Bare Flesh and Sticky Milk: An Affective Conflict Over Public Breastfeeding

Abstract

On New Year’s Day 2016, a photograph of a breastfeeding woman taken by a Finnish celebrity sparked a social media debate over mothers nursing in public. By analyzing Instagram posts and a discussion forum thread, this article explores the affective body politics involved in this short-lived yet intense social media debate. It examines the power of hashtags and images in mobilizing motherhood as a site of political agency. Concurrently, it investigates how social media users negotiated the appropriate public presentations of the female body and how the celebrity’s gayness became an object of negative affect. The analysis of the incident makes visible how social norms concerning motherhood and heteronormativity are articulated in social media. It also demonstrates how affect sticks to images, texts, and bodies and becomes a binding force in social media discussions concerning them. The article argues that Instagram’s hashtag practices facilitated affective engagement for those following #teriniitti. It further argues that the affective dynamics of the case demonstrate how affective intensities stick on gay bodies and lactating bodies as objects of disgust, fascination, and desire.

Views and experience of breastfeeding in public: A qualitative systematic review

“…In two UK studies, breastfeeding was negatively associated with poverty and not being able to afford to purchase infant formula (Condon, 2018; Grant, 2016). However, in two studies reporting on social media content, these beliefs were contested (Lehto, 2019; Marcon et al, 2019). The most frequently reported emotional reaction arising from observing breastfeeding, within the context of it being considered an antisocial act, was discomfort (Battersby, 2007; Boyer, 2012; Grant, 2016; Henderson et al, 2011; Morris et al, 2016; Owens et al, 2018; Rhoden, 2016; Spurles & Babineau, 2011; Stearns, 2011).…”

“… a Grandmothers are also included in the combined grandparents figure. b NB: Two cases reported more than one location; Hauck et al ( 2020 ) with three countries and Lehto ( 2019 ) with one country plus ‘global’ social media. c Many studies included more than one and up to three methods of data collection; all methods are included in this table.…”

“…Ashamed (Chopel, et al 2019;Forster & McLachlan, 2010;Gallegos et al, 2015;Hauck, et al, 2020;Helps & Barclay, 2015;Lehto, 2019;Owens et al, 2018).…”

Nipples, memes, and algorithmic failure: NSFW critique of Tumblr censorship

“…Moving the bodies involved from one state to another, affect is an issue of relational impact that oscillates in its qualities and intensities (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010). Social media inquiry has attended to contingent publics (Papacharissi, 2015; see also Lehto, 2019) and contagious viral phenomena (Sampson, 2012; see also Pilipets 2019) shaped by affective intensities, as well as to how affect operates as a binding force that pushes people to engage and helps to generate more data for the platforms to harvest and monetize (e.g. Coté and Pybus, 2007; Dean, 2010; Karppi, 2018).…”

“…The combination of significant decrease in the number of posts in January 2019 with the intense screenshotting of notifications mentioning the possibility of reviewing flagged content (Figure 4) speaks of user resistance to Tumblr’s filtering strategies. It also points to the gradual flattening of affective intensities connected to both the purge as an event and to Tumblr as a platform, given how the affective “stickiness” that made many frequent users to engage (Coté and Pybus, 2007; Lehto, 2019) evaporated in the course of the NSFW ban. Following the peak posting intensity in December 2018, visual practices connected to the porn purge began to sharply deflate, indicating growing user disenchantment with Tumblr.…”