Safety and Scarcity in the Production and Distribution of Banked Donor Milk

• In Event: 034 - Section on Science, Knowledge and Technology Paper Session. Bodies and Sexualities in Science and Technology Studies (co-sponsored by the Section on Body and Embodiment)

Abstract

Based on a multi-sited ethnography of human milk banking, informal milk sharing, and the use of human milk in biomedical innovation, this paper walks through the making of safety and scarcity through the processing, testing, and distribution of human milk at a milk bank. It follows the ways in which breastfeeding, as a practice that underlies milk banking is carefully negotiated within this techno-scientific domain. Similarly, tensions regarding whether and how human milk should enter a marketplace are also carefully negotiated.

Authors

• Krista Mary Smith Sigurdson, University of California-San Francisco

• Adele E. Clarke, University of California-San Francisco