Truths are in here,or what The X-Files taught me about breast milk

Abstract

This essay traces the epistemological implications of maternal grief through a meditation on a rogue stain of my hand expressed breast milk on an X-Files fan poster. I reorient the television show's mantra—“The truth is out there”—to argue that truths, for this postpartum brown femme, are located within: interior and embodied. Leveraging feminist theory and cultural critique, breast milk is situated as both a biological and sociopolitical text marked by (pseudo)science, histories of colonial wet nursing, racialized healthcare inequities, and contemporary crises like the famine in Gaza imposed by Israel's genocide against Palestinians. Yet through a personal narrative of nursing failure, I reveal how human lactation has been overdetermined by this empirical scrutinization, moral judgement, and ethical inquiring, concealing something far more primal—an intergenerational hunger. Emerging at the moment when the comfort of explanation has been extinguished by the desperation to feed and be fed, this hunger evinces bodily knowledge that de-linearly links the maternal lines between ancestor and descendent, my late brown immigrant mother and my baby daughter. Against The X-Files' white male protagonist's obsessive pursuit of a singular truth “out there,” I suggest that there are other plural truths located in here that are only known through an attachment to perpetual loss and longing, not the promise of eventual satiation.