Do you want to hear a brilliant, funny, foul-mouthed history of the emergence of capitalism and how it relied on the terrorism of the Witch hunts and the construction of gender? And explosive insights into the ongoing moralization of breastfeeding and its relationship to the multinational push to commodify clean water and put the burden of infant mortality on the shoulders of poor women? STEP RIGHT UP AND MEET THE FABULOUS DR. Phyllis Rippey! She is our newest coven-mate, professor of sociology, QUEEN.
Excerpts from this hilarious, astonishing, emotional interview:
“I started to see breastfeeding as really central to the construction of gender, and the moralizing of breastfeeding as really central to the construction of what women are supposed to be.”
“If breastfeeding people can have these little beings who see them as all providing and all-knowing, it’s almost although only those people can experience what it’s like to be a God… and so there’s a kind of jealousy there… and so we start to see a control of women’s bodies… Historically there’s just tons and tons of rules that men have created for how babies should be breastfed”
“The Witch hunts were a means of dividing the proletariat into men and women… The people who were best able to protest were grandmothers… Grandmothers were responsible for food. We start to see a shift in the presentation of the breast… As the Witch hunt went on we see the emergence of this shriveled breast in art… it went from magical to the shrunken breast.. this became an extremely powerful way of visually saying famine, hunger, that’s women’s fault.”
“I always have this tension between the real magic of breastfeeding and then the imposition of breastfeeding… that it’s women’s responsibility to save the world.”
“I’m going to look into joining your coven because fuck all the fuckers.”
=)
