Got milk? from growing strong bones to nurturing idealized subjectivities

ABSTRACT Philosophers of education have written about the moral, ethical, racial, and gendered dimensions of the hidden curriculum of what we eat, who we eat with, and the significance afforded this moment of the school day. To this body of literature, we add the observation that female bodies were positioned by Jean Jacques Rousseau as necessary food for the stuff of society. We trace the ways in which Rousseau’s rendering of the natural female body have followed us into our modern educational systems such that any hopes for gender equality in our educational and social structures must attend to the pervasive naturalization of the bodies – human and nonhuman – that we are taught to milk for all that they are worth.