Managing the lactating body: The breastfeeding project in the age of anxiety

Abstract

Public health campaigns aimed at increasing breastfeeding rates in the United States rest on the twin premises that the 'breast is best' and that breastfeeding is 'natural'. This chapter draws on interviews with class-privileged American mothers to demonstrate that far from 'natural', breastfeeding decisions, practices and experiences are shaped by historical, cultural, political and social norms and customs. The chapter examines how this group of women makes decisions about infant feeding and their breastfeeding practices. I demonstrate that these women construct the lactating body as a carefully managed site and breastfeeding as a mothering project - a task to be researched, planned, implemented and assessed, supported by expert knowledge, professional advice and consumption. Viewed in this light, 'the breast is best' and 'breastfeeding is natural' are impoverished slogans that do not capture the extent to which both the science and the imagery of breastfeeding are shaped by normative assumptions and middle-class experiences. The chapter also diverges from the emphases on pleasure, embodied subjectivity, relationality and empowerment that characterise much of the recent breastfeeding literature across the humanities, arguing that these normative/political agendas do not reflect empirical realities. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.