‘The Free-Flying Natural Woman Boobs of Yore’? the Body Beyond Representation in Feminist Accounts of Objectification

Abstract

This article takes up references to breasts as a key case study to examine white Western feminist debate around embodiment and objectification. Tracking shifting understandings of ‘the gaze’ in these accounts, we find that objectification is often rendered singular, ahistorical and, increasingly, individually internalised. The history of these approaches to objectification helps to explain why during the early 2000s, theorisations of feminist politics-lost were often rhetorically located alongside discussions of surgically modified breasts as a symbol of a new era of ‘fake’ feminism. In contrast, the 2010s saw several feminist movements premised on exposure of flesh and claims to individual recuperation of bodily autonomy. This article contends that both of these perspectives rely on a notion, built over successive eras of white Western feminist thought, that political work can and ought to be done through the body as a site of representational politics. This article subsequently offers a brief insight into how we might queer our approach to breasts to better account for the messiness of experiences of the flesh, considering the personal as political, while not investing in the body as the site where politics must be enacted.

Keywords

feminism postfeminism breasts femininity embodiment queer theory

introduction

As Hilary Hinds and Jackie Stacey (2001) have argued, bras and breasts are strongly symbolically imbricated in the history of women’s liberation in the West, most notably around the myth of the feminist ‘bra-burner’. The myth emerged in response to the women’s liberation protest at the 1968 Miss America Pageant, where around 150 protesters paraded sheep along the outside boardwalk, holding signs and throwing various items into a ‘freedom trash can’ (Spain, 2016, p. 26). Though many objects—not only bras—were part of the stunt, and though the trashcan was never set alight due to police restrictions, the legend of bra-burning has endured as a caricature of early radical feminist activism (Siegel, 2007, p. 49). As others have discussed, the negative media fixation on the bra-burning myth has functioned to reinforce negative stereotypes of feminists as anti-feminine (Whelehan, 2000; Beins, 2015). As Hinds and Stacey suggest:

Given the items in the ‘freedom trashcan’ in Atlantic City, the liberation of the foot from the high heel or the stomach from the girdle could have been taken up by the media as appropriate symbols of this new movement, and yet it is the fetishism of the bra and the breast that has lasted for 30 years as a metonym for the essence of women’s liberation. (Hinds and Stacey, 2001, p. 159)

As this passage highlights, the focus on the ‘bra and the breast’ and myth of the bra-burner reveals a persistent symbolic association between breasts and feminist activism in the popular imaginary in the West. However, it is also in recent years within Western feminist thought that breasts have come to function as symbols and signifiers, of the state—or health—of feminist politics. As I explore below, some of these accounts have tended towards making the objects of objectification (in my examples, breasts) ‘the problem’, particularly in accounts where objectification is theorised as a male gaze interiorised by women. The theory of objectification is primarily concerned with how women are reduced to their appearance and rendered as objects. As Catharine Mackinnon (1982, p. 538) suggests, ‘Woman through male eyes is sex object’. However, as I track across many white Western feminist accounts, objectification has often been rendered ahistorical and untethered from racialised and other coercive bodily regimes. This version of objectification is, at its worst, seen as the fault of individual women who cannot unyoke themselves from the male gaze, signified by how these women ‘do’ their embodiment. Under such accounts, breasts and their accoutrements regularly act as substitutions for the source of trouble.

Here, the body becomes a battleground of politics that accounts only for gender oppression in the narrowest sense (the male gaze) and where the war is no longer fought by the collective, but through the individual. ‘The personal is political’ reaches its corporeal limit, becoming ‘the personal as the political’ (McCann, 2018, p. 28, emphasis in original). This article argues for rethinking this particular emphasis, while still attending to the personal. It subsequently offers a brief insight into how we might enact a queer intersectional approach to bodies to better account for the messiness of experiences of the flesh while historicising objectification. As I explore at the end of this article, queering traditional approaches to objectification might instead allow us to think through questions of bodily liberation while also accounting for the joys, displeasures and complications of breasted-experience. This offers a way to give time to individual experiences of embodiment, understanding the personal as political but not declaring the personal as the political.

from freedom to docility in white Western feminism

From motherhood to nationalist representations of freedom, breasts continue to be embroiled in a web of representation that stretches from the interpersonal to the Western-centric ‘global’. As Marina Warner (2000, p. xxii) argues, throughout Western European history the breast has come to represent ‘complex values’ pertaining to: ‘[l]ove, motherly and erotic and ardent, and the tension between the connotations of maternal tenderness and Amazonian zeal present in the propaganda of the French Republics’. Warner offers the example of Eugène Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People (1830), where the revealed breast is a signifier of liberty following the French Revolution. However, on a more prosaic level, in the West, depictions of breasts have come to represent either (hetero)sexual sexiness or successful achievements of motherhood. As Iris Marion Young (1990, p. 200) argues, there is a sharp social distinction made between breasts as sexual and breasts as nurturing.

With this complex set of Western cultural associations in mind, the feminist texts traced below are largely focused on how breasts are sexualised and objectified. Here, breasts are made objects of study within white Western feminist discourse, as objects of objectification. Though on the one hand these critiques helpfully illustrate some of the gendered logics of objectification, close analysis reveals that they fail to account for the intersectional dynamics of this, and pave the way for investing breasts with political potential for resistance. This maintains a sense that breasts have an efficacious object-status, embedding them with a weight of feminist significance such that some breasts might be marked ‘empowered’ and others ‘disempowered’.

We see latent notions of this investment play out in Germaine Greer’s highly influential radical feminist work The Female Eunuch (1970). While the chapter ‘Curves’ in part describes the anxiety caused by the societal fetishism of breasts, Greer (ibid., p. 34) suggests that liberation and transformation can be found in throwing away one’s bras, ‘[s]o that men must come to terms with the varieties of the real thing’. Foreshadowing the emphasis that would be placed on the nipple in feminist campaigns such as #freethenipple in the following century, Greer (ibid.) suggests that greater representation of nipples would be helpful for women, as ‘[t]he nipple is expressive and responsive’. Despite her anthropological gestures, and her attempt to factor in class distinctions around curves, Greer’s account also presumes a singular white-centred experience of fetishism of breasts in society. This ignores long histories of the fetishisation of black women’s bodies in colonial rule, and in slavery in the West, that cannot be so easily overcome through lifestyle-based refusals to wear constricting undergarments. However, in these passages we also see that Greer has a vision of liberated yet sexual feminist breasts, which sits in contrast with the assumption that in this period breasts were desexualised in the context of feminist liberation (Hinds and Stacey, 2001, p. 160). As Anne Ferguson (1984, p. 106) suggests, women’s liberationists such as Greer were able to account for both ‘danger and pleasure’, albeit within a narrowly white Western framework.

The greater social mainstreaming of sexual liberation and the attendant sexualisation of Western culture into the 1980s meant that there was little space for maintaining this approach, and instead there was a more detailed focus on the technologies of objectification. For instance, Andrea Dworkin (1974, p. 114) refers to bras as ‘binding’ objects, in the context of a discussion about foot binding, blurring cultural lines in order to make a broad point about women’s oppression in the West. Breasts also feature extensively in Susan Brownmiller’s work Femininity (1984), wherein she tracks the changing social ‘trends’ around breasts. In such discussions, breasts are included in broader points about expectations of femininity generally and the reduction of women to their parts via the male gaze, rather than exploring the liberatory potential of those parts per se (as Greer might have it). In these accounts, flesh is rendered a passive receptor of social inscription. Breasts are politically significant but submissive, and indeed imprisoned, or as Brownmiller (ibid., p. 45) describes, ‘a thoroughly colonised province of masculine sexuality’. In these accounts, the relevance of actual colonisation for understanding the history of objectification is washed of its racist Western specificity. Instead, in these accounts there emerges a conceptualisation around the ‘docility’ of bodies, and references to all women’s individual ‘vanity’ as part of this (ibid., p. 51).

Into the 1990s, as neoliberal ideology intensified in the West, so too did white Western feminist examinations of femininity and embodiment begin to collapse the theory of the male gaze into women themselves, shifting the story of objectification to a distinctly individual register. For example, speaking generally about all women, Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth (1990) argues that women have internalised norms about breasts in a particularly pernicious way. Discussing plastic surgery, Wolf (ibid., p. 247) claims that breast surgery is akin to ‘mutiliation’ that women falsely claim is ‘for themselves’. Notably, the gaze that Wolf describes as internalised is not only colour-blind but operates regardless of sexuality. Eliding the experience of queer women, she suggests that, ‘Since most women rarely if ever see or touch other women’s breasts, they have no idea what they feel like … or of how they really look during lovemaking’ (ibid., p. 246). While Wolf’s approach is distinctly ‘third wave’ insofar as she endorses the reclamation of women’s sexual pleasure, her characterisation of the gaze remains singular. Furthermore, we see in this work a veer towards endorsing individual ‘choice’ as the resolution to the conundrum of victimisation (ibid., pp. 272–273).

Also published in 1990, Sandra Bartky’s Femininity and Domination (1990) proposes a theory of feminine narcissism, whereby the objectification of women’s bodies can be understood as something that women absorb and reproduce. Bartky (ibid., p 32)—following the uncited Combahee River Collective (1983 [1977])—acknowledges that oppression is ‘interlocking’, but that sexual objectification is understood as uniform. Though Bartky draws on Franz Fanon’s (1986) critique of colonialism, rather than deepening an understanding of how objectification is constructed beyond the narrowly gendered ‘male’ gaze, she uses his theory of the psychic effects of colonial rule as a metaphor to understand women’s oppression. She suggests that ‘Women of all races and ethnicities, like Fanon’s “black man,” are subject not only to stereotyping and cultural depreciation but to sexual objectification as well’ (Bartky, 1990, p. 26). On the topic of breasts specifically, Bartky acknowledges a limited set of changing norms around how breasts must appear—‘Breasts are bound in one decade, padded in another’—but goes on to add that all women have adopted ‘infatuation with an inferiorized body’ that keeps their bodies docile to these changing trends (ibid., p. 40, emphasis in original). For Bartky (extrapolating to all women), breasts are one important example of how a form of narcissism has emerged in the late twentieth century where the external (and singularly) male gaze is not necessary but is instead interiorised by women. Bartky (ibid., p. 43), taking a Marxist feminist perspective, notes that what is needed is a collective movement against oppressive regimes of femininity, where ‘while not requiring body display, will not make it taboo either; it will allow and even encourage fantasy and play in self-ornamentation’. However, as discussed in the following section, we can also see that in the context of rising neoliberal ideology in the West, notions of internalisation as ‘narcissism’ laid the groundwork for a particular political inflection placing responsibility on the individual for docility.

While many of the feminists discussed so far address the intersection of racism and beauty norms around skin colour and the lauding of whiteness in beauty culture, the internalised gaze is rendered colour-blind. In stark contrast, bell hooks (1997) highlights the deeply racialised politics involved in objectification that is missing from all of these accounts, wherein the notion of an internalised male gaze is understood as insufficiently explanatory. hooks (ibid., p. 115) illustrates the way that obsession over black women’s breasts and ‘butts’ has a long history embedded in colonialism and its logics. Noting the display of chocolate breasts at a dessert shop, hooks is confronted when her white colleagues do not think of the racialised history this calls to mind. hooks goes on to describe the history of enslaved black women put on ‘show’ in Europe during the nineteenth century:

Objectified in a manner similar to that of black female slaves who stood on auction blocks while owners and overseers described their important, saleable parts, the black women whose naked bodies were displayed for whites at social functions had no presence. They were reduced to mere spectacle. (ibid., p. 114)

hooks (ibid., p. 128) suggests that representation must be interrupted and rewritten by black women in a way that centres pleasure and fulfilment, rather than the desires of others. Her more complex account of objectification and the gaze nonetheless draws on a logic of internalised docility, as she suggests that ‘black women have either passively absorbed this thinking or vehemently resisted it’ (ibid., p. 117). Yet, in drawing attention to history, hooks does not prescribe a particular programme for re-wielding the body for political ends (freeing breasts from the bra, focusing on the nipple and so forth). Her account maintains focus on the context of oppression that constructs and recirculates the objectification of black women’s bodies.

What we gain from hooks is understanding of the necessity of accounting for history and context in attempts to subvert and resist objectification. hooks’ work sits within a body of USA-centric black feminist thought emerging in the period that offered critiques of mainstream white Western feminist organising and politics, such as Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1989) germinal work on intersectionality. It was also in this period that queer theorists such as Judith Butler (1990) began to offer critiques of the false globalism and latent heterosexism of many feminist accounts.

breasts and the narrative of Western feminist loss

In the aftermath of these critiques of difference, in the 2000s a tendency emerged to describe feminism as ‘lost’ (Adkins, 2004; Hemmings, 2005; Dean, 2012). UK feminist scholar Angela McRobbie (2009, p. 13) derisively characterises this period (focusing particularly on Butler) as ‘feminism dismantling itself’. As Jonathan Dean (2012, p. 323) argues, during this time loss became key to the ‘affective economy’ of feminist discourse in the West. Several popular white Western feminist texts published at the time extended discussions of embodiment and objectification, but invested women’s bodies with a new kind of significance around this loss (McCann, 2018, p. 50). As I outline below, taking discussion of breasts in these texts as an example, these thinkers explicitly establish a connection between women’s bodies and the theory of (Western) feminism ‘lost’. In these accounts, not only is objectification understood in interiorised individualised terms, but individual bodies are understood as indicative of the state of feminist activism. Despite the critiques of difference raised in the 1990s, these authors continue on without recognition of the intersectional factors influencing objectification, instead cementing the notion that feminist activism be exercised through the body, and through individualised choices.

The leading example of this, given its general popularity and broad reach in the West at the time, is Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (2005). Echoing Bartky’s theory of feminine narcissism, Levy explores the idea that women (again, extrapolating to women broadly) have become complicit in regimes of objectification. Levy evokes a sense of a feminist past—located in the West but not named as such—prevented from flourishing by women who have become ‘female chauvinist pigs’. Drawing explicitly on the myth of the feminist bra-burner from the USA Miss America protest, Levy (ibid., p. 3) contends that ‘Only thirty years (my lifetime) ago, our mothers were “burning their bras” and picketing Playboy, and suddenly [now we are] getting implants and wearing the bunny logo as supposed symbols of our liberation’. Levy contrasts the liberation-focused past with the surface-focused present, coding this feminist loss along bodily lines.

Levy discusses a range of topics, but gives great focus to exposed breasts, where ‘implants’ function as a specific signifier of the (problematic) present. She suggests that ‘“Raunchy” and “liberated” are not synonyms. It is worth asking ourselves if this bawdy world of boobs and gams we have resurrected reflects how far we’ve come, or how far we have left to go’ (ibid., p. 5). It is interesting to see here how Levy draws on the discrete body parts of ‘boobs’ (breasts) and ‘gams’ (legs) to function as symbolic of an old sexism that has re-emerged. Levy suggests that this is an era of ‘raunch culture’, where the promises of sexual liberation have imprisoned women. She focuses in detail on the video franchise Girls Gone Wild, where young women are encouraged to flash their breasts for the viewing audience, as evidence of this. However, Levy does not simply analyse the objectification of breasts (and women’s bodies generally) in contemporary Western society—within her critique of objectification, breasts inadvertently come to function as a signifier of lost feminism. As she writes:

Instead of hairy legs, we have waxed vaginas; the free-flying natural woman boobs of yore have been hoisted with push-up bras or ‘enhanced’ into taut plastic orbs that stand perpetually at attention. What has moved into feminism’s place as the most pervasive phenomenon in American womanhood is an almost opposite style, attitude, and set of principles. (ibid., p. 87)

Mapped onto the contrast between feminism past and (lost) contemporary feminism in the USA is the idea that breasts used to be truly ‘free’, while contemporary breasts are not. In this passage, the bra plays a central role, as well as plastic surgery, which has continued to be a topic of contention as the practice has become ubiquitous (Morgan, 1991; Holliday and Taylor, 2006; Marwick, 2010). What we see in Levy’s work is that the discursive placement of the ‘taut plastic orbs’ against the bleak assessment of a lost ‘set of principles’ collapses the personal into the political where ‘fake’ breasts can be said to corrupt feminist politics. Levy’s remarks go beyond a critique of plastic surgery/normative regimes of embodiment to suggest that the body is the key site of loss. We see through Levy’s account that where the body can be understood as carrying resistant potential, so too is it then set up to fail as potentially not resistant enough.

Similarly, Nina Power’s One Dimensional Woman (2009) offers a broad assessment of the state of feminism in the West. Here we see breasts operating as a metaphor for the state of feminism writ large. Also writing on the topic of Girls Gone Wild, Power suggests that:

When the ‘Girls Gone Wild’ team hand out hats or t-shirts in exchange for a shot of breasts, or the performance of a snog with another woman, the logic is right out in the open: we’ll give you something obviously crap in exchange for a kind of performance that reveals that there is nothing subjective, nothing left, hidden behind the appearance, that you simply are commensurate with your comportment in the world. You are your breasts. (ibid., p. 24)

Given that the logic of objectification that both Power and Levy work with centres specifically on the operation of the male gaze, in both of their accounts we find that same-sex attraction is rendered always performative. Pointing out the broader context of objectification, Power critiques these performances as ‘surface’ without substance. Ironically, given Power’s recognition that under regimes of raunch culture women ‘are [their] breasts’, she then makes the same rhetorical move. Power shortly states that:

They, the breasts, and not their ‘owner’, are the centre of attention, and are referred to, with alarming regularity, as completely autonomous objects, much as one would refer to suitcases or doughnuts. Constantly fiddled with, adjusted, exposed, covered-up or discussed, contemporary breasts resemble nothing so much as bourgeois pets: idiotic, toothless, yapping dogs with ribbons in their hair and personalised carrying pouches. These milkless objects of bemused scopophilia (frequently and explicitly ‘fake’, as is the fashion) are described over and over as if possessed of their own will and desire, separate from that of their owners (‘Oh no! It slipped out of my top! Again!’). (ibid., p. 25)

Power moves from a critique of the cultural representation and objectification of women, to women themselves in personal relationship to their bodies. She reiterates the sentiment that women have internalised their objectification, also calling to mind Herbert Marcuse’s (1964) ‘one dimensional man’ who has absorbed commercial interests. However, as we see in these excerpts, Power’s derision of the objectification of breasts here cannot help but slip to the women who have internalised objectification (the ‘owners’). This is most clearly illustrated in the suggestion that the breasts are ‘idiotic, toothless’, inferring that these women lack ‘teeth’, that is, the substance of feminist politics past.

Lastly, we might turn to Natasha Walter’s Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (2010), which focuses on scenes of exposed breasts as a symptom of lost feminism and what Walter calls ‘The New Sexism’ (ibid., p. 19). In her first chapter, she recalls visiting a nightclub, wherein the crowd shouted ‘… get your tits out, get your tits out, get your tits out for the lads’, and where the women in question ‘… rubbed their breasts against each other’ (ibid., p. 24). Rather than examining the complex interplay of homoerotic dynamics with objectification, there is no longer room for understanding both the pleasure and danger of negotiating sexual expression, only danger. While Walter aims to describe the ‘technologies of sexiness’ (Evans, Riley and Shankar, 2010), she understands revealed breasts as inherently problematic. In Walter’s (2010, p. 71) descriptions, large/exposed/pushed-up and ‘pneumatic’ breasts all function as symbols of a new sexism not via a discussion of women’s experiences negotiating a sexist terrain of normative breast-expectations but rather as inevitable identifiers of a problematic culture. Such perspectives prime clashes—often played out along generational lines—seen in the past decade between those who see breasts as always subject to disempowering processes of objectification where no agency is recoverable, and those who attempt to reclaim the body (including exposed breasts) as empowered.

These texts embed the idea that breasts are a synecdoche of lost feminism, that to analyse the state of breasts in contemporary Western culture is necessary to assess the state of Western feminism. Here, a binary between the ‘real’/‘fake’ breasts symbolically functions to represent ‘real’/‘fake’ feminism. While these accounts mark out certain embodiments—and ‘fake’ breasts in particular—as un- or anti-feminist, they miss the fact that the very same embodiments are often portrayed as grotesque and unfeminine in mainstream media. This association between ‘lost’ feminism and ‘fake’ breasts works to obscure intersectional specificities. For example, as Jeffrey Brown (2005, p. 84) discusses, the breasts of celebrity Anna Nicole Smith became a focus of media scrutiny, wherein her ‘white trash’ status and failure to embody appropriate femininity were signified by her breast implants. Similarly, the focus on revealed breasts as always-problematic occludes recognition of the ways that non-white bodies have been historically marked as hypersexual (Parreñas Shimizu, 2007), a point that—as hooks raised a decade earlier—should complicate simple narratives of the logics of objectification.

reclaiming breasts in the West

These claims about an era of ‘lost’ feminism came to be specifically characterised in terms of ‘postfeminism’, invoking comparison of a politically oriented past to a surface-oriented present where feminist gains had been actively undermined (McRobbie, 2009). Enrolled in many critiques of postfeminism at this time was a focus on women’s embodiment, particularly as related to ideals of sexiness and femininity (Renold and Ringrose, 2008; Jackson, Vares and Gill, 2013). For example, Camille Nurka (2015) theorises breast surgery as a metaphor for postfeminism trumping feminism. She writes:

… in the antagonistic postfeminist rift between unfuckable mothers and fuckable daughters, the creative potential of the female body’s biological function (giving birth) cannot possibly compete with the creative process of erasing the birthing body through cosmetic surgery. (ibid., p. 211)

In Nurka and similar discussions of plastic surgery, we see a final symbolic gesture where change to the body (in the case of surgery, taking into oneself the ‘false’/’fake’ silicone implant) is an assault to the ‘naturalness’ of prior feminism. While Nurka claims that the constitution of cosmetically altered bodies erases mothers past, she inadvertently evokes a generational tension between the bodies of young women who may undergo surgery for reasons beyond the ‘birthing body’ (perhaps even, to be closer to this symbolic body in terms of aligning with ‘the feminine’).

So far, the historical moves I have tracked have been around describing the body as made docile by an internalised—specifically male—gaze, with a focus on breasts as one site of lost revolutionary potential. Though the way of framing the significance of breasts for feminism has changed over time—from docility to loss, to postfeminism—the investment in the body as a site of politics, and thus political power (to resist, or capitulate), has intensified with the broader rise of neoliberalism. This emphasis has been further exemplified by various white Western feminist demonstrations since the mid-2010s that have sought to reclaim the body in resistance to objectification. This political investment in the body creates a logic where revealed bodies/breasts might be seen by some as powerful, while the very same acts might for others be seen to maintain regimes of hypersexualisation.

For example, the #freethenipple social media campaign has been critiqued as highly individualised and sexualised (Barnard, 2016). Similarly, the meaning of the display of breasts by some SlutWalk activists has engendered fierce debate over whether showing one’s body is a powerful act of resistance (Dow and Wood, 2014), especially when considering that women of colour have historically been represented in racist ways as more bodily, wild and closer to nature through exposure of body parts (Nguyen, 2013). Also similarly, FEMEN’s claims to the power of topless protest have frequently been enacted alongside Islamophobic statements and actions from the group (O’Keefe, 2014, p. 14). These racialised entanglements between breasts and claims to empowerment through exposure of flesh evoke the histories of slavery and colonisation involved in representations of non-white bodies. There have, however, been attempts to utilise these strategies in anti-racist ways, such as the 2015 topless #SayHerName protests that were part of the National Day of Action for Black Women and Girls, used to draw attention to police violence (Wong, 2015). Here, recuperation was not merely of the male gaze, but of resistance to the colonial white supremacy embedded in the logic of the gaze. Such examples call to mind hooks’ (1997) work highlighting the highly contextual nature of using the exposed body as a political protest tool, and suggest that it is essential to take context and history into account.

However, we might still problematise the neoliberal elements of suggesting that one’s body should act as a political ‘manifesto’ as FEMEN have (O’Keefe, 2014, p. 10). The consequence of making ‘the personal’ signify ‘the political’ leaves us in an inevitable bind where what is judged as ‘disempowered’/docile might be claimed by others as ‘empowered’/resistant. What these accounts miss, particularly in relation to their use of breasts as the test of freedom or bondage, is centring on the experience of breasts in a way that breaks down these either/or assumptions. When we decentre from the logic of ‘choice’, neither claims to empowerment nor disempowerment carry as much weight, and we might begin to notice desires and experiences that we could not account for previously (McCann, 2015, p. 244). We might wonder why we cannot have a more complicated understanding of the ways people are called on to negotiate the political terrain of breasts and bodies, all the while having, or perhaps desiring, breasts in the first instance.

queering breasts

Queering the approach to breasts otherwise offered in the Western feminist canon tracked here means considering the experiences of breasted subjectivity that do not neatly map onto a binary of empowerment/disempowerment and that acknowledge the complex intersectional factors around experiencing objectification. This approach goes beyond the focus on breasts/bodies as a ‘test’ of feminism, creating space to acknowledge and understand the politics of lived experience without then reproducing the body to a signifier of the political.

Turning to a queer approach here is not to suggest that there have not also been feminist accounts focusing on experiences of breasts, that go beyond the symbolic meaning of exposure. For example, we can turn to the work of Audre Lorde (1980) or Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1992), among others, on the experience of breast cancer, who offer important attention to embodied experiences in discussions of breasts. Indeed, discussions from broadly feminist perspectives around breastfeeding (Bartlett, 2002; Taylor and Wallace, 2012; Faircloth, 2015; Lee, 2018) and living with breast cancer (Pitts, 2004; Kaiser, 2008; Clark, 2017; Parton, Ussher and Perz, 2017), in particular, continue to be published on a frequent basis. We might also note Iris Marion Young’s (1990, p. 190) important phenomenological work, which calls to examine ‘a positive women’s voice for breasted experience’. However, Young also restates the ‘natural’ versus ‘fake’ breast binary, where she both expresses concern for breast augmentation surgery and suggests the liberatory effects of not wearing a bra. Here, precisely what counts as the ‘natural’ body, versus the augmented body, remains unclear. As Kathy Davis (1997, p. 35) implores in her writing on the utopian possibilities (and limits) of cosmetic breast surgery, what is missing from many accounts is ‘the sentient and embodied female subject’. Arguably, this is still missing, absorbed instead today into body as politics, as described.

However, a queer account is not simply about describing experience, and is specifically about breaking down binaries around the fake/natural, the empowered/disempowered and what constitutes pleasure/danger. As Fiona Giles (2004, p. 301) suggests in her account of a queer approach to breastfeeding, ‘queering’ refers to considerations ‘outside the normative constraints’. As I have written previously around how to acknowledge the queer aspects of queer femme identity without relying on flattening tropes of visibility, ‘Femininity can be understood queerly when we consider what it does and not simply what it means’ (McCann, 2018, p. 12, emphasis in original), challenging the binary of empowerment/disempowerment. In a broader sense, then, queering our analyses of breasts in contrast to the strand of feminist thought described above requires looking outside the ways of speaking about breasts in terms of docility, loss or postfeminism, and instead complicating claims to the ‘natural’ and refocusing on experiences of embodiment in order to challenge claims to authenticity as well as ‘choice’. To queer our approach to body politics, then, is to maintain a critique of objectification—which acknowledges the intersecting histories that inform the cultural landscape—while simultaneously accounting for the messy ways that this plays out, breaking down binaries and resisting collapsing the personal into the political.

Starting from this point of personal experience, an important and productive space for rethinking breasts comes from within the field of transgender studies, which proliferates with engagements around the experience of changing bodies and the desire for embodiment and identity without evaluating these along simple lines of empowerment/disempowerment. Though surgery is not an essential part of all transgender experiences, the reflections on body modifications and transformations from writing in the field of transgender studies offer important insights for feminist discussions of bodies. As Trystan Cotten (2014, p. 205) argues, ‘Redrawing the body’s sex contours affirms the feminist mantra that biology is not destiny’. For instance, we may look to Dean Spade’s (2003) reflections on undergoing top surgery, which reveal the complicated experiences involved in circumnavigating the social breast-terrain. Spade’s perspective here challenges critiques of plastic surgery as necessarily corrupt, and also acknowledges how these critiques have impacted on some trans people desiring surgery. Spade reflects:

The therapists I’ve seen have wanted to hear that I hate my breasts, that the desire for surgery comes from desperation. What would it mean to suggest that such desire for surgery is a joyful affirmation of gender self-determination—that a SRS [Sex Reassignment Surgery] candidate would not wish to get comfortable in a stable gender category, but instead be delighted to be transforming—to choose it over residing safely in ‘man’ or ‘woman’? (ibid., p. 21)

Spade (ibid., p. 18) also makes the point that there is a differentiation made between breast augmentation surgery as merely ‘cosmetic’ or breast removal for cancer patients as ‘treatment’ and any breast surgery performed for trans persons as belonging to another moral category. This theorising echoes Davis’ (1997) findings on cosmetic surgery undertaken by cisgender women, which emphasised the role of identity rather than straightforward beauty norms in determining decisions for breast augmentation. In Spade’s account, he resists any simple reduction of breasts to the symbolic of something ‘lost’—rather, it is in losing his breasts that a complex relation to gender can be found, though not because he ‘hates’ his breasts. Similarly, as Micha Cárdenas (2014, p. 181) importantly highlights, the trans body that gains breasts and undergoes physical transformation is marked as ‘sick’ by the psychological-medical establishments that ‘diagnose’ transgender status. Where breasts change, or are gained because of hormonal supplements or surgery, a binary of ‘real’ versus ‘natural’ breasts might only serve to further pathologise the bodies of transwomen in particular. Furthermore, where the synecdoche of ‘fake’ breasts as ‘fake’ feminism persists, this sets up a dangerous space for justifying the embodiments of trans or gender-nonconforming persons as un- or anti-feminist.

A refocusing on the potential joy of breasts may be a similarly useful way to focus on experience to queer our understanding of breasts, acknowledging the personal as political without enrolling the personal as the political. Within lesbian and queer femme writing, for example, there is much reflection on this aspect of breasts. As Lisa Walker reflects:

Pages of femme writing overflow with descriptions of stockings, dresses, shoes, and lingerie. The erotics of dress are lovingly detailed—the feel of the zipper running smoothly up the back, of a breeze rising up a skirt, of breasts cradled in a pushup bra, of the slick of lipstick across the mouth. (Walker, 2012, p. 807)

As Walker tracks, in these femme accounts the technology of the bra, often seen as restrictive, is reflected on with delight. Here, breasts are ‘cradled’ by the bra, evoking a sense of literal support but in turn also nurture, care, safety and desire.

However, we need not only look to ‘subaltern sexual protagonists’ alone for queer insights (Jagose, 2010, p. 519). One contemporary feminist enactment that ‘queers’ breasts via experiential reflection can be found in the work of Caitlin Moran. In How to Be a Woman (2011), Moran reflects on breasts and bras in great detail, not for their revolutionary capacities, but rather for the mundane ways in which she finds both joy and pain in appendages and accessories. On the subject of her breasts, she writes:

On their own, I’d just be kicking them in front of me, like an overly long dress. But with a Bra, I can place them anywhere … If I don’t have my contact lenses in, they could end up anywhere. I fully expect to leave the house one day, hungover and in a hurry, with my tits on my head. (ibid., p. 101)

Moran’s breasts are unruly, humorous and helpfully managed using a bra, where bras are seen to enhance bodily capacity and autonomy. This perspective extends to how she judges the ethics (rather than morals) around bra-wearing: what causes pain, what enhances capacity? In one section, she reflects on a ‘bad’ painful bra: ‘I would hurl it to the floor, and rub the red welt that it had left, like a monk tending the after effects of a cilice belt’; however, she shortly also reflects that, ‘… bra is my friend’ (ibid., p. 102). Here, joy is a central affect for understanding the relation between bra and breasts, particularly around the ritual of shedding the bra (ibid., p. 101).

Much of the mainstream backlash to self-determined sexual and gender identifications focuses on the misguided ‘politics’ of these identities (Reilly-Cooper, 2016). However, what is truly erroneous in such retorts is the gross misconstrual of how people are trying to find their way around violent regimes of identification and comportment in ways that feel both safe and joyous for them. In the accounts from Spade and Walker, for example, we see that whether breasts are absent, or present and contained, the relation between one’s identity, affects and embodiment is not so clear-cut as to determine which bodily presentations can be said to ‘fail’ or ‘succeed’ politically—indeed such assertions work to ignore the dynamics of experience altogether. Importantly, queering our approach to breasts and bodies does not mean doing away with critiques of objectification, and queering as I have rendered it here should not itself stand in for political critique. Rather, queering our approach to breasts offers space for acknowledgment of the messy and contradictory personal experiences of embodiment under regimes of oppression to help inform but not to determine our political claims. For example, this approach helps us to understand that having surgery/not having surgery, desiring breasts/not desiring breasts, wearing bras/not wearing bras cannot translate easily onto claims about empowerment/disempowerment or victimisation/choice. This approach offers a way to talk about individual experience and agency without reproducing a neoliberal lifestyle-based politics.

conclusion: the body beyond representation

In tracking this history of feminist work on objectification, we see that in orientating towards the question of breasts (or other corporeal fascinations) we must be careful not to make the ‘object’ the problem nor the solution. Much white feminist thought on breasts and objectification in the West has not only de-historicised understanding of the operation of ‘the gaze’ but has also gradually built the ground for over-emphasising the individual as the centre of objectification. However, if we continue to reiterate breasts in terms of their symbolic meaning, investing them with the potential to either fail or succeed politically, we are doomed to code questions relating to bodies and feminist politics along a binary of disempowerment/empowerment that more frequently than not relies on a highly individualised form of politics. If breasts are solely discussed in terms of their meaning to and consequences for feminism, this does not do justice to the complicated relations between self, identity, body and politics involved in experiences of having and negotiating breasts, particularly as this relates to further questions regarding racialisation, gender identity, sexuality, class or otherwise.

In taking breasts into account more holistically, we need a rubric of the political that understands both capitulation and resistance to objectification beyond individual bodies. Queering our approach to breasts in the first instance might alleviate some of these tensions, and provide a glimmer of how to rethink our engagement with ‘the personal’. Looking more closely at the diverse ways that breasts are experienced in terms of materiality, sensation, identity, capacity, pain and affect, for example, can be our guiding point for troubling the neat stories of bodily docility that are now well-rehearsed. This is not to say that representation is moot, or that a thoroughly historical approach to objectification is not also vital. Rather, the opposite is true: in looking to experience, we might make space to consider why we should seek a liberated embodied future in the first place, where ‘choice’ is not rendered in narrow individual terms. Here, we should rethink ‘the personal’, not overstating the individual as the centre of internalised disempowerment nor relying on the defence of choice as empowerment for determining ‘the political’.

Footnotes

author biography

Hannah McCann is a Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research is located within critical femininity studies, and she writes on queer identity, beauty salons, queer fangirls and more. She has published in various feminist journals, including European Journal of Women’s Studies, Women’s Studies Quarterly and Australian Feminist Studies. Her monograph Queering Femininity: Sexuality, Feminism and the Politics of Presentation was published by Routledge in 2018.

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