Patty had become involved with surrogacy after having three of her own children. She was talking to her husband one day about how much she loved being pregnant and breastfeeding, and he had suggested surrogacy. It took her a while to find the right couple, but she had “fallen instantly in step” with Edgar and Roberto. She was very proud of being able to help them create a family by carrying the baby and then providing milk not only for him but for three other donees as well.
There were other surrogates in our network. A recent offer by Jessica on HM4HB Georgia stated that she is three weeks’ postpartum as a gestational surrogate to boy/girl twins for “lovely parents in the Midwest.” She explains that
originally, the parents and I discussed I would pump for their babies, pack, and ship the milk to them; however after delivery . . . the family left and the parents have decided not to receive my milk due to the packing and shipping costs of sending frozen milk. So I currently have over 90 ounces of milk frozen in Medela bags. I plan to continue pumping every 3-4hrs until June 3 (I have a 4 week vacation planned end of June thus I would like at least 2 weeks to slowly wean my milk supply before leaving on vacation). At each pumping, with the Medela
Symphony, I average about 3.50Z-50Z each breast. Is anyone interested in the milk bags I currently have frozen and/or the milk I will be pumping up until June 19? Please fb Message me if you’re interested.
What was striking to me was the fact that successful sharing contains a performative aspect here for donors—of parenthood, of altruistic providing, of being competent, of being part of a broader imagined community of mothers, and of trust.
With sites like HM4HB having just celebrated its fifth year in existence at this writing, ideas about the relative good of milk sharing are becoming more common. When I explained in 2010 to my children’s doctor and her nurses what we were doing, they were very interested to hear this, but they had never heard of informal milk sharing and did not seem concerned. By 2012, when I asked my doctor and the nurses about it again, they told me that there were still no other families in their office that had discussed milk sharing with them (although there may have been people doing it). April also said that the “lactation consultant at my pediatrician’s office was surprised and thought that it was really cool. But, she really only knew about the hospital version.”
When Sarah found that she had built up an oversupply as a result of pumping to send milk with her son Whitaker to morning care at a local church, she decided to become a donor. She asked her own lactation consultant about health care issues and what tests she might need to take or to show her donee but found that she “didn’t really know anything about it, but then she did some research, and brought me a questionnaire that I filled out for my recipient, who had not asked me for any of that more specific information.” Interestingly when the lactation consultant herself had a second child, she also ended up taking advantage of this new practice by using donated milk and then later becoming a donor herself.
One aspect of sharing that my own friends and family did ask me about—a part of this new practice that they “were concerned about” when they learned of our involvement (which usually meant that they really did not think it was a very good idea)—had to do with the issue of trust. How do you know this is not going to make the baby sick? I mean, who is this woman anyway? How do you know her? Why don’t you use formula? This giving of advice (use formula, fool!) in the guise of questions reminds me of Wolf’s (2013) description of American-style “total motherhood” in which mothers seek to avoid all risks at all costs instead of managing inevitable risks. Given the issues of chemical, bacterial, and heavy-metal contamination, along with the possibilities of disease or even deliberate adulteration of pumped or shared breast milk, as well as the apparent, or even imagined, dangers of formula, donors and donees navigate the risks that are suggested to them by popular discourse. And while donors and donees have different roles, their identities are mutually constructed through not only material exchange but also gratitude, a shared concern with parenting, and a kind of interdependent love: each is necessary for the other to exist. But taking donors and donees as a group we see patterns as well as idiosyncrasies with regard to why people become involved, how they manage risks, and with whom they chose to work.
But actors other than donors and donees help advance milk sharing as a love practice. And as we expect in a social organization characterized by heterarchy, people occupy different roles over time and exert themselves in small and large ways according to circumstances. But how is the heterarchical counternetwork advanced? How does trust come to pervade it? Although activism is diverse and contested, the cumulative effect of individual, mundane acts is to shape the set of norms associated with the sharing infrastructure and to push the (re)production of the counternetwork. (L)activists, who see breast milk as a sacred, quasi-magical liquid that should repel profane commodification, shape this counternetwork in important ways.
The Milky Way, our galaxy, as a feature in the night sky, was referred to in classical Latin as via lacteal or circulus lacteus, a term derived from the Greek galaxias (an adjective, as in galaxias kyklos), literally “milky circle." In Greek mythology, Athena brought baby Heracles (the love child of Zeus and the mortal Alcmene) to Hera to breastfeed so that he would become immortal. When Hera realized who the baby was, she pushed him away, spraying drops of milk, which then became the Milky Way. You can see these drops turning into stars in The Origin of the Milky Way, a Renaissance painting by Tintoretto. In fact the word galaxy derives from the Greek word for milk, yaAa (gala).
The alchemists’ symbol for solar system and galaxy is the same as that used for the sun. In the earliest known accounts of minerals gold was compared to the sun; it was seen as sunlike in its life-giving and universal warmth and color. When we learn that the alchemists’ symbol for gold is the same as that as used for the sun, we see the phrase “white gold" deepen. This symbol representing galaxy, sun, and gold—a circle with a dot in the center—also happens to look like a breast. Perhaps activists who promote milk as a community resource, who refer to themselves as “lactivists," might try the more ambitious-sounding “galactivist."
In The Republic of Therapy (2010) Vinh-Kim Nguyen uses the term “therapeutic citizenship" to describe how people living with hiv use confession and storytelling to appropriate antiretroviral drugs as a set of rights and responsibilities in a context where disclosure of hiv status can lead to abandonment and shame. In this way therapeutic citizenship is attached to a biomedical condition in which disclosure translates into life-sustaining medical care.
Similarly, galactic citizenship is practiced by sharers narrating need
when access to mothers’ milk, viewed as necessary to healthy life, is not available. In Nicu units banked milk is supplemented with the costly Human Milk-Based Human Milk Fortifier, produced by Prolacta. It is difficult to find up-to-date pricing on fortifier, but Richard Lopez (2013) has reported that a four-ounce bottle of pasteurized human milk cost $56, or $14 an ounce, and that Prolacta estimated the cost of feeding an infant the fortifier ranges from $5,600 to $10,000 per hospital stay. For small babies (who take between 202.8 and 4431.8 milliliters per feeding) in hospitals it is insurance, the state, or the hospital itself that generally subsidizes or covers the costs of providing fortifier, but once a baby is discharged there is no coverage that could even begin to approach the budget required to supply processed human milk to a healthy full-term baby at home for a year.
The demand for milk far outweighs supply. This is the context in which mothers (and fathers) perform, confess, and enact a style of parenting that values breast milk. As with Nguyen’s hiv patients, developing the ability to “tell a good story" is key to successfully participating in milk sharing. Donees describe themselves and their babies as needy and deserving while the healthy, lactating mother is cast, like the life-giving sun, as the ultimate universal donor.
Less than a century after Tintoretto’s rendering of “ga-lactation," Galileo’s telescope told us that the Milky Way was made up of individual stars, not a band of light.
Most scientists thought all of the stars in the universe resided in the Milky Way until 1923, when Edwin Hubble discovered a star, dubbed Vi, in the outer regions of Andromeda, proving the existence of stars outside of our own galaxy. Astronomers would come to realize that our own galaxy, thought to contain between 100 billion and 400 billion stars and at least 100 billion planets, was just one among billions (Villard 2012a, 2012b). Even more powerful technologies now suggest that our Milky Way looks like ngc6744, a nearby spiral galaxy, only about 30 million light years away.1 Remarkably this galaxy seen from a bird’s-eye view resembles the symbol for gold, the sun, and a breast.
I recently ran into one of our family’s milk donors, Jill, in a newly opened Whole Foods store in our area. Swaddled against her body, in a Moby Wrap, was her new little daughter. Jill had regularly donated milk, about twenty ounces a week, to our first child, and I usually visited her and her firstborn, a son, in their home just outside of Savannah. Jill’s husband is in the military; she is a stay-at-home mom, practices attachment parenting, is active in a Christian homeschooling group, and is vehemently against childhood vaccines. What really struck the anthropologist in me was the combination of these values, usually associated with the political right wing, with her leftist-sounding critiques of profit-driven business. She promoted sharing in our community by becoming a donor, advocating donation through word of mouth, and participating in the local Facebook milk-sharing group. Even though La Leche League does not officially support milk sharing, Jill had invited me to attend local lll meetings to meet additional donors. “I am a lactivist,” she had joked.
The first time I heard this term, I laughed and thought, “How clever!” But then I found out that other donors and donees, as well as scholars like Tanya Cassidy (2012, 2014), refer to the promotion of breastfeeding, breast milk nutrition, and the related practice of sharing milk (especially against those who find sharing to be weird, dangerous, strange, or just outright gross) as “lactivism.”
Activisms
I have been describing the breast milk sharers as a heterarchical counternetwork of strange bedfellows that coalesces both in adherence to and as a critique of institutional milk authorities, but this counternetwork did not happen on its own. Lactivists have been instrumental in shaping how milk is shared.
To get at the (l)activism espoused by Jill, I am going to step back to examine the term “activism.” First, activism suggests an exertion of agency. Both the meaning of milk and how it circulates are shaped by agents, even as lactivism is itself diverse and contested, with sharing seen as a social act with political ramifications undertaken with varying degrees of consciousness and strategizing.
Some sharers are simply acting in their own lives in accordance with their own private need, only accidentally serving as a model for others, if at all. This inadvertent activism by example (in the form of private actions, or what we might call microactivism) is not intended for public view, operates on a superlocal scale, and is far more serendipitous than organized grassroots activisms that address a public audience and seek to create change through protest, letter writing, or the consolidation of voting blocs. But private actions can also be potent and may enter into the arena of the overtly political. Microactivism can introduce milk sharing to sharers’ families and friends, at times in spite of itself, and enhance the ability of public lactivists to shape the meaning of milk, and, therefore, attitudes about sharing.2
At the other extreme are militant milk activists, at times referred to by detractors as the “Breastapo,” whose mission is to ensure that all babies are nourished with human milk as a human right and one that can even override a mother’s freedom to choose how to feed her baby. A viable feminist critique of this position charges lactivists with undermining women’s rights. Some mothers who were unable to provide sufficient milk complained to me that they had encountered hurtful or at least unwelcome pressure to breastfeed from friends or family and that some lll leaders were “overly strict” or “not making sufficient allowances” for different bodies and family needs. Some women experienced this rigidity as an impossible contradiction, since they, according to lll, are also not supposed to share.
Despite their antisharing stance, some women (like Jill) participated in lll and in sharing (beyond the gaze of lll leaders). For example, Mara and her partner, Selina, have two babies. Selina is a member of La Leche League, and while Mara and Selina know that the group does not approve of informal sharing, Mara explained that
some members do it on the side. I mean they [lll leaders] are very strict and the coordinator is a nurse and she believes that this is just extremely dangerous. So lll is against this practice, maybe for legal reasons. And yes, it can be risky, but look at formula! For Selina, breastfeeding was all consuming in the beginning. She was not even sure that she wanted to breastfeed but because of health reasons and all that, but she said, “ok, I will do it,” but for her it was very involved and complicated. She was in a lot of pain at first and had all kinds of problems, which is why she got involved with lll in the first place. But, for her, it was also complicated in a gendered way, because she is more butch. But there was such pride in breastfeeding the baby! And we had a friend in lll that was adopting, and she induced lactation and was eventually able to [do it], but Selina even donated to her.
Mothers may selectively accept advice, whether from lll or friends and family, and thus parent in a way that fits their own worldviews and needs.
Within any society people view the world somewhat idiosyncratically and have different aptitudes for mobilizing their own or others’ agency to effect change.3 While some women may be inadvertent activists through private actions, we can think of activism as activity that intentionally, and rather self-consciously, works to bring about political or social change. The term implies a counterhegemonic intentionality, so when we hear “activist,” we might identify hegemonic policy or activity being critiqued and then evaluate the alternative being offered.
Lactivists advance a probreastfeeding position: women should be able to breastfeed whenever and wherever they need to. Lactivists often consider breastfeeding, and by extension giving a child breast milk, a moral imperative. They may be critical of the formula industry and at times of mothers who choose formula. They work to promote breastfeeding awareness by explaining health benefits, educating people about laws related to breastfeeding, and working to strengthen policy that allows mothers to breastfeed in public and pump at work and that, in general, makes breastfeeding a normalized, protected aspect of life (rather than a hidden, sexualized, or embarrassing activity).
In a study of militant activism Charlotte Faircloth (2013) follows mothers who defy social norms by breastfeeding their children to “full term” (up to eight years of age) and practice a form of attachment parenting that requires them to forgo careers. This child-led practice is supported by what Faircloth recognizes as a choosy reading of biological, scientific, and even anthropological materials. In this context breastfeeding is mobilized as part of “intensive mothering,” as identity work by mothers understood as moral citizens, where breastfeeding is framed as natural and normal, even as mothering is undersupported by the state, as is the case in the United States (especially in terms of maternity leave and child care) (Faircloth 2009). But lactivism in the United States has resulted in improved legislative protection for women pumping at work, and, when it is not forthcoming, women now have legal recourse.
For example, the American Civil Liberties Union (aclu) and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission brought a suit against a glass factory in Port Allegany, Pennsylvania, on behalf of Bobbi Bock-oras.4 Prior to giving birth Bockoras was one of only a few female machinists in a mostly male workforce. When she returned to work, the company, Saint-Gobain Verallia North America, asked her to pump in bathrooms and old locker rooms that she felt were unsanitary and insufficiently private. She was harangued by coworkers who brought her a bucket in an ill-conceived effort to compare her to a cow being milked and who covered the door handle of the room where she was pumping in grease and metal shards (acts that, according to an aclu report [2013], her supervisor did not consider to be harassment). The suit asserts that the company failed to meet requirements of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which states that employers must “provide reasonable break time for an employee to express breast milk for her nursing child for one year after the child’s birth each time such employee has need to express the milk. Employers are also required to provide a place, other than a bathroom, that is shielded from view and free from intrusion from coworkers and the public, which may be used by an employee to express breast milk” (U.S. Department of Labor 2010).5
The problem with the Affordable Care Act, lactivists argue, is that it applies only to companies with more than fifty employees and protects only hourly, not salaried, workers, instead of all working mothers.6 So although lactivists still have work to do, the increasing visibility of breast milk and sharing is helping to challenge the squeamishness that underpins the discomfort that Bockoras’s coworkers and employers allegedly experienced. This shift may ease women’s ability to pump comfortably at work, especially if calls for pump designers to revamp the machines are heeded (see Martin and Cary 2014).
By engaging in a discursive battle to define access to milk as a human right, lactivists have been instrumental in shaping attitudes about breast milk, breastfeeding, and now sharing. This is important because the way we think of milk in the abstract, as a Peircian type, affects how we think about particular instances (tokens) of sharing.
The Abject
Because milk oozes from the postpartum body, it toggles between being sacred and profane and carries a heavy symbolic load. Sharing milk can thus be more than the distribution of a resource; it can become a highly charged interaction.
Orion explained that as soon as his family started looking for milk through Facebook and MilkShare
we found a medical doctor who became a regular donor for us. We also got a donor out at Ft. Stewart who just had many many gallons of milk. And then there was a tree farmer out in rural Georgia. And then, as a surprise, one of my colleagues at work’s wife became a donor. He brought the bags to work, and would put them in the work fridge, which I am sure freaked a lot of people out. I would bring it home. So it was cool to us, but you know, to other people, breast milk is a bodily secretion, coming out of someone’s breast! That’s weird. I mean to find a breast secretion in your communal fridge? One time, I accidently [sic] left it overnight and the next day the principal, at our post-planning meeting, was like “be sure to clear stuff out of the fridge,” and then she kind of gave a shiver, like an eeeeuuuuwwww shiver. I am pretty sure she was referring to the milk in there.
Orion’s principal was responding to milk as an abject, bodily fluid. The milk is liminal: like other neither/nor secretions—menstrual blood, semen, sweat, excrement, and the placenta—milk is ambiguous, powerful, and subject to ritualized elaboration. Its power arises in part from the categorical ambiguity it poses: Is it self or not self? Is your semen, or menstrual blood, or excrement part of you or not? Is it sacred or profane? Or both? Or something in between?
As Mary Douglas (1966, 15) has pointed out, that which cannot be easily categorized leads to social anxiety, suppression, or avoidance: entities that fall between classificatory confines may be regarded as “polluting” or “dangerous.” Douglas shows us how ambiguous things can seem threatening and become tabooed or domesticated through ritual. Postpartum purity rituals, or proscriptions about the type of breast milk to be given and when and where it can be given, function to protect categorical distinctions, which, because they are cultural, must be maintained through symbolic labor. Ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating, and punishing transgressions help to impose systems on an inherently untidy experience (Douglas 1996, 9). As a powerful liminal ooze, breast milk is implicated across a range of symbolic activities, from the rejection of the “beestings” (colostrum) in twentieth-century Britain (engorged breasts were relieved by another woman with a suckling glass, a puppy dog, or another, older child) (Fildes 1987; Hogan 2008), to Islamic milk-sibling kinship (Parkes 2005), to Ndembu puberty rituals (V. Turner 1967), to Sambian gender rites (Herdt 2005).
In the United States women’s pregnant, postpartum, and lactating bodies are viewed as temporary (and liminal); the body is in a special phase with special rules and expectations and having attendant possibilities for pollution and power (Hogan 2008). Milk traverses the envelope of the skin, from inside the person to outside, bringing with it water, nutrients, and perhaps something more, troubling the easy congruence of personhood with bodily boundaries. And in fact there is a long history of the idea that breast milk might ferry personality, mood, or inclination to a recipient (not unlike the ways in which Lesley Sharp [2006] has shown that body organs are believed to bring with them traits of a heart, spleen, or kidney donor). Back in the eighteenth century, for example, Denis Diderot (1765) suggested that an acceptable wet nurse must be vigilant, wise, prudent, sweet, happy, gay, serious, and moderate in her penchant for love lest the baby be contaminated with a bad attitude.
A taboo against sharing because of the something else milk might bring with it shapes attitudes about allo-nursing and milk sharing.7 I must admit that I found myself considering the possibility that a donor’s personality might be carried in milk and tried to avoid getting “crazy-lady” milk by meeting mothers who were donating to us. The medical historian Susan Hogan (2008) notes in her work on the history of breastfeeding that a beloved friend demurred when Hogan offered to suckle her baby; knowing Hogan was healthy, this something else caused her friend discomfort. Allo-nursing today is still considered transgressive, something (for parents) to get used to. As one donor described her experience nursing a friend’s baby, “it was a little weird at first, but after a while it was fine; [the baby] knew just what do to even though he had been on a bottle.”
Exploring the effects of categorical ambiguity from a psychoanalytic perspective, Julia Kristeva (1982) defines the abject as a human reaction to a threatening breakdown in meaning caused by a disintegration between subject and object, or between self and other. An example of something that causes an abject reaction is the corpse, which reminds us of our own materiality; Kristeva points to other objects that elicit a similar reaction: wounds, excrement, sewage, or even the skin that forms on the surface of warm milk. I know that I experience a thrilling sense of disgust when faced with warm milk skin and thus am drawn to it. I have the same reaction of nausea combined with acute fascination when I see hair on a shower drain. I think this subjective texturing is what Kristeva (1982, 9) was getting at when she associated the abject with jouissance: “One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it [on en jouit]. Violently and painfully. A passion.”
But drain hair and milk skin are after the fact: from the perspective of psychoanalysis the abject marks a moment of mother-child separation, when the boundary between self and other (me versus mother) solidifies. The abject marks a boundary condition. Mother’s milk sends us to an important site of abjection, which is why it is viewed as sacred, polluting, gross, magical, and so forth. Its abject nature makes it ripe for artistic and social projects whose goals range from adventurous tit-illation to political critique to collaborative world-making.
This is why even pondering the possibility of sharing elicits reactions in some people. When Kaya was considering donation, she was surprised by how many people she talked with “seemed put off by it. Even grossed out! I mean, when I was coming along, moms would just share their milk if there was another baby around, so I guess I just did not think it was a big deal.”
Some of my friends had similar reactions. Carrie, who had given birth to her first child when we started receiving milk, told me that after she saw us sharing and found herself unable to keep up with her baby’s needs, she too had decided to become a donee. Describing her first donor experience, she admitted, “I didn’t know how it would be. I thought it would be so weird. I had seen yours [donated milk in our fridge] and it totally freaked me out! I thought, ‘Now, that it is disgusting!’ I had brought some club soda over to your house and I didn’t want [the bottles] to touch it. But then, when I had Lacy and understood, all of a sudden, [milk] became this amazing thing. But now I wonder what people think when they see milk in my freezer. It’s a Hollywood comedy to drink breast milk in your coffee!”
And she is right, because breast milk, like other body fluids, is seldom seen and rarely described or pictured in popular culture. So when it does show up, its power is exploited to produce laughter or other affective states.
In her exegetical essay “From ‘Gift to Loss’ to Self Care” Fiona Giles (2010) examines the abject power of milk in contemporary film. She describes how films such as Les valseuses (1974) (which contains an adult nursing scene) use milk to provoke an abject reaction, while other films use milk for comedic ends, such as Look Who’s Talking (1989) or Me, Myself & Irene (2000), both of which play on a character’s revulsion at the idea of accidentally drinking breast milk. Giles (2010, 236) argues that these films reflect an unresolved and underexplored cultural fascination with breast milk and the capacity of women to lactate; this fascination is expressed in cinema as the interplay of the erotic and the abject, of desire and disgust.
Giles goes on to suggest that lactation and breastfeeding exist along a continuum of embodied care for both adults and children to be viewed as a part of our sexuality, as suggested by A Place on Earth (Mesto na zemle [2001]), in which a hippie commune in Moscow offers breastfeeding as sustenance to a homeless population, as well as by the Japanese black comedy Visitor Q (2001). Visitor Q is remarkable because it comes full circle, linking what might be construed as a shocking scene (of a mother breastfeeding her grown children and husband) to venerated traditions we see expressed in Renaissance paintings, Greco-Roman mythology, and Shinto Buddhism. Here lactation is shown simultaneously as care, wholeness, power, and female sensuality.
I would not necessarily expect to find many examples of Visitor Q-like scenes in mainstream American society, but I was surprised by the rarity of breast milk in contemporary visual culture since many well-known artists, such as Meret Oppenheim, Gunter Brus, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Karen Finley, Kiki Smith, Joseph Beuys, Mona Hatoum, Robert Gober, and two of my personal favorites, Bob Flanagan and Joel-Peter Witkin, do work with the abject. There was even an exhibition in 1993 at the Whitney Museum, Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art, and another at the Tate in 1995, Rites of Passage: Art for the End of a Century, both of which were inspired by Kristeva’s work. But despite the references to breastfeeding in paintings by popular, modern artists such as Frida Kahlo (e.g., My Nurse and I [1937] or Love Embrace of the Universe [1949]) or Wolfgang Herzig (e.g., Judith I [1966]), mothers who post photographs of themselves breastfeeding their own babies can be reported for indecency on social media, even on the HM4MB Facebook site through which many donations are made.
Despite all of the press about the joys of breastfeeding and benefits of milk, both are still viewed as out of bounds. The lactating woman is leaking, excessive, dangerous, and polluting, and so is her milk. In exploring this idea the artist Jess Dobkin staged The Lactation Station Breast MilkBar in 2006 at the Ontario College of Art and Design. As one scholarly commentator put it, her work “forces us to confront the judgmental, suspicious gaze that we project on women’s bodies, particularly the bodies of breastfeeding women” (Van Esterik 2009, 23). Lactivists frame this same potency as positive and empowering, reclaiming the lactating breast from a judgmental and/or sexualized gaze. In this vein Lynn Randolph’s painting Venus is accompanied by an essay defending spectacular lactation as a form of resistance to the policing of women’s bodies such as that exerted on Facebook.
Randolph (2010) writes that Venus is “not a Goddess in the classical sense of the contained figure, she is an unruly woman, actively making a spectacle of herself, queering Botticelli, leaking, projecting, shooting milk, transgressing the boundaries of her body, Botticelli’s shell has been turned upside down, and it is raining. Hundreds of years have passed since Botticelli painted his Venus and we are still engaged in a struggle for interpretive power over our bodies in a society where they are marked as a battleground by the church and state in legal and medical skirmishes.” She articulates, in words and in paint, ideas that reverberated in my interviews, as women like Issa described women’s bodies as sites of political struggle and pointed out that sharing challenges the disciplining of women’s bodies by a predominantly male medical establishment.
The Refusal to Abdicate
Although not everyone was as explicit as Issa, her meditation on sharing echoed others’ sentiments. Formerly a Russian-language translator for the American government, Issa is now a doula and an active member of my local counternetwork. She strategically promotes women’s health, helps women gain access to information, and brings support services related to health, pregnancy, and childcare to those who cannot afford them. A grandmother herself, she is older than the childbearing donors and donees that make up most of the community. Well known locally, Issa was instrumental in helping us get linked into the community. She explained to me, “Back when I was a new mom, we did something like this. We did a lot of cross nursing, but it was all family and friends. But these Facebook circles and so forth, just expand our community phenomenally.”
As Issa pointed out, there is a lot more to sharing than spreading resources. Sharing can also make community. She identified a radical altruism that confounds the logic of the commodity market, medical authority, and the materialist interpretation of milk. “This is pure generosity,” she said. “It’s a woman thing. And you know I’m big on women! When a lot of women do things together, something happens. To me, it seems like there is a lot of pride in participating in what in more traditional times would have taken place in other circles, in tribes or families,
22. Lynn Randolph, Venus, 1992. Oil on board. Collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington dc. Image used by permission of the artist.
but this is a different kind of community, more faceless or unknown, but this highlights the altruism that is at work, maybe it is altruism at its highest.” Sharing that exceeds the production of kin and friend for a faceless community is performative and may entail few if any future expectations but still give back in terms of pleasure and satisfaction.
Milk donation is somewhat costly to donors in terms of time, labor, and emotional investment. But as Issa put it,
it is important to highlight the aspect of altruism. A lot of social movements start with that because people want to give, to give back, to help. And the feeling of doing that is off the scale! I mean co-nursing is like that, and if we would have done milk storing and sharing [in my day], it would have been a great feeling. But that was not even on our radar! We never even conceived of such a thing! Or we would have done it. You have to remember, I was living in Boston in the 1960s and 70s where experimental community living was big. If we could have done it, we all would have been like, “Hell yeah, you should have some of my awesome milk!”
Besides pride, there is a dynamic politics implied in the way Issa links sharing to communal experiments critical of mainstream society. Altruism is a historically constructed idea about human potential that is usually defined as a concern for the well-being of others with whom one may or may not have an ongoing social relationship. In breast milk sharing, as in the communes in which Issa lived, altruistic donors bypass the principle of economic self-interest foundational to American capitalism.
Even though anthropologists have fatally critiqued the notion of “rational man,” he continues to haunt economic, psychological, and sociological theory. The very idea that one might act selflessly for the benefit of others runs so counter to the way people are thought to behave that there are serious academic debates about whether or not altruism is even possible. Much of this debate in anthropology takes place in evolutionary studies that consider whether altruism as an adaptation may confer advantage either at the level of the individual (the level upon which natural selection is usually thought to operate), where it may be selected for if it increases the probability of survival of close relatives (Relethford 2012), or at the level of the group (“eusociality”), where altruism may be costly to an individual but benefit the group (Wilson 2012, 2013).
In writing about how motivation is presented in the social sciences Richard Wilk (1993) argues that decision making is classified into three categories—economic, social, or moral—but they are not mutually exclusive; he shows that in fact these categories are folk models of the explanations that people use to describe their actions. And indeed we must take seriously the fact that sharers highlight how giving and receiving takes place among strangers not only outside of the market but also beyond kinship or even friendship, and they use the term “altruism” to describe and explain what they are doing. It has all three components: moral, social, and economic.
The for-profit milk and formula market presses against this landscape of “altruistic” donation by offering alternatives. As Issa put it, “of course, labs try to reproduce the effects of breast milk, or try to make breast milk-like formulas. This is what is so paradoxical, yet so American! Why trust a woman’s body when you can control a chemically formulated version? This is exactly how men took over the birthing from midwives. It [the hospital birthing process] is presented as all clean and controlled and spic and span. So we have generosity, altruism, and love—which is the essence of birthing and having babies—versus a sanitized, profitable, hospital environment, that is usually for, let’s face it, men—and I hate to say that! But usually it is, and it is offered as ‘safe’ to make it seem better, or more attractive.”
Obliquely referring to the dangers conjured to justify scientific, sanitized, medicalized scenarios, she continued, “But babies and also mothers sometimes do die. And that is sad, but it is also a part of life, part of the organic nature of life that you cannot always control. But when you introduce ‘safety’ into [lab-made or treated] breast milk to appease fears about life, it works as an enticement, and takes milk out of an understanding of it as something coming from the earthly, natural body and into the realm of the spic and span, squeaky [clean] lab. And really it is a provocation, because it appeals to the notion of risk.” Issa is offering a view of life that embraces, even celebrates, the gambles associated with living. Her perspective is the polar opposite of neoliberalized mothering in which there is an effort to eradicate every conceivable risk.
The hidden costs of capitulating to a spic-and-span, technologized milk distribution refract an ethics of life. What does it mean to have and to be given responsibility for another life? What does it mean to live with, to commune with others? What activities and practices do we extend, or retract, in creating the warp and weft of society? How can we live, and die, well? Ideas advanced by lactivists like Issa run parallel to those of scholars who like Donna Haraway (1998, 2013) valorize but also critique science, explore different ways to live better together, and forge liberatory spaces by recognizing that to be alive is to take risks together.
Milk sharers discuss risk and how to use science and technology to share well. In talking about tips suggested by social media sites we both used, Melanie told me that she was “always impressed by people’s willingness to give out their milk, and to share their medical records. I usually asked, but there were times when I just took their word for [their good health]. I can’t say that I felt great about that, but it’s what we did.” Her face and body language suggested that she felt sheepish admitting this, but she seemed to feel better when I confessed that we had at times done the same: trusted.
This trust is the flip side of risk, which, as Alphonso Lingis (2004, ix, original emphasis) tells us in his investigations of traveling, constitutes human connection:
Every day we deal with people who occupy posts in an established social system where behaviors are socially defined and sanctioned. . . . But to trustyou is to go beyond what I know and to hold on to the real individual that is you. . . . When we leave our home and community to dwell awhile in some remote place, it happens every day that we trust a stranger, someone with whom we have no kinship bonds, no common loyalty to a community or creed, no contractual obligations. . . . We attach to someone whose words or whose movements we do not understand, whose reasons or motives we do not see. Our trust short-circuits this space . . . and makes contact with the real individual agent there—with you.
Trust sets up a foundation for connection, but alone it does not explain one of the most significant payoffs of milk sharing, which is to illuminate how to better live with.
As a phenomenologist Lingis takes us into the arena of the subjective by describing trust as “the most joyous kind of bond with another living being. . . . It takes courage to trust someone you do not know. There is an exhilaration in trusting that builds on itself. . . . Indeed, just as there is courage in trust, so there is pleasure, exhilaration in trust: trust laughs at dangers. . . . Trust is courageous, giddy, and lustful” (2008, x, xii). The stranger work in milk sharing is exhilarating in a deeply existential way, because sharing opens the possibility for new ways of being together. Strangers are risking, trusting, being together at a critical point, in the reproduction of care and life, at a place where the sacred and the abject are united. Sharers leap into the unknowable together, which is why milk sharing is experienced at times as emotional, cathartic, and loving. So how do people make decisions about whom to trust when they travel or share? In exploring this theme Issa said what most sharers know:
There are always risks . . . which are minimal in the big picture. But a lot of times bringing up risk will play into the fears people have and to the idea of “being a good mother.” But that’s capitalism, and advertising. On the other side, women instinctively have an intuition, and a lot of times it kicks in when you become a mother, and of course you can be wrong or mistaken, but usually, whatever you feel is powerful, and that can work against the technological, squeaky-clean lab approach, and, really, I see it working a lot of times as an issue of empowerment. The squeaky-clean, controlled lab approach tries to strip away the validity of intuition as a form of knowledge. But there is a lot riding on it; so questions like “Is that really a good idea?” or “Is that safe?” can get people to second-guess the choices they have made based on deep feelings, and whether we trust [those feelings] or some other way of knowing, it is a personal thing. Look, we all want the best for our children, and there are many ways of knowing. Intuitive skills are real skills that help us decide, for example, if this or that environment is right for this child. And these skills are, well not explicitly, but they are, let’s say undermined by a more technological approach. It’s not a conspiracy, but it is a power play by folks who think they know better, who think that intuitive wisdom is not valid. But science and intuition are not mutually exclusive! Knowledge comes in many forms. And that’s ok, because everyone has to do what they think is right at the time, but [being the person to] question authority and ask questions can be challenging.
In questioning the hierarchy of scientific over intuitive knowledge making and calling for the situational deployment of decision-making skills, Issa validates both. Milk sharing is not a rejection or dismissal of science or technology but rather a calculated, embodied engagement with it. This is why I found doctors, lactation consultants, and lll members sharing milk but giving the caveat that personal sharing is different from their professional recommendations and obligations.
Amber, for example, is deeply involved with the science of breastfeeding and breast milk. As a board certified lactation consultant she knows as well as anyone the risks of sharing identified by science, but as a donee she did not get any paperwork from any of her donors, explaining, “Not from my sister. Not from my friend (I mean we had an informal conversation, and I knew she was healthy), and not from my other three donors with whom I had very little contact. I just trusted the lactation consultant that connected us. And, I mean if you can’t trust an ob [one of her donors was an obstetrician], who can you trust?”
But as Amber explained, the stakes were different when the tables were turned and she became a milk donor. She had approached her donee about testing:
[I asked her] if she wanted documents, and I would have been happy to get tests and provide her with anything she wanted, but she said no. So, I went online, printed out a questionnaire and filled it out. I gave that to her. I felt like I wanted to provide that. But, the main issue is that this is donation. When money gets involved, there has to be testing, and documentation, because motivations are different: people might say, hey I can add some milk or water or whatever, so I see that as a really important distinction. One mom to another is different. Me? I went with intuition. On the whole, people do this with a good heart, a full heart, and there is nothing to hide. I felt fine doing paperwork as a donor, but as a donee, I needed the milk and felt that it was the right thing, so I took it without paperwork. And mom-to-mom sharing is a beautiful thing.
So as a mother Amber has been both a donor and a donee, but as a professional she does not and cannot recommend it “because of the liability.” Pointing out the contradiction, she explained that “there are not a lot of lactation consultants that know about my sharing activities. There is a stigma there. I think a lot of my colleagues would support it, but many would see it as a big, big risk. But there are personal feelings and then there are professional responsibilities—it’s the liability issue.” So, yes, Issa is right, questioning authority is challenging; the solution for Amber has been to cleave her private from her public face. Professional words and deeds support the policy, and authority, of the International Lactation Consultant Association establishment, largely for financial reasons; in her personal life she quietly upends it.
Perhaps we should not be surprised about the use of the body in these unsanctioned ways since women’s bodies have long been a site for resistance to patriarchal authority. In Holy Feast and Holy Fast Caroline Walker Bynum (1987) describes how the medieval body was wielded by women, perhaps because it was all they had to work with. Bynum writes persuasively against a long-held position that fasting women were anorexics to suggest that, although a version of anorexia may have been at play, fasting must be considered in a larger context, and that larger context was food. Food was the arena of women, they were expected to produce it and serve it, and it also had a heightened religious or at least spiritual significance. To eat or not eat was to exert authority, or at least power, in this domain.
In our own society food preparation remains women’s work—and the act of nourishing one’s own baby in addition to others’ works as a performance of successful motherhood, an index of fecundity, and an avenue for feeling fulfilled and empowered. For sharers, making and sharing milk is a sacred act that would be sullied by commodification. Sharing is a quiet but unequivocal refusal to behave according to the mandates of health officials or to the logic of capitalism. These ordinary women (and men) are occupying the interstices of public places (the Internet, lll meetings, and parents’ groups) to counterhegemonic ends. But what kinds of politics inhere in these acts? What kind of (l) activism is this?
An Ordinary Friendly Act
In Life as Politics Asef Bayat (2010) describes the appropriation of space and utilities by marginalized third-world urbanites in the Middle East and indeed all over the developing world. While some have looked at the marketing of fruits and vegetables in public streets or the sale of cell phone minutes on corners as poor people’s survival strategies or tactics of urban social movements, Bayat’s work highlights their creative, strategic expansion. His notion of “quiet encroachment” describes the silent and protracted but pervasive advancement of ordinary people in the space of the propertied and powerful, and the larger public, in order to survive and improve their lives; these activities are marked by largely atomized and prolonged mobilizations with episodic collective action, characterized by open and fleeting struggles without clear leadership, ideology, or structured organization (Bayat 2010, 56).
Quiet encroachment is not explicit political activity but acts performed by dispersed individuals and families for the purpose of acquiring basic necessities. People tapping electrical lines or water pipes in Cairo or Tehran are emblematic of quiet encroachment. Bayat developed this idea out of his observations of subaltern responses to globalization, with its simultaneous consequence of increased integration with greater social exclusion and informalization in the Muslim Middle East, but he wonders if it might have relevance for other third-world places. For my part, though it may appear to be a strange, even unwarranted comparison at first, I find it relevant in relation to my observations about first-world, middle-class milk sharers, as milk sharing is an individualized act that shifts milk and trust into the realm of the political. So how might this work?
Going back to Marx’s contested depiction of the Lumpenproletariat, Bayat tracks the history of sociological scholarship on the marginalized poor. In explicating the experience, role, and future of the “underclass,” he shows how scholars have debated issues of class agency, consciousness, stability, and revolutionary potential. Rather than rehearse the full debate on the politics of the poor (which Bayat sees coalescing into four major perspectives: the passive poor, survival strategies, urban territorial movement, and everyday resistance models), I extract three aspects of the debate about underclass activism for a discussion about the politics of milk sharing: power, network, and intentionality.
What about power? When we think about strategic responses to structural circumstances, we can consider everyday practices as well as organized resistance. Gramsci and Foucault helped pave the way for looking at resistance like this when they identified power as not only decentered and circulating but as distributed along particular trajectories with a tendency to accumulate in sites that advance class interests (which is why, capillary as power may be, the state and other authoritative institutions must be examined with care [Bayat 2010, 54]). To wield power, or to become empowered, subalterns may create, or seek opportunities within a moral economy (relying on trust, reciprocity, or voluntarism) using social power (for example, free time, social skills, or networking), with the household as a central unit of production of livelihood (Friedmann 1992). These opportunities may be discovered, or produced, within “free spaces” (Woods 1993), political or social interstices, gray areas of the law, or spaces beyond easy surveillance. As micropolitics, third-world urban subaltern action under these conditions tends to be spatialized and local, with the potential for a great deal of variation in individual perspectives; this form of resistance is thus flexible, small scale, and unbureaucratic (Bayat 2010, 52)—in other words, heterarchical.
Milk sharing is undertaken within a moral economy using social power by a shifting, markedly unbureaucratic group. Part of the reason that this sharing community is in flux is that donors’ ability to give and donees’ needs change rather dramatically over the course of a year or so. What’s more, exchanges tend to be local, in part defined by the distance one can comfortably drive with an infant in tow (usually within a three- to four-hour radius) or how long milk will remain frozen solid using low technology (ice and a cooler).
But how might lactivism and milk sharing as quiet encroachment support or undermine the state or other authoritative institutions? As part of a growing informal economy it flies in the face of state surveillance of commodity production and exchange, the profit motive necessary to the smooth functioning of capitalism, and social demands to acquiesce to a hierarchy of knowledge that privileges science, documentation, and policy developed by authoritative institutions. Milk sharing takes place between single individuals, so it is virtually invisible to the state, is outside of any regulation or mandate (or protection) by the law, and bypasses formal markets for both human milk and formula. It takes place outside of milk banks and for-profit corporations, eschewing existing attempts to capture milk circulating through sharing, which are already under way by both types of institutions since demand by insured customers for products from banks and for-profits companies far outweighs supply. Sharers’ refusal to commodify milk thus represents a challenge to the state, whose very existence is predicated on the extraction of capital from all forms of production.
So even if it is not a social movement per se, milk sharing is activist in that sharers support a heterarchical counternetwork forged out of a biocultural condition (lack of sufficient milk) combined with a political, ideological, and/or emotional impetus.8 Participants as a group do not have a clear allegiance to either left- or right-wing politics; in fact the group is populated by strange bedfellows, at least in terms of basic political orientations, and does have a markedly doubled character as both local and international.9
But what about intention? The communities Bayat describes—those who tap water or electricity—may not be acting out of an intentional resistance but out of need, though their actions may lead to welcome changes in urban infrastructure or governance. Within the sharing community, women, especially those who called themselves “(l)activists,” such as Issa and Jill, were clear about their participation in sharing as a critique of authoritative institutions, while others saw it as simply “helping out” a baby or another mother.
We might sever activism from the activist as a heuristic move to identify actions that result in social change. Milk sharing as (l)activ-ism, even undertaken by those who do not claim an explicitly activist identity, has a transformative effect in that it is a form of doing, of making, of being in the world. It is a de facto enunciation of an alternative value and economic system that not only does not cooperate with (if not outright opposes) hegemonic authority but can engender a feeling of thrilling delight, experienced as tears and expressions of thanks, love, and relief, that asks to be comprehended as communitas, even if fleeting or sporadic.
I use the term “communitas” to underscore how sharers come together not only sociopolitically but phenomenologically: sharing, as well as the trust it entails, is an experience that, as the rapper Rich Homie Quan says, makes “you feel some type of way.”10 Within anthropology the term “communitas” was developed by Victor Turner, who adopted it from the anarchist Paul Goodman (Rohrer 2013, 83). Turner (1967, 1969) renders communitas as a feeling or experience of collective solidarity, of one-ness, as opposed to divisive individuality, that emerges in antistructure, often within the context of ritual. In a related comment on what makes anthropology unique, Lingis (2007, 78) writes that fieldwork sets the anthropologist apart from other kinds of social scientists: “Government officials, traders, explorers, and missionaries are also in the field, and longer. Is it not the heady, intoxicating, unforgettable abandon to trust that makes the anthropologist’s experience so distinctive?” This giddy, even quasi-erotic trust is, I think, what Edith Turner (2011, 4) is also getting at in Communitas: The Anthropology of Collective Joy, where she expands the notion of communitas to “togetherness itself” to elucidate the affective qualities of communitas as part of the fieldwork experience.
Recalling the work of Goodman, the Turners, and Lingis, I know that as a participant-observer I experienced at times an intoxicating joy in a deep attachment to a stranger bucking authority with me. Our donors seemed just as energized by the partnership, at times thanking me with enthusiasm.
Here a one-ness is somewhat imaged, and, unlike the kind of unity we might expect to note within traditional rites of passage where initiates move together in time and space to experience communitas, the digital technology that makes milk sharing possible creates a kind of (paradoxically) asynchronic communitas that is egalitarian (at least in theory), decentralized, informally organized, organic, aleatory, localized while globalized, and marked by idiosyncrasy. In contrast milk banks and formula offer standardized experience and a standardized product, through formal, rational channels. Of course not everyone experiences communitas, nor would they do so all of the time. But in this version of milk sharing—even if communitas may be an exception and not the rule—it does represent an affective variation experienced by participants.
Admittedly, a counterhegemonic bent was not articulated by all participants, and some shares are rather pragmatic, devoid of affective expressiveness. So what does this tell us about the role of agency? Identifying political intentionality in the domestic activities of middle-class (sub)urbanites in the American South is tricky, since being overtly political, much less activist, is largely frowned upon. In the case of milk sharing the willingness and ability to describe sharing as a manifestation of resistance is varied, but I did find a clear inclination to claim membership in an imaginary community of sharers (both men and women), which is akin to what I think Bayat is describing with his idea of a “passive network”—a group of individuals who are mobilized to act collectively when their accomplishments are challenged by an authority such as the state or other institution (e.g., La Leche League, the American Academy of Pediatrics, or private companies attempting to disrupt sharing through commodification or criticism).
The mobilization of a passive network is never a given, but I see glimmers of a more organized demand for milk as a human right as researchers, critics, and milk banks contest sharing. Breast milk advocates and milk bank representatives, like staff at the South Carolina Milk Bank, hope that one day human milk will become available to all babies as a universal right, like access to water, housing, and antiretroviral drugs should be today. All of this must be balanced against parents’ rights to decide what is appropriate for them and for their children, but there are already activists discussing the right to breast milk, “based on the right to life, to adequate nutrition and to the highest attainable standard of health, and based on women’s rights, which includes the right to breastfeed, to breastfeeding education and to paid maternity leave” (Ball 2010).11 Taking this approach even further, participants at the 2012 World Breastfeeding Conference in Delhi called upon all to adopt “a human right-based approach to the protection, promotion and support
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23. “We Are” poster on HM4HB.net. Courtesy of HM4HB and Stephanie Benelli.
of breastfeeding and infant and young child feeding at international, national, sub-national and community levels.”12 In May 2014 (just four years after it was founded), the Human Milk 4 Human Babies Facebook page for Georgia expressed the position that all babies and children have the right to receive human milk, stopping just short of claiming that it should be viewed as a right on par with shelter, health care, and freedom from violence. At the moment, they are very likely preaching to the choir.
Galactivism
There is a danger in seeing resistance everywhere. An alternative would be to distinguish the kind of resistance enacted by, for instance, gossip, from actions that make one vulnerable to physical or mental harm, arrest, or even death. Keeping in mind the importance of maintaining the distinctions of intensity that mark various acts of resistance, we can compare milk sharing with the struggles of third-world subalterns without constituting a dangerous and “savage leveling that diminishes rather than intensifies our sensitivities to injustice” (Brown 1996, 730).
Bayat points out that even privileged segments of the developing world may resort to quiet encroachment as they are squeezed by advanced neoliberal governance, and I would note that these are the same politics squeezing the American middle class through a combination of flat wage-earning power, a reconfiguration of the global labor market, and the defanging of unions. In these ways the milk-sharing community, peopled by a shifting cast of middle-class parents, has something in common with the groups Bayat describes in that sharers are exploiting a legal blank zone. Sharing, considered illicit by some, is not illegal. But as industry treats milk as an ever more valuable resource, it is placed squarely into the realm of political economy, with milk management taking on a distinctly biopolitical tang.
In a study of water infrastructure in Mumbai, Nikhil Anand (2011) tracks the intersection of technologies of politics and the politics of technology to describe what he calls “hydraulic citizenship,” which has everything to do with who can get how much water to flow where, given their geophysical location, network of relations, and available tools and technologies. Unlike water, the flow of milk is viewed by the state, for the moment anyway, as a private matter, and thus the state has little to say about it. On the other hand, with so many powerful institutions, including federal ones, insisting that breast milk is best, it is surprising that activists have not pressured the state to ensure milk availability as a right of citizenry. Sharing poses the question: what might a (ga)lactic citizenship look like?
Sharing, as a pattern of social interaction, is of particular interest since American culture is shaped by capitalism. As a successful heterarchical social practice that critiques it, milk sharing may contain object lessons. What impact will this “hit-and-run” critical practice have on capitalism? How is capitalism responding? And why does it matter? As sharing becomes more visible, questions about commodification loom ever larger.