matrescence: emotional, mental, and spiritual wellbeing
Jouissance
In writing Bone Mother, I wanted to write of the moist abundance, specific to the body and psyche of the lactating woman, which is rarely named or celebrated. Since we lack a language that valorises the transfigurative female body, I wanted to invent it. I drew on ancient images, such as the many-breasted Diana of Ephesus, the Venus of Willendorf, or Sheela na Gig, and looked for a vocabulary that celebrated the milkmother’s physicality.
This particular kind of flourishing, specific to the transitional maternal body which I've attempted to write in Bone Mother, is most aptly suggested by the French word, jouissance, rich in connotation, and extensively explored in feminist theory. Whilst “pleasure” is the simplest translation, the noun comes from the verb “jouir” that has no exact English equivalent but means something like to enjoy, to have an intensity of feeling that takes one to the edge, to revel in without fear of the cost, to climax or peak.
"The French feminist theorists suggest that jouissance is a re-experience of the pre-oedipal physical pleasures of infancy and later sexuality, which are repressed in patriarchal culture. Irigaray uses this word to call for “a transcendental which leaves them free to embrace the maternal . . . . that surrounds them and envelops them in their jouissance” (An Ethics 69).
I claim a jouissance that is specific to the physical transfiguration of maternity: jouissance as the flourishing, flowering, vivification that accompanies the experience of pregnancy, birth, lactation, and tending of small children. Jouissance, as an embodied fullness of experience, embraces both joy and difficulty. In my use of it, jouissance implies a surging fruition, which must inevitably yield to senescence. Jouissance is sensual, even in pain. Jouissance is soulful, even if unremittingly physical. Jouissance is ravishingly moist.
I aim to celebrate jouissance in “Bone Mother,” and propose that other women writers may emphasise this aspect of the milkmother’s experience as they foreground her and contribute to the creation of a feminine imaginary. My discussion does not aim to be definitive or prescriptive; nor do I suggest we undo the vital work of speaking honestly about negative emotions and painful truths, as evidenced in my own writing.
Rather, at the same time as we continue to lift what Adrienne Rich calls “the masks of motherhood” (25), I hope to open up conversation about the empowered and positive aspects of the transfigurative maternal body, which are underrepresented and understudied. My argument is that to write mythopoeic images of the milkmother’s jouissance, as I aim to do in “Bone Mother,” is a necessary counterweight to the masculinist imaginary with its emphasis on alienation and discontent, and its medicalisation of the milkmother’s body. I apply and develop this concept of jouissance, which arises out of feminist theory, in relation to the milkmother.
I suggest that three aspects of the milkmother’s transfiguration drive jouissance: her embodiment; her courageous endurance, and her radical relationality. I also argue that, while jouissance may be a state or feeling, jouissance is perhaps most commonly a performance: a decision, an intention, or an action, that subverts the dominant paradigm.
Embodiment
By embodiment, I mean conscious attention to the sensations of the body, and a willingness to trust them. Even though, as I have discussed, the unexpected and dangerous can occur, this is less likely when a woman is bathed in the hormones of relaxation and trust.
Neuroscience teaches us that both the physiological process of birth and breastfeeding flourish in the presence of oxytocin, also known as the hormone of relaxation, pleasure and love.
As psychologist and pioneer in breastfeeding and birth research, Niles Newton, argued from the 1960s, childbirth, and the “psychophysical reciprocity of lactation,” both mediated by oxytocin, are inhibited by the high levels of regulation of the maternal, typical of our society (84). Bartlett, in her exploration of alternative discourses, uses the word jouissance to describe the pleasure, play and desire of breastfeeding. She reminds us that breastfeeding is a physical act of love between mother and infant, and is best represented as an act of self-satisfaction, not self-sacrifice (200).
Bartlett calls us to think through our breastfeeding body as “sexy, thoughtful, and timely,” to enjoy our lactating breasts’ intelligence and creativity (“Breastfeeding” 163). Emily Martin gathers metaphors for giving birth that women enjoy using, in contrast to the medical imagery of professionals, including, for example, labour as a river or a ripening fruit, and contractions as rushes or bursts of energy (157-58). These embodied images used by Bartlett and Martin are jouissant, and contrast with representations of the maternal as chaotic, dangerous, and disgusting; they contrast with the self-fulfilling, “not enough” representations.
Courageous endurance
Rabuzzi proposes that, just as tales of the masculine warrior-hero’s quest dominate in a masculinist imaginary, the heroic, transfigurative journey of the milkmother provides the foreground of a new feminine imaginary, the story against which all other human dramas unfold. Although multiple other feminine rites of passage also demand foregrounding, diverse representations of the milkmother’s extraordinary rite of passage are urgently required.
In the absence of a feminine imaginary that valorises female initiation, our daughters appropriate masculinist definitions of the heroic. They have trouble recognising the extraordinary courage and endurance involved in birth and infant care, and, as a result, are unprepared for their own sometimes shocking physical and emotional transfiguration.
The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines a hero as “a man, now also a woman, distinguished by the performance of extraordinarily brave or noble deeds [and] a man, now also a woman, admired and venerated for his or her achievements and noble qualities in a field.” Despite this dictionary’s attempts at inclusive definitions of the hero, the word is so deeply embedded in millennia of individualistic, masculinist discourse, that in this article I use the term “courageous endurance” to denote the milkmother’s heroism.
Birth, for example, is an ordeal that takes us to the body’s extreme, that tests our capacity to endure, that terrifies; it requires wit, and courage, and trust in the two million year old intelligence encoded into our cells. We need the right kind of support, so that we know what to expect, so that we learn to read our body’s signs, so that we are reminded of stories about how other women have managed. We need the right kind of skilful support that helps us contain our fear, hold out, hold on, have faith. Wisdom is the final gift of any birth experience, as at the end of any initiation.
Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, and The Language of the Brag, a poem by Sharon Olds, are able to contest patriarchal ideas of the hero because, as Ellen Argyros explains, they represent childbirth, not just “in all its messy, bloody, corporeal reality” but as an epic and heroic achievement, “no less worthy of praise than Achilles’ slaying of Hector” (141).
In “The Language of the Brag,” regarded by feminists as a watershed in American literature (Tharp and MacCallum-Whitcomb, Introduction 1), Olds uses intertextuality to brazenly assert that this previously taboo event, “this exceptional/ act with the exceptional heroic body,/ this giving birth, this glistening verb,” is something Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg could never do (8). In Beloved, Sethe gives birth in a “useless boat” while on the run, with the help of a white girl: “There on a summer night surrounded by bluefern they did something together appropriately and well” (Morrison 84).
“The journey to motherhood is an odyssey of epic proportions,” Susan Maushart writes in The Mask of Motherhood, “and every woman who undertakes it a hero. Celebrating our role at the very core of humanity means learning to sing every line of that epic freely, the lamentations along with the hymns” (318).
Pregnancy, birth, and the care of a small child, with the accompanying exhaustion, sleep deprivation, and seemingly endless physicality of care over a period of years, are heroic performances. They demand of us forbearance, intelligence, and perspective. Jouissance arises out of the courage to be embodied, to be present to–to feel–the difficulty and the darkness, the pain, the fatigue, as well as to linger in the sensual, the delightful, and the joyous. Jouissance does not disown or flee from the body’s truth, but is an attitude towards it: a gutsy determination to value and celebrate the physicality of our transfiguration. Jouissance transcends shame; it embraces, but is not defined by, feelings of defeat and disempowerment; jouissance is a dignified, deeply self-accepting, and valorous performance.
Radical relationality
I propose that what I call the milkmother’s “radical relationality” is a third facet of her jouissance. The absence of a term that distinguishes between a woman who is either pregnant or caring for children under the age of three or four, and the mother of older children, has in my view constrained such discussions about the subversive nature of maternity over the past two decades.
If the maternal is relational, the milkmother is radically so. If the maternal is subversive within advanced capitalist societies, the milkmother is more so, because of the corporeal and temporal intensity of her experiences. Bartlett uses the term “breastfeeding mother” in her discussions of the maternal subversive, though half of Australian mothers are not breastfeeding at all by six months postpartum. Another term is required. Generic terms like “working mother” fail to highlight important psychobiological differences in the needs of mothers at different life stages. Now, the term "matresence" is used to emphasise the unique psychobiological transformations of this time of life. I've used the term "milkmother" to refer to a primary carer in the first twelve months of life who identifies as female, regardless of how she and her family are feeding the child.
In my consideration of the milkmother’s radical relationality, I take theorists’ discussion of the performance of breastfeeding to be synonymous with the performance of milkmothering, regardless of feeding method, and I narrow theorists’ discussion of working mothers to focus on the milkmother phase, when the maternal performance is most acutely embodied and time-intensive. Radical relationality manifests in the milkmother’s corporeal intelligence, and subverts this popular representation of the milkmother as a site of warring identities. It also results in an altered experience of time.
The emphasis on individualism and autonomy, that has both shaped contemporary infantcare practices and masculinist ideas of the heroic in Western societies, arises out of Western notions of identity and selfhood. In the masculinist imaginary, it is the lone warrior-hero who triumphs over adversity, by virtue of personality, intelligence, or most often, brute strength. Late capitalism privileges the rights of the individual; success is measured by indicators of wealth, power and prestige. Efficiency, competitiveness, high productivity, and being in control are highly valued.
Second wave feminism placed workplace equality at the top of the agenda, and women in the West now enjoy unprecedented participation in education, the workplace, and public life. But although more than half of mothers with young children are in paid work, there remains limited valuing of the subjective maternal experience and corporeal needs. Instead, to be successful, women are required to participate in a male-oriented career cycle: of training while young; consolidating skills and status by working long hours in one’s twenties and thirties; intense competitiveness with other workers; and limiting time off, for fear of the effect on one’s career and capacity to earn.
As any mother of small children will tell you, these measures of successful personhood are difficult to reconcile with the demands of the milk years. Contemporary women in paid work sacrifice care of self and relaxation in order to invest time in their children, even as they maintain paid work responsibilities. Not surprisingly, in both academic and popular representations, pregnancy, birth and childrearing are commonly the site of painful identity conflict and guilt. As Stephens observes: “This notion of motherhood as loss or threat permeates much contemporary discussion” ("Motherhood" 35).
Contesting modernist emphases on the individual, Irigaray calls for a “placental” economy. This is an example of thinking through the milkmother’s body, using radical relationality–in this instance, the radical relationality of the placenta–to frame a subversive political and social agenda. The placenta, an organ that belongs to the foetus, is a site of complicated, intricately ordered exchange of nutrients, protective factors and hormones between the mother and foetus. For Irigaray, a placental economy is “an organized economy, one not in a state of fusion, which respects the one and the other one,” and which emphasizes nourishment, networks, and inter-dependence (Je 41).
In the United States, Sarah Ruddick argues that mothers are uniquely placed to further political change and subvert Western notions of individualism by living out principles of nurturance and mutuality in public and political life. This concept has been further developed by Australian theorists. Taking up Rich’s call to “think through the body” (284), Bartlett suggests that “thinking through breastfeeding . . . is a revaluing of priorities, a revaluing which does not respect the rational and profit-driven economy of late capitalism” (“Breastfeeding” 162).
Manne calls for what is termed “care feminism,” an alternate conceptual framework that views both the raising of children and work as communal and social enterprises, rather than arenas competing for the interests of the self ("Motherhood" 96). Stephens, Giles, and Sinclair also argue that the breastfeeding mother challenges us to abandon the oppositional discourses of independence and dependence, and instead conceptualise our humanity in terms of relationality and interdependence.
The notion of the milkmother as a performance of work, balanced alongside other work performances, is borne out in women’s practice, which appears to contest widespread representations of the milkmother as a site of guilt and conflicted identity. For example, Catherine Hakim’s research shows that women are heterogenous in their preferences for family work and employment balance. Currently, around 70% of mothers, both in Australia and overseas, are, in Hakim’s terms, “adaptive,” combining childcare and paid work in creative ways: some work part-time long-term, others stay home while children are young, and increase their hours of work as the children grow older.
Maher studied a group of Australian mothers and also found that, despite the binary discourse that dominates contemporary representations, women are not guilt-burdened and conflicted sites of identity crisis, but are in practice adaptable ("A Mother" 18). She and Jo Lindsay report that women offer a nuanced and complex account of how they go about meeting both their own and their family’s needs (4). Maher and Lindsay suggest we need to represent motherhood differently: that mothering is a work practice that it can be put alongside other work practice such as paid work outside the home without conflict, if a woman chooses. This reminds me of Bartlett, who frames breastfeeding as one way of performing maternity, and also of Morrison’s observation that the history of African-American women is “the history of women who could build a house and have some children and there was no problem. . . . It’s not a conflict. You don’t have to give up anything. You choose your responsibilities” ("What" 135).
If we frame the milkmother as a radically relational work practice or performance, that sits alongside other (paid or unpaid) work practices–often also relational, as Manne points out–we contest not only masculinist ideas of conflicted or fragmented identities, but also simplistic ideas of success. Successful personhood for a milkmother may include competence in the workplace, but is also likely to embrace the dynamic and adaptable understandings of personal worth and success which grow out of her radical relationality, her expanded experiences of time, and her embodied intelligence.
Another aspect of the milkmother’s radical relationality is evident in an altered experience of time. Kristeva and Grosz develop the concept of what they call female, or “milk,” time, which is cyclical and rhythmic, a repetitious, slow, chaotic temporality of breastfeeding and early maternity that contests the linear, pressured, “scramble-to-the-future” quality of late capitalist time. Similar, too, to my own understanding of jouissance, is Ariel Salleh’s concept of “enduring time,” where enduring connotes “the enfoldment of time in pleasure and suffering, hardiness and commitment, stability and security.” Reizi argues that the mother’s embodied way of comprehending time is so transformative that it fundamentally threatens late capitalism (21). My patients often refer to a perception of altered mental functioning during pregnancy and breastfeeding negatively, as if their “brain has gone to mush,” but as Bartlett points out, breastfeeding is associated with neurogenesis, a remarkable neuronal creativity and a new kind of embodied intelligence, which alters perceptions of time.
Conclusion
In summary, the milkmother’s jouissance as I develop it, doesn’t ignore the painful or shocking, but it does value, even celebrate, the complex, many-faceted, corporeal experiences of the milkmother. I hope to contribute to paradigm shift by inviting awareness of the oxytocin-mediated jouissance of pregnancy, birth and metaphorical or literal breastfeeding.
Jouissance is a nuanced, complicated, deeply lived celebration of the transformative maternal body. It is a particular way of performing the maternal, which contests the dominant medical discourse and is fundamentally courageous, relational, and empowered.
From my PhD, The University of Queensland, 2012
