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Paper short abstract:

Employing corporeal feminism and Deleuzo-Guattarian ideas, this paper explores women’s enactment of body practices at the intersection of breastfeeding, chronic milk insufficiency, and milk sharing. In so doing, it challenges dominant conceptualisations of the ‘failing’ maternal milk-producing body.

Paper long abstract:

The breastfeeding body as a site of complex, contested, and conspicuously moralised practices has long been a focus for professional and technical languages, often within a masculinised biomedical frame that marks the milk-producing body as problematic, failing, and necessarily subject to and object of expert knowledges.

In this paper I challenge such discourse through discussion of findings from ethnographic research with women who identify as experiencing 'chronic milk insufficiency', and who have shared in other women's breast milk to mediate and (re)construct the experience of breastfeeding concurrent with that bodily insufficiency. It draws on fieldwork with individual mothers in Australia and the US, as well as donor/recipient dyads and small mother-centred groups.

Through a conceptual frame comprised of corporeal feminism (Grosz 1994, Bartlett 2002, 2005); and ideas such as flows, becomings and deterritorialisation offered by Deleuze and Guattari (1987), I explore body practices enacted at this intersection of breastfeeding, bodily insufficiency, and milk sharing. Bodies and body practices are seen as constituted and reconfigured by an explicit inter-corporeality which encompasses such preindustrial tropes as wet nursing ranged alongside the extension and (dis)embodiment of motherhood, in part through technological bodies such as breast pumps and feeding aids. The non-normative moralities that inform and emerge from this intercorporeality thus respond to, challenge and subvert dominant biomedical conceptualisations of the (physiologically and morally) 'failing' female body, and of infant feeding conventions; and support the notion of continued breastfeeding concurrent with ongoing insufficient milk as an intersubjective, radicalised and radicalising act.