Abstract
Drawing on interviews with twenty-five mostly white, educated, work-force experienced and class-privileged mothers, this paper explores how these women construct the lactating body as a carefully managed site and breast-feeding as a project—a task to be researched, planned, implemented, and assessed, with reliance on expert knowledge, professional advice, and consumption. The framing of breast-feeding as a project contrasts with the emphases on pleasure, embodied subjectivity, relationality, and empowerment that characterizes much of the recent breast-feeding literature across the humanities and social sciences. I argue that the project frame sheds light on the amount of work and self-discipline involved in compliance with broader middle-class mothering standards set in the consumerist, technological, medicalized, and professionalized contexts that shape parenting in late capitalist America.
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Notes
Although the ILCA was formed by La Leche League, it quickly an became independent organization.
The network, parents.berkeley.edu, is an anonymous on-line forum, in the form of several weekly newsletters; membership is free. When I posted a call for volunteers the network had around 5,000 subscribers, the vast majority of whom reside in the San-Francisco Bay Area. I have no information on the demographics of the membership. Anecdotal evidence, from people’s introductions when they join, through the types of advice sought and dispensed, to daily access to the internet, suggests a culturally and economically privileged group.
I thank Linda Blum for pointing this out.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Raka Ray and Barrie Thorne for their enthusiasm, guidance, and support throughout this project. I am grateful to Linda Blum for her generous comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and to editor Javier Auyero as well as five anonymous reviewers whose insightful comments helped shape the final version of this paper. A Graduate Research Stipend from the Center for Working Families, University of California, Berkeley supported the writing stage of this paper.
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Orit Avishai is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. Her research interests include gender, religion, culture, and feminist theory. Her previous research was published in the Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering. Her recent research, Politics of Purity: Menstrual Defilement and the Negotiation of Modern Jewish Femininities, considers how orthodox Jews in Israel negotiate their participation in Israeli culture and its major social institutions while attempting to retain a purportedly timeless culture and its value systems, ritual practices, and institutional structures.
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Avishai, O. Managing The Lactating Body: The Breast-Feeding Project and Privileged Motherhood. Qual Sociol 30, 135–152 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-006-9054-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-006-9054-5