ABSTRACT

The novelist, poet and French man of letters Anatole France, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921, is said to have observed that ‘a woman without breasts is like a bed without pillows’. This is a provocative reduction of the female body to an object that is comfortable and useful while being (a) as domestic and controllable as a home's soft furnishings, and (b) incomplete if a woman is flat-chested, from birth, from breastfeeding or from disease. France's words deserve to be ridiculed, and yet they seem to strike at the heart of a wider, broadly acknowledged truth about attitudes towards women's breasts. Breasts symbolise womanhood in all its diverse manifestations: they are sexualised, nursed at, revered, mutilated, sniggered at and politicised, for how they look and feel, as well as for what they do.2 Iris Marion Young has problematised the sexual and nutritive functions of breasts, which shatter the border between motherhood and sexuality in the West.3