Background In 2015, the popular online parenting forum, Netmums , named breastfeeding selfies as the number one parenting trend in the UK for that year. Public reaction to the rise in popularity of this practice is polarised, much like breastfeeding in public. The unspoken rule that breastfeeding should be discreet is challenged by the ostentatious presence of breastfeeding selfies. The case study This paper focuses on a detailed case study with a white, working class, single mother of two children who has taken and shared breastfeeding selfies online. The analysis employs psychoanalytic and phenomenological methods in order to consider the interrelation of both the internal processes and external forces at work in the practice of taking and sharing breastfeeding selfies. The focus is on how her practice might function in relation to the development of a maternal subject position and the ways in which any cultural capital associated with breastfeeding is perceived and mobilised. The analysis reveals how the relational dimension of selfie taking and participation in online breastfeeding and mothers’ groups helps develop an embodied sense of cultural capital which has ramifications in the everyday, although not without its own contradictions. Whilst breastfeeding may take up a particular place in contemporary discourses around parenting and ‘good mothering’, the capital it affords women is inherently wrapped up in their subject position and material conditions. Online spaces allow for manoeuvre and the mobilisation of this capital in a way which is precluded in the outside world. The practice of sharing and consuming breastfeeding selfies critically contributes to the actualisation of this capital in an embodied sense. Conclusions The key theme which emerges is the crucial need for recognition at both the micro and macro level and how this need for recognition is informed by both psychic and social pressures. The visibility, or self-exposure, associated with selfie sharing contributes to the surety of taking up a maternal subject position, from which the participant was better placed to work through some of the cultural ambivalences she too had internalised toward breastfeeding.
This article focuses on the practice of breastfeeding selfies, as a relational practice within online breastfeeding groups. I suggest that despite breastfeeding being upheld as the most superior infant feeding method, the practice has a paradoxical relationship to discourses of the “good mother” and the idealisation of motherhood more generally. This is due to the unashamed boldness of the practice, which flies in the face of notions of discretion, with their subsequent links to respectability. Breastfeeding selfies can be understood as gestures for something outside of the mother-infant dyad, therefore insisting on recognising the desire, needs and sociality of the mother. Furthermore, they move to position breastfeeding as a social, rather than an individual or solitary act. The desire for women to share their mothering experiences with other women challenges the individualising notion of the exclusive mother and, furthermore, can be understood as an invitation for intimacy with other women. Whilst the practice has the potential to be interpreted in a way which challenges much of the pernicious “good mother” discourses, it continues to be a practice marked in Whiteness, revealing the inequitable nature of online public spaces.
This paper takes a feminist approach to rethinking the significance of user-device interaction, attachments and dependency. It suggests that Jean Laplanche's resignificantion of 'seduction', the function of the 'enigmatic message', and reconfiguration of sexuality as a 'charge and tension', are particularly useful for theorising the relationship that smartphones, as digital objects, have to unconscious sexuality and psychic life. The paper suggests that the draw of user-device interactions is connected to the rhythms of unconscious sexuality and that this opens up the space for thinking beyond subject-object dichotomies and ultimately offers hope for a shift in the cultural imaginary.
How does it feel to be of working-class heritage and to work as an academic in the UK? This paper takes an autoethnographic approach in order to think this question through. Its focus is on the ways in which social class becomes internalised through the subtleties of affect and the enactments of symbolic violence over the life course. I suggest that the elite environment of the academe is a particularly painful place to be, especially when held in tension with one's working-class past and present. I suggest that the split at the heart of the cleft habitus is not singular, but the result of multiple fractures and tensions as one moves through different social contexts and locations. The academe is the place where this split can no longer be sutured and in fact becomes an open wound of class.
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