Breasted Bodies as Pedagogies of Excess: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming M/other

Women’s breasts are invested with social, cultural, and political meanings that shape the ways we make sense of, experience, and materialize our embodied selves. Breasts can be highly prized objects of sexual desire and/or markers of the monstrous, harassment, and shame, thus compelling women to experience their breasted bodies in confusing and contradictory ways. Large breasts further complicate this ambivalence given the social and cultural meanings understood in relation to breast size. Discourses of beauty in Western society have required breasts to be a particular size and shape, and while the popular message is that “big is better, " feminist scholar Iris Young (1990/2005) notes that the ideal breast is “round, sitting high on the chest, large but not bulbous, with the look of firmness” (p. 191). Breasts that do not measure up (or cover up) threaten to exceed the rational framework, disrupting the binary categories through which the clean and proper self is held apart from abjection (Kristeva, 1982). Maternal breasts-swollen, expansive, and sometimes leaking-emphasize the unpredictable and excessiveness of a woman’s breasted body.