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Blurring the boundaries: breastfeeding and maternal subjectivity
Author(s) -
Schmied Virginia,
Lupton Deborah
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
sociology of health and illness
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.146
H-Index - 97
eISSN - 1467-9566
pISSN - 0141-9889
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9566.00249
Subject(s) - breastfeeding , subjectivity , gender studies , sociology , autonomy , identity (music) , qualitative research , independence (probability theory) , psychology , perspective (graphical) , developmental psychology , social psychology , medicine , social science , epistemology , aesthetics , pediatrics , political science , philosophy , statistics , mathematics , artificial intelligence , computer science , law
Contemporary medical and public health discourses represent breastfeeding as vital to infant development and the mother‐infant bond. Little research from a medical or sociological perspective has sought to investigate the qualitative breastfeeding experiences of women. This article draws on a range of feminist perspectives on the body and subjectivity, together with empirical data from a series of interviews with 25 Australian first‐time mothers, to theorise the experience of breastfeeding. These women’s accounts revealed that, although nearly all of them subscribed vehemently to the dominant discourse of ‘breast is best’, the experience of breastfeeding differed markedly among them. Some of the women experienced breastfeeding as a connected, harmonious and intimate relationship between themselves and their baby. For others, however, the breastfeeding relationship between mother and infant was difficult to reconcile with notions of identity that value autonomy, independence and control. We use insights from feminist philosophy on subjectivity and embodiment to explain why the latter response predominated among our interviewees.