Managing The Lactating Body: The Breast-Feeding Project and Privileged Motherhood |
| |
Authors: | Orit Avishai |
| |
Affiliation: | (1) University of California, 410 Barrows Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-1980, USA |
| |
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 |
本文献已被 SpringerLink 等数据库收录! |
|