Raccogli e passa
Breastfeeding Breasts!
(August 19, 2008)
Tina Modotti
"Baby Nursing" (1926)
In honor of my two young children and World Breastfeeding Month, a few thoughts on the work of women’s breasts.
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Print thisAmong Tina Modotti’s better-known photographs is “Baby Nursing,” with Luz Jimenez nursing a young baby; it was first exhibited on October 7, 1926, in the Galeria de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, and later appeared in a review of the exhibit in the December 15, 1926, issue of Art Digest. Like most of Modotti’s work, the image makes visible otherwise overlooked people and places, showing, if you will, the aesthetic of the everyday. As Art historian, Sarah M. Lowe puts it (in describing “Baby Nursing”):
The photograph [is] tender without being sentimental and descriptive without objectifying
its subjects…. The image is tightly cropped so that the geometric roundness of the breast
and of the baby’s head become significant compositional elements.
That Modotti’s subjects included a suckling child and mother reminds us of the importance of childrearing and daily, necessary, and very personal kinds of relations, relations that much of our contemporary society judges less than essential. In order for nursing to happen, it’s not just biology that has to be in place, but social parameters, a point alluded to by Modotti’s series of photographs of mothers and children. In short, she gave recognition to the value as well as the beauty of the relationship between mother and child.
"Children Bathing" (Tina Modotti) "Mother and Child" (Tina Modotti)
Tina Modotti was born in Udine (Friuli) in 1896 and immigrated to California at seventeen. Her basic biography (Italian immigrant; seamstress; film actress; anti-fascist revolutionary; photographer of Mexico’s indigenous people; Communist Party activist; first model and student, later lover and co-worker, to Edward Weston; friend of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera) is out there, knowable. Her status as one of a few early female photographers (albeit in the shadows of Edward Weston) is established in the world of art history. Nevertheless, she’s yet to be fully embraced within many Italian American circles. Do a few Google searches with terms such as “famous Italian Americans” or “well-known Italian Americans,” and you’ll see that she’s rarely listed. (The reasons for this I’ll leave for another post.)
But allow me to return to women’s breasts for a moment. August is World Breastfeeding Month, an expansion of “World Breastfeeding Week” (August 1-7), itself a commemoration of the signing of the so-called Innocenti Declaration, adopted in 1990 by a consortium of international organizations, like UNICEF and WHO, which met at the “Innocents’ Hospital” in Florence. The document declares the overall benefits of breastfeeding for both mothers and children and suggests public policy goals to further encourage nursing, especially in the first year of life.
It seems quite fitting to me—a woman, a mother, a professor—that my posts on this site would now and then explicitly address this particular trifecta of my identity. Within Italian and Italian American everyday culture, motherhood, and specifically nursing mothers, evokes strong sentiments. Most women, mothers or not, have stories to tell, stories that get shared mainly with other women over the telephone, at the park, in the kitchen, at the water cooler—or on blogs!
Before shutting down my computer so I that I can tend to my own nursing baby girl, I close here with another image of breastfeeding and motherhood. Evoking a quasi-sublime experience, Carole Maso, Italian American author and Brown University professor of English, writes:
This mythic elixir—so elemental, so essential. At the center of our living: a fountain.
The very essence of how we live—since we have arrived, since we have been asked to
enter this pact: curve of the world—earth bound, earth-linked, the love we pass. I am
drinking the stars, the little monk said upon his chance invention of champagne. I look at
her drunken, pleasured face. That magic potion, her satiated face—a heady brew. With her
small hand she pats my breast three times and she is at home.
(Carole Maso, "Rose and Pink and Round," in The Milk of Almonds: Italian American
Women Writers on Food and Culture, Eds. L. DeSalvo & E. Giunta)
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wonderful post, as usual.
i just received this email:
Call for Papers: MOTHER
Guest Editors: Nicole Cooley and Pamela Stone
We have entered a motherhood moment--from celebrity mom baby-bump sightings to recent televised debates between "stay at home moms" and "working moms," from "welfare mothers" to "Alpha moms," images of motherhood are circulating in our culture as never before.
Motherhood demands a new look. As women push motherhood later and later, as a larger share forego it entirely, and as mothering itself takes up a smaller fraction of women's lives, why is the fascination with all things "mother" at an all-time high? What does it mean to be a mother when motherhood is increasingly decoupled from biology? At a time when women's reproductive rights are vulnerable and the pro-choice movement on the defensive, why is so much of the discussion about mothering framed in the rhetoric of choice and agency? As the majority of mothers pursue both family and paid employment, the "cultural contradictions" of intensive mothering that sociologist Sharon Hays first identified over a decade ago do indeed seem, to paraphrase writer/journalist Judith Warner, an ever more "[im]perfect madness."
This *WSQ* special issue invites feminist work that speaks to our current historical moment in an effort to try to begin to construct a comprehensive and critical overview of mothers, mothering, and motherhood. We welcome academic papers from a variety of perspectives in all disciplines, from theory, qualitative research, and empirical studies to literary studies. We would also be interested in memoir and first-person essays, fiction, poetry, art, and writing which blurs boundaries and crosses genres in its exploration of mothering.
Topics to be explored include:
. Discourses around motherhood and how they are shaped by race, ethnicity, immigrant status and sexuality
. Mothers in the workplace: The price of motherhood, "mommy tracking" and "maternal wall," "opting out"
. The "mommy wars": Stay-at-home moms vs. working moms
. The paid and unpaid work of mothering and caregiving; the "second shift"
. Motherhood, loss and grief: Infertility, miscarriage, stillbirth and infant and child death
. Motherhood and disability/special needs
. Intensive mothering: Ideologies and practices around co-sleeping, breastfeeding, homeschooling and unschooling, toilet-training, tutoring
. Mothers as consumers: The marketing of motherhood
. Pregnancy: The medicalization of and birthing practices, representations of the mother's body, assisted reproductive technologies (ART), surrogacy, abortion and reproductive choice
. New models of motherhood: LGBT moms, young moms, single mothers, stepmothers and blended families
. Men as moms: Stay-at-home dads, coparenting, single fathers
. Immigration and motherhood; global labor chains
. Childcare and domestic labor: Practices, issues and politics
. Motherhood and ecofeminism, explorations of "mother nature"
. Mommy lit as its own brand of chick-lit and the new "dad" books
. Mothers and digital media: The role of mommy blogs, list-servs, message boards and social networking sites
. Adoption: Transnational and domestic, transracial
. Motherhood and public policy: From debates about FMLA to activist groups such as MomsRising
. Mothering older children, mothering adult children, grandmothering
. Motherhood and Third Wave Feminism
. The experiences of women who choose not to mother
. Mothering in comparative, global and transnational contexts
If submitting academic work, please send abstracts by September 30, 2008 to the guest editors Pamela Stone and Nicole Cooley at: WSQMotherIssue@ gmail.com . If accepted: Full papers should be no longer than 22 pages, and will be due by January 1, 2009.
Poetry submissions should be sent to WSQ's poetry editor Kathleen Ossip, at ossipk@aol.com , by January 1, 2009.
Fiction, essay, and memoir submissions should be sent to WSQ's fiction/nonfiction editor, Susan Daitch, at sdaitch@hunter. cuny.edu by January 1, 2009.
Art submissions should be sent to WSQMotherIssue@ gmail.com by January 1, 2009. Please keep in mind that after art is reviewed and accepted, accepted art must be sent to the journal's managing editor on a CD that includes all artwork of 300 DPI or greater, saved as 4.25 inches wide or larger. These files should be saved as individual JPEGS or TIFFS.
-- Stacie McCormick Administrative Associate WSQ at the Feminist Press 365 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10016 212.817.7926 www.feministpress. org/wsq