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Never Innocent: Breasted Experiences in Women's Bodily Narratives of Puberty

Oregon State University in the USA, jlee{at}orst.edu

In this article I focus on the social construction of the female breast as a central aspect of body politics, emphasizing how the breasted female body becomes invested with certain properties and is inserted into regimes of truth, knowledge and power. I share data from an oral history project of women's experience of menarche or first menstrual period and explore how cultural scripts associated with developing female breasts are negotiated and lived by women through processes of compliance and resistance. I suggest that in western societies, the ambivalence women remember feeling about their developing breasts is a result of the simultaneous experience of breasts as signifying both disempowerment and sexual authority.

Feminism & Psychology, Vol. 7, No. 4, 453-474 (1997)
DOI: 10.1177/0959353597074002


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