NGender seminar programme – Spring 2009

The Spring 2009 NGender Seminar Series talks will be held in Silverstone Building 317, on the campus of the University of Sussex, Tuesdays 1:00-2:00 pm, from 19 of January. To view the full programme: ngender_programme

You can bring your lunch with you and eat it during the seminar if you wish. All of the seminars are open to everyone that is interested.

1st Talk on Jan, 19

Our first speaker, Ana Porroche Escudero, will talk about “Hidden Pleasures for Women: Forbidden Nipple Eroticism and the Implications of Nipplectomy for Breast Cancer Patients Institution”. 

Abstract .The feminist critique of the emphasis on breast reconstruction and breast prosthesis is usually invoked as a way of highlighting the commodification of women´s breasts as objects of sexual pleasure for men (Wilkinson & Kitzinger 1994; Blum 2003). They claim that prostheses and breast reconstruction give primacy to how women look to the male world, rather than to how women feel to themselves (Young 1990). The reconstructed breast is defined as a “dildo”(Broom 2001) or “eye candy” whose mere aim is arouse women’s male partners. Indeed, from the point of view of larger society, the breast is assumed to have only a dual function: that of lactation and that of erotic decoration to stimulate men. So entrenched is our belief that the eroticism of the breast is purely visual that climax caused by the stimulation of the breasts and nipples, defined as ‘nippleism’ and ‘breastism’, are almost completely absent from our dictionaries of sexuality. Hence, it should not be surprising that the discourse on breast reconstruction frequently reduces the cancerous breast to an object which can be changeable or improved with breast reconstruction, rather than to see it as a site of lived experience or a bodily extension of the self. In this paper I use nippleism, a concrete and embodied instance of orgasm, to explore hidden pleasures for women’s (and men’s too) overlooked in the breast cancer research agenda. This paper is based on a case study of an informant during my PhD fieldwork in Spain during 2007-2008. Federico, partner of a breast cancer patient, brings into sharp focus the idea of the mindful nipples as an important erotic and erogenous site for sexual excitement, arousal, and even orgasm. Thus, mastectomy and nipplectomy would be understood as an euphemism embedded in the medical risk free sounding word `ectomy´ to refer to a castration of his partner’s key sexual body part.