Not “Simply the Breast”

Abstract

Two prominent media events involving breastfeeding celebrities prompted unprecedented transnational media attention to their bodies, their breastfeeding practices, and their beliefs about the act of breastfeeding. This study critically analyzes media representations of Salma Hayek and Angelina Jolie that feature (or imply) a nursing celebrity breast to argue that discourses about celebrity breastfeeding are a semiotically potent phenomenon that destabilize boundaries of public and private, perpetuate normative beauty standards, and prescribe proper breastfeeding practices to audiences. The transnational celebrity of Jolie, Hayek, and others makes analyzing media discourses of their breastfeeding particularly necessary because they are prominent purveyors of femininity and have made activism about women's health a key aspect of their public personae.

Abnormal Mothers: Breastfeeding, Governmentality and Emotion Amongst Regional Australian Women

“…The data presented earlier demonstrate how this paradigm governs women, and produces feelings of abnormality for those women who cannot conform to its logic. In the second paradigm, because of its corporeality, breastfeeding belongs to a private, secluded world; it is an act for home [see 18,16,17].…”

“…Simultaneously, breastfeeding remains predominantly understood as a private act within Australian society. There is a "general unease with the lactating body" [16] which positions breastfeeding as a public taboo in practice [17]. What is characterised as public space remains masculine space, defined by rationality and solid, "in control", rather than "seeping" bodies [18].…”