Performing the Breastfeeding Body: Lactivism and Art Interventions

“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.

"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.
Artists who work in an activist vein frequently use spectacle and hyperbole to draw widespread attention to political or social issues. They may exaggerate a position, or employ tools of irony, slapstick humor, or self-deprecation in order to make a point.
In some cases, visual artists create sensory spectacles to highlight a social injustice; in others, artists use spectacle as a distraction, defusing a hot-button issue by redirecting the public's attention while slyly hitting home a particular viewpoint or at least prompting viewers to question their existing assumptions. For decades now, visual artists in the United States and elsewhere have taken on motherhood as an issue of social activism, granting visibility to the diversity of lived maternal experiences and protesting inequality and discrimination. Perhaps the richest maternal territory for activist-artists to address is that most contentious of maternal bodies, the lactating body, which is regularly subjected to censorship in the popular press and in society at large. In these instances, the notion of spectacle becomes an important tool for dismantling media-driven, patriarchal constructions and expectations of maternity.
For artists interested in engaging with spectacles around maternity, and specifically around breastfeeding, the United States has offered a gold mine of recent contextual grounding. In U.S. media coverage over the last several years, national headlines have reported on discrimination and censorship of the lactating body on a monthly, if not weekly, basis. Breastfeeding mothers have been denied their legal rights in workplaces, restaurants, health clubs, airplanes, swimming pools, retail stores, and courtrooms. While 49 of the 50 United States now have laws that specifically protect the act of breastfeeding in public, the vast majority have no enforcement provisions, meaning that breastfeeding mothers may have little legal recourse when their actions are illegally censored. 1 Popular magazines and newspapers report on such incidents, embracing and exacerbating the polarizing dynamic around breastfeeding and, on occasion, even manufacturing their own controversies around the lactating body. In May of 2013, Jamie Lynne Grumet agreed to participate in a photo shoot about breastfeeding for TIME magazine. Grumet later shared that the photographer, disregarding hundreds of usable photos, staged the awkward photo that became the cover image after several hours of work, when her son was exhausted. 2 The standing pose, which had the effect of making her son look taller and older than his three years, generated a firestorm of controversy about breastfeeding in the letters to the editor and online. In a time when controversies about mothering blow up over social media, mothers who might never claim the label of activist are unexpectedly becoming so, using social media to their own ends.
In March of 2015, new mom Kristen Hilderman was shamed by a United Airlines flight attendant for breastfeeding her five-month-old son in flight. 3 Receiving little initial response from United about her complaint, Hilderman turned to Twitter, where her story was retweeted nearly 2500 times, prompting an eventual apology from the airline. Two years after their manufactured breastfeeding controversy, TIME magazine published an article about Hilderman's situation, suggesting that "social media is helping moms win the war" over breastfeeding in public. 4 During 2015-16, celebrities and everyday women in the United States and elsewhere have joined the Free the Nipple campaign with actions of guerrilla nudity designed to challenge the censorship not only of breastfeeding but of women's bodies in general.
In this context of heightened anxiety about maternal bodies, it is perhaps unsurprising that recent years have also witnessed a groundswell of maternal activism among North American artists, some of whom directly engage as agents of cultural change around breastfeeding. 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 raise critical questions and alter public and private spaces in ways that make visible and challenge one of the significant taboos still surrounding motherhood. In order to destabilize the perceived spectacle of the breastfeeding body, each of these artist-activists stages 2 Grumet shared these insights while participating in a panel discussion with the author at The Pump  arguing not only that much socially engaged, or participatory, art disregards aesthetics but also that such works most often do not forge new democratic or emancipatory relationships, instead engaging art-world audiences who were already predisposed to form connections. 6 Kathryn Brown's recent volume of essays seems to seek out a middle ground, examining what she terms "interactive" contemporary art by avoiding generalizations and instead focusing on the specific contexts and types of dialogue produced by and through each discrete work. 7 Brown's emphasis on specificity offers the clearest connection to the artists discussed here, for all three artists operate within a fairly narrow context: Jackson, Dobkin, and Miller each stage spectacles in order to hyperbolize situations and facilitate interactive dialogues around the breastfeeding body.  From that very first photograph, Jackson's project enters into a significant history of feminist artists performing the body. 8 Like Ana Mendieta or Hannah Wilke before her, Jackson becomes both photographer and subject. She performs the (nude maternal) body but rejects its sexual objectification in favor of a feminist personal / political statement. Jayne Wark argues that feminism and performance art are inextricably linked: feminism has "played a decisive role in negotiating a new relationship between art and politics" because of the ways that each contest definitions of gender. 9 Right from the outset, Jackson challenges cultural conventions of female body appearance by showcasing not only a postpartum body but also one that pushes against expectations of maternal propriety through lavish tattooing.

Spectacular Bodies
Soon after that first generative photograph, Jackson began facilitating other maternal performances. Using her background in boudoir photography, Jackson emphasizes a body-positive approach and helps women with hair and makeup as desired before photographing them, seeking not to glamorize the mothers but rather to emphasize their maternal beauty for their own benefit. Through photo shoots that function as private celebrations of motherhood, as journeys of healing, or as a way to strengthen multi-generational connections, Jackson gives wide attention to the diversity of maternal experiences. In addition to the photographs, Jackson records and presents narrative text as gleaned from conversation during the session.
Jackson relates the narrative of each woman's journey, acting as both confidante and conduit to give public visibility to stories and journeys that are often kept hidden.
Many of these stories are messy. Just as Jackson's photographs embrace the specta- While fewer of her breastfeeding photos have recently been removed from social media, she has found that a more insidious form of censorship is now taking place: as of mid-2015, the 4 th Trimester Bodies Project had over 50,000 Facebook followers, yet her posts no longer reach more than a tiny fraction of that audience, apparently throttled from the outset. Far from daunting her, the censorship of Jackson's project has convinced her more than ever of the need to normalize the wide variety of postpartum bodies and to normalize images and perceptions of breastfeeding in the United States. In a recent breastfeeding photograph from 2015, Jackson montaged a sequence featuring nine women and herself (Fig. 2), with the goal of broadening what is considered socially acceptable for nursing behavior: the women, from varied ethnic backgrounds, represent not only breastfeeding mothers with newborns but also those with nursing toddlers and preschoolers, mothers who pump exclusively,  of maternal fluid in the gallery, in the promotional poster (Fig. 3) for the event, Dobkin positions her own nude body in such a way as to heighten the spectacle.
Dobkin uses breastmilk donated by other mothers for her performance, yet she here advertises the event in a way that exaggerates the potential controversy and even provides some false advertising. As many mothers will know from experience, expressing milk most often involves a sizable machine to pump the breastmilk.
By manipulating the image to appear that she effortlessly shoots milk into wine glasses, Dobkin humorously engages with social perceptions in a number of ways: first, by suggesting that perhaps many people do not actually know what is involved with pumping breastmilk; second, by implicitly acknowledging that the nude white female body is used to advertise many things, whether or not that body has anything to do with the product (or in this case, the milk); and lastly, in what is more ing support to nursing mothers, attending nursing-related events, and responding to breastfeeding emergencies. The Milk Truck, a mobile art installation and performance, is designed to empower nursing mothers, create community, raise awareness, and stimulate conversation around breastfeeding -and, as a truck topped by a 5-foot breast with a flashing nipple, is a sight to behold (Fig. 4). "performative gesture depends on the presence of the addressee," 19 but who constitutes an addressee can shift even within a single work. For Ashlee Wells Jackson's 4 th Trimester Bodies Project, the receiver begins as the mother herself being photographed in a private performance; only once the artist shares the photographs and narratives online does the receiver shift to a broader public. The reception of the Milk Truck shifts between breastfeeding mothers who call for back-up in an emergency situation and a broader viewing public who witnesses, or otherwise takes part in, the spectacle. The Lactation Station Breastmilk Bar, on the other hand, exists only to address a participatory audience in the gallery, not the mothers who donated the breastmilk.
Jackson, Dobkin, and Miller each operate in the context of cultural prohibitions surrounding breastfeeding that result in discriminatory, emotional, and often highly publicized encounters. Elizabeth Podnieks argues that the censorship of breastfeeding is not isolated but represents a broader cultural attitude, espoused particularly by the media: "Mass media praises and vilifies mothers, keeping them under constant surveillance and judging them according to the extent to which they adhere to ideologies of good motherhood." 20 When nursing in public is deemed inappropriate or even obscene, breastfeeding mothers become bad mothers, despite the fact that pediatricians, lactation consultants, and even formula companies advocate that "Breast is Best." By exaggerating the spectacle that often surrounds breastfeeding, Jackson, Miller, and Dobkin directly engage with conflicted cultural perceptions of lactation. Performing the breastfeeding body in order to confront social discomfort and culturally normative perceptions of the maternal, each artist opens up space for dialogues that, we may hope, will help to change the public conversation.