Others’ Milk: Sharing Breastfeeding and Sharing Breastmilk as Queer Embodiment

• In Event: 080 - Regular Session. Sociology of the Body: "Natural" vs. "Artificial" Bodies

Abstract

Breastfeeding is both intimate and broadly social. Public dialogue and medicalization of breastfeeding seek to define how breastfeeding should be done. Interviews with over 50 breastfeeding parents reveal non-normative (but not uncommon) practices that, in effect, disrupt many assumptions about what is natural.

Adoptive mothers inducing lactation, trans* bodied and gender nonconforming parents nursing, extended nursers, lesbian couples co-nursing, and others challenge existing ideas about who is breastfeeding and how. Pumping milk to donate to friends and to strangers found through informal networks also changes the value and understanding of the milk itself. All of these parents nurse their children for many of the same reasons as anyone else—to bond, to provide the best nutrition, to soothe. But breastfeeding also becomes about discovering new forms of embodiment, about establishing novel kinds of biological and kin relationships, and about sharing both obligations and power inside the family and beyond.

Author

• Kristin J. Wilson, Georgia State University