A Mythology of Milk

Abstract

This research traces a mythology of milk within the Dutch context. Drawing upon a mode of mythological analysis developed by Roland Barthes, as well as an understanding of the cultural archive as posited by Gloria Wekker, this thesis examines in what ways a mythology of milk constitutes the national body within the Dutch cultural archive. Utilizing a scavenger methodology, the multiplicity of a mythology of milk is explored through the intersections of colonialism and race, gender and motherhood, and able-bodiedness and nationality. Chapters contain an inquiry into the construction of race, gender and class in colonial Indonesia through the dissemination of cow milk products; an analysis of gendered violence and the mobilization of fear in the emerging Dutch nation through an exploration of the folkloric specter of the milk witch; and finally, a discussion of able-bodiedness, nationalism, gender and race within a corpus of Dutch milk advertisements between 1930-1960. Ingestive politics and affective economies turn the body into a site where nationalism can be swallowed. Cow’s milk is configured as a way to consume the nation, and with it all its racialized, gendered and able-bodied conceptions of Dutchness. The disparate chapters all articulate when and how allusions to a national body concealed numerous historically contingent vectors of oppression and exploitation. Conclusive remarks show the ways in which a mythology of milk persists in contemporary discourse, point to avenues of further research, and link the mythologization of milk to the obscuration of violent realities within the animal milk industry.