ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a question: ‘How can we think beyond the phallus, when it is entrenched in the logics structuring Western dominant culture?’ It looks for ways through and past this stranglehold. It turns to clues in popular culture where, increasingly, women are claiming the right to breastfeed in public and to march topless. Protests and movements deploy oversized breasts on buildings and inflatables on canals. Trans* individuals are removing and acquiring breasts, disrupting binaries of sexed bodies. Men are lactating. We experiment with typographical signs and movements as possibilities. This decoupling establishes breasts as personal and social, corporeal and manufactured, verisimilitude and abstract. We conceptualise the breast as assemblage, which fosters new orientations and relations that raise exciting questions: Where does it begin and end on the body? When is it female? Male? Neither? Why is a floating breast or one perched on a building still a breast? How can such serious play enable new symbolic and material ideas to emerge; to float; to cross bodies, buildings, and online cultures?
