Maternal Sexuality and Breastfeeding

Lactation is currently viewed principally in terms of its use value in relation to feeding babies, and the practice of breastfeeding is legitimated according to a medical discourse based on the nutritional value of breastmilk and the benefits of skin-to-skin contact to the mother-infant dyad. The virtues of breastfeeding represented by Christian iconography have been replaced by the equally reverential, scientific utility of breastfeeding; and both traditions are bound to the idea of the dutiful mother performing an act that verges on the sacrificial, whether constructed as spiritual or physiological. This chapter argues that the acknowledgement of pleasure in relation to lactation liberates breastfeeding from this negative symbolic terrain, enabling an exploration of its erotic potential that adds equally to the well-being of mother, infant and adult partners. By beginning to write an ars erotica for breastfeeding, we can further our understanding of the intersections between lactation, sexuality and mothering.

Mother-Texts: Narratives and Counter-Narratives, 2010

In this chapter, I look to 1970s maternal advice manuals to investigate the sexual liberation of maternal breasts as a cultural phenomenon from a particular time, which has since been displaced. I tender as evidence a seet of advice manuals, which I procured over some years from charity book sales and opportunity shops, as a tenuous archive through which we might read the 1970s as much as its breasted and sexualised bodies. Their discarding by their owners perhaps indicates their expiry as cultural currency. They offer quite different readings of breastfeeding to those circulated no, and so suggest a passing and a remaking of particular knowledges about breastfeeding and sexuality.

2017

volume 7, number 2 The concept of sexual pleasure while breastfeeding, still faintly scandalous in the twenty-first century, circulates in a variety of nineteenth-century French texts, from medical discourse to the fictional works of Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola. Although some medical authorities condemned sensual breastfeeding, or “mastomania,” as a vice, others used the promise of sexual pleasure to entice recalcitrant mothers to breastfeed. In representations of maternal breastfeeding found in both literary and medical texts, it is often the male gaze that constructs meaning. The reciprocal desire of mother and infant shifts to include a third person, the narrator-spectator, whose own desire for the breast creates a fantasy of maternal erotic response that is then condemned as a vice. This confusion of subject and object of desire raises complex questions about the motivations of the male authors of these texts. This article uses psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Klein, and Kristev...

Breastfeeding, ‘tainted’ love, and femmephobia: containing the ‘dirty’ performances of embodied femininity, 2020

In this conceptual analysis, we theorise breastfeeding as an embodied ‘dirty’ performance of femininity and draw on Hoskin’s (2019a) work on femme theory to propose that women who breastfeed in public, who do so for an ‘extended’ time, and who enjoy it are subject to femmephobic attacks. We integrate three streams of literature to unsettle the ‘taint’ of breastfeeding. We first theorise breastfeeding as an act of femininity where women perform gender trouble in line with Butler's work. We also draw on Douglas’ work on ‘dirt’ and Rivera’s work on emotional ‘dirty’ work to theorise that ‘taint’ is one way in which society stigmatises the phenomenon of breastfeeding. Specifically, we propose that embodied breastfeeding evokes ‘tainted’ emotions. We then draw on Schippers’ work on ‘containing’ pariah forms of femininity (lest they ‘contaminate’ patriarchy) by showing how femmephobic stigmatisation limits breastfeeding women’s corporeality and presence in shared spaces.

Australian Feminist Studies, 2004

This thematic issue of Australian Feminist Studies brings together a collection of articles which represent a new wave of feminist theoretical analysis about breastfeeding. It has been a truism that 'feminism' has had ambivalent relations to maternity, but breastfeed-ing seems to ...

In 2016, the World Health Organization, together with UNICEF, provided new guidelines for breastfeeding, emphasizing its importance for the health and well-being of babies and mothers.

This study reveals the lack of attention paid to the significance of breastfeeding in traditional psychoanalysis whereby the mother is continually aligned as object and her breast is disembodied. This phenomenon is explained through insights in psychoanalytic feminism which bring attention to the matricidal thread running through conceptions of subjectivity. The ramifications of this on women’s symbolic identities is considered through themes such as abjection, lack of individuation between woman and mother and the denial of female embodied specificity. The aim of the study is to resituate the mother as desiring social subject and to acknowledge the importance of the erotically charged breast in psychic life. I draw on Laplanche’s acknowledgement of maternal sexuality in psychic life and keep his work in tension with that of Luce Irigaray in exposing the unconscious fantasies informing the symbolic. The analysis focuses on Catherine Opie’s depiction of breastfeeding in Self-Portrait / Nursing and suggests that this image makes an important contribution to articulating the mother as desiring social subject specifically in relation to the embodied practice of breastfeeding.

Women's Studies International Forum, 2002

Synopsis -Recognizing that there is now a corpus of feminist work that theorizes the body, sometimes termed corporeal feminism (Volatile bodies: toward a corporeal feminism, 1994), this paper seeks to apply some of those theories in their transformative potential to the practices, policies and experiences of breastfeeding of the late twentieth century in the west. As an example of material sexual difference, the physiology of breastfeeding is examined in comparison with other cultural and institutional discourses. On the narrative level, all are found to varying degrees to characterize breastfeeding as a matter of headwork, as an activity to be learned and managed rather than embodied. Duplicating the preoccupation with and privileging of mind over matter common in western epistemology has entailed a shift in knowledge/power from mothers to professionals at a time when women's corporeality is most active and symbolically significant. New narratives are therefore sought and tentatively applied, which involve reconceptualizing what we understand the brain to be, and ways in which we might strategically read the body (and breasts) as literate and thoughtful. D

Anthropological Notebooks, XXI/1, 2015, pp. 135-144