Managing The Lactating Body: The Breast-Feeding Project and Privileged Motherhood |
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Authors: | Orit Avishai |
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Institution: | (1) University of California, 410 Barrows Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-1980, USA |
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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.
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Keywords: | Breast-feeding Mothering Parenting experts Body management Medicalization |
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