Breastfeeding bodies and choice in late capitalism

Abstract

In a social culture that institutionally endorses Breast is Best policy, and yet commonly refers to the nation’s breastfeeding support agency as the nipple nazis or breastfeeding police, breastfeeding ‘culture’ is at best ambivalent in contemporary Australia. There have been numerous studies on what influences women’s choice to breastfeed or not, but most of them see breastfeeding as a personal choice and a personal practice which has varying levels of success or failure. Failure to breastfeed (through choice or practice) is interpreted as a personal failing of the mother. But neither choice nor practice is a simple concept, being contingent on at least our education, suburbs, peers, race, corporeality and personal histories. In this article, I follow through some of the consequences of breastfeeding as ‘choice’ and then propose some discursive options which might shift the direction of advocacy rhetoric.