Liquid gold from the milk bar: Constructions of breastmilk and breastfeeding women in the language and practices of midwives

Burns, Elaine; Schmied, Virginia; Fenwick, Jennifer; Sheehan, Athena

doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2012.07.035

Cited by 50 publications

(85 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…This is crucial for both your baby's health and your own", and "the only reason why we women have breasts is to feed our children, that's what you should use them for". These voices echo the dominant public health discourse that emphasizes the moral superiority of breastfeeding (Schmied and Lupton 2001;Wall 2001;Burns et al 2012). They also indicate that dominant constructions about breastfeeding are used as a bio-political tool to produce both mother and infant as healthy citizens (Meyer and Oliveira 2003).…”

Section: Autoethnographymentioning

confidence: 79%

“…'Liquid gold' is how she referred to my milk. Burns et al (2012) and Hausman (2003) show that the term liquid gold is also used by midwives in Australia and the USA to communicate the perceived superiority of breast milk compared to formula. According to my very own breastfeeding expert, the smell of my newborn will help me produce some of this precious liquid.…”

Section: Autoethnographymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Both my colleague and I use an extra cooler bag to cover our transparent bottles so that the actual milk -you know, the stuff that is deemed so precious and valuable by the experts (see, e.g. Burns et al 2012) -is not visible. Breast milk is constructed as valuable and extremely 'pure' food in the context of the home.…”

Section: Caution! Leaky Bodymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Othering the ‘leaky body’. An autoethnographic story about expressing breast milk in the workplace

Amsterdam

2014

Culture and Organization

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In this paper, I present an autoethnographic story about my experiences of expressing breast milk at a Dutch university department. My story illustrates how interrelated and conflicting discourses about gender, motherhood, breastfeeding, embodiment and professionalism raised issues about (in)visibility, embodied control, spatiality and discipline of my body and shaped my experience as a newly maternal employee. This paper thus aims to include bodies and embodied experiences in organization studies and highlights the need to consider spatiality as an important topic of research. I address these issues in my writing and use insights from feminist poststructuralism to show how the experiences I describe are part of a larger cultural framework of power structures that produce the 'leaky' maternal body as the Other, subject to (self-)discipline and marginalization. I hope my story inspires reflexivity and empathic understanding of the complex reality of experiences related to expressing breast milk in the workplace.

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Section: Autoethnographymentioning

confidence: 79%

Section: Autoethnographymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Othering the ‘leaky body’. An autoethnographic story about expressing breast milk in the workplace

Amsterdam

2014

Culture and Organization

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“…With important exceptions (e.g. Haynes, 2008a, b;Martin, 1989;Gatrell, 2013), social research on motherhood tends to focus mainly on either maternal and infant health (Burns et al, 2012) or maternal employment (Ashcraft, 1999). This paper highlights the uncomfortable relationship between public health discourses which valorize the capacity of the maternal body to reproduce and nourish infants, and antipathetic organizational attitudes towards motherhood which may construct the maternal body as monstrous: as a source of abjection and disgust.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Monstrous motherhood versus magical maternity? An exploration of conflicting attitudes to maternity within health discourses and organizational settings

Gatrell

2014

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal

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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to compare public health discourses on the importance of motherhood with organizational attitudes towards childbearing. It shows how pregnancy and the nurturing of infant children are valorized within public health discourses, which treat pregnancy and new maternity as a miraculous “project”, encouraging mothers to position maternity as central to their lives. By contrast, the paper shows how employers treat pregnancy and new motherhood as inconvenient and messy: as monstrous, at work. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws upon a database of qualitative netnographic (or internet-based) research. It analyses netnographic interactions between pregnant and newly maternal women. These virtual data are afforded the same validity as face-to-face research. Findings – The paper demonstrates how maternal responsibilities for nurturing pregnancy and infant children, and the bio-medical properties of the maternal body, are central to public health discourses. By contrast, the maternal body is treated within organizations as alien, or monstrous. Originality/value – The paper compares and contrasts public health valorizations of motherhood, with organizational tendencies to treat pregnancy/newly maternal bodies as monstrous. It highlights dichotomies faced by employed mothers. A continuing chasm between the social organization of maternity, and the attitudes of employers towards children and maternal bodies, is identified.

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“…Together these form a basis for drawing conclusions that at times confirm existing understandings, and at other points challenge or push back against those in practically and theoretically important ways. The work of Bartlett (2002Bartlett ( , 2005, Schmied (Burns, Schmied, Fenwick, & Sheehan, 2012;Burns et al, 2010;Lupton & Schmied, 2013;Schmied & Lupton, 2001, Shaw (2004aShaw ( , 2004bShaw ( , 2004cShaw ( , 2005, Lupton (2012a) and Van Esterik (1989 has also informed my research through those authors' individual, woman-centred approaches.…”

Section: Approaching Bodiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Becoming-(breastfeeding-)woman: women’s body practices and experiences at the intersection of breastfeeding, milk insufficiency, and milk sharing

Smith¹

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The breastfeeding body is a site of complex, contested, and conspicuously moralised practices that has long been a focus for research in the social sciences through to the arts and humanities. Often too the maternal, lactating body is situated within a biomedical frame that marks the milk-producing body as problematic, failing, and subject to and object of expert knowledges. In this frame, women who identify as producing "not enough milk" to feed their babies have been a significant focus.Despite this extensive attention, however, there is little research that has explored women's experiences of and body practices enacted in relation to continued breastfeeding alongside ongoing milk insufficiency, nor the act of milk sharing as a specific response to this bodily insufficiency.In this thesis, I describe and discuss my research with 13 women who have faced difficulties in breastfeeding based on a shared experience of 'chronic milk insufficiency'. I also focus on the act of milk sharing as one response to this insufficiency. Through analysis and discussion of in-depth interviews and observation, I explore how women enact and experience body practices at the intersection of breastfeeding, milk insufficiency, and milk sharing.My critical exploration of breastfeeding, milk insufficiency, and milk sharing as interrelated body practices and modes of meaning-making is informed by, and also informs, the use of a conceptual frame developed through articulation with corporeal and post-constructionist feminism, and ideas from Deleuze and Guattari's work such as deterritorialisation, complex assemblages, flows, desire, and (inter)corporeality. I employ this rhizomatic, cyborg conceptual frame to analyse women's body practices with reference to a number of Deleuzo-Guattarian thematic strands including expectations and beginnings, incorporation and avoidance, the fragmenting body and complex assemblages, creative corporeality and body extension, and becoming-(breastfeeding-)woman.In situating embodied knowledge relative to creative body practices, and highlighting the spaces between bodies and the tension between normative and resistive body practices, I disarticulate and reterritorialise a range of ideas about maternal, lactating bodies. Taken together, these support the conceptualisation of continued breastfeeding in the context of ongoing insufficient milk as a creative, resistant (inter)corporeal act. I further discuss this creative (inter)corporeality in terms of its pragmatic and conceptual implications for anthropologists and social scientists more broadly, as well as for health professionals and others working with pregnant and breastfeeding women.ii Declaration by authorThis thesis is composed of my original work, and contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference has been made in the text. I have clearly stated the contribution by others to jointly-authored works that I have included in my thesis.

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Liquid gold from the milk bar: Constructions of breastmilk and breastfeeding women in the language and practices of midwives

Cited by 50 publications

References 37 publications

Othering the ‘leaky body’. An autoethnographic story about expressing breast milk in the workplace

Othering the ‘leaky body’. An autoethnographic story about expressing breast milk in the workplace

Monstrous motherhood versus magical maternity? An exploration of conflicting attitudes to maternity within health discourses and organizational settings

Becoming-(breastfeeding-)woman: women’s body practices and experiences at the intersection of breastfeeding, milk insufficiency, and milk sharing

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