Suckling Strange, 2017
A text

Hello Mammalian, fellow, have you ever been suckled?

When I was a kid I used to breastfeed my dolls frequently, and as an adult I once breastfed my lover, who was sick, for an entire night, and by the morning my lover had recovered. 

Once I dreamt that, together with a couple of other people, I was connected to an industrial, steely milking machine that extracted me. I couldn’t move and I didn’t know if I was locked into that machine voluntarily or not. I didn’t know who was going to have my milk. But somehow I knew that my teats had been carefully disinfected before the milking had begun. 

Another time I held a small baby who got hungry and began fumbling for my breast to feed from. I brought the baby back to its parent and was left with a feeling that it could be very satisfying to be able to feed another being from my body. It’s a subtle form of cannibalism – someone once told me that milk is light yellow blood. Was it you?

You see, I have never had offspring but I nevertheless insist on using my nipple and breastfeeding, whether the milk is invisible or not. And I want to talk to you about suckling, nipples and radical intimacy between beings. I want to ask if the situation of suckling can offer us a particular understanding about our relations of giving and taking from one another. 

My engagement with the topic springs from my deep fascination with suckling, my long-term interest in interaction between human and non-human animals, my background as a grandchild of a cow keeper as well as my belief in the importance of reflecting what we can do with our bodies in this volatile era.

First, consider the act of suckling.

All of us are likely to have an experience of it. We drink and eat milk, or we have drunk and eaten it. Sometimes it is with our mouth against a nipple. At other times a milking robot does the labour of suckling for us, while bacteria and enzymes process the milk into foods. Usually we just want the fluid and do not want intimacy with the cow’s body.

There are also other kinds of suckling situations that I need to talk about. Situations that may have milk or not, or situations where the milk is invisible. Consider animals feeding on human milk that was more common in herstory. And consider the sucking of nipples between lovers.

What happens in situations of suckling? They can be banal, caring, greedy, painful, erotic, or transgressive. There are different intentions and mental experiences involved. Often we can only try to understand what it means for other beings to be suckled. What exactly is, for example, a cow’s experience when a human or a robot works its genetically engineered udders? And how do I create a meaningful suckling situation with a lover – is my role to be a dominator, a baby, a cow, a machine? What are the power positions in situations of suckling? What are the ethics?

Attending to what takes place in singular situations of sucking nipples, we might be able to gain insight into wider cultures of suckling. What do we make of humankind's giant lust for cheap milk when it comes to animal lives and global warming? Or of the cultural expectation of bodies with wombs to produce and care for biological offspring. In my thirtyfour-year-old speculations on whether or not to try to have a child, climate change anxiety mixes with deep curiosity towards the potential of my body to build another being through procreation and feeding. It seems important to explore ways of using our bodies in non-normative ways when it comes to, for example, using our nipples, eating, reproduction and kin-making which would not need to be bound to ancestry but could mean more radical concern and intimacy between humans and other species.* 

Furthermore, could attending to what takes place in the dynamic of suckling and expanding it to include more figurative forms of nourishing offer a different way of thinking about how we give and take in different contexts? What would it do if we considered the entanglement between an audience and an artwork, a reader and a text, or human and the earth as situations of suckling?

In suckling, the nipple is the apparatus.

I want to ask you to consider the nipple as a literal and metaphorical interface between beings; a sensual, witchy joint.

Put your hand underneath your top and touch your nipple. What do your different body parts feel? What do your fingertips and your nipple make of this touch? What about the rest of your body?

When my nipple has been petted, licked, sucked or bitten by another being I have experienced and observed it as an interface that produces different sensations for both parties. It is an intimate junction and a charged connecting-point. It can function as an opening out onto the other, an offering that has potential to lead into a joint satisfaction when desires meet. What seems crucial for an ethics of suckling, however, is that attention is paid to the singular experiences of the fleshy beings that the nipple connects. This is violently missing in the animal-industrial complex where bioproductivity, not the ability to have complex pleasures of having a body, is the core reason for the bovine wet nurses to exist.

Stretching it even further: is it not possible to consider any situation of exchange in our lives as a situation of suckling?  

In these situations one’s mission would be to not to suck the other – the cow, the lover, the text, the earth, the artwork – dry or too hard. Or, if the roles change, not to allow oneself to be exhausted. The name of the game would be to stay alert to the responses, whether pleasurable or painful, of the other and oneself as nourishing energy flows in between beings and things.

A couple of images come to my mind for reflection on suckling of literal, fictional and figurative kinds:

The first image is from Black Moon, a movie directed by Louis Malle in 1975. The film has a character who is called the Old Lady. The Old Lady is moody, bedridden and shapeshifts between a human and a unicorn pony. A teenager, called Lily, breastfeeds the Old Lady. Lily’s breasts look like they store no milk, yet Lily is proud about the role as a feeder. The movie ends when Lily is just about to breastfeed the unicorn. It leaves me wondering how Lily and the unicorn will place their bodies together for suckling and whether the unicorn’s yellow, strong teeth will hurt Lily’s nipple – intentionally, or unintentionally. Looking at the image, I realise that suckling can be queered to take place in peculiar setups and compositions, and that milk can flow in our imaginations allowing for suckling situations that may be literally but not experientially dry.

I would like you to then consider a second image called Roman Charity (in Latin Caritas Romana), versions of which have been painted by various artists over time. The image portrays a story about a grown-up human offspring secretly breastfeeding an imprisoned, old parent who is sentenced to death by starvation (in the original Caritas Romana story the parent was a mother but the Renaissance and Baroque changed the parent into a daddy). The child is caught, but the act of compassion impresses the guards and gets the parent released. Not only is the act compassionate but also unconventional. It abandons the norm of who suckles whom out of urgency for care. 

A third image now comes to my mind – or, rather, a dreamy scene. It is a reimagined version of my grandmother’s life that could take place somewhere in the future, after my actual grandmother has passed away.

In this scene, she is… Or actually, I prefer to tell this from the first perspective: I am living in a place that consists of a barn and a house. I live with cows. We are close – they scrub me with their tongues and I look at their anuses stretch as they expel faeces from their body. I rub them and sometimes lick, too, just above their eyes. The cows have their eyes on the sides of the head and I have my eyes in the front. That could signify that they are prey and that I am a hunter, but in our case both species die of old age, save for the occasional cow that a wolf comes and kills in the pasture. 

I wrote this speech with the cows: I am a co-writer and a cow-writer. I channel their energies. I am not the kind of witch they describe in Finnish stories where witches in the barn meant death to the cattle. I spend hours every day with the cows to observe, to learn from them. I look at their nipples and touch them while touching my own.

At night I turn into a cow myself. Or rather, I shape-shift between cow and human forms. Both being-hoods collapse into me and the way I move my body. I am yearning to get down on all fours and breastfeed. Due to pumping and other induced lactation techniques that I found online I produce milk, without ever having had a baby.

One night I have you come to my house.

I ask you to imagine a situation.

Imagine all of us pulling our tops off. Some of us might then fold the shirt – or maybe you’re wearing a dress – neatly on a chair, some might let them fall on the floor. If you wear a bra, remove it too. Remove everything that is covering your breast.

Imagine you now start walking around in this space slowly, at a pace that comes to you intuitively and that connects to the shared tempo. After a while you might want to get down and move forward on your hands and knees.

Imagine that you and all other humans are then joined by a miscellaneous collective of other beings: animals, extraterrestrials and androids. Some of them are still babies, some of them are fully grown with swollen, sore udders. All are thirsty but for different things. They crawl and amble and slide from different directions towards you. Their movements create sounds: clacking, jingling, humming, thrumming. You gulp once, and then a second time, in suspense, fascination and appetite. Your nipples tingle. You are preparing to suckle and be suckled by human and non-human animals and other beings. You are preparing to take new positions through the act of suckling.

Notes:

While working on this text I encountered writings by Amelie Björck that this text feels deep kinship with. Björck writes in her article “Telling stories of humans, animals, and modernization” (in Exploring the Animal Turn: Human-animal relations in Science, Society and Culture, 193) that “living creatures, just like texts, are made of layers of time”. Drawing from other theorists ideas of resistance through alternative, non-“chrononormative” (Freeman, 2010) conceptions of time – “queer time” (ibid.) and “revolutionary time” (Söderberg, 2012) – she rewrites a story on a human-cow relationship. In the original story, “Kreaturstransporten” (‘The Cattle Transport’ in Statarna, 1961) by Ivar Lo-Johansson, two proletariats who are strike-breaking form a bodily, tactile and sympathetic connection to cows about to be butchered. However, the story ends with the strike-breakers finding new solidarity with the strikers and abandoning the animals. Björck explains this through “the influence of anthropocentric chrononormativity on the storyteller” that pushes him to conform to the traditional logic of historiography. In her own version, Björck places herself into the story, dreams “with the boy in the cattle wagon, with [her] head on the cow’s belly”. “Tomorrow”, she writes, “[they] will all three go on strike – not only for the humans, but for human-animal freedom, whatever that will look like when it comes”.

*) My thinking here is influenced by Haraway, who writes, in her article “Making Kin: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Cthtulucene” (Staying with the Trouble, 102–103) that she wants to “make “kin” mean something other/more than entities tied by ancestry or genealogy” because the fact is that all beings on earth are “kin in the deepest sense”.