Mathilde Cohen (University of Connecticut – School of Law) has posted Eating Mothers: Feeding Women to Feed Children (Cahiers du genre, vol. 79(2), 2025, pp.23-71) on SSRN. here is the abstract:
This paper explores the gendered dynamics of women’s roles as sources of nourishment, emphasizing the embodied, material ways they sustain children. Across time, women have been tasked not only with feeding-growing, preparing, and serving food-but also with being food. Through pregnancy and lactation, their bodies become direct channels of sustenance, delivering nutrition via the placenta and milk. Yet their own nutritional needs and desires are often overlooked, except when aligned with reproductive functions. This tension highlights how casting women as food reinforces their subordination, while simultaneously affording them some measure of agency within family and society. The notion of edibilitywhat and who gets consumed and why-reflect broader power hierarchies since we eat only those deemed subordinate. Drawing on French legal and medical discourses from the early twentieth century to the present, this paper traces how women have been constructed as maternal figures responsible not only for feeding children, but for transmitting health, morality, and national identity, ultimately serving as instruments of social reproduction qua food themselves.