katyaev anton
(ekaterina vasilyeva)

 Mathilde Cohen

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Leaks and Labor : On the Material Politics of Lactation 

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2025

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Katya Ev’s Lactating Bodies articulates a de-romanticized and critically engaged perspective on lactation, framing it as a site of socio-political inquiry and gendered embodiment. The project disrupts idealized, sanitized, and often heteronormative representations of breastfeeding by centering the lived realities of lactating bodies, including the messiness, labor, and discomforts that are rarely made visible. By incorporating elements such as leaking milk, breast pumps, stains, and other visceral details, Ev opens space for a broader, more inclusive discourse around care, corporeality, and reproductive labor.

 

Building on this critical approach, Ev’s use of human milk as both subject and material intensifies the political charge of their work. Rather than functioning as mere provocation, milk becomes a medium through which to expose a form of unpaid, often unseen work deeply entangled with questions of gender and bodily autonomy. Their practice reclaims the intimate and often private act of breastfeeding, repositioning it within public, aesthetic, and discursive spaces where its cultural, economic, and affective dimensions can be reexamined and reimagined.

 

At the heart of Ev’s practice is a fictional lactation contract : a legal-like document that imagines compensating people for the time, physical effort, and personal cost involved in producing and expressing milk. This illusory contract aligns with what legal scholar Elizabeth Emens theorizes in her essay Bound as “extralegal contracts”—binding not in law, but in meaning, critique, and imagination. These speculative agreements offer counter-visions to the enforceable contracts that structure labor and value in our societies.

 

Ev’s project powerfully aligns with feminist economic and sociological critiques that expose the systemic undervaluation of lactation. In The Big Letdown (2017), maternal and infant health strategist Kimberly Seals Allers argues breastfeeding should be recognized and compensated as labor. Economist Julie Smith argues for the inclusion of human milk in GDP calculations, pointing to a growing body of research that highlights the substantial economic costs of not breastfeeding—estimated at approximately US$300 billion in global losses. Sociologists Phyllis Rippeyoung and Mary Noonan have shown that those who breastfeed, especially for extended periods, often suffer significant and long-lasting income losses and other career penalties. These burdens are not borne equally: class, race, gender identity, and (dis)ability all shape who can access the time, space, emotional, and economic support necessary to breastfeed. 

 

Ev’s art makes these structural inequalities around lactation tangible. It prompts audiences to consider how breastfeeding is spatially segregated: pushed into private zones like homes, lactation rooms, bathroom stalls, or concealed through wearable pumps. Even human milk banks, despite their vital medical role for premature infants, are often relegated to marginal spaces such as hospital basements near waste disposal or sterilization units. This spatial logic echoes anthropologist Mary Douglas’s concept of “purity and danger”: once milk exits the body, it becomes both symbolically and materially “out of place.”

 

Beyond spatial and economic critiques, Ev’s project interrogates the gendering of lactation. While people of all sexes and genders may lactate, the act remains tied to a narrow ideal of cisgender, able-bodied, maternal femininity. Those who breastfeed older children, use expressed milk, or lactate due to medications or medical conditions are often stigmatized or pathologized. Ev disrupts this narrative, asking: what if lactation were liberated from the maternal script ? What if its generative potential were extended to radical care?

 

Katya Ev has not yet realized their envisioned performance where lactating individuals are generously paid to express milk in serene, light-filled gallery spaces rather than the secluded basements to which they are often relegated, the concept endures as a powerful utopian proposal. More than a hypothetical artwork, it stands as an activist proposal. A call to revalue reproductive labor and to reimagine cultural institutions as spaces capable of materially supporting such work. In a society that extracts so much without compensation, Ev’s art becomes a site of resistance and rethinking, where human milk is not merely a bodily fluid but a potent symbol of care, inequality, and future possibility. One can only hope that an institution will one day have the courage to bring this vision into being.

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