For myriad reasons, breastfeeding is a fraught issue among mothers in the U.S. and other industrialized nations, and breastfeeding advocacy in particular remains a source of contention for feminist scholars and activists. Breastfeeding raises many important concerns surrounding gendered embodiment, reproductive rights and autonomy, essentializing discourses and the struggle against biology as destiny, and public policies that have the potential to support or undermine women, and mothers in particular, in the workplace. The essays in this collection engage with the varied and complicated ways in which cultural attitudes about mothering and female sexuality inform the way people understand, embrace, reject, and talk about breastfeeding, as well as with the promises and limitations of feminist breastfeeding advocacy. They attend to diffuse discourses about and cultural representations of infant feeding, all the while utilizing feminist methodologies to interrogate essentializing ideologies that suggest that women?s bodies are the ?natural? choice for infant feeding. These interdisciplinary analyses, which include history, law, art history, literary studies, sociology, critical race studies, media studies, communication studies, and history, are meant to represent a broader conversation about how society understands infant feeding and maternal autonomy.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Contextualizing Breastfeeding and Culture: Discourses and Representation
Ann Marie A. Short
I. HISTORICIZING CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF LACTATION AND BREASTFEEDING
Big Mother: Breastfeeding Rhetoric and the
Panopticon in Popular Culture, 1700 to Present
Elizabeth Johnston
?Milk for Gall?
Elizabethan Power Strategies in Macbeth
Eileen Sperry
Same-Sex Lactations in European Art and Literature (ca. 1300-1800):
Allegory, Melancholy, Loss
Jutta Sperling
Latch: The Object of the Breast Pump
Elaine McDevitt
II. REPRESENTATIONS OF LACTATION AND BREASTFEEDING IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
?That?s Not a Beer Bong; It?s a Breast Pump!? Representations of Breastfeeding in Prime-Time Fictional Television
Katherine A. Foss
(Breast)Milking the Situation: Interracial Wet-Nursing in Sherley Anne Williams?s Dessa Rose
Abigail L. Palko
Gender, Psychology, and Breastfeeding as ?Perverse?:
From A Clockwork Orange to Game of Thrones
Tatiana Prorokova
?In this Whole Story, That?s the Shocking Detail??:
Extended Breastfeeding in Emma Donoghue?s Room
Ann Marie A. Short
III. THE POLITICS OF BREASTFEEDING AND LACTATION: THE IMPLICATIONS FOR IDENTITIES
My Black Breast Friend: Breastfeeding and My Black Body
Dionne Irving
Breastfeeding in the Military: A Communicology Analysis
Patty Sotirin
Legal Representations of Breastfeeding: On Angela Ames and Sex Discrimination Dana Lloyd
The Politics of Mothers? Milk in Modern India
Sucharita Sarkar
IV: THE CHALLENGES OF FEMINIST BREASTFEEDING AND LACTATION DISCOURSE
?We Chose the Hardest Road?: Examining
Self-Representations of the Exclusive Pumper
Lee Ann Glowzenski
Surrogacy and Breastfeeding?A Puzzle to Solve:
A Case Study on the Surrogacy Industry in India
Anindita Sengupta
Framing Breastfeeding as ?Natural? Implications for Mothers? Identities
Laura Fitzwater Gonzales
About the Contributors