— Milk Factory Series, Corinne Botz, 2021.
Breastfeeding in public has become more accepted, but milk expression—defined as removing milk from the breasts manually or using a breast pump—continues to be seen as a distasteful bodily function confined to the private sphere. Milk expression should be recognized as part of a reproductive justice-based right to breastfeed.
The Right to Express Milk, 33 Yale J. L. & Feminism 47 (2021).
— Mother, Lisa Sorgini, 2020.
Mathilde Cohen is a Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on laws and regulations framing food, parenting, and power. She explores the understudied, embodied phenomena of eating and lactation through the prism of constitutional law, food law, and health law, as well as philosophy and the social sciences. Her commitment to the health of parents and children is the drive of her research and a catalyst for policy change.
The irony of Botz’ still-life photographs is to make lactating labor more visible by ellipsis. The compositions focus on the materiality of the space, the pump, and the bottles of expressed milk. Women are conspicuously missing from the frame. Babies only appear as pictures within the pictures. This double absence—of mothers and their children—highlights our society’s preference for human milk as a disembodied product, rather than an affective relationship. Why else do laws and policies facilitate lactation through the provision of breaks, rooms, and pumps, implying the separation of parents and children?
In the Court’s discourse, milk drinking is channeled through the language of constitutional rights, creating what this Article calls a “quasi-constitutionalization” of milk. This quasi-constituationalization breaks down the traditional dichotomy between constitutional law and ordinary law and is thus interesting in its own right. But the privileged status of milk is in tension with other constitutional principles, in particular with equal protection.
Evolutionary biology designates females as the generators of the mammalian class’ milk supply. The assumption is that only female mammals lactate and, therefore, only female mammals nurse their own. Taking on the biological, social, and cultural aspects of male lactation, and questioning this gender normativity of milk, the article argues that male lactation can be seen along a continuum, from the literal production of milk by a small number of mammals of the male sex, to male-identified parents and caregivers breastfeeding their children, to males’ role in shaping breastfeeding norms and practices.
Milk, placenta, and feces consumption can be sites of empowerment and relationality for individuals and groups; however, their growing popularity and the repugnance they elicit in some provides a pretext for the law to reach into bodies. In the eyes of the law, one of the problems with such practices is that they destabilize conventional forms of governance, calling for the mediation of state sanctioned organizations into people’s decisions about what to take in and out of their bodies.