Guidelines for Submissions

Newsletter Editors

Navigation
    Newsletters Index (06:1)
    apaOnline Home Page

APA Newsletters

Fall 2006
Volume 06, Number 1

Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy

Book Reviews

Previous Article | Index | Next Article

Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture, and Mothers’ Bodies

Rebecca Kukla (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). 249 pp. $27.95. ISBN: 0-7425-3358-1.

Reviewed by Laura Newhart
Eastern Kentucky University, laura.newhart@eku.edu

In Mass Hysteria, Rebecca Kukla constructs an elaborately detailed, historically based argument for two claims: 1) Contrary to recent trends in the scholarship on maternity, current cultural discourses and medical practices of motherhood do not represent a discontinuity or break from modern treatments of maternal bodies but are rather continuous with the modern project of controlling mother’s bodies; and 2) Feminist theories, like those of Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous, that emphasize and celebrate the fluid, unbounded nature of the maternal body reinforce the oppressive effects of that project.

The theoretical framework upon which Kukla bases her argument consists of the opposing yet mutually dependent relationship between two cultural representations of motherhood, i.e., the Fetish Mother and the Unruly Mother, which have operated in Western civilization at least since Jean-Jacques Rousseau placed the responsibility for transforming the disparate perspectives of a collection of individuals into the general will on mothers’ breastfeeding. Infants, according to Rousseau, would imbibe patriotic values through their mothers’ milk; hence, mothers were obligated to nurse their children and refrain from hiring wetnurses to do it for them. At the same time, anxieties concerning the influence of the maternal body on the quality of the fetus began to arise. Charged with the civic duty of creating good citizens, mothers had an obligation to breastfeed their own children and to control the conditions both within and outside of the womb in order to create citizens of the highest possible quality.

Mothers’ bodies became objects to be surveyed and regulated, i.e., disciplined, and the primary means of doing this was through the iconic cultural figures of the Unruly Mother and the Fetish Mother. The Unruly Mother is the woman who might let her appetites, desires, and even experiences cross over the permeable boundary of the womb and affect her fetus in negative ways. In order to meet her civic obligation, she must be ever vigilant to protect the fetus from her own uncontrollable nature. The Fetish Mother is the nursing mother who forms a seamless, unified whole with her infant whereby the two become one. While at face value these normative figures appear as opposites—one a negative image to be avoided and the other a positive ideal to be pursued—given their common historical roots and the similarities in their effects on pregnant women’s and mothers’ lives, it is obvious that they are flipsides of the same disciplinary project that runs from the beginning of the modern period to the present. Both figures play upon the perceived lack of boundaries and identity on the part of pregnant women and new mothers, and neither lacks support from the medical profession, media sources, and even mothers themselves in disciplining the maternal body to carry out the modern normative project of creating good citizens.

In Mass Hysteria, Kukla conducts a genealogical analysis of the contemporary cultural discourses and medical practices of pregnancy and early motherhood much in the manner of Michel Foucault. In her analyses of the disciplinary regimes surrounding pregnancy and breastfeeding, Kukla utilizes a number of Foucauldian concepts including the role of professional medicine as a bridge between the individual and the state, the panopticon, and the technic as a practice of self-discipline in the care of the self.

Flashes of brilliance are evident in Kukla’s historical analyses of contemporary cultural discourses and medical practices of pregnancy and breastfeeding as continuations of, and contributions to, this modern normative project. For example, in her discussion of the Unruly Mother, Kukla traces the contemporary notion of the mother and the fetus as two distinct entities presumably at odds with each other to its origin in the thaw of the freeze on dissection and vivisection of the human body that gave rise to modern obstetrics. Kukla’s historical survey of various scientific, medical, and cultural representations of the fetus culminates with the work of Leonard Nilsson, whose editorial choices concerning his photographs of the fetus resulted in a historically significant photo spread in Life magazine in 1965 and has since come to be recognized as the image of the fetus on everything from public billboards to medical informational pamphlets. According to Kukla, this generic fetus has become a celebrity in its own right and now serves to mediate the pregnant woman’s relationship to her own fetus. This externalization of the fetus in order to open it up to public view works in tandem with medical technologies, like the sonogram, to abstract the fetus from the maternal body that is then easier to view as a passive receptacle for the fetus. Moreover, it allows the maternal body to be divided into parts to be manipulated at will. It is from this detachable, mobile, public, and generic image of the fetus in the womb in contemporary Western culture that Kukla derives the title Mass Hysteria.

Moreover, in her discussion of the Fetish Mother, Kukla claims that, in the tradition of Rousseau, the contemporary cultural discourse around motherhood collapses into proximity, i.e., close bodily contact, and proximity collapses into the mouth-breast contact of breastfeeding. One striking example of contemporary cultural discourse where Kukla notes this synecdochic collapse is the American Academy of Pediatrics guide to breastfeeding, which goes far beyond the medical facts of the biological benefits of breast milk for the infant to include testimonial statements from breastfeeding mothers, genuine or contrived, where women claim that their infants know they come first in their mothers’ lives because they are breastfed. Another is the relative absence of research and information in the culture concerning methods of getting breast milk to infants other than breast to mouth contact (e.g., breast pumps), which might enable mothers to leave their children for longer periods of time to work or pursue identity-driven projects of their own. Thus, while every other human relationship is premised on the separate identity of the participants where time apart is deemed necessary and healthy for preserving their separate identities, the relationship between the mother and child is not.

Finally, Kukla discusses how contemporary pro-breastfeeding groups like La Leche League International and self-help books for new mothers like What to Expect the First Year actually function to constitute the normatively appropriate desires of new mothers, both sexually and otherwise. Kukla tells the story of Denise Perrigo who in 1991 experienced biologically normal sexual sensations while breastfeeding her child. When Perrigo called a hotline recommended by La Leche League concerning these sensations, she was accidentally transferred by the receptionist to a rape crisis hotline, which promptly called the police, who raided Perrigo’s home and took her child. Kukla notes that while proponents of breastfeeding often idealize it by comparing it to a sanitized romantic heterosexual union between the mother and the infant, the real feelings of nursing mothers are often foreclosed and even forcibly silenced. Finally, in La Leche League’s The Womanly Art of Breast Feeding, Kukla reports that new mothers are told that they should be able to take a nursing baby anywhere they want to go, thereby implying that they should only want to go to places where the baby can go (e.g., the mall, mother-child play groups, etc.) and not places like a library or board room where a baby would not be welcome. The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding also prepares new mothers for their first night out without the baby by warning them that they might miss their baby so much that they will not be able to enjoy it. Such advice suggests that a mother who would enjoy a night out alone is somehow inadequate.

In sum, Kukla’s argument is that pregnancy and early motherhood are already times of shifting personal boundaries and a sense of uncertainty concerning ones identity. The medical practices and cultural discourses surrounding them take advantage of the uncertainties of the experience and further diminish new mothers’ privacy and agency in their enforcement of the modern normative project whereby mothers are held responsible for the reproduction of civil society.

In the final chapter of Mass Hysteria, Kukla finds fault with feminist theorists such as Irigaray and Cixous for their valorization of the permeable boundaries and fluid identities of women in general and mothers in particular.

Kukla warns:

(T)he working mother who feels she has selfishly abandoned her infant if she allows another caregiver to give it a bottle during the day, the expectant woman who looks to the ultrasound monitor to be told the moral meaning of her pregnancy, and the pregnant woman who is scared to take antidepressants that pose only a theoretical risk to her fetus because she is held captive by an image of her risky and permeable womb will not be helped to restore appropriate boundaries and healthy integrity by the postmodern efforts to valorize the fragmented and permeable self. (226)

In the gray, plodding, meticulously detailed manner of the genealogical method advocated by Foucault, Kukla adds thought-provoking subtlety and historical nuance to the exuberance of postmodern feminist celebrations of women’s bodies and experience.

Previous Article | Index | Next Article