Witches' Milk: Queer Breastfeeding and Alternative Kin-Making in Isak Dinesen's "The Caryatids". Issue 4 (2nd October 2022)
- Record Type:
- Journal Article
- Title:
- Witches' Milk: Queer Breastfeeding and Alternative Kin-Making in Isak Dinesen's "The Caryatids". Issue 4 (2nd October 2022)
- Main Title:
- Witches' Milk: Queer Breastfeeding and Alternative Kin-Making in Isak Dinesen's "The Caryatids"
- Authors:
- Mortensen, Peter
- Abstract:
- ABSTRACT: In this essay, I use the recent convergence of queer, feminist, and ecocritical perspectives under the heading of "queer ecology" to analyse how Danish bilingual author Isak Dinesen (real name: Karen Blixen) deploys breastfeeding in her Gothic story "The Caryatids: An Unfinished Story." Queer ecology entails critiquing the assumption (or myth) that heterosexual identities, monogamous relationships, consanguineous kinship networks, and reproductive nuclear families are better, healthier, or more "natural" than other formations. I situate Dinesen in opposition to the tradition of Enlightenment "lactivism, " whose proponents (chief among them Jean-Jacques Rousseau) celebrated exclusive maternal breastfeeding within hetero-reproductive nuclear family structures. In my reading of "The Caryatids, " I place special emphasis on three Gothic-related female characters—the incestuous wife, the adulterous mother, and the "gypsy" witch—who breastfeed queerly, knowingly or unknowingly thwarting the demand that women nurse the monogamous and patriarchal bio-family order into existence. When removed from its sanctioned familial context, I argue, the lactating breast in Dinesen's narrative proves a disorderly signifier of errancy and dissent, pointing towards the possibility of alternative, emergent, contingent, and potentially more sustainable configurations of gender, relationship, and community.
- Is Part Of:
- NORA. Volume 30:Issue 4(2022)
- Journal:
- NORA
- Issue:
- Volume 30:Issue 4(2022)
- Issue Display:
- Volume 30, Issue 4 (2022)
- Year:
- 2022
- Volume:
- 30
- Issue:
- 4
- Issue Sort Value:
- 2022-0030-0004-0000
- Page Start:
- 264
- Page End:
- 277
- Publication Date:
- 2022-10-02
- Subjects:
- Isak Dinesen -- queer ecology -- literature -- Gothic -- breastfeeding
Women's studies -- Periodicals
Feminism -- Periodicals
305.4 - Journal URLs:
- http://www.tandfonline.com/ ↗
- DOI:
- 10.1080/08038740.2022.2100824 ↗
- Languages:
- English
- ISSNs:
- 0803-8740
- Deposit Type:
- Legaldeposit
- View Content:
- Available online (eLD content is only available in our Reading Rooms) ↗
- Physical Locations:
- British Library DSC - 6117.380500
British Library DSC - BLDSS-3PM
British Library HMNTS - ELD Digital store - Ingest File:
- 24422.xml