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3 / Ut in pene The Medical and Moral Discourses of the Breast The rivalry of breast and phallus/penis, played out in the contest between Klein and Freud/Lacan, has its origin in the medical and pedagogical discourses of the eighteenth century, particularly in Germany. The provocations of Klein’s assertions are not only anticipated but also irresistibly formulated according to the logic of eighteenth-century anatomy and physiology. One medical doctor after another, purportedly proceeding in an empirical manner, stumbles to the conclusion that at the level of physiology, of the material reality of the body, the breast and the penis share an overwhelming resemblance, so much so as to cast doubt on the primacy of the one over the other. What is at work here is a remarkable confluence of empirical science and deep-seated fantasy. There is, of course, nothing in the matter itself that compels an analogy between breast and penis. The predisposition to elaborate such an analogy within the parameters of empirical medicine is cultural; we would therefore correctly suspect that the most tenacious versions of the analogy are to be found in Germany. In a sense, the new science—and it is 80 in large part a German science instituted by Albrecht von Haller, professor of medicine at the University of Göttingen—is not equal to the breast, is incapable of containing it conceptually. Given the slipperiness that manifests itself in the medical discourse, it is not surprising that gynecologists, pedagogues, and moral reformers redouble their eªorts to bring the breast and its analogue, the penis, under control. What we wind up with is an anomalous but nonetheless paradigmatic situation: empirical medicine permits the bizarre conclusion that, at some deep level, sexual diªerentiation between breast and penis is not possible, and yet the same empirical science will be coordinated with a strenuously imposed gender diªerentiation founded upon the diªerence between thebreastandthepenis,not intermsoftheirphysiologicalanalogy—there is no diªerence there—but through the opposite ways in which they are regulated. Obviously, penis and breast are functioning here as metonyms formanandwoman.Inotherwords,itistheEnlightenmentthatproduces the nexus that allows for the cultural diªerentiation of breast and penis, ofhavingandbeing. Thebreastemergesasacontestedandunrulysignifier, not easily disciplined by biological and medical discourse, though all the more rigorously subjected to domestication and colonization by the discourses of morality, hygiene, pedagogy, and political ideology.1 A first indication of the breast’s ambiguity can be deduced from the fact that Thomas Laqueur’s paradigmatic account of the history of conceptions of the sexed body, Making Sex, dispenses with all but the most peripheral reference to the breast.2 Although lactation involved the breast in the greater scheme of the “fungibility of all fluids” in the one-sex model, Laqueur’s major focus is, of course, the isomorphism of male and female genitalia.3 Moreover, according to the prevailing logic, it was not unlikely that men also might lactate in particular circumstances, and corroborating anecdotes abounded. When, “sometime in the eighteenth century, sex as we know it was invented,”4 the biological division into two incommensurable sexes also primarily involved the genitalia: “Lactating monks [ . . . ], and so on, were the stuª of phanaticism and superstition even if they were not so far beyond the bounds of reason as to be unimaginable .”5 As for the female breast, it is simply extraneous to Laqueur’s delineation of the two-sex model, perhaps a discarded ornamental scrap free to be recouped by another discourse. 81 ut in pene: medical and moral discourses Laqueur’s stinting reference to the breast, particularly with respect to the eighteenth century, seems to stand in stark contrast to Londa Schiebinger’s attempt to answer the question of why mammals are called mammals. Noting that Linnaeus “introduced the term Mammalia into zoological taxonomy” in 1758, she argues that “in so doing, he idolized the female mammae as the icon of that class.”6 Since Linnaeus could have chosen among other shared features, and since, furthermore, “the mammae are ‘functional’ in only half of this group of animals (the females) and, among those, for a relatively short period of time (during lactation) or not at all,”7 it is reasonable to conclude that he was guided by cultural as opposed to strictly biological considerations. Schiebinger, relying on the cultural history of such scholars as Lynn Hunt, Barbara Gelpi, Mary Jacobus, and others, points to the massive and sweeping attempt in eighteenth -century Europe to define the breast...

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