[lbo-talk] Breast milk ice cream...

Alan Rudy alan.rudy at gmail.com
Sun Feb 27 15:14:43 PST 2011


On Sun, Feb 27, 2011 at 1:24 PM, martin schiller <mschiller at pobox.com>wrote:


>
> On Feb 27, 2011, at 6:26 AM, Alan Rudy wrote:
>
> > And you don't have to be Catherine MacKinnon to be floored by Dennis's
> and
> > Fernando's lack of gender/political reflexivity when it comes to the
> > completely healthy contestation around the vile history of male gaze
> (and,
> > here, I'm not sure Joanna's attempt at humor helped).
>
> Lots of big words here. Perhaps the breast milk ice cream might be viewed
> as a counter to the phobia about breast milk consumption among US
> population.
>
> martin
>
>
Surprised "reflexivity" (awareness) and "contestation" (struggle) are thought to be "big" on this particular lefty list... or were there others? The male gaze (masculine objectification) might be a little opaque and you might not know MacKinnon but, really, how hard is it to find the meaning of the former or the positions of the latter?

It is not breast milk consumption that is the issue in the US. What's at issue, as clearly indicated in certain posts to this thread, is the equation of breasts with sex and sex with women and sex and women with premodern bodily reproduction which is assumed to be and treated as the opposite of modern technological production... a world were the feminine and usually female is always the sexualized object of and for masculine and usually male productive subjects.

In this case, however, Joanna's criticism is that this ice cream is not only an eroticized classist moment in apoltical post-modern bourgeois niche consumption but also one likely to be drawing down the milk production of women with hungry babies to feed who for normative and biological/developmental reasons would do better to feed their kids with the milk. Perhaps the milk comes from women who breast fed their babies for two years and have chosen to continue to lactate as a secondary or tertiary commercial venture - perhaps what Jordan was imagining - and, maybe, this would make it less upsetting... but Joanna and Wren and I (I think) collectively doubt it.

I have, again, used "Big" words but of all the things that bug me about many of my sociology students and many socialists I've known, high in the rankings is the widely prevalent idea that sophisticated knowledge and technical terms are unnecessary when it comes to understanding society while it is equally assumed that sophisticated knowledge and technical terms are very necessary for everything from engineering to the law and atomic physics to medicine. You can start down the Left road without the technical terms but the il-literate folks Carrol described as engaging in study groups oriented to Marx or Gramsci or... had to learn the language to learn the politics and understand the strategies of the left.

I don't use this language all the time and, for that matter, just about never use it in my undergraduate teaching but it has more than a place on the left and, tracking discussions here for a number of years, it clearly has a place here.



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