Encountering public art: monumental breasts and the Skywhale

This chapter is grounded in the idea that more visual imagery of breastfeeding will contribute to its normalisation, and counter the commercial sexualisation of breasts. It suggests, however, that this strategy is not just about seeing but also about feeling. To demonstrate this the chapter turns to a controversial piece of public art — Patricia Piccinini's Skywhale — which was launched in Australia in 2013 and has been touring internationally. The Skywhale is a hot-air balloon in the shape of a fantastical creature of the imagination, which features five giant breasts on each side. This unexpected flying mammal provokes responses wherever it goes, and arguably provides productive ways of engaging public responses to breastfeeding and maternity. This chapter examines responses to Skywhale through broadsheet and social media, and then analyses its affective domain through psychoanalytic concepts and its materiality through the tradition of public art and monuments. The extremes of intimacy and monumentality configured through Skywhale offer an object par excellence for seeing breastfeeding writ large in the public domain, and for feeling the return of the maternal. The chapter argues that this is fundamental to a shift in perceiving breasts as maternal, and breastfeeding as normative.

Law of lactation breaks in the UK: employers’ perspectives

This chapter looks into the legal understandings that managers have of lactation breaks. It gives a summary of the key legislation applicable in the United Kingdom and discusses how this is applied within the workplace. The chapter also gives some suggestions for how to improve the legislative backdrop in which women make decisions about their return to work, breastfeeding, and how this process can be better managed by employers. In the project described here, managers, human resources staff, and strategic leaders in a UK public sector organisation were asked about lactation breaks. This investigation shows a real-world context for decision-making around infant feeding. Managers displayed limited knowledge of the legislation and called for goodwill from all parties to resolve issues, better guidance, and perhaps legislation on the topic. There were some hesitancies about allowing a baby to visit the workplace, because of lack of suitable facilities, and health and safety issues. This chapter indicates that better procedures are needed for the process of returning to work as a new parent, and that lactation breaks should be part of that conversation.

Cultures of breastfeeding: reflections for policy and practice

As an infant feeding specialist in midwifery practice and a university senior lecturer in midwifery, we have had some very interesting discussions about the work presented in this group of chapters. It has become clear to us that what midwifery students learn is heavily influenced by the practice they observe while on clinical placements. This may seem obvious, but from our perspective the pressures that higher education and the NHS face in the current climate of austerity in the UK have resulted in a squeeze on opportunities for dialogue, feedback and reflection between the two sectors, and we feel that this has a potential impact on the quality of student learning....

‘Betwixt and between’: women’s experiences of breastfeeding long term

This chapter draws on research with women who breastfeed for longer than is usual in the United Kingdom, where a minority of women are still breastfeeding at six months and an unknown number breastfeed into the second year of life and beyond. The anthropological concept of liminality (being ‘neither one thing nor another’) is used to explore and understand their experiences. The chapter takes ideas about liminality and relates them to breastfeeding long term, discussing how they might help those working in this area to support more mothers to breastfeed for longer. It briefly outlines what is known about long-term breastfeeding from previous research and explains the concept of liminality. The remainder of the chapter discusses the findings in relation to liminality and how this has been used to think about breastfeeding, and considers what being ‘betwixt and between’ means for breastfeeding women. The idea of breastfeeding as polluting or ‘matter out of place’ is also briefly discussed.

Changing cultures of night-time breastfeeding and sleep in the US

This chapter looks at the cultural assumptions that childbearing requires specialised medical knowledge in the United States, where expectant parents usually receive advice on all aspects of pregnancy, childbirth, and infant care from multiple medical experts. This guidance divides the care of mothers and infants under the supervision of separate medical experts, and further fragments various aspects of infant care, including feeding and sleep. The chapter uses historical and ethnographic research to explore the origins of these assumptions and their consequences for American parents who embark on breastfeeding. It suggests that severing the links between these evolutionarily and physiologically connected domains has had a significant detrimental impact on night-time infant care. Parents have been left without adequate community cultural knowledge about the interaction of breastfeeding and sleep, and assume that these processes are separate. As a result, they are frequently surprised by infants' night-time behaviour and have difficulties navigating night-time breastfeeding and sleep. These challenges constitute an important element of an already formidable set of barriers to breastfeeding in the United States, where structural support is extremely limited and breastfeeding remains a controversial practice.

Breastfeeding and popular culture: reflections for policy and practice

This commentary is informed by personal written reflections as well as ideas from a conversation, both of which sparked our engagement with the chapters and the meaning of the seminar series to us. Quotes within the chapter are from these conversations and reflections; we decided not to identify ourselves in relation to these....

Parenting ideologies, infant feeding and popular culture

This chapter takes a critical social and health psychological perspective to bring together different strands of the contemporary debate around infant feeding, drawing on ideas across the social and health sciences to explore key points of tension. These include media representation of infant feeding, health promotion discourse in a ‘neoliberal’ society, and the impact of contemporary parenting ideologies on parenting practices and parenting subjectivities. It argues that some of the complexities and nuances of the infant feeding debates may be one way of explaining discrepancies in rates and the difficulties inherent in breastfeeding promotion strategies. Some of this stems from the ways in which it is approached — as a topic in its own right or as part of a larger jigsaw of early parenting. The former approach runs the risk of ignoring wider issues that are impacting on infant feeding; the latter runs the risk of downplaying infant feeding methods. The chapter aims to reach a deeper understanding of the ways that competing discourses about what it means to be a ‘good parent’, and how we feed our infants, become operationalised in these different standpoints, using contemporary examples to illustrate these points of tension.

‘Missing milk’: an exploration of migrant mothers’ experiences of infant feeding in the UK

This chapter explores the experiences of parents born abroad who are raising a child in the United Kingdom. It is recognised that work, paid and unpaid, can pose challenges to exclusive and even partial breastfeeding, and such challenges are exacerbated when mothers are migrants and live in precarious social and financial circumstances. A complex mixture of factors influences infant feeding behaviours, including ethnicity, health beliefs, and financial demands; and the economic necessity to return to work soon after delivery has been previously identified as a factor reducing migrant women's ability to breastfeed. Who migrants are and what is known about their breastfeeding and weaning behaviours are addressed, and the chapter then reflects upon two empirical studies conducted with migrant parents in the South West of England. In this way, the voices of migrants from a variety of migrant backgrounds are heard and their experiences explored in depth. Throughout the chapter the concept of ‘missing milk’ is also discussed, and the consequences for babies, parents, and society raised. ‘Missing milk’ is the breast milk that babies would customarily have received, which has decreased following migration.

Breastfeeding and emotions: reflections for policy and practice

We found a wealth of rich material in these chapters, enough to fuel many conversations and stimulate much reflection. Faced with the constraints of bringing all of this together for one short reflective chapter, we decided to focus on the aspects of the chapters which are the most relevant to the public health outcomes that are the focus of our professional roles, namely, breastfeeding prevalence at six weeks and supporting good perinatal mental health. In particular, we were drawn to the issues of guilt and shame, especially when breastfeeding does not go well, that were discussed by Dawn Leeming and Lisa Smyth (...

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides a brief background into the seminars which have helped to shape the publication of this book. Here, the emphasis is on breastfeeding, as it is a policy priority for the four devolved UK governments with a responsibility for health and is acknowledged to be important in improving public health and reducing health inequalities. However, there is a clear relationship in the United Kingdom between socioeconomic status and breastfeeding, with significantly lower rates among women living in the most deprived areas. There are also differences between younger mothers and older mothers, women with different levels of formal education, and women from different ethnic backgrounds. The variation in available breastfeeding support is also part of the story, as is the loss of intergenerational kin-based knowledge networks. In addition, a whole range of micro-practices, social engagements, and events unfold when mothers try to integrate breastfeeding into the rest of their lives. It is these parts of the story that the seminar series focused on — the nuances of breastfeeding babies as a social practice.