Hannah Ryan, PhD '19, recently published a new book based on her Cornell dissertation with Yale University Press.
Liquid Gold: Lactation as Labor and Human Milk as Commodity in North American Visual Culture (2025)
Synopsis
A social history of infant feeding that traces the value of milk and lactating bodies through the visual culture of the Americas
This enlightening book reveals milk for its true value, and lactation as a valuable form of labor, in illustrated case studies throughout the Americas. Chapters address such issues as the European vision of the New World as a lactating body; lactation as a vital component of racial inscription in colonial Mexico; proximity to lactation as cause for suspicions of witchcraft in colonial New England; the development of alternatives to human milk via industrialization in the early twentieth century; and how modern and contemporary artists deploy lactation imagery to examine transatlantic interaction. Hannah Ryan explores how lactation and its product, human milk, operate in a terrain with many registers: symbolic, mercantile, domestic, colonial, racial, and magical, which has at times created a vulnerability for those who lactate—and those, like midwives, who support them—as they were often not the ones who created the meanings attached to milk. Ryan reveals what is often in plain sight in the accompanying imagery: the historic exploitation of African, African-American, Indigenous, and working-class women.
The official Yale listing of the volume can be found here.
Dr. Ryan is currently serving as an Associate Professor of Art and Art History at St. Olaf College.
