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CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY SAN MARCOS
THESIS SIGNATURE PAGE
THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULLFILLMENT
OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE
MASTER OF ARTS
IN
LITERATURE AND WRITING STUDIES
THESIS TITLE:
Shungicu Uchida Springs l::kJ EB$~
AUTHOR:
Charles Bailey
DATE OF SUCCESSFUL DEFENSE:
April30,2010
THE THESIS HAS BEEN ACCEPTED BY THE THESIS COMMITTEE IN
PARTIAL FULLFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF ARTS IN LITERATURE AND WRITING STUDIES.
Kenneth Mendoza
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Mark Wallace
DATE
THESIS COMMITTEE MEMBER
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SIGNATURE
DATE
Shungicu Uchida Springs IAJB3if. By Charles Bailey 1
CONTENTS Acknowledgments...............................................................................2 Preface..............................................................................................4 1
Queer Milk and Visitor Q •.•..•• •...••..•.•..••..••.••..•••.••..•••.•....••..•.•.•..... 6 2
Shizuko
3
Uchida ~ EB Reproduces............................................................26 4
GiGi t.,;' t.,;' Sprinkles..................................................................51 5
Keiko ~ T-: Are We Reproducing Visitor Q? ...................................... 66 6
Shungicu ~~: Springing Volatile Poetics from the Fluid Feminine......82 D T- Fucks Father...........................................................18 Appendices......................................................................................95 Notes .••.•..••••...••....•••....••..••••..•.•..••....•..••..••..•..•....•...••..••.••....•.••..•.• 104 Works Cited................................................................................... 113 2
Acknowledgements
Without Shungicu Uchida's permission to reproduce her splendid images, my
words alone could not relate the spirit, elegance and profound beauty of her artwork.
I am truly thankful to the artist for this reason among so many others.
I am grateful beyond words to a very supportive committee-Dr.s Kenneth
Mendoza, Pamela Redela, Mark Wallace-who have stuck with me through thick and
thin, never losing faith, guiding my work in ways I could never completely describe.
Many thanks to those permitting me to present work in seminars and those providing
helpful commentary and wisdom: Dr.s Sonia Ruiz, Karen Eso, Zhiwei Xiao, Andrea
Liss, Heidi Breuer; Dr.s Yuan Yuan and Martha Stoddard-Holmes. Special thanks to
David Avalos, Rodger D'Andreas-Wahl, Sonia Gutierrez, Richard Hunt, Tony Allard,
Brandon Cesmat, Kristine Deikman, Karen Schaffman, Deborah Small, and Aaron
Knight. Very special thanks to all my students, WEG and Orange Crush, Christine
Tejeda in the Department of Fashion at Palomar College, Beth Accomando from
National Public Radio and KPBS Public Television, Aya Ibarra ofthe Japan Society
of San Diego and Tijuana, George Lin ofthe San Diego Asian Film Foundation.
I will never forget the camaraderie and valuable oral/printed translations of:
Naoko Kaipozumou, Maya Mealins,Yasutaka Iwata, Ayari Kanezashi, Robert Marks,
Moe Sakamoto, Manami Fukawa, Rei Fukuda, and Kristina Kasahara. I appreciate
Kazuko and Kuro-san for so many lively conversations and nourishment at Hyuga.
Much love to my charming friends: Yipeng Liu, Philip Jerge, Chaoyue Chen,
Adam Turner, Marc and Sara, George Wolfe, Kiyomi Kihara, and Adam Tillotson.
3
I dedicate this book to my family:
to my father, Charles Bailey
and
to the strong women surrounding me, who came after and before me,
and who continue to inspire me every moment ofevery day:
my daughter, Madeline Violet; my wife, Allene Bailey;
my grandmother, Edwiges "Gim" Moreno, and especially to my loving
mother,
Margarita M Bailey (1944-2007).
Without each one ofyou I could not and cannot be.
I love you all forever and ever!
4
Preface
The works of Japanese artist Shungicu Uchida often use the conflicted status
of the maternal and erotic breast as a motif and springboard into some wild ideas
about human intimacy, embodiment, gendered expectations of women, and artistic
representation. Through some of her art-a novel, comic books, a film-her own
body becomes the central text by means of performance and her own celebrity to
question, laugh, struggle, thrive, and create meaningful works. Previous evaluations
and present writings about Uchida have neglected to cover reproduction, pregnancy,
and lactation: three central tropes of this artist. I now correct for that deficiency by
providing a thorough analysis, creative conjectures, and the first English translations
ofmany ofher images through an amalgam of approaches represented in combinatory
fashion. I distill corporeal feminism through modified phenomenology as a lens to
bring the central ideas of Uchida's artwork, performance, and representations into
focus. This textual strategy highlights the return of sensorial experience often lost in
narrow distractive foci of explicit transgression or overly intellectual, conceptual
frameworks.
Because Uchida is so prolific in so many media and because she covers so
many different types of stories her art is a challenge to categorize. Rarely do you find
a single artist that makes music, writes dramas, comedies, essays, and comic books,
among many endeavors. Uchida is perhaps best known in Japan as a mangaka
(comics artist) of what are calledjosei manga-frank, often erotic and candid works
written for and about Japanese women generally in their 30s, give or take. These are
5
neither the Pokemon type boys' (shonen) stories nor the teen-girl (shojo) comics and
anime most Americans are somewhat familiar with. Nor are they the pornographic
type of seinen manga/animes popular on the internet, though Uchida is not averse to
writing very explicit storylines with sexy pictures. I am saying is that Uchida's art is
quite distinct from other manga, and in several ways even defies some of the
characteristics ofjosei manga.
A few notes on my approach to translating Uchida's work need to be
mentioned before taking a look at the pages that follow. The translations you will see
are the result of my relationships with friends and acquaintances who were willing to
provide written, marked-up, graphically-manipulated, or spoken translations. No two
translators worked in the same manner as you will note a sort of patchwork to this
volume. In my estimation this is part of the charm and art of translation. In the
process I was fortunate to learn a small amount of Japanese and could test out my
guesswork on patient friends. Often colorful conversations would result from out
mutual explorations. Please remember. .. when reading manga (Japanese comics), the
text always reads from the right side to the left, opposite of English. Unless otherwise
noted all images are copyrighted© artwork of Shungicu Uchida, reproduced in these
pages with the kind permission of the artist.
Key Words: breastfeeding, art, Japanese popular culture, manga, P-1 E8~~i, body
studies, Shungicu Uchida, Shungiku Uchida, performance art, phenomenology,
human sexuality, motherhood, feminism, film theory, corporeal feminism, lactation,
pornography
6
.1- Queer Milk and Visitor Q
The fashionable consumption ofbad taste {is] characterized by an
unexpected popularity {and] resurgent interest in the human body in a
perverse form typical ofan age far removed from nature .
1
-Mitsui Midori
An out of work television reporter interviews his daughter about her life of
prostitution before having sex with her. Then, after being smashed in the head with a
rock by a stranger, he invites his assailant home for dinner with his dysfunctional
family: a mother with a heroin habit who is frequently beaten by her son, a boy who
is pursued by bullies of his own, and the absent daughter from the opening. Night
after night the father watches a spectacle on his video camera where some teenage
delinquents forcibly sodomize him with his own microphone in an alley. Airing that
segment on TV led to his dismissal. The film I describe and director Takashi Miike
have been criticized for displaying anything no matter how abject it might appear.
With its string of aberrant episodes-often humorously treated-the movie Visitor Q
tests audience fortitude with incidents that can be said to exhibit the worst taste.
90% of audiences polled2 during a limited screening at a college campus
report the film as "problematic". A challenge emerges in how to evaluate this text in
a meaningful way that attenuates or suspends several distractions that complicate its
reception for many. In viewer responses, only 35% did not list any offensive scenes.
The remaining 65% of those that did rank the most disturbing parts of the movie
reveals an interesting pattern in the frequency with which the taboo scenes were cited.
7
The first item below was only mentioned twice (the fewest of all listed) and ranked
ninth, while the last item in the list (cited 21 times) ranks as the most offensive scene
in the film:
9 - Peers urinate on an adolescent boy to bully and humiliate him, 8 - A family dismembers the corpses of its murder victims, 7- Bully victim's father murders son's assailants, 6- Father sexually assaults and kills his former co-worker/lover, 5- Son whips mother's body and face with a rattan carpet beater, 4- Father has sex with the murdered corpse of his former lover, 3- Prostitute daughter commits incest with father for money, 2- Daughter and dad simultaneously suckle milk from mother, 1 - Lactating mother sprays milk from her nipples
The lactation segments-rated as the first and second most offensive scenes-upset
more respondents than any other taboos broken in the film. But when asked to list
which scenes they found the most inspiring, 27% of viewers ranked breast milk
scenes as the most uplifting depictions from the movie! Why and how can this be?
Artistic conceptualizing of breast milk informs the argument in the chapters
that follow. I will not use medical or biological views to argue the baby-food benefits
of breast milk over formula, nor will I detail the politics ofbreastfeeding legislation.
Several sources already cover those topics in detail? Instead, this work aims to re­
contextualize human milk by locating its shift from artistic and literary motif to the
8
creative, corporeally-invested act it becomes in the hands of P-1 IE~~ (hereafter,
Shungicu Uchida)-mother, artist, celebrity, and the woman starring in the film
Visitor Q.
This chapter closes with a preview of theoretical framing that can maneuver
beyond distractions of obscenity, charges of misogyny, and arbitrations oftaste that
make the cinematic text problematic. Seeing the film in the new way I will propose
comes only after a preliminary exploration that situates breastfeeding as it often
appears-in conflict. So, I begin by showing public lactation as a phenomenon
increasingly rendered in diverse forms and valuations.
Recent headlines and celebrity accounts confirm a range of positive and
9
negative attitudes as well as a diversity of expressions that constitute contemporary
lactation. The August 2004 magazine cover of Babytalk, for example, drew many
angry letters for depicting a mother's partially exposed breast as she nursed her baby.
"Gross," remarked one reader, quoted in the next issue. A couple years later a Delta
Airlines flight attendant told a nursing mother, "Cover up. You are offending me"
4
•
Both stories suggest some reticence to public displays of breastfeeding in spite of
legislation enacted to protect a mother's right to feed her child in public areas such as
airplanes or restaurants.
But reactions to public breastfeeding are not so easily categorized by those
who approve of it and those inclined to shield it from view. For one thing, many
asserting that breastfeeding should be more widely practiced do not necessarily feel it
should be more visible in public (Carter 128). This results in part because oftwo
assumptions difficult to dislodge. Supposition One: lactation replaces a breast's
erotic dimensions with non-sexual, nutritive-bonding functions. Supposition Two:
the milk-laden breast focused on feeding infants signals the most 'preferred' context
for lactation. The magazine and airline anecdotes could be seen as appealing to those
inclined to agree with both suppositions. Provisionally disabling these presumptions
expands the story of human milk and fosters a deeper understanding of breast milk's
complex significations and utility.
A second type of story is distinguished from the first by the absence or lack of
focus on a baby. March 9th, 2010, the Associated Press reported that an incarcerated
Owenboro, Kentucky woman was accused of assault for squirting breast milk at her
10
jailer, the same day that United Press International told of a New York restaurateur
who prepared a canape of breast milk cheese with figs and Hungarian peppers. News
like this stretches the narrow context of selfless mothers discreetly feeding their own
infants yet these narratives have antecedents in a larger, variegated thread of lactation
reaching back to antiquity 5 • Moreover, this second class of story deviates from the
dominant, contemporary mother-infant paradigm of breast milk that motivates much
of the call for greater acceptance of public breastfeeding as well as the opposing push
for more discretion.
The concomitant fascination and revulsion that keeps the story of both
normative and non-normative lactation in the headlines sterns from what feminist
Fiona Giles calls a "cultural amnesia that represses the idea of an integrated breast,
which accommodates multiple meanings" (Giles "Tears" 123). Her implication of the
6
milk-laden breast's status as the body part "most richly invested serniotically" ,covers
both the mother/child and alternative configurations she theorizes in works like
'"Relational, and Strange': The Preliminary Foray into a Project to Queer
Breastfeeding"7• She claims social fixation restricts not only queer (i.e. non-baby­
oriented) lactation but mainstream expressions ofbreastfeeding as well. Together,
two views--one that enforces and one that breaches the widely-held child-mother
script-comprise a conflicted space for many women, in spite (or because) of the
growing prominence of breast milk in mass media. Competing meanings and
attitudes intermittently mask the connections between sexual, nutritive, and other
functions of the breast. Matters get further complicated where technology and
11
celebrity intersect.
Through television talk shows, reality programming, entertainment news, and
through social networking on the internet, breastfeeding has migrated from discreet,
largely-domestic settings to conspicuous venues of popular culture. This stream
exacerbates "a number of complex, even contradictory, discourses of female sexuality
operating in relation to private/public boundaries especially as regards breasts"
(Carter 121). Via instantly-dispatched and consumed images, lactation is propagated
as a type of performance. Hastened by inexpensive digital video cameras and viral
mechanisms-Facebook or Twitter, instant downloadable content, high-definition
broadcasts, real-time internet streaming-burgeoning breast milk narratives gush
forth, aiming at diverse targets, confronting or forging limited valuations. The drive
to normalize conspicuous breastfeeding prompts some agendas, while a desire to
broaden the repertoire of favorably regarded human milk contexts motivates others
8
.
The gaps and overlaps between domestic and civic spaces, maternal and sexual sites,
and celebrity or public terrain complicate how lactation is done, by whom and for
what purpose. Actress Salma Hayek's recent public breastfeeding on ABC News and
YouTube websites in 2009 illustrates this situation, showing what can occur with wide
dissemination of moving texts like video clips.
Hayek came upon a crying infant while touring a small village in Sierra Leone
on a UNICEF goodwill mission to Africa. Told the mother could produce no milk
when Hayek asked why the baby was crying, the actress proceeded to nurse the child
on camera. She tells ABC News: "Am I being disloyal to my child by giving her milk
12
away? l actually think my baby would be very proud to share her milk. And when
she grows up I'm going to make sure she continues to be a generous, caring person."
9
Her humanitarianism was lauded by various authorities, the press, and much of the
public, though there was the typical smattering of detractors who, if not puerile, lewd,
or dismayed, simply disapproved. The mix of positive and negative reactions is
typical given YouTube's availability to nearly all people.
Did Hayek stray from a suitable context? Is there public disdain for the self­
promotional aspect of Hayek's celebrity that colors this story? The 'Entertainment'
part ofthe ABC News web address suggests how it might be marketed to an audience:
as a public performance, not unlike a movie. By spectacularizing an intimate daily
activity for hundreds of millions of women every day, Hayek risks censure from
10
critics suspicious, perhaps, of a selfish grab for publicity and interests not centered
on her child. Breast milk in this way can confound expectations and can confine
lactation to a slim code. The irresolvable tension begs the question: can celebrity
artists lactate in resonance with audiences' sympathies?
YouTube features Hayek's incident, as well as clips from others such as
lactation consultants giving demonstrations, a Japanese television comedy with
women letting a cat suckle their milk, and mothers feeding children ranging in age
from infancy to
5th
grade. Breasts (lactating or not) deemed pornographic by
moderators acting on viewer complaints are deleted arbitrarily, though viewer's
complaints or prurient commentary can prompt action at times. But for the most part,
mother's milk exists on the website in a wide span of contexts. Facebook's policy on
13
depicting nursing mothers does not share the liberal tolerance of YouTube, however.
Heather Farley is a mother from Fallbrook, California, who would regularly
upload written posts and images of experiences with her new baby to her former
Facebook account. Some pictures displayed her in the act ofbreastfeeding her son.
Face book made the decision to delete all those photos one day, informing Farley that
she cannot show her breasts even if feeding her child. Farley's charge of unfairness
was refuted by spokesman Barry Schnitt:
Our policy is against nudity and we feel strongly that policy is
important to keeping Facebook clean...a safe, secure environment for
all users, including the many children ... afu/ly exposed breast does
violate those terms and may be removed ... we act upon attention by
other users who complain. (from Farley's website, emphasis mine)
Farley reacted first by forming the webpage Facebook, Breastfeeding is NOT
Obscene 11 • Next, she orchestrated a lactation performance of unprecedented scale:
the Virtual Nurse-In on December 2ih, 2008. Mother's International Lactation
Campaign (M.I.L.C.) organized to have over 11,000 moms to simultaneously feed
their babies publicly in front of Face book headquarters in an effort to cause a loss of
face .for the company. Protestors called the corporation hypocritical for allowing
content from other viewers or advertisers that sexualized breasts
12
•
Farley garnered
more support than ever as a result ofthe Virtual Nurse-In. Staging breastfeeding acts
through or against socio-technology like Facebook or YouTube, shows human milk as
a remarkable text capable of inspiring grass-roots activism.
14
"The essence oftaste is suitability," writer Edith Wharton once decreed.
"Divest the word of its prim and priggish implications, and see how it expresses the
mysterious demand of the eye and mind for symmetry, harmony, and order". I see
the point but feel skeptical about any utility coming from her description of taste. It
is manifold. In a gustatory capacity, taste is both the flavor of a substance and a
sensual, sensory experience that occurs in the mouth: it is one of the five senses. In
another manner, taste is regarded as a sort aesthetic discernment that sensuously
indulges the spirit yet seeks propriety, as Wharton seems to suggest. But defining
taste becomes problematic for any substance like breast milk, a food with a taste, and
any custom such as breastfeeding, an act alternately regarded as being in good taste or
in bad taste, depending on context. Turning from non-artistic accounts of mother's
milk to its use as an actual medium of art, readers should note disorderly but
productive sights of tension between taste and distaste.
Breast milk as visual or literary motif in the arts is nothing new
13
,
though its
appearance as newsworthy event or staged performance for some artists is a more
recent phenomenon. Some artists have enhanced the milk as motif aesthetic of earlier
writers or visual artists by linking it with a corporeal investment to bodies of their
own or others. With artists working in the medium of breast milk the question
becomes how can this unstable or ambiguous property of taste serve an aesthetic
purpose in such an ambivalent landscape?
Jess Dobkin offers mother's milk out of a suitable context that provides one
answer. Canada's Fado Performance, Inc., an artist's collective, sponsored an event
15
entitled 'Five Holes: Matters of Taste' in Ontario during the summer of2006 that
sought to unite the "performer's body and the audience member's bodies with an
assertion that "We 'perform' when we bring our bodies into relationships with an
audience [and we] consider[ s] some of the ways in which sight, touch, smell, hearing
and taste allow us to perceive." 14 A forecast by Antonin Artaud over 70 years before
describes a similar space as "without barrier or partition of any kind ... the theater of
the action [where] ...direct communication will be re-established between spectator
and spectacle, between actor and spectator, from the fact that the spectator, placed in
the middle of action, is engulfed and physically affected by it" (Artaud 96). Dobkin
tested public perceptions with her contribution: Lactation Station Breast Milk Bar
15
•
The installation was not an actual performance of lactation per se, but rather a
milk bar providing samples of breast milk from six anonymous donors. No active
lactation took place but several patrons willingly tried the pasteurized samples,
commenting in Dobkin's video documentation on the taste of the milk and their
rationale for trying it. Others were unnerved by what might constitute a breach of
good taste. "I don't expect everybody to feel comfortable at the milk bar," the artist
told the Toronto Star on July 14th, 2006. Ensuing controversy prompted one
politician, outraged by a 'misuse' of public funds, to threaten shutting down similar
events in the future. After the first day, the Professional Gallery at the Ontario
College of Art and Design decided not to permit minors into the exhibit, meaning that
babies being nursed by their mothers would technically not be allowed into the
exhibit because they would see adults tasting the breast milk samples.
16
The preceding instances of breast milk serve to establish a landscape from
where Shungicu Uchida launches her art. Developing along a specific path, she
connects elements from her book Fatherfucker to her manga (Japanese comic book)
series We Are Reproducing, where she breaches the dominant parent-baby breast milk
valuation, yet depicts her lactation as a quotidian element that pluralizes human
relations, asserting agency-self-esteem fully intact-with and without maternal
interests engaged. A strategic arc culminates in the inhabitation of Visitor Q' s Keiko
Yamazaki, who Uchida uses to parasitically enter a misogynistic substrate. I extract
Keiko from the film in order to reveal a (re)productive blending of fictive narrator
personas that perform art distinctive to Uchida. The critical lens most helpful in that
regard is one that forgoes looking at cinema entirely as cinema!
Conceptualizing Uchida's performance as body art (Amelia Jones term)
dispenses altogether with reified suppositions that see explicit female bodies filmed
or narrated as only victims locked in passive positions for the abusive gaze of
spectators that objectify them. Instead, I reveal the intentional objectification ofthe
body by the performer as part of a purposeful subjectivity. Distilling Jones's feminist
art criticism through Elizabeth Grozs's philosophy of fluid corporeality unlocks
Uchida's performance in ways not otherwise possible. Capitalizing on Grozs's and
Jones's approaches to a specific phenomenology keys in on the primacy of sensory
perceptions that can dislodge the false triumph oftranscendence (spirit) over
immanence (flesh) through what Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls being-in-the world
16
•
In gendered, Cartesian terms men are supposed to think, women are supposed to feel.
17
A privileging of the masculine, rational mind over the emotional, feminine body
affords existential plateaus to men buoyed by intellectual and spiritual
transformations. These are denied to women, who, are purportedly tethered to Earth,
limited by sensual bodies and intuition. But emphasizing the strengths of immanence
as both Grozs and Jones do, I comprehend an actual body-Uchida-as both medium
and conduit of experiences that resonates intersubjectively with many audiences such
that she invokes viewers to join in her meaningful reproductions. I vigorously assert
that Uchida's phenomenological lactation restores the good taste ofhuman milk,
juxtaposing then extracting it from the conflationary spectacles of 'bad taste' in
various abject terrains.
Breast milk is a consistent element of Uchida's art. It is the unifying thread
between three specific works (Fatherfucker, We Are Reproducing, Visitor Q), in three
different genres (novel, comic books, film), from three different periods in her life
and artistic development. The relationship between theses three works culminates in
certain frames of Visitor Q where a volatile poetics of ejaculatory milk relieves and
re-lives Uchida as she enriches and derails the drama. With her expressive fluid
body, she liberates what is all too frequently usurped by various discourses or
expropriated by patriarchy: tacit, forbidden, unsanctioned pleasures. In the end,
Takashi Miike's film and Itaru Era's screenplay are subversively high-jacked, their
high-definition video and words re-authored by Uchida's re-scripting body fluids.
Milk displaces ink! 17 In other words, when Uchida reproduces her body in Visitor Q,
we can sense the volatile poetics comprising human experience for many women.
18
2 - Shizuko
ftf-T Fucks Father
... imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of
her own body.-Adrienne Rich
18
The story My Son's Lips, from Inside and Other Short Fiction: Japanese
Women by Japanese Women is the only text available in English from the popular
Japanese writer and artist Shungicu Uchida. She is largely unknown to American
readers. Author of dozens of texts, including essays, short stories, and novels, Uchida
began her professional manga career in 1984, making several written and illustrated
19
contributions to publications as varied as "women's magazines ... men's erotic manga,
the avant-garde magazine Garo .. .news weeklies, music magazines ... read by an
audience of mainly young adult men and women" (Shigematsu 572). Uchida's
accomplishments have included literary awards, music recordings, interviews,
magazine articles, appearances on stage, television, and in film, credits for directing,
acting, and writing. In addition, several stories by Uchida have been adapted for
television and film 19 .
Part of Uchida's childhood is described as that of a fatherless sixteen-year-old
runaway escaping from rundown housing and a negligent nightclub-hostess mother.
Writer Setsu Shigematsu contends that this background sets Uchida on a path of
"potentially subversive discourses of gender and sexuality [that violate] boundaries of
art, public performance, erotica, comedy and social criticism [through] self-conscious
production of a publically transgressive subject ... an auto-biographical subtext" (572,
emphasis mine). This broad claim covers many of Uchida's stories. Shigematsu
notes that the "[P]rovocative integrations of sexuality, power, and violence, and her
synthesis of autobiographical subtext in her manga and fiction" mark Uchida as a
boundary-breaker using intimate details as "objects of the public gaze ... to manipulate
the voyeuristic desire of the audience" (573). While mostly true, this limited (namely
outre) assessment can be accepted then curtailed to move to productive, substantive
ends. In other words, I intend to build beyond where Shigematsu concludes
20
•
For now, I confine transgression to one Uchida book: Fatherfucker (Faza
Fakka in the katakana syllabary), a best-seller about a teen's repeated rape by her
20
stepfather. In the chapter that follows I will explore transgression in We Are
Reproducing, a manga comic book series focused on pregnancies, motherhood, and
especially lactation. Both texts are semi-biographies. Though "shock value" figures
in this preliminary exploration of Fatherfucker and We Are Reproducing, I caution
readers about one risk in fixating on Shigematsu's agenda. Sustained emphasis on
misconduct from Uchida's celebrity life and characters arrests the transgression itself
as the distinguishing feature of her art rather than what follows: new subjectivities. A
post-trangressive outlook will prevent the limits that stop the viewer's journey
prematurely and compromise fully constructive participation with the artist in
meaningful ontological shifts. This project aims to realize that reproductions of
Uchida are enacted with a sympathetically-invested and reciprocal audience.
My 2009 intervie~ 1 with Uchida reveals that she considers the 1993 novel
Fatherfucker her best work, her crowning achievement. A literary and commercial
success,22 it startles readers for many reasons. This autobiographically based tale
relates the sexual abuse ofthe story's narrator, Shizuko, at sixteen in the hands ofher
stepfather. Many victims and authors in fiction and truth through numerous texts
have told similar accounts23 . Books like Andrea Dworkin's Mercy and Karen
Finley's performance piece Constant State ofDesire share with Fatherfucker
narrators who risk shame from a disbelieving public. When breaking the insular
silence corroding the victim from within, these three works strip sexually violent perpetrators from the protection afforded by silence. In Mercy, the gravity of Dworkin's disclosures is heightened through dense passages lacking paragraph 21
indentations, structured claustrophobically to keep readers from catching their breath.
Finley's delivery is venomous and unstable, veering from dispassion to mockery to
caustic hatred in "chant[ed] monologs describing horrific and abusive family scenes
and sexual scenarios ..." (Schneider 15). Uchida works some of this territory in some
of the same manner but she differs in ways as well.
For one thing, Uchida's audience is broader than either the academic and
feminist circles ofDworkin or the small clusters of performance art enthusiasts
familiar with Finley. Uchida simply reaches a greater spectrum of readers through a
24
more conspicuous profile contructed in popular culture through a wider range of
media. More importantly, her politics oftragedy and redemption jarringly violate
convention in ways not attempted by Dworkin, Finley, and others:
...no[t] the pitiful subject of a victim's narrative; she is a survivor who
packages and markets her own story of sexual violence ... preventing
her from bearing the typical stigma of the "rape victim." Rather than
reproducing ... "shame" about it, Uchida ... refers to her rape in a
straightforward manner, as one of the many elements of her life
story... [With] a kind of overexposure of rape and domestic violence,
[she] practically renders them her trademarks (Shigamatsu 575).
In Fatherfucker, Shizuko Tanaka's opening words "I have always been told I have the
face of a whore" (Uchida FF 7) begin a pattern of 'inappropriate' humor that leavens
morose aspects of the harrowing text. More survival story than tragedy, Uchida's
account shakes expectations, by resorting to comic relief on a topic almost never
22
joked about.
She also engages and breaks the stigma of silence in contradictory ways.
Dealing with a leering stepfather, Shizuko gets pushed towards a silence that both
allows her to cope with his lechery and protects his reputation and that of her family.
After she tells her mother that she resists his touch on her budding breasts, her mother
admonishes Shizuko to "be gentle toward him" and that she should "offer up [her]
ass" (53). Shizuko, whose name literally means "quiet child", increasingly uses the
coping mechanism of silence engaged with ironic distance to keep her sanity intact.
The film adaptation of Father Fucker is titled Girl ofSilence because of the way
Shizuko recedes into her thoughts and offers her tormentor no feedback during the
episodes of abuse. As an author, Uchida ruptures silence by publically indicting her
real stepfather's reprehensible conduct and her real mother's complicity through
thinly-veiled portraitures. Uchida's conflict prompts a closer look at one intense scene
that shows how bad the mistreatment is to warrant both the silence and the black
humor that comes before and after the passage.
Shizuko hesitantly informs her mother's husband that she has become
pregnant by her high school boyfriend. Her control freak stepfather gives her a
terrible beating followed the next night by something more heinous. As she lies
down her father rubs and prods her stomach, expressing disappointment that his kicks
and punches did not cause a miscarriage:
My stepfather was gradually getting excited by this bogus medical
examination. He removed my panties and fingered my genitals.
23
Don't you ever do that again for the rest ofyour life. Never again!
I was silent.
To make sure you can't I am going to sew your labia shut. And I'm
going to do it right now. You can still have a baby by Caesarian
method so don't you worry.
As if I wouldn't worry.
So, my stepfather actually started preparations to stitch my genitals
shut (141-2).
The palpable violence menaces the girl's body and metaphorically sutures lips that
might freely articulate unspeakable trauma on the one hand, or indescribable pleasure,
like teenage love, on the other. Silence is imposed without executing the gruesome
gesture, which never actually gets carried out in the story. The threatened act of
silencing closes in on her, confining Shizuko; it also tensely opposes the self-enforced
silence affording her meager detachment.
Later, the odor of pomade sickens and awakens Shizuko as her father begins
to rape her (160). Later, asking her mother why her dad would do that, she is
informed that he thought it might induce a miscarriage. Shizuko further learns that her
father now expects regular sex with her to prevent her from experiencing "abnormal
things with her boyfriend" (Shigematsu 574). Shizuko runs away from home in the
open-ended conclusion that finishes the book. The barrier of silence is shattered not
when the events are unfolding, but later, when she is recollecting them. Shizuko
reproduces them for an audience as the grown up narrator, an artist casting events
24
through writing, launching her reproduced trauma out onto audiences. Shizuko the
adult is sensed more at the beginning of the story than at the end (Shamoon 149).
The publisher's exploitation of bad publicity as a marketing factor in the
successful promotion of the book cannot be dismissed. Fatherfucker's reception, in
the words of Adrienne Hurley, "epitomizes the complexities of 'survivor discourse',
receive[ing] considerable hostility and outrage ...'telling' Uchida's 'unpleasant' story
publically...criticized as untruthful and distasteful" (Hurley)
25
•
Covering this ground
confirms the transgression Shigematsu alleges and sets up a necessary foundation for
understanding Uchida. But keeping in mind the caveat made earlier about arresting
fixation on the breach, I reemphasize that reproduction after transgression will better
frame later readings ofUchida's milk as narrated by illustration and performance.
In Fatherfucker, lactation begins when Shizuko's child dies while still in her
womb. A profusion of mother's milk descriptions (Uchida 175-7) play off against
conflicting emotions: grief, elation, laughter, anger, and relief. Desire also appears in
her anticipation of sex with a stranger. A fascination mingled with a muted disgust
fills Shizuko. Puzzled, she asks the excited man "Really? You don't mind doing it
with this dead baby in my belly? You want all this messy milk from my tits leaking
out on you?" (180). This leaking can be seen as letting go of prospective motherhood:
her milk will run out shortly after the tiny body exits her womb. Milk serves as balm
to comfort Shizuko in her loss and contradictorily it signifies the trauma poisonously
contained and internalized by the heroine. Whether seen as a toxin purged from her
body or an elixir of life, this body fluid performs vital functions that come up often in
25
Uchida's work: breasts articulate that which was formerly repressed, lactation
ruptures that silence which had stifled, milk ejaculates profoundly from the springs of
Uchida's reproduced body to reveal newfound or emergent agency.
Fatherfucker, this trauma of an abused girl, this disillusionment and
repression punctured by Shizuko' s breast milk, inaugurates several persistent tropes
in the art of Uchida Shungicu: articulation, ejaculation, reproduction, and lactation.
These elements weave through much of her work and life, stitching together media
and genres, merging truth and fiction, often in restorative capacities. This threading
-culminating in the reciprocal bridge between We Are Reproducing and Visitor Q­
begins with the yoking of Fatherfucker and We Are Reproducing.
Both reality-based texts are told by fictive agents bearing much in common
with their creator. The incest-surviving daughter of Fatherfucker, shares Uchida's
early disastrous home life and an aspiration to become a mangaka (comic artist). In a
replication from Uchida's adolescence, a sympathetic teacher named Nakajime gives
Shizuko a ream of drawing paper as a gift (Uchida FF 41 ). A teenage daughter who
runs away at the end of a book, partially disintegrated is the adult mother who, years
later, integrates conjugal and personal fulfillment with her family life. In one sense,
"sexual reproduction ...is not the reinstatement of the same, but the repetition that
engenders the different" (Lingis 201). Frequently conducted through artfully rendered
episodes of lactation, this transformation or re-production is seen in We Are
Reproducing as GiGi's re-medial correction to corrupted experiences from the
childhoods of Uchida and Shizuko.
26
3- Uchida 11\J E8 Reproduces
27
I wonder what the view must be like through that 'eye'< Little one-eyed monster.
28 ,
*
"7 , ...
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29
Text to the image on the previous page reads:
Ouch! Ouch!! And it's gone, that pain. Ouch how it hurts! Hurts?
No, hell! More like kills.
But then it disappears for a bit. Oddly, I'm bored without the pain.
I was too concerned with breathing heavily. Then it came out!
He came out and I didn't have to push anymore, I thought in my head.
Just breathe and see? Ah.
1.t ~ Ct
t.> -tt
"?
t:~
J:O)
7
J:
IJ•
?
t::.
t:J... A tl
! "? mJ A.
"( IJf ~
t:. &:
"'
Text to the image on this page reads:
There really was a human in there, thank god! Yeah! And he is
saying "hello!!"
It's a boy, said the nurse, it's rare a baby says 'hello' when born. And
he's such a skinny boy. (Uchida We Are Reproducing I 29-30)
30
"I have never met Shungicu Uchida, but I feel I know her," writes Frederik
Scholdt in Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Japan (Scholdt 173). This
feeling comes from her ability to draw readers into the intimacy of her experiences.
Uchida imparts a sense of her "strong desire to take control of her own life ...
presenting her birthing experience in highly personal terms" (177). In the manga, the
child born to the narrator is referred to as 'number one' throughout the series; the
name of Uchida's real son is actually Alpha! It is conceivable that this mother GiGi
from We Are Reproducing signals a return of Shizuko from Fatherfucker. I offer this
conjecture among several leaps that take place. A runaway daughter becomes a new
mother. A novel's survivor turns into a manga's heroine. Birth and rebirth occur as
the artist collapses the partition between her history and her fiction with a unique
narrative shuttling across events from life, spanning artful works that connect with
audiences. This is Shizuko; this is Uchida; this is GiGi.
The successful actress, singer, writer, mother GiGi mirrors the artist who both
draws her and draws on her. Bucking convention through spectacles oftransgression
as Shigematsu contends (see page 17), GiGi accomplishes more than Uchida can do
with her manufactured celebrity alone. GiGi's irrepressible sense of wonder and her
candor, things absent or deeply submerged in Shizuko, abound in this story of
reproduction. Self-display, insecurities and impetuousness endear GiGi to readers,
who, even before her first child is born, sense her potential faith in a necessarily­
selfish space:
So I said to my boyfriend Yuya, "I'm pregnant with another man's
31
child, so break up with me. " But he suggested,
"Ifyou aren't planning
to marry the other guy, we should get married and tell people that the
baby is mine." You don't believe me? Well, you don't have to. So, I
said "No, that's a lie. It's not part ofmy nature to pretend that
something I did never happened, " but he didn't leave me anyway. So I
got married, though I claimed it wouldn't stop me from being a slut.
He replied, "I know." (Uchida We Are Reproducing I 50)
With this unconventional family two people ignore monogamous ideals and more.
Stating she would not lie, GiGi hints at Uchida's blurring oflines between fictional
and actual events, between writer and narrator. This is not unheard of among authors,
some who confirm, deny, or refuse comment on such accusations. But through the
voice of GiGi and Shizuko something beyond veiled biography occurs. Uchida nests
identity within identity; characters begin to melt into one another and straddle texts.
The artist often conflates author with narrator, thrice using her own sonogram in
manga, proclaiming it GiGi's. Whether names change or not, Uchida deploys
narrative ambiguity across several works, most notably in the transition from
Fatherfucker to We Are Reproducing. By the time Uchida's role as Keiko in Visitor
Q enters this arc, an emphatic leap springs from inked experience in manga to the
flesh and milk of a (non)cinematic, volatile body. Thus, relying on most film theory
alone to analyze Visitor Q and Uchida's performance would join other incomplete
evaluations of her works to date.
26
Setsu Shigematsu, Adrienne Hurley, and Deborah Shamoon have written
Jt.:.e
n-??l'
..g .. \ "("
id:?~
lv (})
.
"C
'
After calling her boyfriend weird for wanting to record the birth of the child she ho1ds in
the lower right panel, Uchida('s character) says she's actually glad that he insisted. Here
the couple share the memory as they view the videotape. From 1 Want to Die in Bed.
33
about Uchida's texts and her celebrity, though none of these three have specifically
addressed birth, pregnancy, lactation-processes that provide vital comprehension of
Uchida's art. The lack of focus in these areas of reproduction, of nourishment, of
growth causes attention to rest on Uchida at the sight of the breach rather than what
unfolds after. So where to turn? What can open these three experiences in Uchida's
drawings to reveal how exactly Uchida employs breast milk taboos?
Fiona Giles and Alison Bartlet have not written on Uchida but they prove
useful in ways that Shigematsu, Hurley, and Shamoon cannot: by dismantling the
narrow script of'suitable' mother's milk. After the 2003 University of Sydney
conference "Spilling the Milk: Cultural Studies Approaches to Breastfeeding", this
pair served as guest-editors in a thematic issue ofthe journal Australian Feminist
Studiei 7• What I dub Antipodal feminism28 identifies displacement of the erotic
breast with a nutritive one and the infant's locus as the focal point ofbreastfeeding as
needlessly restrictive to a more holistic conception of what constitutes lactation, what
purposes it can serve, and what meanings it can have. Correlating images from
Uchida's We Are Reproducing with milk narratives compiled in both Bartlett's
Breastwork and Giles's Fresh Milk: the Secret Life ofBreasts counters reluctance to
move beyond breasted binaries like mother I lover, sex I food, and private intimacy I
public display.
Intimate activity like dislodging blocked milk ducts and breastfeeding babies
in baths appears alongside Uchida's non-normative breast milk uses like
breastfeeding older children, and sexual activity with lactating breasts. GiGi further
34
theres other
uses for
breast milk?
•I
I
lsomeuses
of breast
milk,
according to
what ·I heard
coffee
creamer...
and
make
milk bath
I've picked ~-P
some men
telling them
that I WQUid
tll•i!ltn drink it.
I wonder \
If the
,
Regardless,
how can thes
babies they J people spray th
already had,' milk even when
are still l .~-lheir bellie
\. drinking/ l
".Jflllk7..l
•'1
are so big
-,-~
Apparently ;
1
drinking
milk until
I that '
tasty••
she was
thraey-­
,
I
.
I
met this
hi& daught* It
I
had bean I wasn't 1, expert who
..
Read right column, then left. Page 172 from We Are Reproducing II.
"made
ice cream
with it"l!
35
mentions how breast milk has been ingredient to bath, coffee, and plant foods--odd
yet arguably 'appropriate' uses. Teasing about a weird taste, the narrator mentions a
man who made ice cream from breast milk. This incident is akin to the cheesemaking restaurateur mentioned in my introduction and finds a similar space as
"Nick's Vanilla Diazepam Ice Cream" among actual recipes for Sourdough bread and
"Breast Pump-kin Pie" in the book Fresh Milk (Giles 250-4). GiGi's humor hints at a
push to move beyond limits of 'good taste' through opening or sustaining discussion.
Something that easily could have come from Uchida or Giles is uttered in Jess
Dobkin's video feed for Lactation Station: "It's not a question of whether people taste
it or not; but the dialogue that's created when the question is posed ...not that I feel so
comfortable with the idea of drinking a lot of women's breast milk either. It's just. ..
for a conversation to happen ... the performance actually happens through the dialogue
that's created"29 . Uchida moves slightly beyond the direction of this goal with the
humor indicated in GiGi's luring of potential lovers and her wink at lactation and
pregnancy fetishists.
Giles covers similar ground, touching on "ontological and epistemological
ruptions ... [which] many may understand to be 'yuk factors' in readings of specific
breast feeding practices ... [that] may not necessarily involve infant[s]" (Bartlet/Giles
270). These 'yuk factors'-latent and patent revulsions in public fascination with
breast milk-are confirmed by public reaction Giles notes to research of 'stray' breast
milk contexts like male lactation, fetish pornography, and adult nursing relationships
(ANRs) 30 . Antipodal feminism evaluates the contested topography of
36
0
-:: a wbile later
baby started
~......""".. the
crying
It must take
long time to
mix another
·formula
37
breastfeeding Uchida negotiates. The manga on the preceding page easily fits into
Alison Bartlett's varied lactation tales drawn from medical discourse, advertising, art
history, news accounts, lactation advocacy, pornography, and interviewed mothers.
Giles's '"Foray' into Queer Breastfeeding"31 also helps frame this unique artist.
Several Uchida images (much like Giles and Bartlett's writings) explore "permeable
boundaries between sexuality and breastfeeding, [through events with a] marginality
to heteronormative sexual practices [that] render them queer" (270).
Thus certain assertions from Bartlett and Giles provide good foundations for
interpreting as queer32 the pages of lactation in We Are Reproducing, while images
like Kitagawa Utamaro's ukiyo-e woodblock print from an 1802 album Ehon hana
is
time in
we can together like this. My jeertngs nave
been building up for so long I can barely contain myself!
Her: I feel the same so I finally managed to arrange it. Promise you 'll never leave.
38
fubukP 3 (Picture-book ofFlowers in Violent Bloom) situate Uchida within a specific
Japanese teleology. Centuries apart, Utamaro and Uchida acknowledge common
emotional sensations, sexuality, timing issues, and physical engagement as often
experienced by lovers and family members-sons, mothers, daughters, or fathers.
Uchida's manga on page 37 bears an uncanny resemblance to Utamaro's on page 39.
In both pieces, a mother enjoys contact with her lover and her son simultaneously.
Such an expression in Uchida's time chafes at modem partitions separating the selfish
sexual breast from the dutiful nutritional one. Today, ifthe activities ofbreastfeeding
and sexual intercourse are not separated, stigmatic labels like 'pervert' or 'reckless
mother' easily attach to a woman who might disclose such an episode.
Stating, even questioning sexual feelings while nursing can have grave
consequences, as with the case of Karen Carter. Using a hotline service for new
mothers, Carter (a pseudonym) sought some reassurance that mild orgasmic
sensations were typical while breastfeeding (Umansky 299; Bartlett 97). She was
instead reported to child protective services, losing custody of her daughter for nearly
a year in the early 1990s34 A 1988 Dutch questionnaire ofbreastfeeding mothers
shows that 34% reported "sensation of sexual excitement" while a 1999 study in
English revealed not only a higher percentage than the earlier survey, but also that a
fourth of those felt guilt (Levin 23 8). Researchers in a 1949 study cited arousal
strong enough to trigger orgasm as influencing the decision to stop breastfeeding for
many women (241 ).
GiGi does not worry about this overlap. The woman observing the
39
Does it feel
good?
Read from right to left. Page 119 of We Are Reproducing I alarms some readers.
40
breastfeeding in Uchida's manga validates the joy of both participants, though the
"deep dark river" she mentions may be the impositions on maternal sexuality that
hamper articulating pleasure more centered on her gratification as an individual than
on her dutiful role as a responsible mother. GiGi's friend seeks to answer her own
curiosity and confirms vicarious satisfaction that occurs when people watch breasts
feeding babies. Though an infant cannot express that mother's milk tastes good in the
words of an older child or adult, most people draw that conclusion based on cues
provided by the baby. Bartlett writes of healthy "voyeuristic interest in the sight of
naked breasts, their softness and plentitude, and the baby's frank guzzling delight,"
stating that "breastfeeding in public remains an issue because it is a sensuous activity
... [involving] voyeurism, pleasure, desire [and that] we cannot insist there is nothing
sensuous about it" (87). The food must be tasty to inspire the child's "guzzling".
Antipodal feminism suggests that public taste-insistent non-gustatory decorum­
inhibits the good taste of the scene to many eyes.
Demanding both public and private fulfillment of needs not always and only
focused on children, Uchida seeks environmental change. Toward that end, the artist
partially springs human milk away from its place in discursive domains, like
prevailing medical and advocacy literature, pornography, and even some aesthetic
renditions. Uchida's art has both rifts from and similarities with Japanese examples
from arts and letters, beginning with Junichiro Tanizaki's story Bridge ofDreams
35
.
Tanizaki's narrator vaguely recalls breastfeeding from his mother at the age of
five "without a word of reproach" because of laxer attitudes held a century ago
41
toward weaning children who might sometimes continue to nurse their mothers into
adolescence (Tanizaki 74). Tadasu fondly recollects dry-nursing his stepmother as a
boy often, though as an eighteen-year-old later, when witnessing her at a breast pump
shortly after the birth of his half-brother, he juggles revulsion and desire:
Her breast swelled up inside the glass receptacle, almost filling it, and
a number of tiny streams of milk spurted from her nipple. She emptied
the milk into a drinking glass and held it up to show me.
"I told you I'd have a baby some day and there'd be lots of milk for
you, too, didn't I?" I had somewhat recovered from my initial shock
and was watching her fixedly, though I hardly knew what to say.
"Do you remember how it tastes?" she asked. (Tanizaki 90)
Similar scenes appear in contemporary erotic manga and pornographic videos as well
as classic Japanese texts. Deborah DeZure implies that amae
36
,
a facet conceptually
unique to Japanese mother-child dyads, frustrates a simplified read of Oedipal desire
in Bridge ofDreams (DeZure 48). Anne Allison's Permitted and Prohibited Desire,
falls into such a trap with a distortional book eliding ethnocentricities in the texts of
Freud and Lacan, contlatingfictional scenes of incest and rape in ero-manga with
real crimes, and falsely constructing a troubling Japanese meta-misogyny.
37
Uchida does not pathologize. She does not see or sense what Allison claims;
like many Japanese, the artist distinguishes genuine incest from rhetorical and
fantastical forms of it. With both motherly and non-maternal sensuality, Uchida
emphasizes the producer (not the recipient) ofthe milk, yet deploying amae with the
43
same purposeful ambivalence Tanazaki used years before. She depicts it erotically,
though not in the narrow masculine sense of the word, but from a different point of
view. Uchida holds a reverence for literary and literal breast milk, including her own.
In the right panel from Vol.I, page 114 of We Are Reproducing, GiGi states that some
men become fixated on ladies' panties or shoes, saying that such men are called
fetishists. She reasons that because babies are so focused on nipples and milk then
they too must be fetishists, not something that is necessarily negative. The left panel
makes a gentle distinction: babies come to associate 'this thing' with 'this face' and
so learn to love both objects and people in a complete sense. E.L. McCallum's Object
Lessons38 concurs that fetishism does not so much always indicate impulsivity,
immaturity, or an unhealthy drive to control and construct women as sex objects, but
rather more often, a means used individually by people to make sense of the world
through understanding the relation of one object to another. It is an unrealistic
expectation that every person ought to always avoid objectification of other peoplethe investments necessary to treat everybody as subjects would be overwhelmingly
impractical. More importantly, I will elaborate in later chapters how to perform the
44
interobjectivity that leads to intersubjectivity. This realization is a key component of
the phenomenologic operational dynamics between artist and viewer that corporeal
performers tap into during their acts, where a "subject poses as an object in order to
be a subject."(Owens in Jones 152). For now, suffice it to say Uchida's manga
maneuvers here through Tanizaki's consuming obsession, beyond Allison's
ethnocentric judgments, and past Shigematsu's limits oftransgression.
Interesting contrasts and comparisons are found as well when comparing
Uchida works to examples of other manga or anime-influenced art. What Dick
Hebdige has called 'Sado-cute' 39 pervades pop-mythical vision of a goddess feeding
worshippers that enshrine her. Shown below, Junko Mizuno's Ai, is rendered as a
45
source of nourishment for the masses, in a space quite different from the domestic
spheres of Uchida's manga. Life-size, sculptures40 , Hiropon and My Lonesome
Cowboy, Takashi Murakami's comment on otaku (geeky) idle adolescence, provide a
separate contrast with Uchida. A bishojo (the lovely-girl-type of manga) sports
hyper- sexualized breasts and lacks a vagina and pubic hair. Her obscured genitals
mimic Japanese protocols that censor the vulva with pixilating mosaics; her sterility,
an implied symbol of the anxiety of a shrinking population that some say displaces
holistic sexuality with fetishistic behavior. The boy (shonen) ejaculates a lasso of
sperm frozen overhead in mid-flight. He cannot reproduce with her. Though
46
semen and breast milk are expressed, the fluid squeezed from Hiropon's caricaturized
breasts makes a jump rope of static lactation that affixes the bishojo between
identifications: neither girl-child nor mother-woman, neither perversion nor sexual
reproduction. Her nipples, huge and playfully tempting are impotent phalluses.
Hiropon is pleasure without deep meaning, gloss concentrated on the spectacle of
convergent Superjlat41 surfaces that define yet confine.
Uchida's phallic appropriation conflates
i¥"' (mother's milk) and ~T
(sperm) like Hiropon and Cowboy, but with fictive underpinnings latched onto an
actual body. GiGi's stories are indexed to real experiences and discussions had by
Uchida. GiGi seems aware oflris Young's warning that the lack of focus on an erect
penis renders non-phallic pleasure as deviance. Male orgasm might get displaced by
the "model of sexual power in breasts rather than penises" where "men's nipples
[serve] as puny copies, just as men have constructed women's clitorises as puny
copies of the penis ... [in order to] potently disrupt borders between maternity and
sexuality." (Young 190) The challenging comical imagery Young invokes where the
seams of dominant patriarchal language be found so as to begin unstitching them.
The philosopher Alfonso Lingis suggests women should use:
... multiple, disjoint female semiotics and feminine cultures ... a collage
including elements from past epochs ... contemporary inventions ...
cultural regions ...anticipatory or prophetic .. .improvisations-not
simply resisting, evading, mocking male culture, but elaborating their
own identities and distinctness (Lingis 163).
47
That makes
me think...
when
my breasts
are full
"""
,.­
tash,
1 it's coming out
forever!
"
.
Again, the other night,
1
.fT~at ~' • I forgot to put something against
1
t ere s \1
my chest and went to sleep,
someone
.
dd
k'
t
willing \ my paJamas en e up soa mg we .
o hire me ...l
When I'm
1 out of ajob,
1 maybe I
jshould become
\wet nurse...
I
Wet nurse
body type.
'_
Read from right to left. Milk and semen on page 111 of We Are Reproducing I.
,.,.~"'
48
To those ends, using an activity Uchida shows in some of her manga (though with
less frequency than lactation), Barbara Sichtermann draws an interesting correlation
to oral sex:
The parallel between breastfeeding in particular and the heterosexual
sex act [is] superficially more obvious than the actual similarities in
sensation and arousal would suggest ... the tip of the breast, a highly
sensitive, erectile organ pushes its way into baby's warm and moist
oral cavity. While the lips, jaws and gums close around the organ,
massaging it in a rhythmic sucking motion, it discharges its special
juice into the child's deeper esophageal region (Sichtermann 64).
Sichtermann treads the same ground as Uchida's GiGi with ideas that "disrupt the
border between sexuality and motherhood ... [by asking] us to acknowledge the often
silent sensual pleasures women experience with their breasts and infants" (Bartlett
86). Some may sense these thoughts as snide, outright attempts at offense through the
'hip irony' of transgression. These utterances and images, however, are much more
than edgy efforts to break taboos or to suggest broad tolerance for activities some
may regard queerly. These words are not so much embracing of something falsely
incestuous as they are a call for a widely adopted new language. This action prompts
negotiating the shades of meaning among terms like sensuality, pleasure, sexuality,
intimacy, desire, love, and passion. Such communion can recognize "an inkling of
[lactation's] rank as sexual potentiality" (Sichtermann 107). This break from dichotomous language ("either it is sex or it is not") might 49
"Having
your
breasts
Hmm ...
Ohmy...
Maybe their
husbands are
bad
do it right...
50
come not by defining, not by closing, but by "elaborating on the cultural meanings
and uses of breast milk as a substance, breastfeeding as a practice, and lactation as a
process ... offering opportunity for mutual confluence of bodily flows which help
disassemble the binaries of sexual difference" (Giles 301). Uchida's art revels in the
potential of such a space through a very sophisticated conglomeration of subject
positions. I contend there is a nuanced boundary loss engendered by intermittent
maternal decoupling that allows GiGi to enjoy pluralized pleasure much to the benefit
of her entire family. Eros of parenthood means that "Erotic love-at whatever end of
its continuum-always involves an element of transgression, the overflowing of
ordinary boundaries ...present as possibility ... [t]he very permission that is granted to
physical love in certain contexts ... " (Oxenhandler 205). What Sichtermann, Giles,
and Oxenhandler suggest comes to fruition through Uchida in several ways as shown
in several images comprising the next chapter where GiGi sprinkles.
51
4 - GiGi L;' L;' Sprinkles
I wanna
try it!
I did the same
for the baby and
he opened his mouth
and stuck out his
In these pages from We Are Reproducing, Gigi engages in so many activities
of fluid, poetic, quotidian marvel. Not harried, not with an intention to shock. She
relaxes in the bath with her baby and older son. Her milk sprinkles while she muses
about oxytocin, a chemical behind uterine contractions in childbirth, nipple erections,
orgasmic response in women and men, lactation's let-down reflex, and increased
caretaking behavior42 needs to be better understood by more folks. Her baby is seen
on the bed when Gigi has sex. No one is disgusted where her amused children see
their father, Yuya, playfully suck milk from GiGi. In fact, there is wonder. Splendor!
52
3) And finally,
allows the mother
to begin secreting
milk \Vhile
working towards
various other
functions.
I) Causes an
increased desire
to have your body
touched.
2) Accelerates
the processes
involved in
labour.
The main effects came
from a female·specitic
hormone called oxytocin
(
My oldest and youngest daughter love being nursed.
Since they know that when I'm in the bathtub milk
pretty much comes flying out of my breasts, it seems
that bathing with them has become a part of everyday life.
I was having a
lot of sex while
I was pregnant...
Once again,
about the
effects of
carrying a
baby...
Come to think
of it...
... and the delivery
went by really fast
with my third-hom.
I wonder how the
Japanese saying of
"Bathing the children
is the father's job"
came about?
I suppose you could say that if a
mother is having trouble nursing,
she should try bathing with her kids
as often as possible.
53
•sigh"'
Oh? His face is
the exact same...
Sleeping like
a baby.
" ... too bad that changes the
scrond they wake up.
Babies always
look so peaceful
when they arc
ru;lccp...
54
Ifyou bite,
I'm not going
to give you
any!!
[The youngest
is teething]
55
With Uchida's characteristic humor, such episodes are not transgression so
much as articulating what others reluctantly or voluntarily choose to withhold. As
stated earlier, many43 disclosures-hidden nursing activity with older children,
lactating breasts in sexual play, and of variations to nutritional infant feeding in the
context of the mother-child bond-potentially garner censure. But in a fictive, artistic
space Uchida manages not only to render these tacit or 'forbidden' pleasures, but also
to highlight them, to validate women's experiences as mothers and as human beings.
By depicting accounts similar to many of those documented in the works of antipodal
feminists, Uchida dissolves rigid partitions, dislocating and augmenting the gaps and
overlaps in lactation stories through reconstructive strategies, through reproduction!
This is, as Giles puts it "a blurring ofboundaries between the maternal and the erotic
breast, as well as exploration of the ways in which both eros and maternity draw from
each other" (Giles "Tears" 137).
Maternal decoupling-temporarily shedding the lactating breast of its baby­
feeding purpose44-gratifies the mother before returning her to 'nutritional duties'
without feeling deprived. The method tints the many pleasurable sexual encounters
GiGi has. These indirectly enact a sort of pedagogy ofbreast feeding imparted to
indulge children old enough to voice natural curiosity. The didactics of her healthy
reproductive body pepper much of Uchida's art though never in a cumbersome or
prurient way. GiGi says she would be in trouble in some countries for what she does.
Child abuse? Perversion45 in We Are Reproducing's baths? No. GiGi's healthful acts
occur emotionally, via fountains of love and loveliness-through Uchida's springs!
56
It's probably
gonna be
milk bath
tonight.
57
but he never
gets quiet
then he enters the
"boobie finder phase"
59
She starts looking for the nipple. But that face she makes, goodness,
< Oh no ... < AHHH < She fell asleep, asleep. I can't take it. What do you mean? I mean, once you are all grown up, no one looks for something with their mouth
unless they're bobbing for apples. But she does it like everyday. "Where is it?
Where is it?" She shows me pretty good stuff. (Page 97 of We Are Reproducing II).
60
It's up to you, hahaha
I would feel bad rubbing on hot mustard or wasabi I'm saying it seriously... < I heard drawing scary faces can help wean kids < Faces? OH SHOOT. She hasn't
forgotten about it at all <Mommy!< Eventually, I welcomed them home as they are
(GiGi attempts to wean her child as Yuya cracks up. From We Are Reproducing III).
61
t.>
I!
I•
Mommyl
breast
•
1ng.
2 images from We Are Reproducing: Above-Gigi surprised her milk still comes out so
long after birth of her youngest; Below-Daughter feeding her doll just like mommy.
62
Yeaah!!
Mommy,
I wont to drink
tool
It seems she
wonts to
copy the oth!!T
kids
-- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
63
Looks in wonder The next day I take a
From now on I can take a bath
(sound of milk < bath with my daughter <
Really!!
sprinkling)
Milk again
It's a milk bath
What am I supposed to do?
-----------------------
----~-
66
5- Keiko
5-T: Are We Reproducing Visitor Q?
- L!.J :.e--- l-4
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,.;:.,
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: ) \..- \ ) ~,ill , -r· [6._ ..,.~ \.'
"My 'water trick' from Takashi Miike's Visitor Q. It's not that kind ofmovie."
46
67
... she was curious about the taste ofher own body, and the sweet taste
ofthe milk reconciled her to all the body's other juices and excretions.
She began to think ofherselfas tasty; her body had become as
agreeable and legitimate as any other object...
-Milan Kundera47
I'm not a special woman or a pathetic woman. I'm just an ordinary
woman.-Keiko Yamazaki I Shungicu Uchida
I now focus on Uchida's role Keiko Yamazaki the mother of teenagers from
Visitor Q. Having revealed narrative and corporeal ambiguity (speaker/author,
victim/agent, mommy/lover), and the beneficent boundary losses of maternal
decoupling that drives so much of We Are Reproducing, I tum to Visitor Q as the
ultimate platform for this artist. Through ways not feasible in looking at Uchida's
novel or her manga, this chapter examines Keiko's parodical phallic displacement
and phenomenologic intersubjectivity. Successful deployment of these tactics comes
down to the performer marshalling a simultaneous lactation converged in the
reciprocating body of not only GiGi and Keiko, but also ofUchida and her receptive
audience. Through "invo[king] the public performance oflactation, in which human
milk production is celebrated as a spectacle, and becomes an object of play" (Giles
"Tears" 133) Shungicu Uchida springs beyond targets like feeding children and even
past greater public tolerance of conspicuous breast milk, queer or not. By collectively
embodied intersubjective enactment, she seeks a productive distortion of the
patriarchal proscriptions "aimed towards 'consequences' [and] separating pleasure
68
and sexuality from reproduction" (Sichtermann 56). Such a move restores not only
"the sexual potentiality ofbreastfeeding [which was] wholly expropriated from
women" (57) but moreover champions corporeal immanence as a decisive key to self­
sufficiency and to a better understanding human relationships. It begins with humor.
Strategic phallic displacement harkens back to psychoanalytically-trained
feminist Luce Irigaray and others who found androcentric biases in Freudian concepts
like penis envy and in the Lacanian framework asserting 'lack' of complete
personhood (read: masculine) as something negating feminine agency. Maurice
Merleau-Ponty sums up "Grant[ing] to that phallus ... power of causality over so many
forms of behavior [and] refusal to see behind the dream, the humorous word, the
failed act, so absurd a multiplication of associations" as a major fallacy of
psychoanalysis (Merleau-Ponty 69). Many feminists want to unseat such false
assumptions echoing what Simone de Beauvoir argues throughout The Second Sex:
namely that male-oriented language falsely describes women's erotic experiences by
presuming either that they are similar to men's or contradictorily, that they are
inferior deviations to the primacy of a masculine model
48
.
Frustrated by deeply
entrenched presumptions about an omnipotent phallus, some feminists resort to using
phallocentric concepts in ways never intended by the original theorists: against the
grain as a sort of parody. In Uchida's Visitor Q performance, these modi operandi of
phallic displacement and the conflation of semen and milk are directed at an obvious
patriarchal target. They are used in a manner at times complicit and at times not with
that which they critique. Uchida has intermittent sympathy with the film's agenda.
69
This unstable complicity complicates analysis of Visitor Q when formulated along the
lines of British screen theory like "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", whose
author Laura Mulvey might claim cinematic images of suffering or sexualized women
constructed as objects for the sadistic gaze of male spectators (Mulvey 14-26). Visitor
Q's excessive taboo-breaking depictions, distractions of obscenity and spectacle, and
misogynistic surfaces certainly seem to deserve Mulvey's withering gaze. In her day
during much of the 1970s and 80s discourse of art critics rejected representations of
women's bodies as being a continuance of the teleology propagated by sexist
patriarchies. British art circles largely adopted poststructuralist and deconstructive
critical modes49 to contest the socially constructed femininity and its cultural artifacts
that moored women to the inferior status of objecthood. This development repudiates
forms as widely varied as the traditional nude figure and the bodily performances of
artists like Carolee Scheeman50 and Hannah Wilke 51 whose "adoption of such
structures of femininity work through reiteration to unhinge them" (Jones Body 179).
At the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado on September 4th, 1977-an event
screening her film Fuses-Schneeman makes comments about her own film and
performance that are worth repeating before taking a look at Visitor Q:
[S]tep into the area of discrepancy between film which ... remains in
the mind's eye permits the passive viewing separation projection an
illusion step into the fissure between live action and filmic images
the distancing of audience perception and fixity of projection an
actual reality triggering filmic reality as coherent present the lens
70
standing between us and the material embodiment a live action beside
illusionistic actions/images an antagonistic field where the spectators
must find their move ... you must stand out step out of your frame ...
(Schneeman 235)
Mulvey, a filmmaker like Schneeman, does not see it this way, since she feels
that such art relies on essentialized gender, something to overcome just like socially
constructed identity-either pole a potential trap for objectifying women's bodies.
Contrary to Mulvey, Jones decries the "reified and prescriptive" false premise of
feminist critics imploring viewers to dis-invest in film's narratives-an approach
influenced by dramatist Bertolt Brecht's concept of "distanciation"-to somehow
identify or attack or abate a predatory gaze ( 175-182).
Amelia Jones provides a more complex way of interpreting Uchida's
performance in Visitor Q when she raises the question of what happens when a
"subject poses as an object in order to be a subject" (Jones Body 152-154). She
documents a range of subject and object positions that collide, merge and reverse in
performance artists. I would like to explore these positions as I now consider whether
screen artists can become corporeally invest in the reproduction of their identities,
more than cine permits? Could an actress accomplish reproductivity through means
other than direct, unwavering insistence on pure monolithic subjectivity as Mulvey
and others propose? In terms like these I find that in the origins and echoes of phallic
displacement, this is not a destruction of an oppressive gaze but an appropriation even
facilitation of a gaze that, if courted and sustained, could transform negativity, control
71
or even condemnation into things and acts confirmative and (re)productive. The
gamble Schneeman, Uchida and others make with performative self-objectification is
that other viewers, particularly women, will identify with what it feels like to be
looked at, leered at, desired and used as a sex object, but somehow recuperating,
facilitating, or even exponentializing agency through what appear as contrary means.
Such concepts can ignite the chain of phenomenological intersubjectivities
and corporeal reproductions that Uchida undergoes in Visitor Q. This purposeful
'objectification' is a necessary path toward empathetic but unnamed audiences
through "bodies [that] do not appear to us merely in two ways, as agents and objects
ofaction... [but] experienced ... as dwellings for an anonymous agent-'someone who
perceives in me"' (Heinamaa 64). It is this mechanism that allows viewers, especially
women, to identifying with/as the performing narrator who can negotiate a flow of
negative and positive forces that constitute a conflicted feminine space. Heinamaa
puts a twist on Beauvoir' s notion that one becomes but is not born a woman: "not as
the question of 'what she is' [ontology] but as a question of 'how she is'
[phenomenology]" (70). Before returning to these postulations I focus on phallic
displacement as it pertains to a couple of scenes from Visitor Q.
Keiko is putting together a jigsaw puzzle when her son starts berating her and
whipping her with a rattan carpet beater, pausing only long enough so that she can
refill the glass of the husband's visitor. Later, Keiko instinctively senses her
daughter's vaginal fluids on her husband's penis when she initiates oral sex which her
husband declines. In part, this abuse, dysfunction, and rejection are contained by
72
Keiko's silence; she suffers dutifully and inarticulately save for her screams of pain.
Then, encountering the visitor alone, this mother begins to spontaneously lactate
when he begins to tug at her nipples. "How did you do that? It's incredible!" she
moans, in the thralls of what appears to be long-denied pleasure. The absence of a
mother-baby breast milk context helps Uchida decouple maternal restrictions from
inward gratification, something Giles's might classify as 'queer' lactation. With milk
symbolizing voice, ejaculation occurs in both senses of the word. Milk speaks denied
sentiments and it displaces the male-privileged orgasm or cum-shot. Sichtermann
writes: "Women experience welling in their white mammary fluid with the same
pride with which a boy fingers his semen: life-giving (and sustaining) material which
finds its pleasure-tinged way into another body ... " (65). This 'body' is more than a
baby's or a lover' s-it is the sympathetic body of the viewer, even if conflicted at the
prospect of accepting the gesture.
Many people seeing this intimate active lactation might liken it to looking
directly at the sun ("no need to stare to know it's there"). Some may be disconcerted
by the high-definition video (more realistic, quotidian, and pornographic than film)
which zooms in for a close up on jets of milk squirting out of Uchida's swollen
nipples in a scene sustained for audience impact. This explicitness borrows
pornographic I?ethods but has subtexts that never subvert the entire agenda to pure
arousal like porn does. Here it makes sense to tum to something Amelia Jones says
of artists like Uchida, who use their bodies and technology to make:
subjects as 'real' to the viewers who consume them ... flesh seems
73
almost to burst through the video .. .insist[ing] on flesh's status as
three-dimensional- as 'being' -to negotiate the terrain between self-as­
image (representation, visibility) and self-as-being (embodied,
52
weighty, sensual, volumetric). As Maurice Merleau-Ponty would
say, these works explore the 'thickness of the body' precisely by
enacting and contesting its relationship to the screen of representation
(Jones "Working" 135).
A format like the high-definition digital video used to make Visitor Q is dually
explicit: it overly discloses of the traumatic narrative and it exposes the flesh of the
actors with pore-counting detail. Thus it mines the exponentially contracting and
expanding gulf between embodiment and representation, fiction and reality, sweeping
back and forth, from the object to the subject positions of the film's principals. This
chasm, through Uchida's fluid corporeal insistence contradicts Mulvey's distancing
strategy of locating a gendered gaze because of a collapsed distance between the
spectator and the spectated. Jones calls this "Oscillation between the flesh (the self)
as two-dimensional (in the regime of representation, ofthe fetish) and the flesh (self)
as three-dimensional (a volume whose surface can never render its fullness) ...
indicating [the body's] tangibility: it cannot be (only) a picture if it oozes fluid from
within" (137-138). Viewers 'feel' (for) Keiko through Uchida; they have the
empathetic investment and may now see the satire and retribution in the following
scene even without seeing Freud undone.
The symbolic castration coming after Keiko's first milk scene occurs at the
74
dinner table where the brooding son visibly resents his mother's new confidence as
she serves the meal. "Is it somebody's birthday?" he snidely asks before hurling a hot
bowl of soup at her face. Keiko returns moments later with a knife, slicing up a
cucumber before throwing the knife at the boy and missing by inches! Then she takes
the remaining cucumber 'stump' and chomps into it with a little snicker. It is not the
castrating father of a Freudian economy that the son (a patriarchal seedling) should
dread but rather a deliberate cross-gendered parody: the silent mother cum biting
castratrix. What should be feared are slicing teeth from a mouth that speaks up and
the chaotic feminine fluids that resists masculine orderliness and dutiful purpose. The
implications? She is not there to silently endure his abuse, to coo and coddle, to suck
him off, to feed the baby, or to make him cum.
Keiko's lactation indicates the appearance of"breast-milk as a [previously]
hidden, invisible resource ...particularly recalcitrant to male control" (Maher 32). Just
as small children have used toothpicks dipped in milk to write invisible ink messages
that are revealed when the paper is held under a flame, so too, does this human milk
make its appearance-under stress. Unblocking this stoppage may involve "a pinch
[to] the nipple and twist[ing] like so-it hurts a lot-but hang in there!!" Uchida tells
women (Uchida You Were 53). Milk is conjured as a form of release, an unblocking
of that which hinders the fluid feminine, expressed in a comer free from discursive
masculine spaces like medicalized or restrictively pomographized female bodies.
Moments later fireworks launched into the kitchen by the son's bullies animate the
father as he revels in the destruction while Keiko sits calmly eating her dinner amid
75
t
.
When milk is stored In the nipple, sometimes there
can be some blockage at first
To remove the blockage,
you must pinch the nipple
and twist it like so - it hurts
a lot - but hang in there~!
Page 53 of You Were Also Thinking About Pregnancy Pictures© Shungicu Uchida
76
chaos, unruffled as she placidly brushes hot sparklers out of her hair. There is a sense
of emerging competency and serenity that her milk seems to have brought her. Her
husband meanwhile spirals downward, locked in bizarre spectacles with paralyzing
fascination: daughter's enjo kosai (teen prostitution), the microphonic sodomy, the
son's beatings. "Life is miraculous! I made a corpse's pussy get wet! Some things in
this world are truly strange," he says to the camera before initiating necrophilia Then,
moments later, "No!! Life is shit!!" realizing the victim merely evacuated her lifeless
bowels on him. He resumes screwing the corpse only to have his penis trapped inside
of her via rigor mortis. Comic absurdity in these scenes testifies to both the film's
misogynistic components and its criticism of masculinity.
Meanwhile, in another profuse lactation scene, Keiko shows the visitor she has
learned to milk herself before rushing to save her panicked husband. She uses oil,
vinegar, and heroin to free her husband from the grip of the corpse. "I haven't seen
her this competent since we first wed," he tells the videotaping visitor who remarks to
him, "You just don't get it, do you?" Keiko's breast milk and Uchida's are one in the
same, not simulated; not faked, but queer and real, mingling in the instability so that
the artist's body can overwrite the film's narrative to "create holes or fissures in
perception and interpretation, destructur[e] thought, caus[e] spectators to ...critique
cultural norms, fixed perceptions and sedimented values as they pertain to the body,
identity, and society" (Heatherfield 9).
Skeptics may wonder if she really needs to use her body that way. But
audience surveys identifying lactation passages as the most inspired scenes of the film
Visitor Q: Keiko throws a knife she used to 'castrate' her son, then eats as husband
films fireworks destroying the house. He shouts, "My family is being destroyed!"
78
back the validity of a corporeal performance art framework where:
the paradoxical status of the body as art: treating it as an object within
a field of material relations with other objects [or spectacles, good or
bad], and simultaneously questioning objectification by deploying it as
disruption of and resistance to stasis and fixity ... ensures that the
artist's exploration of the meanings and resonances of contemporary
embodiment will be received in and through an intersubjective,
phenomenal relation (11).
This intersubjectivity is directed from the audience toward the performer when she
"Unveil[s] her flesh ... as radically excessive ... forc[ing] us to interact with her body
(image) as a constitutive aspect of her multiplicitous self and so mak[ing] us
complicit in formulating her significance" (Jones Body 185). A reciprocating flow
from artist to spectator completes the circuit. Uchida's "performative body/self
conflates not only her mind with her body as autobiographically invested maker of art
but also confuses in fascinating ways her identities (as feminist subject/object) with
those of her viewers" (176). This characterization is not restricted to Uchida's screen
performance alone.
Jones describes Hannah Wilke's art in a way that could easily apply to some
of Uchida. Wilke "construct[s] her body as obscene, desirable, and/or victimized
object of an inexorable patriarchal gaze ... within a[ n] ... array of expressions (objects,
interviews, texts, music, performances, photographs) that articulate a proactive rather
than reactive feminist subject" (181, emphasis mine). Jones here has a conflicted
79
utility; in some ways the Wilke assessment is not far from Shigematsu' s emphasis on
transgression in Uchida as a definitive end. These accounts iffully applied to Uchida
would neglect to consider how she contrasts her confrontational breaches with
retreats to quotidian space. An example from the two-dimensionality of We Are
Reproducing's domestic baths seen on page 80 proves this point.
GiGi collates Keiko and Uchida's residual make up from Visitor Q, to show
her children and readers the make-believe, a peel-off-able fa<;ade that becomes child's
play. Gentle sweetness is seldom what is written about Uchida, yet it is another strata,
another means (like narrative ambiguity) of inducting some viewers into the
intersubjective exchange. Full comprehension of how contemporary Japanese artistic
identities are emergent on superjlat surfaces may be difficult for some "from the
homogenous space of Western perspective, which anchors just one whole subject
position, and one unified view" (Looser 98). Yet proliferation of superficial identities
widens the potential of broad empathy for artists, Japanese or not. In a similar way,
Jones's reading ofMerleau-Ponty's existential phenomenology also holds promise.
80
It doesn't
hurt? '
During I had
enjoyable life,
I was getting
hit by a dust whip
and throwing myself
sliding paper screens
shattering
windows
Squirting milk,
getting everything
·wet.
the director
is Takashi Milke.
she
eventually
got used
to it.
(
Page 185 of We Are Reproducing III. GiGi describes Visitor Q, reassuring her kids.
81
With it, emerges a productive interpretation of Uchida's performance as body art that
would not "de-center self... but rather enact or perform or instantiate ... embodiment
and intertwining of self and other" (Jones Body 38). Uchida narrows a gap and takes
remarkable leaps: illustration to film, cinema to performance art, artist's experience to
viewer's sympathy. Before concluding with Uchida's fluid poetics in my final
chapter, I return to Jones with words that frame the remarkable performance of this
unique artist:
conceptualiz[ing] intersubjectivity as imbricated rather than
oppositional. .. embedded rather than simplistically staged in a discrete
social environment ...articulate[ing] an understanding of
intersubjectivity as dramatically intercorporeal: as embodied as well
as contingent... constituted though a reversibility of seeing and being
seen, perceiving and being perceived, and entail[ing] a reciprocity and
contingency for the subject(s) in the world (41).
When I asked Uchida about her challenging statements that "ordinary
housewives" are something to be bored with, or that ordinary women should not try
to be as outrageous as she is, she chuckles. Those statements open the story of We
Are Reproducing but they are really not to be taken seriously. It is merely her jostling
manner of tickling her readers with a poke in the ribs. She says that the women in her
stories are indicative of common experiences that most women share. These women
she calls "comrades". This attitude is a large part of the intersubjective success ofher
artistry.
82
6 - Shungicu ~~: Springing Volatile Poetics from the Fluid Feminine
In performance art, agency is reworked ... leaky because it morphs ...
inauthentic because it borrows and mimics other cultural 'agencies'
... mysterious because it conceals itself .. messy because it refuses
control and demands disorder
53
-Katherine Mezur
... to imagine the woman's point ofview, the breasted body becomes
blurry, mushy, indefinite, multiple, and without clear identity ...fluid
rather than as solid ... things. Fluids, unlike objects, have no definite
borders; they are unstable [but not] without pattern. Fluids surge and
move... 54
-Iris Marion Young
Lactation on film usually appears in suggested or simulated ways such as the
mother discreetly nursing her baby in Like Water for Chocolate or the obvious
drinking-fountain-like flow in Teta y La Luna, neither which show true breast milk.
The 'real' lactation in fetish pornography which Giles confirms also has an active
Japanese corollary market in ero-manga and video producers such as Aroma. 5
5
Uchida's performance, though not exactly like these, borrows some elements and has
more in common with these 'low' culture forms than the 'high' culture of cinema. To
show how antipodal feminism and phallic displacement can diminish 'porn-usually­
means-patriarchal-oppression' criticism, I tum again to corporeal performance art.
Karen Finley typifies a "burgeoning of confrontative, explicit body work in
performance [which] ...actively leaks across the margins separating porn and art"
83
(Schneider 14). Squirting her own breast milk on a black velvet canvas, she parodies
56
Jackson Pollock's Abstract Expressionist cum-shot-like dribblings while (some
would say) confrontationally wasting her child's lunch or arousing the audience
inappropriately. Finley tweaks both 'feed my children with your breasts' and 'turn
me on with those tits' valuations by asserting her own personal context: with her art,
she nourishes herself, turning on her body to spew creative juices! Like Uchida she
undermines hegemonic decorum, using veneeric compliance and subtly-distorted
gestures to chip away the roots of repression. Finley impregnates phallocratric porn
convention with her gyno-centered subtext; she knows the game and opts to 'play'
patriarchy according to her own rules from a position she has carved within its very
structure.
A volatile poetics ofthe fluid feminine operating in the art that Uchida
engenders necessarily begins with an unflinching embrace of the porn imagery of
squirting breast milk as an activating springboard. The challenge becomes how to
overcome negative connotations in order to feel something else, something other than
(male-oriented) gratification of spectatorial or genitalic agenda. In this regard,
valorizing rather than pathologizing fetishism, Giles observes "some of the most
liberating images of lactating women" are in pornographic videos where, she boldly
asserts, "women's milking scenes drive the show, so that their expression of milk
becomes auto-erotic and the male ejaculation becomes a mirror of a new, female
kind, that lasts longer, spurts further, and tastes better"
57
(Giles "Nipple" 10-11,
emphasis mine); "[P]layful, athletic, andfecund," as Bartlett states, confirming
84
Giles's observations (Bartlet 100); my italic alludes to Uchida's persistent trope of
reproduction. What Giles has called "fountains of love and loveliness"
58
I would say
can best be rendered poetically and corporeally in Uchida's manifold springs.
59
Born Shigeko Uchida, the artist now goes by the first name Shungicu or in
kanji characters,~~' which translates to edible chrysanthemum, garland
chrysanthemum, or spring chrysanthemum, a tasty plant that survives a harsh winter.
It is often used as a decorative flower garnish, and appears in several Japanese dishes.
Family name Uchida, or in kanji,
pg EB, denotes among other things, inner structure
or inside meaning, a combination that might represent a field or container, like a
society, or even a body. All together Uchida Shungicu or
P'1 EB~~
reads I shows:
in this field a delicious flower 'springs' to survive
This notion of springs applies to Uchida in other ways as well. Aside from its
seasonal meaning and the new growth associated with it, spring as an action verb
indicates bouncing, breaking loose, escaping. As object, a spring's mechanical
flexibility makes it pliable and resilient whether heavy or intricate. Geological springs
well up through the bedrock of resort baths the world over, long famed in Japan, in
fact, with relaxing associations of cool refreshment or steamy comfort. With both
examples there is a utile tension. Facilitated by pressure, force contracts the potential
work metal springs promise. Likewise, obstructions to the ducts and fissures of
aquifers, serve a purpose, suppressing what erupts with unpredictable violence at
85
times. These are the fluid poetics that are immanent and correspondent to what flows
through Uchida's manga bodies and her corporeal performance in Visitor Q.
This is the terror and beauty that enthralls men and women alike, arousing the
anxieties and pleasures of all genders. This is the untimely volatility Elizabeth Grozs
claims is used to negatively construct the female body in the patriarchal imaginary
with "complexity, as a leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid; as formless flow; as
viscosity, entrapping, secreting; as lacking not so much or simply the phallus but self­
containment-not a cracked or porous vessel, like a leaking ship, but a formlessness
that engulfs all form, a disorder that threatens all order" (Grozs Volatile 203).
Conceptualizing that gendered indeterminacy facilitates the privileging of an
opposing solidity of masculine sexuality bound up in erect penises, reproductive
purpose, and horizons of ejaculatory orgasm. Thus excess feminine fluids prompt
male anxiety and ironically, arousal and the desire for boundaries. An erotic manga
that looks like Visitor Q invites a closely read comparison that can illustrate my point.
Yumisuke Kotoyoshi's Hot Milk ero-manga shows a young mother black­
mailed by former classmates to perform various sexual activities including oral sex,
lactation, and masturbation. The aroused men connect an apparatus like a breast
pump to collect her milk, to 'contain' and 'drink' her. Critics would suggest that she
is conditioned to associate pleasure with abuse 60 • Keiko does nearly the same pose
(see page 82) in a Visitor Q kitchen scene but with a slight variation. Keiko's
lactation is induced by the stranger only the first time; afterward she decides when
she will let her milk spring out. The dispassionate visitor watches blankly, protected
Uchida invokes then springs away
from her surplus milk from beneath a clear vinyl umbrella, suggesting that he fears
contamination or desire, (or both) unlike the film's first lactation scene where his
alternate gentle touch and aggressive pinching to get her milk flowing may be read as
emblematic of misogynists squeezing every drop they can out of mothers and wives.
Again, the camera sustains the gaze until it snaps, as both Uchida and Keiko deftly
express skeins of milk that shoot as much as three or four feet. The vaginal fluids
running down her legs, misidentified by one survey response as urine, combine on the
floor, products of her excessive lactation. She is not incontinent but superfluidic.
With jets of warm milk shooting further than most spermatic ejections, male orgasm
gets knocked out of contention; the absent penis eclipsed by hypertrophied female
nipples distinguished by their potential to lactate, a (dys)functional 'lack' in nearly all
88
masculine nipples which underperform. 61 Milk outfloods semen. Oxytocin trumps
testosterone. Lying prone on the kitchen floor flooded by mother's milk and sexual
fluids, the son concedes to female competency, admitting he is glad the visitor came
to destroy his malfunctioning family, and pledging to take more responsibility. Jones
might call this "Dissolving the prick in a sea of tit" a label she applies to a 1975 Vito
Acconci's video installation Pornography in the Classroom (Jones Body 146).
Breasts have not necessarily been appropriated sexually by men so much as
their complete erotic function "has been incompletely sexualized ... intrinsic wetness
89
has been repressed." (Giles 11) Cultural forces continually (try to) contain feminine
bodily fluids. 'Stray' milk, particularly gets targeted by patriarchal regulation which
"encourages women to limit, dry up, hide, pathologize, remove and stem the flow of
wet, juicy, bleeding, lactating bodies ... [which need to] claim public space in which
to leak, spill, and overflow ... shifting erotic dyad[s] ... and broadening the repertoire
of...erotics in liberating ways." (Bartlet BW 100-101). Uchida's solution, along the
lines of corporeal performance art is to use that tension to spring her milk with a
volatile poetics of the fluid feminine that relies on "producing a new dynamism ... a
self-proliferation ... unpredictability .. .inject[ing] a spark of novelty, invention, into
what is otherwise predictable" (Grosz Nick 200-201 ).
Purposefully wanton lactation or a spontaneous galactorrhea can be seen as
this spark injected into predictable limits or abuse. As Grozs says, eruptions and
ruptures, cataclysms and untimeliness, upheavals and rearrangements not organized
toward practical ends secure potentialities via unexpected avenues (190, 252, 257).
These venues for the volatile poetics of the fluid feminine provide the catalyst.
"Consciousness emerges .. .in its thwarted operations ... The obstacle ... generates the
necessity of some invention ... some reorientation of activity" (225). The direction of
that move is the elevated primacy of immanence-the sensing body of Merleau­
Ponty' s phenomenology because "thought is inadequate to life [which] is always
richer and more complex, more integrated and simple than thought can comprehend"
(197). With this understanding, even the way women love can be seen in a new light
through Sara Heinamaa' s translation of Simone de Beauvoir' s Le Deuxieme Sex II:
90
L 'experience Vecue. Heinamaa interprets "the flow of a woman's experience ...
lingering in a state of nonsettlement" that
radiates throughout the whole body ... not always centered in the
genital system; even when it is, the vaginal contractions constitute,
rather than true orgasm, a system of undulations that rhythmically
arise, disappear, and reform, attain from time to time a paroxysmal
condition, become vague, and sink down without ever dying out.
Because no definite term is set, pleasure extends towards infinity
(Beauvoir as translated in Heinamaa 72).
Understanding corporeal existence through fluid volatility, then allows a dual
conception of bodies materially and in ways that are not; both as subjective
experiences and objective flesh. Applying this to the tactics of corporeal performance
artists we can see what Jones points out as the predication of reciprocal sympathy
with the spectator. They "recognized their own objectification vis-a-vis the world
and to have attempted to reverse it into subjectivity (or at least to meliorate its effects
by taking on a subjective stance) ... and making us increasingly aware of our own state
of simultaneous intersubjectivity and interobjectivity" (239). This, Jones claims
(using Vivian Sobchack's words) is "a structure of engagement with the materiality of
things in which we recognize what it subjectively feels like to be objectively
embodied". (Sobchack 16). Ifwe as sympathetic audiences can buy into Uchida's
corporeal performance of lactation whether written, illustrated, or video taped we
then attempt to see something new. We become less determined and hard set with
92
divisiveness. We can glimpse people, perhaps fleetingly, through a "chiasmatic
openness to otherness ... we could embrace them, allowing them to invade our bodily
contours and to mark us, as well, as joyfully incomplete (rather than shattered),
pleasurably confused (rather than rigidly certain) and ultimately open to the flesh of
the world." (Jones "Working" 141).
This view instigates so much beyond transgression; after all, to transgress
does not mean, as is narrowly thought, to violate or shock, but rather to cross over.
These crossings over occur in several ways in the artwork of Shungicu Uchida, but
can be said to begin with "something at the heart of the eros of parenthood that is
truly radical-radical in its literal sense of its potentially transforming power. What
if," as Noelle Oxenhandler asks "we were to tap the power of the boundary loss that
lies at the root of each of us?" (Oxenhandler 292). These crossovers can be identified
in the transition from Fatherfucker to We Are Reproducing to Visitor Q, considering
that "not all children who suffer ... injury grow up to inflict it on others. Indeed, for
some, the experience of their own childhood suffering serves as a powerful incentive
to break the pattern" (Oxenhandler 277). Uchida turns to fluid activities-lactation
and baths-to refute any lingering harm from earlier domestic violations. This form
of therapy-textual and corporeal-at times violent and beautiful (as Keiko), by turns
quotidian and humorous (as GiGi)-performs a volatile poetry for women, for
people, to fluidly redefine intimacy in artistic and familial terms so that "a simple
flow between parents and children-bathing, dressing, and undressing-hits... the
obstacle of self-consciousness...as though both [parent/child, artist/audience]
93
It seems that since
I've been nursing
so frequently lately,
milk squirts out when
l'm bathing.
Up until now,
*dun dun dundun
dun dun dundun•
it was never
to this extent ...
0
Ohmy...
I'm being
drunk by
both at once.
heh
suddenly realize that 'You're not just an extension of my body anymore. We are ...
separate selves"' (231 ).
Through these means Shungicu Uchida overcomes the limitations of shock,
culture, angst, and even sex, to relate, in novel ways, the contradictions, joys, and
varied maternal and sexual experiences of contemporary women and men, Japanese
or not. With considerable aplomb she diminishes or stretches boundaries, detangling
nudity, family bonding, sexuality, and breastfeeding away from issues of obscenity,
pathology, and scandal such that viewers are rewarded with a renewed, multi-faceted
94
understanding of intimacy in forms manifold and wondrous. An implied call for
'
some sorely-needed reassessments of prevailing attitudes which monitor, limit, judge
or breech the codes and ethics of human activity resides in the author's candid
sincerity and marvelous humor. Uchida's renderings of unspoken sentiments yield
fresh perspectives with potential benefit for all the individuals, families, communities
and societies of the planet.
95
Appendix I- Interview transcript with Shungicu Uchida and Chuck Bailey
I apologize for taking a long time. It was somewhat easier to answer than the
previous version, but the questions were still quite contemplative and thus difficult to
answer, it took me a while.
1. Does josei manga or redisu komikkusu have a positive or negative
connotation? Does that label apply to your work and why or why not?
e Many of them used to deal with sex, but more and more, many of the recent
Lady's Comics are starting to depict the lives of women. My materials have
been following that trend, too. I'm hoping that the readers would consider me
as "a comrade with whom we think ofthe lives of women together".
2. Where do you get your marvelous sense ofhumor?
e Thank you very much.
I'm not quite sure myself, but I think I'm always
thinking,"let's have a laugh out of this situation somehow".
3. What do you consider your greatest work and how would you best like to
be remembered?
e I think that may be "Fatherfucker"
4. It took me the longest to write.
Do you still make music and where can I find some of yours?
e I decided to start again. We are in the process of producing right now.
At my
collaborator Ken Sato's website http://www.numan.jp/kensato, you might be
able to follow what's to come in the future.
5. Please offer brief comments on any of these press items I read about you
awhile back:
You were working on an original stage play.
e I sometimes write theater plays.
Only when someone commissions me,
though.
You did a reading or production of Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues.
e "Omanko" is a line that appears in the play, but that's not the title.
It was an
American monologue theater piece played by three actresses. It is a very
interesting play, but because the entire play is about the female organs, people
96
could not mention the name of the play title on TV or on the radio. It seemed
to me it was difficult to advertise.
You did a photo layout when you were pregnant
e The publishing company Bungeishunjyu publishes a novel called "We are
reproducing Behind-the-scenes stories: You too take a pregnancy portrait"
Your first English translation, My Son's Lips, in that anthology from last year
• The piece is included in the book "Inside" from Kodansha International.
Your early association with the magazine Garo.
•
Currently, you could consider a magazine called "Akkusu" published by
Seirinkogeisha as the successor of "Garo". We maintained a friendly
relationship over the years, and so you can see that I participated in a
dialogue in next month's issue.
6. How did you come to be cast as Keiko, the mother in Takashi Miike's
Visitor Q? Tell me of your collaboration and contribution to that project
behind and in front of the cameras.
e Thanks to my former manager and his passion, I got that job.
He is currently
running a gay bar, but we are still close. I said to the director, "I'm lactating
and nursing currently, so when my breast are stimulated, the milk comes out.
Because ofthat, a shoot was cancelled in the past ... "And Mr. Miike replied,
"Let's use that". We weren't originally planning to spray the milk. The
situations changed every day depending on the director's ideas. Even now
when I look back, it was like a bizarre dream.
I apologize for having kept you for a long time. By the way, I'm not comfortable being called Sensei/Maestra, so you can simply address me "Uchida-san" next time you send me a letter. Talk to you again when our paths cross, Shungiku Uchida. 97
Appendix II- Uchida's manga Keeping Step in the Shadows
98
Appendix III- Additional Uchida Book Covers
7~~
~
99
Appendix III - Continued
100
Appendix IV- Visitor Q Screening Announcement
101
Appendix V - Visitor Q film survey questionnaire (3 pages)
Visitor Q- All questions optional. Did you watch whole film? Yes
Are you a student? Yes
No
No
Major I Field I Occupation _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __
Education: HS AA FR SO JR SR
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _BA/BS MAIMS MFA PhD or
Age___Gender_ _~Race/Ethnicity (2 answers acceptable)._ _ _ _ _ __
Primary Language._ _ _ _ _ _ _Other Languages (not English) spoken_ _ __
If living in the United States, 5 years or less, your original resident country_ _ __
Three worst scenes in order, from most offensive to least:
What three scenes (if any) were the most inspired?
Circle two:
horror comedy tragedy drama porn satire cautionary-tale cultural study parody art film Please take a moment and write down more of your observations, comments,
and opinions of this film and the topics it presents
2 page scaled questionnaire follows
102
The film Visitor Q ...
StronglyAgree/ Mildly Agree \ N I Disagree Mildly\ DisagreeStrongly
a .. .is obscene.
10
a
b ... is problematic.
10
b
c ... has pornographic content.
10
c
d ... is pornography.
10
d
e ... has artistic merit.
10
e
f ..has no artistic merit.
10
f
g ... is a social commentary of merit.
10
g
h .. . appears misogynistic, but is not.
(Misogyny means 'hates women')
10
h
i ... is a very misogynistic text.
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
j ... is not a misogynistic text.
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
j
k .. .made me tense up at times.
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
k
/... made me tense throughout.
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
l
m .. . made me laugh alittle at times.
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
m
n .. .made me laugh a lot at times.
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
n
o ... made me sad at times.
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
p ... made me sad throughout.
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
p
q ... made me angry at times.
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
q
r ... made me angry throughout.
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
s .. .never sexually aroused me.
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
s
t .. . sexually aroused me at times.
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
t
u... made me regret viewing it.
10
u
v .. . is useful in university settings.
10
v
w . .. is the way more films should be
10
w
x .. .had too much graphic sex.
10
X
y... had too much graphic violence.
10
y
z .. .accomplished its cinematic goals
10
z
r
aa ... could accomplish same social
& cinematic goals w/ less severity.
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
aa
bb .. .critiques many world societies. cc .. . critiques one particular society.
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
bb
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
cc
102
103
The film Visitor Q ...
StronglyAgree/ Mildly Agree\ N/ Disagree Mildly\ Disagree Strongly
dd
1
dd... is primarily story of the mom.
10
9
8
7
6
4
2
ee ... is primarily a story of the dad.
10
9
8
7
6
4
2
ee
.!f. ..depicts the stranger negatively.
10
9
8
7
6
4
2
ff
gg... depicts the mom as weak.
10
9
8
7
6
4
2
gg
hh... depicts the dad as strong.
10
9
8
7
6
4
2
hh
ii..has strong character developnent
10
9
8
7
6
4
2
ii
jj.. .is a mostly believable story.
10
9
8
7
6
4
2
jj
kk.. . ends on a hopeful note.
10
9
8
7
6
4
2
kk
mm ... ends with empowered mother.
10
9
8
7
6
4
2
ll
ll...has images that devalue women
10
9
8
7
6
4
2
mm
nn ... depicts motherhood positively.
10
9
8
7
6
4
2
nn
oo ... depicts motherhood negatively.
10
9
8
7
6
4
2
00
pp ... enforces patriarchal values.
10
9
8
7
6
4
2
pp
qq ... is critical of patriarchal values.
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
qq
10
10
9
9
8
7
7
6
6
5
4
8
5
4
3
3
2
2
1
1
rr
ss
tt.. propagates socially conservative,
heteronormative family ideal.
uu... affirms gendered domesticity.
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
tt
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
uu
] ..Japanese men have it good. 9
2..American men have it good. 10
10
9
7
7
6
6
4
4
2
2
] . .Japanese women are happy. 10
9
7
6
4
2
4 ..American womeq are happy. 10
9
7
6
4
2
5 ...... ..the director is a woman. 10
9
7
6
4
2
6 ... .....the screenwriter is a man. 10
9
7
6
4
2
7........the screenwriter is a woman.
10
9
7
6
4
2
8 ....... .the director is a man.
10
9
7
6
4
2
9 ... most women will understand
this film better than most men.
10
9
7
6
4
2
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
10 ... most men will understand this
film better than most women.
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
*
11 ... being Japanese is crucial to
understanding this film.
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
*
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
*
*
rr ... uses (or attempts) one or more
forms of feminist rhetoric.
ss ... employs NO feminist strategies.
J2.. film should reflect social reality.
13 .. . film allows diversion from it.
103
104
NOTES
1
See Matsui Midori. "The Place of Marginal Positionality: Legacies of Japanese Anti-Modernity".
page 148 of Consuming Bodies: Sex and Contemporary Japanese Art. Fran Lloyd, ed. London:
Reaktion Books, 2002.
2
The survey questions and demographic poll given to film viewers in accordance with a research
proposal made to the Institutional Review Board (IRB), California State University San Marcos and
subsequently approved as File Number IRB 2008-081.
3
See Hausman, Bernice. Mother's Milk: Breastfeeding Controversies in American Culture and
Baumslag and Michels. Milk, Money, and Madness, in particular.
4
On October 13th, 2006 a flight attendant ordered removal of Emily Gillette, 27, from a Vermont-to­
New York flight. With her hand holding her shirt closed as she discreetly nursed her toddler, the
mother declined the blanket she was offered only to be escorted off the plane by an airline crew a few
minutes later. Spokesman Paul Skellon defended the policy of permitting breastfeeding if done in a
"discreet way", though Delta later reversed position see "Breastfeeding Case Leads to Punishment" at
http://www. usatoday.com/travel/news/2006-11-17 -breastfeed-discipline x.htm
5
I refer the reader to Carolyn Latteier's Breasts: The Women's Perspective on an American Obsession,
for a more thorough account of such antecedent history.
6
Theorizing the semiotics of the breast, Giles joins a long list of voices. With respect to lactation
discourse, the porosity of broad classifications such as biological, medical, sociological, and artistic
complicates itemization. Wet-nursing, lactation advocacy, legislation, pornography-a short list of
contexts mediated by various political, academic, historical, ethical, and aesthetic agenda (not to
mention popular cultural and public opinion!). What distinguishes Giles's work from most writing on
breast milk and lactation, including recent compilations of narrated breastfeeding stories, is that Giles
excludes the dominant, 'most acceptable' context: healthy babies discreetly breastfed by their
biological mothers.
105
7
Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 19, No. 45, November 2004. This thematic edition is entitled
Meanings ofBreastmilk: New Feminist Flavours.
8
Included in this widened repertoire is the choice by some women NOT to breastfeed, for any reason at
all. The decision to forgo nursing is fraught with guilt imposed by some that gently or insistently
espouse a "breast is always best" approach. Some particular doctors and nurses, certain lactation
consultants and advocates, are described by Alison Bartlett and others as "nipple nazis" for their
heavy-handed tactics.
9
See http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/story?id=6854285&page=l
10
A point of comparison between non-normative breastfeeding by celebrities like Hayek comes into
view through a case recently brought to my attention. The 2008 Chengdu earthquake of central
China's Sichuan province produced a story involving a Chinese policewoman named Xiaojuan Jiang
10
who travelled hundreds of miles away from her home to assist in the disaster relief
•
A recent mother
herself, Jiang left her family behind in order to serve as wet-nurse to the dozens of injured, displaced,
and orphaned babies affected by the earthquake. Commendations of the highest order for actions
above-and-beyond the call of duty resulted in celebrity that came afterward. My friend translated a
media clip in which Jiang was puzzled by all the attention, and in which she demurely mentions
declining the opportunity to capitalize on her fame for commercial gain. This case serves to illustrate
one example of difference-no suspicious motive of publicity to color perceptions of milk and not
necessarily to register disapproval of Hayek's performance.
11
See http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2517126532
12
Ibid.
13
I refer the reader to Carolyn Latteier's Breasts: The Women's Perspective on an American
Obsession, as well as other works from the bibliography for a more thorough account of such
antecedents from ancient mythology, arts and letters up to the present day. They are simply too
numerous to detail in the short space of my work here.
14
See http://www.performanceart.ca/5holes!home.html
106
15
To see video of Lactation Station go to http://www.jessdobkin.com/videos/9
16
Phenomenology is a vast term spread across several disciplines in various capacities. I will
summarize it here as a philosophical focus not on the way humans know (epistemology) or the way
people exist (ontology) but on the way people live through their bodies and senses. This rendition
originates with Maurice Merleau-Ponty but is enhanced through the works oflater writers and
feminists such as Elizabeth Grozs and Amelia Jones.
17
"Intoxications! I'm brimming over! My breasts are overflowing! Milk. Ink. Nursing time. And
me? I'm hungry, too. The milky taste of ink!" said Helene Cixous in Writings, page 31.
18
Rich, A. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. London: Virago 1979 p285
19
Among others these include a 1990 TV show Minami-kun 's Girlfriend, the 2009 gore-comedy film
Vampire Girl versus Frankenstein Girl, and Girl ofSilence-a movie adaptation of her novel Father
Fucker (n72Shigematsu 588).
20
Though I disagree with some of the conclusions on Uchida made by Shigematsu, I am indebted for
much she has written on the artist and on other topics. In particular, I laud her thorough analysis of
feminist criticism and the discourses of women's liberation (uman ribu) in Japan, from its origins in
the 1960s to its presence in the late capitalism of2000. Before the section on Uchida, Shigematsu
tackles the commercialization of sexual liberation, the liberal feminism manufactured by capitalism
and the state which spawned the material-oriented women's culture, and the mass media evolution of
the publishing industry for women's magazines, including comics, pornography, and fashion.
21
An interview with the artist by email. See Works Cited.
22
Shigematsu's correspondence with the publisher Bungei Shunju on March 16, 1998 confirming over
half a million copies sold (Shihamatsu 588 n75). 23
See, for example, Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out ofCarolina, among many. Add to these texts, certain TV talk show broadcasts and confessional books from celebrities and the non-famous alike. 24
These include Japanese publishing juggernauts such as Kodonsha and Shodensha, as well as the television, news and film studios in Japan that adapt her works, provide invitations, and report her 107
celebrity appearances. She is popular enough that her caricatured likeness (known as Dengko-chan) is
the widely recognized corporate mascot for the Tokyo Electric Power Company.
25
Dr. Hurley is faculty at University oflowa's Department of Asian Languages and Literature. These
comments come from her fall 2005 seminar Postwar Japanese Family Fictions. The blog
http://thefamilyfictionsclass.blogspot.com/2005 10 01 archive.html contains syllabus, preparatory
comments, and respondents' commentaries. Hurley's insights and suggestions for locating the
difficult-to-fmd movie, The Girl ofSilence proved quite useful.
26
Exhaustive research reveals these three to be the only authors having written in English about
Uchida in an academic sense, though I should mention Frederik Schodt's book Dreamland Japan:
Writings on Modern Manga where he provides a concise biography, featuring non-translated images
from We Are Reproducing. See pages 173-177 to read Scholdt's mention of Uchida's first son,
Alpha, among other details. Scholdt relates that viewers of Uchida's curvaceous lines or voluptuous
figures are often surprised that the artist is not male because her style is more akin to the ero-manga
style of artists like Kotoyoshi Yumisuke than the narrow-lined heroines and androgynous characters
popularized in the shOjo (girl) manga of artists such as Miwa Ueda (Peach Girl) or Natsuki Takaya
(Fruits Basket), among many. To be clear, my work presents the first "official" translations ofany
Uchida mangas to English.
27
Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 19, No. 45, November 2004. This edition, entitled Meanings of
Breastmilk: New Feminist Flavours, features a Giles and Bartlett introduction, "Taking our Breasts to
Work". Having separately authored between them at least a dozen academic articles on the topic of
atypical lactation as well as Bartlett's Breastwork and Giles' Fresh Milk: the Secret Life ofBreasts,
this pair appear qualified above most others in this undertaking.
28
Antipodal feminism would be an apt label for much of Giles and Bartlett as well as the writing of
Elizabeth Grosz, another thinker whose ideas appear in Visitor Q. I propose that in a geographical
way, 'antipodal' indicates an origin from New Zealand and Australian institutions like University of
Sydney and University of Southern Queensland; in emotional or intellectual senses, 'antipodal'
108
concepts seek to tum popular assumptions upside down.
29
See http://www.jessdobkin.com/videos/9
30
People such as married partners, same-sex couples, and friends to acquaintances made or solicited in
print or online ads, specifically for the purpose of sustaining breastfeeding or inducing lactation.
These relationships may or may not include sexual gratification. For more further discussion see
Giles's "The Tears ofLacteros: Integrating the Meanings of the Human Breast" in Body Parts.
31
This is the title of Giles's contribution to Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 19, No. 45, November
2004- the thematic issue mentioned in note 24 above.
32
As Nikki Sullivan defines Queer Theory as a way to "(in)form our understandings and experiences
of sexuality and subjectivity ... critically engaging with cultural artifacts in order to explore the ways in
which meaning and identity is (inter)textually (re)produced". For several reasons these words apply to
both Uchida's work and my critical strategy. See Sullivan 189-192 for a concise discussion.
33
Now part of the Gerhard Pulverer Collection, Cologne, Germany, this image is reproduced on page
136 of Japanese Erotic Fantasies: Sexual Imagery ofthe Edo Period (Chris Uhlenbeck and Margarita
Winkel, editors, Hotei Publishing, Amsterdam c.2005).
34
Carter confided to a volunteer hotline operator who forwarded the call to a rape crises center because
she suspected sexual impropriety and child abuse of Carter's two-year-old. After the call was traced,
Carter was arrested, interrogated for over five hours, and charged with 'sexual abuse in the first
degree' for 'mouth to breast' and 'hand to breast contact'. Released from jail after the weekend, she
had further charges filed against her and she had to endure interviews and court proceedings which
questioned her sexuality and mental stability, while her toddler was endlessly probed for signs of
neglect and abuse; Carter lost custody of her daughter for nearly one year! Feelings like Carter's are
not often brought up in prenatal discussions with doctors, support groups, and lactation advocacy
circles, though Carter surely could not have been the only women experiencing them. As a recent
mother put it "They never really tell you about that." Perhaps many breastfeeding women do not
articulate those sensations fearing censure or consequences such as Carter's.
109
35
The role of perversion of much of modem and contemporary Japanese literature, fictional and
otherwise is a broad topic I need to acknowledge but cannot fully elaborate in the short space of this
study. I refer readers interested beyond my terse appropriations to the work of Mark Driscoll, who
presented a paper titled "Hentai = Modernity" at the April2005 Association of Asian Studies
Conference in Japan Session 108: Perversion and Modem Japan: Experiments in Psychoanalysis.
Driscoll's chapter in Gendering Modern Japanese History (see Works Cited) covers, among other
topics, the importation, translation, alteration, and influence of key works from Krafft-Ebing and Freud
translated in Japanese years before English.
36
First proposed by the psychiatrist Takeo Doi as without occidental equivalent yet incorporating "a
cluster of related western psychoanalytic constructs .. .indulgent love, reciprocal dependence, denial of
separation... mother fixation and obsession" (Doi 20)
37
See Allison, Anne. Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in
Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000 as well as her critics, Gretchen Jones in "Bad
Girls Like to Watch: Writing and Reading Ladies' Comics" from Bad Girls ofJapan and Deborah
Shamoon's "Office Sluts and Rebel Flowers: the Pleasures of Japanese Pornographic Comics for
Women" in Porn Studies. All three works listed in my Works Cited.
38
See E.L. McCollum's Object Lessons: How to Do Things with Fetishism in Works Cited
39
See Hebdige's "Flat Boy vs. Skinny: Takashi Murakami and the Battle for 'Japan"', pages 14-24 in
© Murakami. See Works Cited.
40
View art critic Jerry Saltz discussing both sculptures at the 2008 retrospective ©Murakami, at the
45-second segment from 1:45 to 2:30 in this video: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=cxmMxi-lelg
41
To sum up, Superflat can mean the collapsed distance between 'low' and 'high' culture (anime
enters museum space), the closing distance between Japanese and American art, the persistence of
flattened pictorial space going back centuries in Japanese woodprints, and much more. To better
understand this complex concept see among other Takashi Murakami writings TheSuperjlat Manifesto,
110
Little Boy: the Arts ofJapan's Exploding Subculture, as well as Consuming Bodies: Sex and
Contemporary Japanese Art. 42
See Bartlett's Breastwork pages 90-96 for a brief but very thorough illumination of the research that has been conducted on oxytocin's varied roles as well as how the fmdings have been used by various discourses. 43
Consider the case of Karen Carter discussed earlier. As well see among many others, Baumann (41,
53-56), Bartlett (90-96), and any of countless pages from works by Giles for a small sense of what
influences decisions to 'hold back'.
44
Something that brings to mind Eros ofParenthood where the Oxenhandler describes a feeling
common to many new breastfeeding mothers: "Nursing a baby can be a blissful, life-giving experience
of intimacy, or the painful, draining contact with a relentless succubus. The utter helplessness of an
infant can melt a parent's heart, or cling to it like a parasite, a barnacle. The unconditional love the
small child offers can feel redemptive, or both suffocating and cheap--for after all they have no other
place to be but with us, on us, beside us, and no choice but to love us." (159)
45
Eros ofParenthhood discusses Gary Snyder's line Is this our body? from his poem "Baths" (See
Contemporary American Poetry, A. Poulin, Jr, Ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980, p. 477-9)
Oxenhandler writes the lingering concerns of societal paranoia that instill parental guilt this way: "Is
something the matter with me? Am I damaging my child? Will someone spying on us in the bath think
badly of me? Report me? Take my child away?" (Oxenhandler 150). Consider the repercussions as in
the Carter case where the breastfeeding mother was incarcerated.
46
From page 123 ofUchida's They're MakingMore Pregnancy Pictures. See Works Cited.
47
Kundera, Milan. Life Is Elsewhere. New York: Penguin Books, 1986 p13
48
See Heinamaa 70-79 for elaboration
49
See also John Berger's Ways ofSeeing.
50
Interior Scroll is Schneeman's most iconic work. In it the artist extracts a scroll from her vagina like
some poetic tampon or a giving of birth to what she has written---<:omplicated by ink which has
111
smudged and blended with her body fluids. The influence on Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologs is not
that difficult to miss. See (Wark 45-47). 51
See (Jones Performing 151-185) for a thorough comparison of the specific representational and performative strategies of both Hannah Wilke and Carolee Schneeman. 52
5
(See also Merleau-Ponty. Visible and the Invisible, 1964, p.135, tr. Lingis) 3 "Sex with Nation" page 192 54
See page 192-193 in Young's Breasted Experience 55
Aroma's slogan inspires a chuckle. All maniacs have their own smell could also be interpreted as Different strokes for different folks or To each his/her own.
The particular translation selection selected seems to confirm a domestic Japanese market as does the company policy of Not for sale or transport outside ofJapan. 56
For an engaging critique of what she calls the "Pollockian Performative" and the androcentric Cartesian myth of transcendence besting immanence see Jones Body pages 74-77, 80 57
Nevertheless, in the same article Giles writes disclaimers to counter claims by others that she is wrong to suggest any pornography at all could empower women or that she negatively eroticizes motherhood.
58
See Works Cited for bibliographic notation of Giles's "Fountains of Love and Loveliness: in Praise
of the Dripping Wet Breast".
59
Or 'last', because in the Japanese or karlji ordering of names, family names always come 'first'. The
artist swaps the 'k' of the proper 'Shungiku' with a hard 'c', something non-existent in romajin
(Japanese phonetic romanization).
60
Japanese artist Yoshiko Shimada hosting an event called How to Use Women's Body points out the
need for women to "reclaim their bodies ... and to present us in multiple forms." Expressing alarm that
high-school girls " ... are using their bodies break away from traditional representations of
woman ... [while] what we should be doing is educating them to think more about their own bodies and
their own sexuality rather than catering to other people's sex fantasies." (Matsui 97)
112
61
Not to say men or intergenders cannot lactate. Giles and other provide cases in various contexts. My
point is that there is neither the volume of milk they produce individually compared nor the overall
total number.
113
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Dobkin, Jess. Lactation Station. Video from http://www.jessdobkin.com/videos/9
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118
I'(
'Y
I' (J) ~ ~ 9EC ~ \,\ (J) (I want to die in bed). Tokyo: Bungeishunju, 2005 My Son's Lips. (Uchida's only English translation) from Inside and Other Short Fiction: Japanese Women by Japanese Women, Cathy Layne, compiler. Tokyo; New York: Kodansha International: Distributed by Kodansha America, Inc., 2006. I~~~~
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*
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