Thinking Through Breasts: Writing Maternity

Introduction: Embodied Knowledge and Maternal Experience

In this provocative 2000 paper published in Feminist Theory, Alison Bartlett undertakes a radical reconsideration of how maternal embodiment—specifically the experience of breastfeeding—can transform academic writing and knowledge production. At a historical moment when feminist theory was increasingly engaging with questions of embodiment and corporeality, Bartlett’s work offers a deeply personal yet theoretically rigorous exploration of what she terms an “epistemology of breasts.”

The paper emerges from the productive tensions of 1990s feminist scholarship, which sought to theorize the body without reducing women to biological essentialism. Bartlett navigates this complex terrain by using her own experience of lactation and breastfeeding as both subject matter and methodological approach, demonstrating how maternal experiences can generate new forms of feminist knowledge.

The Transformation of Academic Practice

Central to Bartlett’s argument is the claim that becoming a mother—and particularly the embodied experience of breastfeeding—fundamentally alters one’s relationship to reading, writing, and research. This is not simply a matter of time constraints or practical challenges, but a profound epistemological shift in how knowledge is produced and understood.

Bartlett resists the traditional academic imperative to separate personal experience from scholarly analysis. Instead, she argues that the lactating body offers a unique vantage point for understanding questions of subjectivity, agency, and knowledge production. The breasts, in her analysis, become not merely biological organs but “complex and potentially subversive ‘performances’ of maternity” that challenge conventional boundaries between public and private, mind and body, reason and emotion.

Performativity and Maternal Subjectivity

Drawing on 1990s performative theories of gender—particularly the work of Judith Butler—Bartlett theorizes breastfeeding as a performative act that both constitutes and challenges maternal subjectivity. Just as Butler argued that gender is produced through repeated performances rather than expressing an essential identity, Bartlett suggests that maternity is enacted through embodied practices like breastfeeding.

However, Bartlett’s analysis extends beyond simple application of performative theory. She explores how the lactating body disrupts conventional academic spaces and discourses, making visible the ways that scholarship has historically been predicated on a disembodied, implicitly masculine subject. The leaking breast, the nursing child, the interrupted writing session—these become not embarrassments to be hidden but analytical tools for understanding how knowledge has been gendered and embodied all along.

Methodology: Connective and Reflexive Scenes

Bartlett employs what she calls “connective and reflexive scenes” as her methodological approach. Rather than maintaining a detached analytical stance, she weaves together personal narrative, theoretical reflection, and cultural analysis. The paper moves through various scenes that explore breasts, performance, space, language, and knowledge, using each as a lens to understand maternal embodiment.

This methodology is itself a feminist intervention, challenging the presumed objectivity and disembodiment of traditional academic writing. By making her own lactating body present in the text, Bartlett demonstrates how all knowledge production is situated and embodied, even when this embodiment is unmarked and taken for granted.

The reflexive dimension of her approach means constantly examining her own position as both subject and object of analysis—simultaneously the researcher studying maternal experience and the mother living it. This double consciousness generates productive insights about the relationship between lived experience and theoretical abstraction.

Epistemology of Breasts: Legitimizing Maternal Knowledge

Perhaps the paper’s most radical gesture is its development of what Bartlett terms an “epistemology of breasts.” This provocative formulation insists that the lactating body can be a source of legitimate knowledge, not despite its association with the maternal but because of it.

In Western philosophical tradition, knowledge has typically been associated with the mind, reason, and transcendence of bodily needs. The maternal body—leaking, feeding, caring—has been positioned as the opposite of the knowing subject. Bartlett’s epistemology of breasts directly challenges this hierarchy, arguing that maternal embodiment offers distinctive insights into questions of relationality, temporality, and the nature of subjectivity itself.

This is not a simple celebration of maternal experience or an essentialist claim that all mothers share the same knowledge. Rather, Bartlett carefully theorizes how specific embodied practices—in this case, breastfeeding—can generate particular forms of understanding that have been systematically devalued in academic contexts.

Reframing Maternal Thinking

Bartlett’s work intervenes in debates about “maternal thinking” that had emerged in feminist philosophy, particularly through the work of Sara Ruddick. While Ruddick argued that the practice of mothering generates distinctive ethical and cognitive capacities, her work was sometimes criticized for insufficient attention to the embodied, physical dimensions of maternal experience.

Bartlett’s focus on breastfeeding brings the body back into discussions of maternal thinking, insisting that cognition and embodiment cannot be easily separated. Thinking through breasts means recognizing that intellectual work is always already corporeal, shaped by the needs, capacities, and experiences of specific bodies in specific contexts.

This reframing has important implications for feminist theory more broadly. It suggests that attending to embodied experiences—not as “raw” data to be analyzed but as sites of knowledge production in their own right—can generate new theoretical insights and challenge existing frameworks.

Challenging Academic Conventions

Throughout the paper, Bartlett implicitly and explicitly challenges the conventions that structure academic writing and knowledge production. The personal narrative voice, the present-tense descriptions of breastfeeding, the willingness to make her own body visible in the text—all of these choices contest the presumed universality and objectivity of traditional scholarly discourse.

This is particularly significant given the historical exclusion of women, and especially mothers, from academic institutions. Universities have long been structured around the assumption of a worker without caregiving responsibilities, free to devote unlimited time and energy to intellectual pursuits. By insisting on writing from and about maternal embodiment, Bartlett makes visible these hidden assumptions and their consequences.

Her approach also raises important questions about what counts as theory. If theorizing is understood as abstract, disembodied, universal reflection, then embodied maternal writing might appear as mere personal narrative. But if theory is recognized as always emerging from particular standpoints and experiences, then maternal reflection can be seen as legitimate theoretical work.

Space, Language, and the Maternal Body

Bartlett’s analysis extends to considerations of how maternal bodies exist in and challenge various spaces—physical, discursive, and institutional. The lactating body, she argues, disrupts the conventional separation between public and private spheres, making visible the ways that “public” space has been implicitly defined as space free from the needs of dependent bodies.

Breastfeeding in public becomes, in this analysis, not merely a practical question but a political act that challenges the boundaries of acceptable embodiment. The discomfort that public breastfeeding sometimes generates reveals underlying assumptions about which bodies belong in which spaces and what bodily functions can be visible.

Language itself, Bartlett suggests, struggles to capture maternal embodiment. The dominant vocabulary for discussing breastfeeding tends to medicalize or romanticize the experience, missing its complex phenomenological reality. Developing new language to articulate maternal embodiment becomes part of the project of legitimizing maternal knowledge.

Feminist Methodology and Personal Writing

Bartlett’s paper makes an important contribution to ongoing debates about feminist methodology and the role of personal experience in scholarly work. The feminist movement of the 1970s famously proclaimed that “the personal is political,” insisting on the significance of women’s everyday experiences. But translating this insight into academic practice has remained challenging.

Some feminist scholars have worried that too much emphasis on personal narrative risks reducing feminist theory to individual testimonial, losing sight of structural analysis and political critique. Others have argued that refusing personal writing reinforces masculine norms of objectivity and disembodiment.

Bartlett’s approach offers a productive middle path. She uses personal narrative not as an end in itself but as a methodological tool for theoretical reflection. The personal becomes a lens through which to analyze broader questions of embodiment, subjectivity, and knowledge production. Her writing is simultaneously intimate and analytical, experiential and theoretical.

Implications for Feminist Theory

“Thinking Through Breasts” has several important implications for feminist theory. First, it demonstrates the ongoing importance of embodiment as a theoretical concern. Despite decades of feminist attention to the body, Bartlett’s work shows that there remain underexplored dimensions of embodied experience that can generate new theoretical insights.

Second, it challenges any lingering tendency toward disembodied abstraction in feminist theory. By making the lactating body central to her analysis, Bartlett insists that feminist theory must remain grounded in the material realities of women’s lives, including maternal experiences.

Third, it expands the range of what counts as legitimate feminist knowledge. If maternal embodiment can be a source of theoretical insight, then the experiences of mothers—historically devalued in both mainstream and feminist contexts—must be taken seriously as intellectual contributions.

Finally, it models a form of feminist writing that refuses the choice between personal narrative and theoretical analysis, demonstrating that rigorous theorizing can emerge from and remain connected to lived experience.

Critiques and Limitations

While groundbreaking, Bartlett’s work also faces some important limitations and criticisms. Her focus on breastfeeding, while theoretically productive, might not capture the full range of maternal experiences, particularly for mothers who cannot or choose not to breastfeed. There’s a risk that privileging breastfeeding as the paradigmatic maternal practice could inadvertently reinforce normative ideas about “good” mothering.

Additionally, Bartlett’s analysis, while attentive to embodiment, might give insufficient attention to how maternal experiences are shaped by race, class, sexuality, and other dimensions of identity. Breastfeeding experiences and their meanings vary considerably across different social locations.

Some critics might also question whether the personal narrative approach, however theoretically sophisticated, can adequately address structural inequalities and power relations. The focus on individual experience might risk losing sight of collective political struggle.

Contemporary Relevance

More than two decades after its publication, Bartlett’s work remains strikingly relevant. Debates about breastfeeding in public continue, with ongoing conflicts about whether and where maternal bodies belong in public space. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the ongoing devaluation of care work, including breastfeeding and childcare, often treated as optional or easily postponed.

Academic institutions continue to struggle with accommodating the needs of scholar-mothers, from inadequate parental leave policies to the lack of lactation rooms to the ways that productivity metrics implicitly assume workers without caregiving responsibilities. Bartlett’s insistence on making maternal embodiment visible in academic contexts remains urgently needed.

The rise of social media has created new spaces for maternal writing and community, with many mothers sharing experiences of breastfeeding, pumping, and balancing care work with professional demands. These contemporary conversations echo and extend Bartlett’s project of legitimizing maternal knowledge.

Contemporary feminist theory has increasingly emphasized intersectionality and the diversity of women’s experiences. This creates both opportunities and challenges for Bartlett’s approach. While there’s greater recognition of the importance of embodied, situated knowledge, there’s also more awareness of the need to avoid generalizing from particular experiences.

Contributions to Corporeal Feminism

Bartlett’s work makes important contributions to what has been termed “corporeal feminism”—feminist theory that takes embodiment seriously as a source of both constraint and possibility. Alongside theorists like Elizabeth Grosz, Rosi Braidotti, and Iris Marion Young, Bartlett insists that bodies matter—not as biological destiny but as sites of experience, meaning, and potential resistance.

Her focus on lactation is particularly valuable for corporeal feminism because it addresses a bodily function that is simultaneously natural and cultural, individual and relational, constraining and enabling. The lactating body cannot easily be romanticized as a site of pure pleasure or power, nor can it be reduced to mere biological function. It requires complex, nuanced theorization.

Conclusion: Legitimizing Maternal Voices

“Thinking Through Breasts: Writing Maternity” remains a landmark contribution to feminist theory, demonstrating how maternal embodiment can be both subject and method of theoretical reflection. Bartlett’s development of an “epistemology of breasts” challenges fundamental assumptions about knowledge, objectivity, and the relationship between personal experience and scholarly analysis.

By refusing to separate her lactating body from her thinking, writing self, Bartlett models a form of feminist scholarship that honors the full complexity of women’s lives. She demonstrates that maternal experiences are not merely personal matters to be kept separate from intellectual work, but can be sources of profound theoretical insight.

The paper’s greatest contribution may be its insistence on legitimizing maternal voices and experiences in academic contexts that have historically excluded or devalued them. In arguing that we can think through breasts—that maternal embodiment can be a site of knowledge production—Bartlett opens space for a more inclusive and embodied understanding of what intellectual work can be.

For contemporary feminism, facing ongoing debates about care work, reproductive justice, and the value of maternal labor, Bartlett’s work offers both inspiration and guidance. It reminds us that personal experiences of embodiment are always already political, that the boundaries between private and public are contested and constructed, and that feminist theory must remain grounded in the material realities of diverse women’s lives. Thinking through breasts becomes not just an individual practice but a collective feminist project of reimagining knowledge, authority, and the possibilities of embodied intellectual life.