“White Gold” - Social Artistic and Symbolic Representations of Breast Milk in Jewelry

This study examines the phenomenon of human milk (breast milk) jewelry in Israel as a unique case for understanding how maternal bodily material is transformed into symbolic, cultural, and economic domains. This phenomenon has developed over the past decade within an Israeli socio-cultural context characterized by intensive motherhood ideologies, medical oversight of the female body, and expectations of maternal responsibility at both private and national levels. Within this reality, breast milk jewelry functions as a novel material practice through which mothers seek to render visible, stabilize, and symbolically endow the bodily and emotional experiences associated with breastfeeding and mother–infant relationships.

The research was conducted using a qualitative methodology with semi-structured in-depth interviews, focusing on two complementary sites: on the one hand, the perspectives of twelve mothers who chose to create jewelry from their own breast milk; and on the other, the perspectives of six artists who transform maternal material into aesthetic objects. The study’s theoretical framework draws on the work of Julia Kristeva, particularly her concepts of ‘abjection’, ‘the semiotic’, and ‘the symbolic’.

The study is based on in-depth interviews and analysis of jewelry photographs, analyzed through an interpretive-inductive phenomenological approach. Three central themes emerged from the analysis:

1. The tension between the glorification and abjection of the maternal body and its material, particularly the experiences of abjection accompanying breastfeeding and mother–infant relations.

2. The transformation of human milk from a living, semiotic, and unstable fluid into a stable symbolic object through which intimate experiences become aesthetic forms and gain social recognition.

3. The artists’ perception of their work as a feminine practice existing at the intersection of creation, care, and entrepreneurship, within an economic and cultural space where the maternal body becomes material that can be processed, framed, and commodified.

Findings indicate that, for many mothers, breast milk jewelry serves as a means of organizing and processing bodily and emotional experiences that are situated in zones of social rejection and marginalization. The milk is perceived by participants as a material with emotional agency and loaded with meaning, while simultaneously remaining living and dynamic. Through the jewelry, difficult or marginalized experiences of pain, fatigue, bleeding, and ambivalence are transformed into a contained, aesthetic, safe, and wearable product. In this sense, the jewelry functions as a transitional object, facilitating movement from an intimate interdependent relationship with the infant toward a more symbolic space in which maternal identity is articulated and anchored within the social order.

Simultaneously, mothers describe breast milk as an indeterminate material: natural, sacred, and purifying on the one hand, but also repulsive and transgressive of boundaries of identity and ownership on the other. This ambiguity illustrates Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic and emphasizes the status of breast milk as liminal material positioned between body and language, nature and culture, intimacy and performance. The transformation of the material into jewelry embodies a shift from the semiotic order to the symbolic order: from nourishment, droplet, leakage, and bleeding to a stable, polished, and aesthetically and representationally valuable object.

The artists’ perspectives add an additional layer of analysis. They conceive their work as combining female bodily knowledge with technical skill, operating both within an independent economic field reliant on material expertise and within a female community of stories, experiences, and memory. Their work highlights the ongoing tension between commodification and empowerment, negotiating market demands, the desire to represent the material with integrity, and the recognition that their craft is also experienced as a therapeutic practice empowering women. In this way, a space emerges in which intimate biological material becomes both commodity and focal point of female solidarity.

The study’s contribution is twofold, theoretical and empirical. Theoretically, the study extends Kristeva’s thought to the realm of maternal objects and offers an understanding of the transformation of material through a semiotic–symbolic–economic continuum. Moreover, the research contributes to discussions of living materiality in maternal contexts, suggesting that breast milk should be understood as a cultural-emotional agent rather than merely a biological substance. Empirically, the study reveals a new cultural practice in Israel, illuminating the positioning of mothers and artists within a field where identity, body, economy, memory, and maternal connection are intricately intertwined.