This article provides a critical overview of selected intersections of feminist theories and gender theories within fathering research and looks at a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to a diversity of fathering experiences, including differences of class, ethnicity, race, sexuality, and family forms. Although there are many overlaps between feminist theories and gender theories, and most scholars who write about gender are feminist or profeminist scholars, there is one important distinction. Gender theories attend to multiple dimensions of gendered narratives, lives, practices, identities, and institutions. Feminism and feminist theories share all of these concerns; however, feminism and feminist theories are also directly connected to the promotion of social change for diverse groups of women, especially disadvantaged women. This point is important because it can lead to potential conflicts between feminist concerns and fathering.
In this article I explore some contributions of queer theory to the provision of lactation support services. In doing so, I also undertake an intersectional analysis of queering lactation, recognizing that forms of oppression do not impact all individuals equally or in the same ways. While recognizing the history of tensions between queer and feminist politics and activism, I argue that queering lactation holds significant benefits for supporting lactation among LGBT families, as well as opening up possibilities for rethinking gender and possibilities for gender equality more generally.
Ecological citizens are increasingly encouraged to adopt 'precautionary consumption' -a set of practices aimed at shielding them from the potential health harms of exposures to everyday toxics. The utility and the effects of precautionary consumption in relation to common chemical exposures are investigated. Precautionary consumption is not only of questionable utility, but is fundamentally misguided as an approach for inspiring antitoxics organizing. The failure of this approach is in part due to its assumption of a naturally bounded, autonomous individual who is able to maintain an impermeable boundary between herself and the environment. Drawing on the work of material feminist theorists, it is argued that Gabrielson and Parady's notion of corporeal citizenship, an approach that places bodies into a complex web of material, ecological relations entangled with the social, offers several strategic advantages for framing resistance strategies.
Breastmilk is bought, sold, and donated in a global marketplace, which risks exploiting the women who produce it. In Detroit, black mothers are targeted as paid milk donors; milk from Cambodian and Indian mothers is sold to parents in the United States and Australia; and the International Breast Milk Project sends donated milk from the United States to Africa. Drawing on transnational care work and affect theory, I argue that merely refraining from paying women does not eliminate potentially harmful effects. Addressing the ethical implications of these exchanges requires reconsidering the relationship between gift and commodity and between love and work.
It is commonly assumed that only women, and in particular women who have recently given birth, are able to breastfeed. However, through induced lactation, adoptive mothers, fathers and trans people have begun breastfeeding with greater frequency. Although breastfeeding is often regarded as a paradigmatic example of sexual difference, it actually exposes the instability of binary categories of sex. Luce Irigaray insists that sexual difference demands a new poetics, a language that is dynamic and fluid, capable of expressing difference while always keeping open the possibility of transformation and change. This article extends Irigaray's work in order to theorise breastfeeding from a perspective that is both feminist and queer.
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