Jesse May Fisher

My current work focuses on the term milk fever, a folkloric diagnosis of post-natal depression from the 1950’s. It was thought that the milk, trapped in the breast of the mother, stagnated in the body and fevered the brain, resulting in madness. Passed down on the tongue of my  grandmother, milk fever evades physical documentation, existing as an oral history - a matrilineal mythology. My moving image work Milk Fever responds to the inherited story of my maternal great grandmother’s forty year institutionalisation after the birth of her fourth child.

My research has taken the form of primary interviews with my grandmother and subsequent investigations into the term milk fever. However, my enquiries offered very few references to milk fever, nor a concrete definition, often referring to it interchangeably with mastitis or puerperal fever. Milk fever’s illegibility and existence through word of mouth echoes the silencing of women’s histories and embodied knowledge. Through my oral familial history, whilst adopting methodologies of autofictioning, I align my practice with subaltern modes of knowledge which counter the medical or anthropological archive.

I’m concerned with the boundaries between the psychic and somatic, the material and immaterial, the real and the imagined within the myth of milk fever. This obscurity, this sticky in-betweenness, provides an entry point for me to speculate and fabricate stories, mythologies and rituals.