Breastfeeding as headwork: Corporeal feminism and meanings for breastfeeding

Bartlett, Alison

doi:10.1016/s0277-5395(02)00260-1

Cited by 46 publications

(60 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Bartlett (2002) takes up Grosz's call for a 'corporeal feminism' (Grosz 1994) and applies this to breastfeeding. Bartlett's work is a challenge to understandings of breastfeeding which are biologically based, as she argues this narrative is incomplete without an understanding of women's subjectivity.…”

Section: The Body and Infant Feedingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding Mothers’ Infant Feeding Decisions and Practices

Head¹

2017

Social Sciences

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This paper begins with a discussion of social research which seeks to critique the emphasis on breastfeeding in infant feeding health promotion. The key themes of this research center on science, risk, and morality but other factors can also shape mothers' decisions and practices regarding infant feeding, and particularly, breastfeeding. The paper explores a range of research studies which together highlight the wide range of social, cultural, and economic factors implicated in infant feeding decisions and practices. The discussions here demonstrate that social and economic factors, familial and social networks, interactions with health professionals, cultural contexts which sexualize women's bodies, and experiences of public space, can all play a role in shaping how mothers negotiate infant feeding. This broad conceptualization of the factors that shape infant feeding practices offered by social research poses a challenge to the more simplistic accounts of infant feeding decisions implicit in public health promotion. It also demonstrates the profoundly social quality of infant feeding decisions that women make and the particular contributions that social research can make to our understandings of this area.

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Section: The Body and Infant Feedingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding Mothers’ Infant Feeding Decisions and Practices

Head¹

2017

Social Sciences

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“…While the lips, jaws and gums close around the organ, massaging it in a rhythmic sucking motion, it discharges its special juice into the child's deeper oesophageal region. (Sichtermann, 1986, p. 64) Few women in practice would speak of breastfeeding in such sexual terms; most are likely to use metaphors relating to machines or cows or milkbars, all of which are much more common in our collective memory than images of women breastfeeding (see Bartlett, 2002b).…”

Section: Breastfeeding and Pleasurementioning

confidence: 99%

Maternal sexuality and breastfeeding

Bartlett

2005

Sex Education

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“…Another theme in the recent feminist literature is the exploration of breastfeeding in relation to maternal embodiment (see, for example, Bartlett, 2002;Kelleher, 2006;Shaw, 2004). Bartlett (2002) argues that women's experiences of lactation can be highly unpredictable and heterogeneous.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Bartlett (2002) argues that women's experiences of lactation can be highly unpredictable and heterogeneous. This variation, she argues, is because a woman's lived experience of breastfeeding can determine her body's response to lactation through an interaction of socio-historical and cultural factors with physiological and hormonal processes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Expressing yourself: A feminist analysis of talk around expressing breast milk

Johnson

Williamson

Lyttle

et al. 2009

Social Science & Medicine

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Recent feminist analyses, particularly from those working within a poststructuralist framework, have highlighted a number of historically located and contradictory socio-cultural constructions and practices which women are faced with when negotiating infant feeding, especially breastfeeding, within contemporary western contexts. However, there has been little explicit analysis of the practice of expressing breast milk. The aim of this article is to explore the embodied practice of expressing breast milk. This is done by analysing, from a feminist poststructuralist perspective, discourse surrounding expressing breast milk in sixteen first time mothers' accounts of early infant feeding. Participants were recruited from a hospital in the South Midlands of England. The data are drawn from the first phase of a larger longitudinal study, during which mothers kept an audio diary about their breastfeeding experiences for seven days following discharge from hospital, and then took part in a follow-up interview. Key themes identified are expressing breast milk as (i) a way of managing pain whilst still feeding breast milk; (ii) a solution to the inefficiencies of the maternal body; (iii) enhancing or disrupting the 'bonding process'; (iv) a way of managing feeding in public; and (v) a way to negotiate some independence and manage the demands of breastfeeding. Links between these and broader historical and socio-cultural constructions and practices are discussed. This analysis expands current feminist theorising around how women actively create the 'good maternal 2 body'. As constructed by the participants, expressing breast milk appears to be largely a way of aligning subjectivity with cultural ideologies of motherhood.Moreover, breastfeeding discourses and practices available to mothers are not limitless and processes of power restrict the possibilities for women in relation to infant feeding.

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Breastfeeding as headwork: Corporeal feminism and meanings for breastfeeding

Cited by 46 publications

References 5 publications

Understanding Mothers’ Infant Feeding Decisions and Practices

Understanding Mothers’ Infant Feeding Decisions and Practices

Maternal sexuality and breastfeeding

Expressing yourself: A feminist analysis of talk around expressing breast milk

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