More than maternity

Representations of breastfeeding in Western art

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  • Published 20250204
  • ISBN: 978-1-923213-04-3
  • Extent: 196 pp
  • Paperback, ebook. PDF

LIKE MANY PROFESSIONAL drifters of my generation, I had moved house often and quickly until my thirties, and home had become quite a melancholy idea. The pandemic placed me on the floor of a valley a few hours from the city. I had always been trying to move, someplace, anyplace, outside of this country’s borders, and COVID-19 put a final end to my youth and all my futile efforts to leave forever. As the general lockdown stretched on, I accepted that I now lived with my partner in the spider-webbed farmhouse of his childhood. It was not the big change I had expected, but I hurtled my way further and further into my new country life, and we fell pregnant the following year.

‘Many cultures assign women to the interior,’ wrote Michelle Perrot in The Bedroom: An Intimate History. I thought I knew this. And yet as soon as my pregnancy formally commenced with an anxious pee on a plastic stick – those two watery red lines hovering, unbelievably, into view, the soles of my feet sweating a little on the cool bathroom tiles – these illusions began to fall away. With my body in full biological motion, I began to see the home as a site of heart-turning drama. Not hospital hallways, not Mafia headquarters. Not overtaken warehouses in political thrillers, not Parliament House, for God’s sake. Not newsrooms. Bathrooms and bedrooms and living rooms and dining areas. Verandahs. Corridors. Door frames. Windows. They are, for me, the loaded places of terrible, awesome, life-changing moments of emergency and tenderness and epiphany.

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About the author

Lauren Carroll Harris

Lauren Carroll Harris is a non-fiction writer whose work has been published in New Statesman, The Brooklyn Rail, Literary Hub, Los Angeles Review of...

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Interstitial

Non-fictionAmerican sociologists John and Ruth Hill Useem first coined the term ‘third culture kid’ in the 1950s to describe the experience of Americans who were raised abroad in a culture different to their birth culture. This term reflects the way children raised overseas straddle three cultures: the culture of their birth, the culture within which they are raised, and a third, nebulous culture – the culture they create through the way they learn to relate to each other. The third culture is interstitial, not an amalgam. ‘Third culture kid’ (TCK) is a term often used as shorthand. Many TCKs will have experienced more than one cultural shift too. Those with diplomatic, military or missionary families are often raised in multiple countries, and others, like me, will continue their travels overseas as adults too, exercising the global and economic mobility they know well.

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