Lauren Carroll Harris

Lauren Carroll Harris’ cultural criticism has appeared in Sydney Review of Books, Brooklyn Rail, Los Angeles Review of Books, Lit Hub, Radio National, ABC TV, Open Secrets: Essays on the Writing Life (Giramondo Publishing) and Outside the Frame: Art and the Moving Image (Perimeter Books). A former casual academic, she has a PhD in cinema from UNSW. Her debut non-fiction book, We Don’t Belong to Ourselves, will be published by Ultimo Press in 2027.

Articles

Cinema speaks back

Hind Rajab’s story unfolded four months into the spectacular unleashing of Israeli military violence on the people of Gaza. Hind and her family had been following evacuation orders. She remained trapped in the car with the corpses of her six family members for hours as Red Crescent staff tried to arrange a rescue operation. When emergency workers finally reached her, the IDF used an American-made weapon to shell Rajab and her rescue crew. Three hundred and fifty-five bullets hit the car.

Beyond brokenness

I’m convinced that, along with the unfinished claims of 1970s feminism, the long shadow of neoliberalism fuels artistic representations of maternal ambivalence. I have learnt that parenting, community-building and caregiving are not just magnificent but intellectually challenging and historically shaped in a way that I rarely see taken seriously in contemporary art.

The tale of the innocents

All women’s domestic labour is finite and takes a heavy bodily toll. Breastfeeding requires calories, sleep and rest; fatigue and illness can set in, lives can end, and there are only so many hours in a day. The difference now is that such reproductive work is assumed and silenced in a different institution: the atomised single-family home.

More than maternity

Principle among art-history instances of breastfeeding are paintings, sculptures, tapestries and stained-glass art in churches that relay key Biblical moments of the Virgin Mary nursing the baby Jesus. Should you find yourself in the corridors of the Louvre, in the same halls where kings and princes are eternalised, one singular image of breastfeeding will make its way towards you time and time again: that of the Virgin Mary nursing the baby Jesus, which emerged in the twelfth century and proliferated in full bloom from the fourteenth as her cult of worship grew. In art, the nursing Virgin is called the Madonna Lactans, and she is a sanctity. Most of all, as the Church’s model of maternity, she is silent. The son of God as a human baby on Earth has presented something of a conundrum for theology. God may be all powerful, but humans are sinful and females are – in today’s parlance – problematic.

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