling, his nipples eventually produce milk. Scranton Roy:

felt a slight warmth, then a rush in one side of his chest, a pleasurable burning. He thought it was an odd dream and fell asleep again only to wake to a huge burp from the baby, whose lips curled back from her dark gums in bliss, whose tiny fists were unclenched in sleep for the first time, who looked, impossibly, well fed … He put his hand to his chest and then tasted a thin blue drop of his watery, appalling, God-given milk. (Erdrich, 1999: 9)

Scranton Roy is raised with pacifist values, but in his fury after being rejected by a woman he joins the army and in his first engagement brutally slaughters an elderly Ojibwe woman. The baby’s need overwhelms his blood thirst, however. The infant teaches him how to care for her even though he had assumed his male body would be unable to nourish a starving infant.

In this example the masculine role of soldier gives way to maternal care through the demand of the hungry child. The categories of masculinity and femininity are transformed through this action. Where previously Scranton’s masculine identity was premised on hostility and rejection of the feminine (angrily murdering a woman after having his heart broken), his feeding the child involves a reintegration of the feminine. It is also notable that the child is female, thus reversing the dominant (heteronormative) description of a breastfeeding dyad in which a mother nurses a male child. Scranton’s masculine identity changes, but endures nonetheless. This passage reinscribes gendered associations of masculinity with violence and femininity with care, even as it then moves to transform them by describing a man assuming a maternal, nurturing role. The initial reinscription of gender norms is subsequently used to promote a transformation of how bodies are understood in relation to gendered norms and sexual difference. In doing so, the passage demonstrates both the challenge and the potential of poetic language, which creates new modes of being but must also operate in the context of existing social and cultural norms.

Inducing lactation does not ‘degender’ breastfeeding, since if men were to breastfeed children it would still be a different experience than for women because of their different bodies and histories. For instance, the risk faced by women of losing themselves in self-sacrificing care for children while breastfeeding would likely be far less of an issue for men. Trans, genderqueer and gender fluid individuals would also have different experiences with breastfeeding. Nevertheless, male lactation could transform conceptions of masculinity and femininity. Longhurst argues that male lactation recodes men’s bodies as fluid, nurturing and maternal (2008: 14), and Giles argues that men breastfeeding could result in profound changes in their relationships with women and children, as well as significant social and political changes (2005: 315). An example of an alternative, more egalitarian approach to child feeding and child care can be seen among the Aka Pygmy people of central Africa, where men often allow children to suckle their nipples and the Aka men engage actively in infant care (Hewlett, 1993). Even though mothers continue to spend the most time in child feeding, the combined time spent in child feeding by fathers, grandmothers, aunts, siblings and cousins exceeds that of mothers (Fouts and Brookshire, 2009). Despite these intriguing possibilities, the history of male privilege must be kept in mind even as masculinity is challenged and transformed.

Inducing lactation demonstrates that lactation is not just a biological function limited to individuals whose bodies have recently experienced pregnancy. Induced lactation destabilises understandings of sex and gender and allows for new, creative understandings of breastfeeding and sexual difference. Following Irigaray, we can develop a way of understanding breastfeeding as intrinsically and necessarily sexed, and challenge current conceptions of breastfeeding.

When carried out by individuals other than cis-women, breastfeeding challenges normative understandings of sex and gender, a goal that is shared by both feminism and queer politics. Creative transformations of breastfeeding practice hold exciting possibilities for changing gendered divisions of childcare and reproductive labour, and for opening up opportunities for individuals to express sexual difference through myriad forms of becoming.

Nevertheless, individuals must continually grapple with oppressive gender norms, particularly hegemonic expressions of masculinity (Heyes, 2003). As well, race and class have powerful impacts on the ability to breastfeed. Although widespread censure of breastfeeding in public persists, white middle and upper class cis-women receive far more support in breastfeeding, while women of colour, poor women and gender-nonconforming individuals encounter significant obstacles. Transgressing the sex/gender system comes at a cost, and queer and trans individuals are likely to encounter substantial obstacles to lactating (MacDonald, 2016). As Viviane Namaste notes, it is important that we not reduce trans individuals to tools for creative theorisation, without recognising the material oppressions they face (2000).

The material realities of bodies must also be recognised. Induced lactation should not be contrasted with so-called ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ breastfeeding, since all lactation requires skill, time and effort, and many cis-women who have recently given birth have physiological (along with emotional and socioculturally-produced) difficulties lactating and producing sufficient milk for their children. However, inducing lactation can be difficult and usually requires both supplemental feeding and the use of drugs and supplements that may have side effects for parents and children.

According to Irigaray, sexual difference is the most important issue of our time and is simultaneously both discursively created and natural. Breastfeeding is conventionally read as a signifier of femaleness, but I have argued in this article that the relationship between sex/gender and breastfeeding is not straightforward. The practice of breastfeeding should instead be understood as a work of art through which one’s nature is cultivated but never finally arrived at or defined: as Hélène Cixous described it, such a poetics requires writing in ‘white ink’ (2009).

Footnotes

Notes

References

Alfonso, D. Rita (2011) ‘Space and Irigaray’s Theory of Sexual Difference’. In: Maria C. Rawlinson, Sabrine L. Hom and Serene J. Khader (eds) Thinking With Irigaray. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pp. 99–110.

Bartlett, Alison (2000) ‘Thinking Through Breasts Writing Maternity’. Feminist Theory, 1(2): 173–188.

Bartlett, Alison (2002) ‘Breastfeeding as Headwork: Corporeal Feminism and Meanings for Breastfeeding’. Women’s Studies International Forum, 25(3): 373–382.

Blum, Linda M. (2000) At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Boyer, Kate (2010) ‘Of Care and Commodities: Breast Milk and the New Politics of Mobile Biosubstances’. Progress in Human Geography, 34(1): 5–20.

Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.

Carter, Pam (1995) Feminism, Breasts and Breastfeeding. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Cixous, Hélène (2009) White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics. New York: Columbia University Press.

Coltrane, Scott (1996) Family Man: Fatherhood, Housework, and Gender Equity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

10.

Cooper, Sarah (2000) Relating to Queer Theory: Rereading Sexual Self-Definition With Irigaray, Kristeva, Wittig, and Cixous. Bern and New York: Peter Lang Pub Inc.

11.

Diamond, Jared (1995) ‘Father’s Milk’. Discover. Available at: http://discovermagazine.com/1995/feb/fathersmilk468 (accessed 20 April 2014).

12.

Emmersen, Pernille Bagi (2008) ‘A Case of Well-Established Breastfeeding for a 61-Year-Old Woman After Menopause’. Journal of Human Lactation, 24(2): 217–218.

13.

Erdrich, Louise (1999) The Antelope Wife. New York: Harper Perennial.

14.

Fouts, Hillary N. and Robyn A. Brookshire (2009) ‘Who Feeds Children? A Child’s-eye-view of Caregiver Feeding Patterns Among the Aka Foragers in Congo’. Social Science and Medicine, 69(2): 285–292.

15.

Fox, Bonnie (2009) When Couples Become Parents: The Creation of Gender in the Transition to Parenthood. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

16.

Friedman, May (2009) ‘For Whom is Breast Best? Thoughts on Breastfeeding, Feminism and Ambivalence’. Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering, 11(1): 26–35.

17.

Giles, Fiona (2004) ‘“Relational, and Strange”: A Preliminary Foray into a Project to Queer Breastfeeding’. Australian Feminist Studies, 19(45): 301–314.

18.

Giles, Fiona (2005) ‘The Well-Tempered Breast: Fostering Fluidity in Breastly Meaning and Function’. Women’s Studies, 34(3–4): 301–326.

19.

Giles, Fiona (2010) From ‘“Gift of Loss” to Self Care: The Significance of Induced Lactation in Takashi Miike’s Vistor Q’. In: Rhonda Shaw and Alison Bartlett (eds) Giving Breastmilk: Body Ethics and Contemporary Breastfeeding Practice. Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, pp. 236–250.

20.

Giles, Fiona (2016) ‘Foreword: Going with the Flow’. In: Trevor MacDonald Where’s the Mother? Stories from a Transgender Dad. Dugald: Trans Canada Press, pp. ix–xxviii.

21.

Grzeskowiak, Luke E. and Lisa H. Amir (2014) ‘Pharmacological Management of Low Milk Supply with Domperidone: Separating Fact from Fiction’. Medical Journal of Australia, 201(5): 257–258.

22.

Hewlett, Barry S. (1993) Intimate Fathers: The Nature and Context of Aka Pygmy Paternal Infant Care. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

23.

Heyes, Cressida J. (2003) ‘Feminist Solidarity after Queer Theory: The Case of Transgender’. Signs, 28(4): 1093–1120.

24.

Hill, Rebecca (2012) The Interval: Relation and Becoming in Irigaray, Aristotle, and Bergson. 1st edn. New York: Fordham University Press.

25.

Hormann, Elizabeth (2007) Breastfeeding an Adopted Baby and Relactation. Schaumburg, IL: La Leche League International.

26.

Huffer, Lynne (2010) ‘Weird Greek Sex: Rethinking Ethics in Irigaray and Foucault’. In: Elena Tzelepis and Athena Athanasiou (eds) Rewriting Difference: Luce Irigaray and ‘The Greeks’. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pp. 119–134.

27.

Huffer, Lynne (2013) Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex. New York: Columbia University Press.

28.

Huntington, Patricia J. (1998) Ecstatic Subjects, Utopia, and Recognition: Kristeva, Heidegger, Irigaray. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

29.

Irigaray, Luce (1981) ‘And the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other’. Signs, 7(1): 60–67.

30.

Irigaray, Luce (1985) This Sex Which is Not One. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

31.

Irigaray, Luce (1993a) An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

32.

Irigaray, Luce (1993b) Sexes and Genealogies. New York: Columbia University Press.

33.

Irigaray, Luce (1994) Thinking the Difference: For a Peaceful Revolution. New York: Routledge.

34.

Irigaray, Luce (1995) I Love to You: Sketch of A Possible Felicity in History. 1st edn. New York: Routledge.

35.

Irigaray, Luce (1999) Why Different? New York: Semiotext(e).

36.

Irigaray, Luce (2000) Democracy Begins Between Two. London: Athlone Press.

37.

Irigaray, Luce (2001) To Be Two. New York: Routledge.

38.

Irigaray, Luce (2004a) The Way of Love. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group.

39.

Irigaray, Luce (2004b) Luce Irigaray: Key Writings. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group.

40.

Irigaray, Luce (2008a) Sharing the World. London and New York: Continuum.

41.

Irigaray, Luce (2008b) Conversations. London and New York: Continuum.

42.

Jones, Rachel (2011) Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press.

43.

Kunz, Thomas H. (2009) ‘Male Lactation: Why, Why Not and is it Care?’ Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 24(2): 80–85.

44.

Lacayo, Aarón (2014) ‘A Queer and Embodied Translation: Ethics of Difference and Erotics of Distance’. Comparative Literature Studies, 51(2): 215–230.

45.

Longhurst, Robyn (2008) Maternities: Gender, Bodies and Space. New York: Routledge.

46.

Lorber, Judith (2000) ‘Using Gender to Undo Gender: A Feminist Degendering Movement’. Feminist Theory, 1(1): 79–95.

47.

MacDonald, Trevor (2012) ‘How I Learned to be a Breastfeeding Dad’. Huffington Post. Available at: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/trevor-macdonald/how-i-learned-to-be-a-bre_b_1452392.html (accessed 20 April 2012).

48.

MacDonald, Trevor (2016) Where’s the Mother? Stories from a Transgender Dad. Dugald: Trans Canada Press.

49.

McCarter-Spaulding, Deborah (2008) ‘Is Breastfeeding Fair? Tensions in Feminist Perspectives on Breastfeeding and the Family’. Journal of Human Lactation, 24(2): 206–212.

50.

Miller, Elaine P. (2007) ‘Reconsidering Irigaray’s Aesthetics’. In: Maria C. Cimitile and Elaine P. Miller (eds) Returning to Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy, Politics, and the Question of Unity. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pp.

51.

Namaste, Viviane (2000) Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

52.

Neville, Margaret (2013) Lactation: Physiology, Nutrition, and Breast-Feeding. Denver, CO: Springer Science & Business Media.

53.

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1974) The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Trans. Walter Kaufman. New York: Vintage Books.

54.

Poe, Danielle (2011) ‘Can Luce Irigaray’s Notion of Sexual Difference Be Applied to Transsexual and Transgender Narratives?’. In: Mary C. Rawlinson, Sabrina L. Hom and Serene J. Khader (eds) Thinking with Irigaray. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pp. 111–130.

55.

Rainbow Health Ontario (2012) Reproductive Options for Trans People. Toronto: Rainbow Health Ontario.

56.

Rasmussen, Kathleen M. and Sheela R. Geraghty (2011) ‘The Quiet Revolution: Breastfeeding Transformed with the Use of Breast Pumps’. American Journal of Public Health, 101(8): 1356–1359.

57.

Rubin, Gayle (1975) ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’. In: Rayna R. Reiter (ed.) Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review Press, pp. 157–210.

58.

Ruddick, Sara (1995) Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Boston, IL: Beacon Press.

59.

Ryan, Kath, Victoria Team and Jo Alexander (2013) ‘Expressionists of the Twenty-First Century: The Commodification and Commercialization of Expressed Breast Milk’. Medical Anthropology, 32(5): 467–486.

60.

Schiebinger, Londa (1993) ‘Why Mammals are Called Mammals: Gender Politics in Eighteenth-Century Natural History’. American Historical Review, 98(2): 382–411.

61.

Shanley, Laura (2009) ‘Milkmen: Fathers Who Breastfeed’. Unassisted Childbirth. Available at: www.unassistedchildbirth.com/miscarticles/milkmen.html (accessed 13 March 2012).

62.

Sim, Tin Fei, H. Laetitia Hattingh, Jillian Sherriff and Lisa B.G. Tee (2015) ‘The Use, Perceived Effectiveness and Safety of Herbal Galactagogues During Breastfeeding: A Qualitative Study’. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 12(9): 11,050–11,071.

63.

Stone, Alison (2004) ‘From Political to Realist Essentialism Rereading Luce Irigaray’. Feminist Theory, 5(1): 5–23.

64.

Swaminathan, Nikhil (2007) ‘Strange But True: Males Can Lactate’. Scientific American. Available at: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-males-can-lactate/ (accessed 6 March 2012).

65.

Szucs, Kinga A., Sherry E. Axline and Marc B. Rosenman (2010) ‘Induced Lactation and Exclusive Breast Milk Feeding of Adopted Premature Twins’. Journal of Human Lactation, 26(3): 309–313.

66.

Tapper, Josh (2012a) ‘La Leche League Canada Rejects Breastfeeding Dad’s Bid to Become Lactation Coach’. Toronto Star, 19 August. Available at: https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2012/08/19/la_leche_league_canada_rejects_breastfeeding_dads_bid_to_become_lactation_coach.html (accessed 27 August 2012).

67.

Tapper, Josh (2012b) ‘Breastfeeding Dad Wins Support from Parenting Community’. Toronto Star, 20 August. Available at: https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2012/08/20/breastfeeding_dad_wins_support_from_parenting_community.html (accessed 30 April 2014).

68.

Tapper, Josh (2014) ‘La Leche League International Removes Gendered Language From Leadership Requirements’. Toronto Star, 25 April. Available at: https://www.thestar.com/life/health_wellness/2014/04/25/transgender_man_can_be_breastfeeding_coach.html (accessed 30 April 2014).

69.

Thomsen, Michael (2011) ‘Man Milk’. Slate. Available at: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2011/05/man_milk.2.html (accessed 13 March 2013).

70.

Van Leeuwen, Anne (2010) ‘Sexuate Difference, Ontological Difference: Between Irigaray and Heidegger’. Continental Philosophy Review, 43(1): 111–126.

71.

Whitford, Margaret (1991) ‘Irigaray’s Body Symbolic’. Hypatia, 6(3): 97–110.

72.

Wilson, Erica, Maryanne Tigchelaar Perrin, April Fogleman and Ellen Chetwynd (2015) ‘The Intricacies of Induced Lactation for Same-Sex Mothers of an Adopted Child’. Journal of Human Lactation, 31(1): 64–67.

73.

Wittig, Sarah L. and Diane L. Spatz (2008) ‘Induced Lactation’. MCN, The American Journal of Maternal/Child Nursing, 33(2): 76–81.

74.

Ziarek, Krzysztof (2006) ‘A New Economy of Relations’. In: Maria C. Cimitile and Elaine P. Miller (eds) Returning to Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy, Politics, and the Question of Unity. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pp. 51–76.

75.

Zuppa, Antonio Alberto, Paola Sindico, Claudia Orchi, Chiara Carducci et al. (2010) ‘Safety and Efficacy of Galactogogues: Substances that Induce, Maintain and Increase Breast Milk Production’. Journal of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences: A Publication of the Canadian Society for Pharmaceutical Sciences, Société Canadienne Des Sciences Pharmaceutiques, 13(2): 162–174.