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Alison Bartlett
University of Southern Queensland
'Breast Practice: Feminism and Breastfeeding in Late Capitalism'
This paper is part of a larger project which reads breastfeeding as a cultural practice and seeks to think through breastfeeding as embodied and thoughtful. It considers breastfeeding as it is embedded in and constituted through a number of institutions and discourses, including legal, medical, moral, symbolic, representational, social, historical, economic, educational, racial, religious, physiological, and psychic. In this paper I focus on women who choose not to breastfeed, the kinds of agency available for them to exert, and the ways they negotiate the dominant imperative to do what's 'best for baby' with all its alliterative and moral force. In a social culture which institutionally endorses Breast is Best policy, and yet commonly refers to the nation's breastfeeding support agency as the nipple nazis or breastfeeding police, breastfeeding 'culture' is still at best ambivalent in contemporary Australia. One particular subject position that has emerged over the past decade is a feminist critique of breastfeeding as antithetical to thinking, equal participation in the workforce, the division of domestic labour, and even to definitions of success within dominant narratives of modern subjectivity. These critiques make abundantly clear the deficiencies of breastfeeding policy rhetoric. In turn, I propose representing breastfeeding as an embodied, thoughtful and pleasurable practice in which breasts are powerfully active and women are empowered, knowing and desiring subjects.
Bio: Dr Alison Bartlett is a lecturer at the University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba and author of Jamming the Machinery: Contemporary Australian Women's Writing, co-editor of Australian Literature and the Public Sphere and co-author of Postgraduate Research Supervision.
<bartlett@usq.edu.au>