Breastfeeding And Media

This book centers on the role of media in shaping public perceptions of breastfeeding. Drawing from magazines, doctors’ office materials, parenting books, television, websites, and other media outlets, Katherine A. Foss explores how historical and contemporary media often undermine breastfeeding efforts with formula marketing and narrow portrayals of nursing women and their experiences. Foss argues that the media’s messages play an integral role in setting the standard of public knowledge and attitudes toward breastfeeding, as she traces shifting public perceptions of breastfeeding and their corresponding media constructions from the development of commercial formula through contemporary times. This analysis demonstrates how attributions of blame have negatively impacted public health approaches to breastfeeding, thus confronting the misperception that breastfeeding, and the failure to breastfeed, rests solely on the responsibility of an individual mother.

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.

Breastfeeding is a human bodily function that differs in practice across cultural and historical boundaries, yet is framed as “natural” and morally virtuous. Breastfeeding and the Pursuit of Happiness rejects the dichotomy of right versus wrong, exploring the historical, political, and symbolic roots of this sacrosanct belief in “breast is best” – from allusions to biblical milk and honey to contemporary claims of parenting and wellness experts. Within disparate contexts such as medieval Europe, eighteenth-century France, contemporary Indonesia, and the mommy blogosphere, Phyllis Rippey finds that infant feeding prescriptions often serve the interests of the powerful rather than meeting the needs of women, infants, and families. Upending some of our most cherished beliefs about the maternal breast, Rippey reveals the ways historical and contemporary debates over breast versus bottle feeding distract from the underlying issues of poverty, environmental destruction, and violence against women. Rippey balances science-based and historical analysis with the stories of lesbian mothers and trans fathers, Black and White breastfeeding advocates, and Indonesian mothers, among other mothers who express feelings of empowerment, pleasure, pain, and moral failure. At turns witty, heartbreaking, and intellectually compelling, Breastfeeding and the Pursuit of Happiness draws on Hannah Arendt, Black feminist thought, affect theory, the ethics of care, and theories of political humility to offer a new framework for valuing and affirming the human power of giving and receiving care, including through the breast.

Breastfeeding Rights in the United States shows that the right to breastfeed in this country exists only in a negative sense: you can do it unless someone takes you to court. Kedrowski and Lipscomb catalog and analyze all the laws, policies, judicial opinions, cultural mores, and public attitudes that bear on breastfeeding in America. They then explore the classic double bind: social norms promulgated by the medical and public health establishment say breast is best; but social practices in the workplace and in public spaces make breastfeeding difficult. Aggravating the double bind is the prominence of the breast in American culture as a sexual object. The double bind creates coercively structured choices that are incompatible with the meaningful exercise of rights. The authors conclude that the solution to this problem requires new theory and new strategy. They posit a new democratic, feminist theory of the breastfeeding right that is predicated on the following distinctions: DT It is not a right to breastfeed, but a right to choose to breastfeed. DT It is a woman's right to choose, not a baby's right to be breastfeed. DT It is a right, not a duty. The authors predict that framing the breastfeeding right in this way provides the basis for a new strategic coalition between breastfeeding advocates and liberal feminists, who have historically been wary of one another's rhetoric. Breastfeeding Rights in the United States represents an important advance toward policy change.

An in-depth, comprehensive and practical guide to egocentric network analysis, focusing on fundamental theoretical, research design, and analytic issues.

This book brings together international academics, policy makers and practitioners to build bridges between the real-world and scholarship on breastfeeding. It asks the question: How can the latest social science research into breastfeeding be used to improve support at both policy and practice level, in order to help women breastfeed and to breastfeed for longer? The edited collection includes discussion about the social and cultural contexts of breastfeeding and looks at how policy and practice can apply this to women’s experiences. This will be essential reading for academics, policy makers and practitioners in public health, midwifery, child health, sociology, women's studies, psychology, human geography and anthropology, who want to make a real change for mothers.

Mother's Milk examines why nursing a baby is an ideologically charged experience in contemporary culture. Drawing upon medical studies, feminist scholarship, anthropological literature, and an intimate knowledge of breastfeeding itself, Bernice Hausman demonstrates what is at stake in mothers' infant feeding choices--economically, socially, and in terms of women's rights. Breastfeeding controversies, she argues, reveal social tensions around the meaning of women's bodies, the authority of science, and the value of maternity in American culture. A provocative and multi-faceted work, Mother's Milk will be of interest to anyone concerned with the politics of women's embodiment.

In recent years, breastfeeding has been prominently in the public eye in relation to debates on issues ranging from parental leave policies, work−family balance, public decency, the safety of our food supply, and public health concerns such as health care costs and the obesity “epidemic.” Breastfeeding has officially been considered “the one best way” for feeding infants for the past 150 years of Canadian history. This book examines the history and evolution of breastfeeding policies and practices in Canada from the end of the nineteenth century to the turn of the twenty-first. The authors’ historical approach allows current debates to be situated within a broader social, political, cultural, and economic context. Breastfeeding shifted from a private matter to a public concern at the end of the nineteenth century. Over the course of the next century, the “best” way to feed infants was often scientifically or politically determined, and guidelines for mothers shifted from one generation to the next. Drawing upon government reports, academic journals, archival sources, and interviews with policy-makers and breastfeeding advocates, the authors trace trends, patterns, ideologies, and policies of breastfeeding in Canada.