Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies
This paper by ecofeminist scholar Greta Gaard presents a strong case for what she terms a “Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies,” a field of scholarship that recognizes the importance of human and nonhuman animal milk as materials through which various types of political and economic power relationships are enacted. Outlining the evolution of the industrial production of cow’s milk, as well as ways in which human mother’s milk has been viewed differently at different time periods, Gaard wishes to promote a deeper scholarship of how milk in general has shaped our world.
Milk is one of the most important substances in the sustenance of young life, both human and nonhuman, and for Greta Gaard, it is something that should be studied much more deeply than it is. Though she notes that both vegan feminists and animal ecofeminists, as well as those in the field of food studies, have studied milk, it is a substance and subject that demands further inquiry. “The pervasive availability of cows’ milk today—from grocery stores to gas stations—is a historically unprecedented product of industrialization, urbanization, culture, and economics,” she says, and in this paper she is making an initial “[proposal for] bringing these knowledge fields together through a new intersectional field of feminist postcolonial milk studies, a perspective capable of interrogating the multiply complex cultural assumptions and material practices articulated through milk.”
For Gaard, the complex relationship that humans have to milk, including their own, has a lot to do with political economy, and she states emphatically that “women’s breast milk and women’s labor are part of the gift economy that is simultaneously invisible, unmonetized, and appropriated in national and international economic systems.” She cites research that estimates the value of human breast milk at approximately $5 billion in the U.S. alone, but also notes that the paradox that, “when women’s breast milk is introduced as a market commodity, it fares poorly. In 2010 New York chef Daniel Angerer produced his wife’s breast milk cheese at Klee Brasserie and was promptly shut down by the New York Health Department.” It is precisely this paradox, and the fact that many humans are ready and willing to consume cow’s milk, that Gaard explores as an area of inquiry. “If eating women’s breast milk ‘feels like cannibalism,’ what does it feel like to eat other females’ milk,” she asks, “and what does it feel like to be a farm animal?” Gaard notes that cows’ bodies and natural lifespans are decimated by the dairy industry, all to produce a product which a majority of the world cannot even digest. She notes Nestle’s powdered milk campaign in Africa (in which many thousands of young mothers were persuaded to use powdered milk and formula instead of breast milk) as one example where the quest for corporate profits resulted in the suffering and death, not only of cows, but human infants. She also cites Operation Flood, “initiated as a solution to a difficult market situation […] a huge dairy surplus in the form of milk powder and butter, [where] after reconstituting some quantities and dumping others, the EEC finally sought to dispose of these products to the third world in the form of food aid.” These examples show not only a desire to place profit ahead of human and animal suffering, but also for the Western world to impress values upon the rest of the world in a kind of food colonialism.
Throughout her work, Gaard brings the question of the animal back into focus: “What is the embodied experience of a dairy cow, and how can we know it?” She states that for many years these questions have been addressed almost solely by the animal sciences, scholars often embedded in the very industries which profit from cows and their milk, representing a gap in scholarship that is truly concerned with the experience of cows. She also notes a gap in empathy between human mothers and their cow counterparts: “Ideologically imprisoned in a humanist colonial framework, few human mothers who breastfeed their infants use this embodied experience as an avenue for empathizing with other mammal mothers; few human parents who touch and nurture their newborns have used these behaviors’ affectionate oxytocin release as an opportunity to consider the experiences of other animal parents locked in systems of human captivity.” She closes her essay in much the same way that she began, with a call to turn to feminist postcolonial milk studies as a way of better understanding our intricate, contradictory, and political relationship with the very substances which help to sustain life.
Original Abstract:
This essay investigates milk as a material with various meanings and compositions in different historical and cultural contexts. I bring together research from the several disciplinary fields where “milk studies” has already begun: food studies, postcolonial studies, animal studies, feminist studies, environmental justice, animal science, and biology. Using these perspectives, I investigate milk by addressing topics such as breastfeeding/nursing across race, class, and species in US history; US dairy industry production practices, economics, and the biological and behavioral experiences of lactating cows; India’s Operation Flood (also called the “White Revolution”) and its devastating effects on mothers and children, cows and calves, rural poor and small dairy farmers; and the US Dairy Council’s eurocentric and nutritionally unsupported ads promoting milk as the “perfect food.” Influenced by feminist philosophers of science, postcolonial ecofeminisms, and the new material feminisms, I examine the animal sciences research on lactation, oxytocin, and maternal behaviors by juxtaposing them with the biosciences studies of lactating human mothers, hormones, and behaviors: read together, these scientific studies show few differences across lactating mothers of diverse species, yet their findings are interpreted in ways that reaffirm the cultural assumptions of the researchers’ various disciplines. In sum, I argue for bringing together these various disciplinary approaches in a new critical framework, one that is sufficiently inclusive and capable of describing the complex cultural assumptions and material practices articulated through the uses of milk across nations, genders, races, species, and environments.