Managing The Lactating Body: The Breast-Feeding Project and Privileged Motherhood

Author: Avishai, Orit¹

Source: Qualitative Sociology, Volume 30, Number 2, June 2007 , pp. 135-152(18)

Publisher: Springer

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Abstract:

Drawing on interviews with twenty-five mostly white, educated, work-force experienced and class-privileged mothers, this paper explores how these women construct the lactating body as a carefully managed site and breast-feeding as a project—a task to be researched, planned, implemented, and assessed, with reliance on expert knowledge, professional advice, and consumption. The framing of breast-feeding as a project contrasts with the emphases on pleasure, embodied subjectivity, relationality, and empowerment that characterizes much of the recent breast-feeding literature across the humanities and social sciences. I argue that the project frame sheds light on the amount of work and self-discipline involved in compliance with broader middle-class mothering standards set in the consumerist, technological, medicalized, and professionalized contexts that shape parenting in late capitalist America.

Keywords: Breast-feeding; Mothering; Parenting experts; Body management; Medicalization

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.1007/s11133-006-9054-5

Affiliations: 1: Email: avishai@berkeley.edu