In the attention that feminists have given to the discourses surrounding women's embodiment, breastfeeding has emerged as a continuously contested cultural practice. Debates on the topic often overlook a racial dimension to breastfeeding, which comes to the fore in the fiction of Toni Morrison and in some of the responses to her writing. Focused as she is on articulating African-American culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Toni Morrison foregrounds the body as a discursive, racialized construct but also as it is experienced phenomenologically by individual characters. Since her position is a feminist, or 'womanist', one, the embodiment of black women is a particular focus of Morrison's. Menstruation, sexual pleasure, rape, pregnancy, childbirth and death are chronicled in her fiction, and all are persistently inflected by the trauma of living in racist societies. Overlapping with this ongoing exploration of female corporeality, mothers and maternal bodies are an enduring preoccupation of many Morrison novels. One component of this preoccupation is an emphasis on breastfeeding subjectivities. In this article, Frampton explores this emphasis, arguing that, paradoxically, it is at odds with and subverts an approach to embodiment valorized by some theorists of African diasporic experiences and literature. Novels such as The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved locate power not only in mothering generally but precisely in the lactating maternal body. Even more radically, Frampton argues, Morrison inscribes an intersubjective, intercorporeal space, between mother and child, from which a subversive interrelational ontology is articulated.
