The Ethics and Politics of Breastfeeding Power Pleasure Poetics
Robyn Lee
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R O B Y N L E E
THE ETHICS AND POLITICS OF BREASTFEEDING
Power, Pleasure, Poetics
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ROBYN LEE
The Ethics and Politics of Breastfeeding
Power, Pleasure, Poetics
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
University of Toronto Press 2018 Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com
Printed in the U.S.A.
ISBN 978-1-4875-0371-0 (cloth)
Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetablebased inks.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Lee, Robyn, 1980-, author
The ethics and politics of breastfeeding : power, pleasure, poetics/Robyn Lee.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4875-0371-0 (hardcover)
1.Breastfeeding. 2. Breastfeeding – Social aspects. 3. Breastfeeding –Political aspects. I. Title.
RJ216 L447 2018 649'.33 C2018-901627-2
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 3
1 Breastfeeding, Subjectivity, and Art as a Way of Life 17
Liberal Autonomy: A Bad Fit for Breastfeeding Subjectivity 20
Breastfeeding as an Art of Living 25
Ethics, Poetics, Poiesis 28
2 Biopower, Medicalization, and Maternalism 33
Biopower 36
Biopower and Eugenics: Breastfeeding, Race, and Class 38
Medicalization of Breastfeeding 44
Nutrition for Healthy Term Infants 50
Breastfeeding and Maternalism 57
The “Womanly Art” of Breastfeeding 60
Conclusion 66
3 Ethics, Pleasure, Subjectivity 68
Feminism, Sexuality, and Breastfeeding 69
Pleasure and Breastfeeding 73
The Moral Problematization of Pleasure 77
Askesis and Aesthetics 81
Pleasure, Pain, and Politics 84
Care of the Self and Community 88
An Ethopoetics of Breastfeeding 91
4 Feeding the Hungry Other: Levinas and Breastfeeding 98
Eating and Enjoyment 101
Ethics and Poetics 105
Metaphor and Ethical Responsibility 109
Levinas’s Breastfeeding Occlusions 111
Towards a Politics of Hunger 116
Conclusion 119
5 Breastfeeding and Sexual Difference 121
Sexual Difference in Irigaray 125
Between Mothers and Children 129
Beyond Levinas and Foucault 132
Breastfeeding, Sexual Difference, and Poetics 135
Fluidity in Breastfeeding 140
Queer Theory and the Multiplicity of Sexual Difference 148
6 A Politics of Breastfeeding 151
Between Ethics and Politics 153
Care of the Self Is Hard Work: Foucault and Social Justice 157
Possibilities for Resisting Biopower 164
Becoming “Poets of the Law”: Irigaray’s Sexuate Right to Breastfeed 167
Breastfeeding Everyone? Alternative Breastfeeding Relationships 174
Conclusion 183
Notes 189
Bibliography 193
Index 231
Acknowledgments
Many people encouraged and assisted me in this project over the years. I am tremendously thankful for the generous and always insightful support of Lorna Weir, Penny Van Esterik, Francine Wynn, and David Goldstein. Barbara Godard was very helpful with this project in its preliminary stages and is greatly missed.
Andrea Doucet has been a wonderfully supportive friend and mentor, and I am very grateful for her assistance on this project. As well, I am deeply appreciative of the research support I received from the Social Justice Research Institute and department of sociology at Brock University, with particular thanks to Kate Bezanson.
I am grateful to the wonderful community of feminist colleagues at the University of Alberta, including Chloë Taylor (for her careful reading and generous feedback on this manuscript), Natalie Loveless, for continual inspiration and for organizing, together with Sheena Wilson, the amazing New Maternalisms conference at the University of Alberta in May 2016, as well as Sara Dorow, Amy Kaler, and Cressida Heyes. I have gained endless inspiration from a number of artists, including in particular Jess Dobkin, Rachel Epp Buller, Miriam Simun, and Helene Knoop.
Thank you to Jodine Chase for being an endless source of invaluable information about breastfeeding, and to the organizers and participants of the 2017 Breastfeeding and Feminism International conference. I am also grateful to everyone who has shared their stories about breastfeeding with me over the years.
I would like to express my gratitude for the extensive assistance of my editor, Douglas Hildebrand, who has been invaluable in overseeing this project. Thank you to the anonymous reviewers of this book, who
viii Acknowledgments
provided careful and extremely helpful feedback. My sincere appreciation to Fazeela Jiwa for her editing assistance. Thank you as well to Terry Teskey for careful copyediting of this manuscript. Any errors or omissions in this work are, of course, entirely my own.
To my parents, Alison and David, my brother, Bryan, and all of my extended family, I am deeply grateful for all their love and support over the years.
Thank you to Vivian Lee and Alana Cattapan for their editing help and assistance in thinking through this project over the years. As well, thank you to Quinn DuPont, Hanno Liem, Ashley Walters, Richard Johnson, Stephen Buijs, Scott Honsberger, Stephanie Herod, Steven Jarvis, and all the rest of my chosen family (too many to list here, but I’m so grateful for all of you!), for emotional and practical support, and for continually inspiring me to expand my understanding of kinship and care.
I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the publication of this book by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta.
Earlier versions of sections of this book have appeared as “Breastfeeding and Care of the Self” in Stephanie Paterson, Francesca Scala, and Marlene Sokolon (Eds.), Fertile Ground: Exploring Reproduction in Canada (2014); “Breastmilk Exchange and New Forms of Social Relations” in MP: An Online Feminist Journal (2013); “Feeding the Hungry Other: Levinas, Breastfeeding, and the Politics of Hunger” in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy (2016); and “Breastfeeding and Sexual Difference: Queering Irigaray” in Feminist Theory (December 2017).
This book is dedicated to my grandmothers, Marianne, Sheila, and Margaret, who are dearly missed.
THE ETHICS AND POLITICS OF BREASTFEEDING
Power, Pleasure, Poetics
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Introduction
“Breastfeeding: it’s natural” was the slogan for a 2013 UNICEF campaign for breastfeeding in China, which featured a wide variety of cartoon baby mammals cooing “mama!” as they happily breastfeed, in stark contrast with a disconsolately solitary human baby calling out “mama?” next to a powdered vat of infant formula (UNICEF, 2013). This popular slogan has been repeated in many breastfeeding promotion campaigns (Calderdale & Huddersfield Foundation Trust, 2014; Office on Women’s Health, US Department of Health and Human Services, 2013). But what does it mean to claim that breastfeeding is natural? Why do women need to be convinced to do something that’s natural? If it is natural, why are lactation consultants increasingly in demand (DeVries, 2013)?
The wide variety of mammals featured in the UNICEF ad is unsurprising, given that breastfeeding has historically been used to construct the class Mammalia and the categories of female and male. Breastfeeding, and specifically the presence of the mammary gland, has been an integral component in the evolution and taxonomic classification of animal species. Carolus Linnaeus established the use of the mammary gland as the defining feature of the classification of mammals in 1758. However, this classification was political: Linnaeus focused scientific attention on the mammae because he was strongly engaged in support for breastfeeding over wet nursing (Schiebinger, 1993). This broad struggle against wet nursing (including a 1794 Prussian law mandating that all healthy mothers must breastfeed) emerged contemporaneously with the undermining of women’s public power and the revaluing of women’s domestic role (Schiebinger, 1993, p. 383).
The relationship between breastfeeding and biological classification of sex difference has long been more ambiguous than Linnaeus’s efforts would indicate, however. The painting La Mujer Barbuda shown in figure 1, often referred to as “The Bearded Lady of Abruzzi,” is by Jusepe de Ribera, originally from Spain but who lived in Naples. The painting is of Magdalena Ventura, aged fifty-two, who, after giving birth to three sons, at the age of thirty-seven began experiencing hormonal changes that included growing facial hair. The most likely cause of Magdalena’s changes is a benign androgen-producing tumour of the
ovary – what is now termed an androblastoma (Tunbridge, 2011). Lactation and breast development in men (gynaecomastia) were remarked upon by early commentators such as Aristotle and, in Spain, have at times been viewed as an unusual but generally non-pathological occurrence in men, and later as indications of intersexuality or lack of sexual differentiation between the sexes (Cleminson & García, 2009). Although in this painting Magdalena is performing what is often understood as a paradigmatically feminine activity, her facial features, body, even the long flowing robes reminiscent of a biblical prophet, all convey masculinity. Next to her in the painting is her husband, who appears to be overshadowed by her. Although it is not known for certain, it is unlikely that Magdalena Ventura would have been able to conceive the child she nurses in the painting, due to her age and probably high levels of testosterone. The stone tablets in the painting describe her as a “miracle of nature.” Ribera’s depiction of the exposed breast and child in her arms exaggerates Magdalena’s underlying femininity, while the small objects on top of the stone tablets also reference gender: a spindle symbolizes femininity and a snail shell indicates hermaphroditism (Tunbridge, 2011).
As Gayle Rubin (1975, p. 180) pointed out, gender requires the suppression of similarities between men and women. The ways in which discourses of lactation are implicated in the constitution of gender are political. Although breastfeeding has been used to shore up classificatory categories, it actually demonstrates how these categories are fluid and subject to cultural and political influences. For instance, Trevor MacDonald, a trans father, describes his experiences with breastfeeding, along with pregnancy and childbirth, as deeply challenging experiences when they are seen by others as paradigmatically feminine (MacDonald, 2016).
Breastfeeding presents the seeming paradox of being habitually described as a “natural” process while at the same time being the subject of deep and abiding controversy (Crossley, 2009). The conflation of “natural” with “healthy” in breastfeeding promotion may undermine other public health goals such as childhood vaccination, in addition to raising ethical issues by potentially supporting biological essentialism (Martucci & Barnhill, 2016). Despite being heavily promoted by public health campaigns, breastfeeding continues to provoke opposition, particularly when it becomes visible in the realm of public life and workplaces. Many women feel uncomfortable or embarrassed breastfeeding in public, and attempt to hide what they are doing (Public Health
England, 2015). Women continue to be barred from breastfeeding in public on occasion (Szekeley, 2014), with nurse-ins being staged in response (CBC News, 2015; Craggs, 2014; Pigg, 2008; Shingler, 2011). A professor who breastfed her child during her “Sex, Gender and Culture” class sparked wide-ranging controversy (Shipman, 2012). Facebook’s ban on photos of breastfeeding led to years of activism by a global group called “Hey Facebook, Breastfeeding Is Not Obscene” and the #FreeTheNipple campaign, finally leading Facebook to permit photos of breastfeeding, although photos of female nipples in any other context are still banned (Chemaly, 2014; Rhodan, 2014).
Breastfeeding became a subject of public health campaigns during the early twentieth century in Europe and North America as a response to high rates of infant mortality (Golden, 2001, 2011; Meckel, 1990; Wegman, 2001). Since the end of the nineteenth century, public health and medical authorities have recognized a relationship between infant mortality and morbidity rates and infant feeding practices (Arnup, 1994; Comacchio, 1994; Dyhouse, 1978; J.H. Wolf, 2003). Mothering practices, particularly breastfeeding, were seen as essential to solving the infant mortality crisis (Arnup, 1994). With the spread of pasteurization and electricity in homes in the early twentieth century, the threats posed by unsafe milk and water being used in infant formula significantly decreased. Although breastfeeding was still supported in theory by medical practitioners and governments, breastfeeding promotion became a low priority for public health efforts. The practical knowledge required for breastfeeding had largely disappeared and because formula feeding was perceived as the modern, scientific option, breastfeeding rates hit a historic low in the 1960s (J.H. Wolf, 2001).
Breastfeeding began receiving attention again when the natural motherhood movement that began in the late 1960s1 and the Nestlé boycott of the late 1970s opposing the marketing of infant formula in developing countries combined to raise awareness about the risks of infant formula and the benefits of breastfeeding. By the late 1970s, scientific awareness of the substantial health benefits of breastfeeding had grown considerably and led to renewed public health campaigns to promote breastfeeding in the early 1980s. As a result of the large body of research since then demonstrating the health, psychological, and developmental advantages associated with breastfeeding (Lawrence, 1995), it became the subject of extensive public health campaigns aimed at improving infant health (Kukla, 2006; J. Wolf, 2007). Concern with breastfeeding intensified as a result of increased scientific awareness
about the nutritional advantages of breast milk, including, but not limited to, strengthened immune systems, reduced risks of respiratory illness and diarrheal disease, and reduced incidences of allergies and ear infections (Stuebe, 2009). With awareness of the benefits of breastfeeding now widespread (Guttman & Zimmerman, 2000), formula feeding is perceived as a questionable or risky decision that leaves women open to the charge of being bad mothers (Stearns, 1999). Public health campaigns have focused on educating women about the benefits of breastfeeding, but have failed to recognize that social and material constraints significantly influence women’s decisions regarding infant feeding (Earle, 2002; Kolinsky, 2010; Meedya, Fahy, & Kable, 2010; Nathoo & Ostry, 2009). Joan Wolf and Rebecca Kukla, in their analyses of breastfeeding promotion campaigns, found that mothers are constructed as the social actors most responsible for the health and well-being of their children (Kukla, 2006; J. Wolf, 2007). Enormous pressure has been put upon mothers to breastfeed or risk being accused of jeopardizing their child’s health.
Debates continue to rage over whether “breast really is best,” with prominent critics of the purported benefits of breastfeeding including Joan Wolf (2010), Hannah Rosin (2009), and Courtney Jung (2015). In the subtitle of her book Lactivism, Jung (2015) takes aim at the “Feminists and Fundamentalists, Hippies and Yuppies, and Physicians and Politicians” who push breastfeeding on women. How did such an odd alliance form in support of breastfeeding? And why are feminists so divided in their opinions about breastfeeding? Pro-breastfeeding advocates view it as empowering, even potentially subversive, in the context of a culture of bottle feeding. However, some feminists challenge breastfeeding promotion as “parenting orthodoxy,” arguing that the benefits of breastfeeding have been oversold and that breastfeeding risks reinscribing gendered divisions of care work and consumerist paradigms of intensive mothering (Faircloth, 2013; Jung, 2015). Increasingly, feminists are pointing out that discourses of choice in the context of infant feeding decisions are problematic given how risk is conceptualized (Knaak, 2010; Smith, Hausman, & Labbok, 2012).
Motherhood draws copious feminist attention since “it represents a key role for women and thus an important experience of pleasure, constraint, subject-formation, and subjection” (Hausman, 2004, p. 273). Breastfeeding represents an intense locus of these experiences of pleasure, constraint, subject-formation, and subjection; it is a site of deep control over women’s bodies, through both medicalized interventions
in feeding children and moralistic valuations about what constitutes “good mothering.” Like motherhood generally, breastfeeding elicits strongly differing views from feminists.
Breastfeeding highlights one of the central conflicts of feminism: should women attempt to minimize gender differences as a path to liberation or should they embrace gender differences by fighting to remove patriarchal constraints (Carter, 1995; Lorber, 2000)? This debate is particularly fraught when attempting to encourage men to take on more equitable childcare responsibilities, without undermining women’s historical caregiving roles or failing to address the associated power imbalances (Doucet, 2006, p. 29). Sara Ruddick (1995) and others suggest that mothering can potentially be degendered in order to equally distribute the work of childrearing, but breastfeeding presents an obstacle to gender-neutral childcare (McCarter-Spaulding, 2008), as breastfeeding can inhibit fathers’ and other caregivers’ participation in caring for babies (Blum, 2000; Coltrane, 1996; Fox, 2009, p. 97). This leads May Friedman (2009) to question whether certain goals of feminism – to de-rigidify gender roles and reconstruct parenting as work that is shared equally – conflict with the deeply gendered and therefore unequally shared activity of breastfeeding.2
Breastfeeding is an important feminist issue (Blum, 2000; Carter, 1995; J.H. Wolf, 2006), but it is not only an issue for women. The association of breastfeeding with cis-women,3 specifically those who have recently given birth, has increasingly been put into question as adoptive mothers, fathers, and trans people begin breastfeeding (Hormann, 2007; Szucs, Axline, & Rosenman, 2010; Tapper, 2012a). Although it is commonly assumed that only women, and in particular women who have recently given birth, are able to breastfeed, men are capable of breastfeeding, and males have been discovered to be capable of lactating in at least two other species of mammals (Thomsen, 2011). Adoptive mothers, grandmothers, transgender, and transsexual people can also breastfeed (Diamond, 1995; Emmersen et al., 2008; Hormann, 2007; Rainbow Health Ontario, 2012; Shanley, 2009; Wilson et al., 2015); breastfeeding also occurs in the context of adult nursing relationships, wet nursing, and cross-nursing. The first medically documented instance of a transwoman inducing lactation was recently reported (Reisman and Goldstein, 2018). Trans parents who breastfeed subvert assumptions about the natural role of mothers in feeding and caring for children (MacDonald, 2016). Although lactation operates as a cultural signifier of both sexual difference and maternity, it is not necessarily tied to either (Bartlett, 2002a, p. 375).4
Debates over breastfeeding are usually framed as either “for” or “against,” with both sides often drawing heavily on medical research supporting the health benefits of breastfeeding, or criticizing this research as inconclusive or misleading. However, this book does not argue either for or against breastfeeding, and neither does it examine the validity of scientific research regarding its potential health benefits. Those projects have been carried out extensively elsewhere, with widely differing conclusions. Instead, this book asks why breastfeeding gives rise to so much controversy, why it is the site of so much contestation and tension, why its “naturalness” is so vehemently extolled, and why it is a lightning rod for so much ambivalence and vitriol. The answer, I argue, is that breastfeeding is a practice that does not fit with the dominant model of subjectivity that underpins so much of contemporary Western society, with its dichotomies of public and private, self and other, body and mind, male and female. As a result, breastfeeding demonstrates the need to think subjectivity otherwise.
This book does not treat breastfeeding as a paradigmatically ethical or feminine/feminist project, since ethics and feminism do not require breastfeeding. Instead, it explores the tensions, contradictions, and ambivalences surrounding breastfeeding, recognizing it as a practice that unsettles independence and autonomy and that throws subjectivity itself into question. I approach breastfeeding in terms of its strangeness or Heideggerian Unheimlichkeit (uncanniness), from the perspective of a cisgender childless academic who remains ambivalent about how motherhood is experienced under contemporary conditions of neoliberalism: its potential for shattering self-identity, the hardships involved in negotiating ongoing conflicts between career and childbearing, and the unequal valuing of women in terms of their reproductive capacities, along lines of race, class, sexual orientation, and (dis)ability. In writing this work I also recognize the irony involved in having had the time to write this book as a consequence of not having breastfed anyone, and am inspired by Elizabeth Gregory’s argument that those who accrue economic and political privilege from delaying (or avoiding) motherhood have a responsibility to support the reproductive and parenting rights of those who are busy caring for children (Gregory, 2007). This work stays with ambivalence in order to learn from it. What do the debates and controversies over breastfeeding teach us about subjectivity and embodiment? How does theoretical reflection on breastfeeding transform understandings of what it means to be an embodied self in relation to others?
In light of Donna Haraway’s slogan “Make Kin Not Babies” (2016), I seek to destabilize motherhood as a primary identity for women,
while also attending to the insights of the reproductive justice movement (Smith, Hausman, & Labbok, 2012). Reproductive justice was developed and principally advocated for by organizations of women of colour. It goes beyond considerations of individual choice in access to contraception and abortion, to include a broader analysis of the racial, economic, cultural, and structural constraints on women’s reproductive choices (Ross, 2007). Breastfeeding can be understood not merely as involving a privileged connection between a biological mother and her child (although in many cases this is how it is practised), but also as a practice with the potential to produce new, expanded kinship relations. This requires attending to the ways in which breastfeeding continues to be curtailed and restricted, particularly for poor and racialized women – at the extreme leading to criminal prosecution and loss of custody of their children as a result of breastfeeding them. Ensuring that breastfeeding is protected, particularly for members of marginalized groups, is essential given eugenicist histories (and present conditions of inequality) in which certain women were encouraged to give birth and care for their children while others have had their reproductive and child-caring capacities dramatically limited and constrained. This includes a history of wet nursing in which enslaved women and poor, unmarried women breastfed the children of others, often while their own children went hungry. This work theorizes how to support breastfeeding practices for those who wish to carry them out, with particular attention paid beyond the group of privileged women (white, higher socioeconomic status, older, married) who are currently most likely to breastfeed (Fein et al., 2008). At the same time, this book continues the feminist project of decentring motherhood as integral to women’s identity, refusing to grant that breastfeeding is ethically obligatory. In challenging gender-essentializing conceptions of breastfeeding, I endeavour to queer breastfeeding through recognizing that individuals besides cis-women can also breastfeed and that human milk may be shared between individuals other than a mother and her child (see also Giles, 2016, 2003). While these various goals may not always sit easily together, I strive to recognize tensions and ambivalences in breastfeeding, seeing them as productive without necessarily trying to reconcile them.
Responding to the most widely read breastfeeding manual, La Leche League’s The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, this book treats breastfeeding as an art – a practice that must be developed through the skilful application of effort as distinguished from a natural or merely physiological process – while critiquing the understanding of breastfeeding as
“womanly” since what it means to be a woman must be continually held open to question. Although breastfeeding is usually understood as a biological marker of femininity, it is not necessarily tied to pregnancy or gender. I often refer to individuals who breastfeed as “mothers” or “women” in this book, since they continue to make up the majority of those who breastfeed. Nevertheless, I wish to always put the association between womanhood or motherhood and breastfeeding into question. I believe doing so requires that we keep language open to ongoing transformation, using the language that feels appropriate to the individuals feeding their children. For example, Trevor MacDonald (2016) describes trying out different terms (“breastfeeding” and “chestfeeding”), and ultimately he finds “nursing” to be the most comfortable term to describe his own practice, though he also continues to use the term “breastfeeding.”
Drawing primarily on the work of Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas, and Luce Irigaray, I develop a poststructuralist-inspired understanding of breastfeeding as an “art of living” or a form of poiesis that need not reinscribe essentialist conceptions of women as mothers. In place of the individualizing approach exhibited by many discussions of breastfeeding, which positions it as a choice or as primarily the responsibility of mothers, I read breastfeeding as shaped by discourses of power, which constrain those who practise breastfeeding but also allow for new possibilities in how we understand embodiment, care, and kinship relations. I apply Foucault’s later work on the ancient GrecoRoman concept of ethics of the self to breastfeeding. Foucault’s ethics of the self has, however, been criticized for insufficiently addressing sexual difference and responsibility for the care of others, given that his ethics of the self is grounded in the elite male life of ancient Greco-Roman societies. For this reason, I combine Foucault’s ethics with the work of Emmanuel Levinas, since he understands subjectivity as inherently responsible for the Other, and Luce Irigaray, because she makes sexual difference fundamental to her thought. From Levinas, I develop an understanding of breastfeeding as an ethical response to the hunger of the Other.5 Through a reading of Irigaray, I explore the importance of sexual difference to breastfeeding. Foucault, Levinas, and Irigaray all share a preoccupation with ethics, and understand it through the lens of art, or poetics. I argue that this linkage of ethics and poetics opens up new ways of understanding breastfeeding arising out of currently dominant discourses of breastfeeding.
Drawing on these thinkers, I go on to develop a politics of breastfeeding. I do not directly follow any of these three theorists, however;
although each of them provides important resources for developing an ethics of breastfeeding, each also has significant lacunae. Their differences are productive and provide the means for conceiving of a more complete ethics of breastfeeding. I do not remain loyal to the theories of these writers; rather, I follow their strategy of revising the philosophical tradition. I argue that elements from their work may be combined to develop a new art of breastfeeding consisting of bodily practices that are creatively imagined and continually transformed. An illustration of this can be seen in the self-portrait, “Milk,” by Helene Knoop that graces the cover of this book. In an interview, Knoop described her experience of painting this work thusly:
The eternal image of a woman and child has always fascinated me; but not until recent years has it struck me so directly as when I myself transformed into the motif. This is a painting of my first son and me. Actually, I was painting as I was breastfeeding. The color of the background had to be the color of the feeling; a bright greenish white in contrast with the pulsating skin. It is such a bodily condition, this is why there is a lack of other objects in the image (Kralik, 2014).
The first chapter of this book, “Breastfeeding, Subjectivity, and Art as a Way of Life,” explores why the traditional, liberal model of the autonomous subject is inadequate for understanding breastfeeding, giving rise to a failure to accommodate breastfeeding in the contemporary Western context. I propose an alternative model of breastfeeding: poiesis, thinking of life as a work of art, connecting ethics and poetics through embodied creative self-transformations in response to and in relation to broader social discourses. I trace the evolution of the concept of poiesis, in order to understand how it is taken up by Foucault, Levinas, and Irigaray and how it may be applied to breastfeeding. The child (implicitly gendered male) has been foregrounded in most discussions of how breastfeeding shapes subjectivity, with St Augustine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Sigmund Freud, and others tracing the development of the self from the beginning point of an infant seeking the breast. This chapter argues for the alternative starting position of a breastfeeding subject who is always already involved in embodied, relational, ethical responsibility to the Other (Shaw & Bartlett, 2010).
While children are certainly participating agents in the relational practice of breastfeeding, they have overwhelmingly been the primary locus of concern, in line with a long tradition of instrumentalizing women’s
reproductive labour and care work (Stone, 2015). In order to redress this imbalance, I focus primarily on those who breastfeed, treating them as moral and ethical subjects in their own right, rather than merely being constrained by moralization through dominant norms of “good” mothering. Focusing on the individuals who breastfeed (the majority of whom are women, although increasing numbers are men, trans, and non-binary individuals) does not mean ignoring those who are breastfed, however. The subject who breastfeeds is relational and intercorporeal, in an embodied relationship with the Other she cares for that precedes any individuation or separation.
Chapter 2, “Biopower, Medicalization, and Maternalism,” explores how breastfeeding is currently subject to what Foucault termed biopower, a modern form of power over life, exercised over populations through concern with, for example, birth rates and fertility, diet, longevity, public health, and rates of illness. Biopower is particularly concerned with procreation and children, making breastfeeding, with its potential to enhance the health of the population, an obvious target. I explore how biopower shapes the two most dominant breastfeeding discourses, medical and maternalist, which developed agonistically but nonetheless reinforce each other, via analysis of two influential texts on breastfeeding: Nutrition for Healthy Term Infants, a policy document from Health Canada providing recommendations for health professionals, and The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, published by La Leche League, which promotes maternalist championing of breastfeeding in conjunction with an idealization of mothers as uniquely qualified to care for their children. Although the maternalist model challenged the devaluing of women’s knowledge and experience and the bottlefeeding culture that developed under the medicalization of infant feeding, it nevertheless relies on essentialist ideas of gender that serve to confine women to the domestic sphere of life.
Chapter 3, “Ethics, Pleasure, Subjectivity,” explores the role of pleasure in the formation of the self. Pleasure is a major mode through which subjectivity is formed, for Foucault, through the intensification of knowledge concerning the truth of one’s pleasure. Women are enjoined to take pleasure in breastfeeding, in its supposed naturalness and intimate connection to their child – but not too much pleasure, since it must be kept within certain bounds of selfless maternal care. Foucault is interested in subjectivity (assujettissement) both in the sense of being subject to power, as well as making a subject. He understands power as constraining or limiting us, but also as producing new
possibilities, capacities, and subject-positions. Foucault’s later work on the ethics of the self in volumes 2 and 3 of the History of Sexuality draws on ancient Greco-Roman practices of managing pleasure to explore how creatively engaging with existing discourses of power can lead to possibilities for self-transformation. This does not enable free or unrestricted self-creation, but it does recognize the potential for challenging and responding to dominant discourses of power. Foucault’s ethics of the self remains marked by the ancient Greco-Roman culture from which he draws it, but it is nonetheless useful in understanding breastfeeding in terms of poiesis, involving ongoing work of self-transformation.
Chapter 4, “Feeding the Hungry Other: Levinas and Breastfeeding,” analyses breastfeeding from the perspective of Levinas’s ethics, in which there is an infinite obligation to the Other that exceeds and precedes the self. Levinas renews the question of the ethical in contemporary Continental philosophy. Drawing on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, and reacting strongly against Martin Heidegger in the wake of the latter’s membership in the Nazi party, Levinas argues that the philosophical tradition suppresses alterity, reducing the Other to the same. He is innovative in making ethics “first philosophy,” through a phenomenology in which the self is put into question by the infinite responsibility imposed by the face of the Other. For Levinas, subjectivity always arises in and through a responsibility to care for the Other, an obligation that is infinite and thus can never be satisfied, but which is nevertheless incumbent upon us.
Intensely individualized moral pressure is placed on women to breastfeed. This chapter argues that the ethical obligation to feed the hungry child must be recognized as coextensive with meeting the needs of those who feed children, especially given the current absence of important social and economic supports for breastfeeding. Under a Levinasian framework, each of us is ethically responsible for feeding children; this responsibility is not limited to mothers. This ethical responsibility needs to be expressed through improving social and economic supports necessary for those individuals who wish to breastfeed, instead of attempting to convince women to breastfeed. It must also be understood in a broader context of a politics of hunger, which requires that everyone have access to quality food, and goes beyond mere nutrition to include the importance of culture, touch, and intimacy in the enjoyment of food –what Levinas calls “good soup.”
Chapter 5, “Breastfeeding and Sexual Difference,” looks at how breastfeeding has been used to uphold binary conceptions of sexual difference. Induced lactation by individuals besides cis-gendered women who have recently given birth destabilizes such binaries, however. The chapter theorizes breastfeeding as both feminist and queer, recognizing the tensions inherent in doing so without attempting to reconcile them, and viewing these tensions as productive and important. In doing so, it draws upon Irigaray’s conception of sexual difference as an ethics and poetics, but pushes her thought further in order to understand sexual difference in terms of multiplicity, beyond binaries of masculine and feminine.
Irigaray, like Levinas, challenges the totalizing tendencies of the philosophical tradition. However, drawing on psychoanalysis in addition to phenomenology, Irigaray takes up sexual difference as the defining philosophical question. She argues that women have historically been associated with nature and unthinking matter, and that their identities have been associated with the role of “mother” regardless of whether or not they are actually mothers. While men are associated with culture and subjectivity, women are excluded from participating in them, yet serve as their unacknowledged support. Irigaray criticizes what she views as the dependence of Western culture itself upon a primary sacrifice of the mother, and all women through her. Irigaray attempts to overcome this tradition in order to develop a true sexual difference, in which women have identity and subjectivity that is uniquely theirs, not dependent on a relation to men or the role of mother. Irigaray’s formulation of sexual (or sexuate) difference requires reconfiguring subjectivity to be embodied, relational, and belonging both to nature and culture.
Chapter 6, “A Politics of Breastfeeding,” explores examples of political action including lactivism and performance art, along with the expanded kinship ties developed through cross-nursing and milk exchange, beyond the mother-infant dyad (Shaw, 2007). I apply Levinas’s understanding of the abyssal relationship between ethics and politics to breastfeeding, in conjunction with Irigaray’s demand for sexuate rights to breastfeeding, and examine political obstacles to carrying out Foucault’s ethics of the self.
This chapter explores milk kinship as a mode of going beyond merely human relationships through Haraway’s (2016) conception of sympoiesis, or “making-with.” The embodied relationality of the mother-infant dyad,
although an important corrective to liberal conceptions of selfhood, does not go far enough in capturing the “worlding-with” of cyborg kin, who are never alone, never making themselves independently of others (Haraway, 2016). The growing visibility and popularity of lactation porn, adult wet nursing, cross-nursing the children of others, and human milk banking, sale, and sharing means that breastfeeding is sometimes carried out between adults, and expressed milk can be shipped around the world and even be processed and packaged into a “human milk nutritional fortifier” or powdered milk (Diaz, 2016). While the majority of individuals who are breastfed or receive expressed milk continue to be the biological children of those who breastfeed, they may also be adopted children, children borne through surrogacy, children outside the family, adults, or, in emerging practices of human milk exchange, strangers who may never meet in person but are connected through virtual and technologized intermediaries of online forums, milk banks, and biotech factories producing packaged human milk products.