Milk lines: tainted headwaters of heritage

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Title Milk lines: tainted headwaters of heritage
Publication Type thesis
School or College College of Humanities
Department Environmental Humanities Program
Author Pace, Julia G.
Date 2013-08
Description Mothers, through their delivery of breast milk to developing infants, are consistently portrayed as nourishing figures who endow the sacramental gifts of love and health upon their children. Using scientific studies, I catalogue the emotional and physiological benefits of breast milk, but I subsequently move toward the complications of "mother-as-nurturer" in light of the litany of foreign contaminants now found in human milk. I expose and explicate the potential harm of contaminated breast milk upon suckling infants, and suggest that the depiction of the nurturing and nourishing mother figure must be reconsidered as evidence of synthetic chemicals in milk emerges. Modern mothers now occupy separate realms: they are caring and contaminating. I frame my work through a personal understanding of my mother as a contaminated woman, and consider the ways in which my lineage-a lineage embodied in breast milk-is tainted by chemical pollutants and their migration into my own breasts.
Type Text
Publisher University of Utah
Subject Breast milk; Breasts; Chemicals; Contaminants; Lineage; Mothers
Dissertation Institution University of Utah
Dissertation Name Master of Arts
Language eng
Rights Management Copyright © Julia G. Pace 2013
Format application/pdf
Format Medium application/pdf
Format Extent 1,223,210 bytes
Identifier etd3/id/2565
ARK ark:/87278/s67h4sq9
Setname ir_etd
ID 196141
Reference URL https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s67h4sq9
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