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The Ethics and Politics of Breastfeeding R O B Y N L E E THE ETHICS AND POLITICS OF BREASTFEEDING Power, Pleasure, Poetics This page intentionally left blank ROBYN LEE The Ethics and Politics of Breastfeeding Power, Pleasure, Poetics UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London © University of Toronto Press 2018 Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4875-0371-0 (cloth) Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable- based inks. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Lee, Robyn, 1980-, author The ethics and politics of breastfeeding : power, pleasure, poetics/Robyn Lee. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4875-0371-0 (hardcover) 1. Breastfeeding. 2. Breastfeeding – Social aspects. 3. Breastfeeding – Political aspects. I. Title. RJ216 L447 2018 649'.33 C2018-901627-2 This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement of Canada du Canada Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 3 1 Breastfeeding, Subjectivity, and Art as a Way of Life 17 Liberal Autonomy: A Bad Fit for Breastfeeding Subjectivity 20 Breastfeeding as an Art of Living 25 Ethics, Poetics, Poiesis 28 2 Biopower, Medicalization, and Maternalism 33 Biopower 36 Biopower and Eugenics: Breastfeeding, Race, and Class 38 Medicalization of Breastfeeding 44 Nutrition for Healthy Term Infants 50 Breastfeeding and Maternalism 57 The “Womanly Art” of Breastfeeding 60 Conclusion 66 3 Ethics, Pleasure, Subjectivity 68 Feminism, Sexuality, and Breastfeeding 69 Pleasure and Breastfeeding 73 The Moral Problematization of Pleasure 77 Askesis and Aesthetics 81 Pleasure, Pain, and Politics 84 Care of the Self and Community 88 An Ethopoetics of Breastfeeding 91 vi Contents 4 Feeding the Hungry Other: Levinas and Breastfeeding 98 Eating and Enjoyment 101 Ethics and Poetics 105 Metaphor and Ethical Responsibility 109 Levinas’s Breastfeeding Occlusions 111 Towards a Politics of Hunger 116 Conclusion 119 5 Breastfeeding and Sexual Difference 121 Sexual Difference in Irigaray 125 Between Mothers and Children 129 Beyond Levinas and Foucault 132 Breastfeeding, Sexual Difference, and Poetics 135 Fluidity in Breastfeeding 140 Queer Theory and the Multiplicity of Sexual Difference 148 6 A Politics of Breastfeeding 151 Between Ethics and Politics 153 Care of the Self Is Hard Work: Foucault and Social Justice 157 Possibilities for Resisting Biopower 164 Becoming “Poets of the Law”: Irigaray’s Sexuate Right to Breastfeed 167 Breastfeeding Everyone? Alternative Breastfeeding Relationships 174 Conclusion 183 Notes 189 Bibliography 193 Index 231 Acknowledgments Many people encouraged and assisted me in this project over the years. I am tremendously thankful for the generous and always insightful support of Lorna Weir, Penny Van Esterik, Francine Wynn, and David Goldstein. Barbara Godard was very helpful with this project in its preliminary stages and is greatly missed. Andrea Doucet has been a wonderfully supportive friend and men- tor, and I am very grateful for her assistance on this project. As well, I am deeply appreciative of the research support I received from the Social Justice Research Institute and department of sociology at Brock University, with particular thanks to Kate Bezanson. I am grateful to the wonderful community of feminist colleagues at the University of Alberta, including Chloë Taylor (for her careful reading and generous feedback on this manuscript), Natalie Loveless, for continual inspiration and for organizing, together with Sheena Wilson, the amazing New Maternalisms conference at the University of Alberta in May 2016, as well as Sara Dorow, Amy Kaler, and Cressida Heyes. I have gained endless inspiration from a number of artists, in- cluding in particular Jess Dobkin, Rachel Epp Buller, Miriam Simun, and Helene Knoop. Thank you to Jodine Chase for being an endless source of invaluable information about breastfeeding, and to the organizers and participants of the 2017 Breastfeeding and Feminism International conference. I am also grateful to everyone who has shared their stories about breastfeed- ing with me over the years. I would like to express my gratitude for the extensive assistance of my editor, Douglas Hildebrand, who has been invaluable in overseeing this project. Thank you to the anonymous reviewers of this book, who viii Acknowledgments provided careful and extremely helpful feedback. My sincere apprecia- tion to Fazeela Jiwa for her editing assistance. Thank you as well to Terry Teskey for careful copyediting of this manuscript. Any errors or omissions in this work are, of course, entirely my own. To my parents, Alison and David, my brother, Bryan, and all of my extended family, I am deeply grateful for all their love and support over the years. Thank you to Vivian Lee and Alana Cattapan for their editing help and assistance in thinking through this project over the years. As well, thank you to Quinn DuPont, Hanno Liem, Ashley Walters, Richard Johnson, Stephen Buijs, Scott Honsberger, Stephanie Herod, Steven Jarvis, and all the rest of my chosen family (too many to list here, but I’m so grateful for all of you!), for emotional and practical support, and for continually inspiring me to expand my understanding of kinship and care. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the publication of this book by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta. Earlier versions of sections of this book have appeared as “Breast- feeding and Care of the Self” in Stephanie Paterson, Francesca Scala, and Marlene Sokolon (Eds.), Fertile Ground: Exploring Reproduction in Canada (2014); “Breastmilk Exchange and New Forms of Social Relations” in MP: An Online Feminist Journal (2013); “Feeding the Hungry Other: Levinas, Breastfeeding, and the Politics of Hunger” in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy (2016); and “Breastfeed ing and Sexual Difference: Queering Irigaray” in Feminist Theory (De cember 2017). This book is dedicated to my grandmothers, Marianne, Sheila, and Margaret, who are dearly missed. THE ETHICS AND POLITICS OF BREASTFEEDING Power, Pleasure, Poetics This page intentionally left blank Introduction “Breastfeeding: it’s natural” was the slogan for a 2013 UNICEF cam- paign for breastfeeding in China, which featured a wide variety of cartoon baby mammals cooing “mama!” as they happily breastfeed, in stark contrast with a disconsolately solitary human baby calling out “mama?” next to a powdered vat of infant formula (UNICEF, 2013). This popular slogan has been repeated in many breastfeeding promo- tion campaigns (Calderdale & Huddersfield Foundation Trust, 2014; Office on Women’s Health, US Department of Health and Human Services, 2013). But what does it mean to claim that breastfeeding is natural? Why do women need to be convinced to do something that’s natural? If it is natural, why are lactation consultants increasingly in demand (DeVries, 2013)? The wide variety of mammals featured in the UNICEF ad is unsur- prising, given that breastfeeding has historically been used to construct the class Mammalia and the categories of female and male. Breastfeeding, and specifically the presence of the mammary gland, has been an inte- gral component in the evolution and taxonomic classification of animal species. Carolus Linnaeus established the use of the mammary gland as the defining feature of the classification of mammals in 1758. However, this classification was political: Linnaeus focused scientific attention on the mammae because he was strongly engaged in support for breast- feeding over wet nursing (Schiebinger, 1993). This broad struggle against wet nursing (including a 1794 Prussian law mandating that all healthy mothers must breastfeed) emerged contemporaneously with the undermining of women’s public power and the revaluing of wom- en’s domestic role (Schiebinger, 1993, p. 383). 4 The Ethics and Politics of Breastfeeding 1 La Mujer Barbuda (1631) by Jusepe de Ribera. Courtesy of Bridgeman Images. The relationship between breastfeeding and biological classification of sex difference has long been more ambiguous than Linnaeus’s ef- forts would indicate, however. The painting La Mujer Barbuda shown in figure 1, often referred to as “The Bearded Lady of Abruzzi,” is by Jusepe de Ribera, originally from Spain but who lived in Naples. The painting is of Magdalena Ventura, aged fifty-two, who, after giving birth to three sons, at the age of thirty-seven began experiencing hor- monal changes that included growing facial hair. The most likely cause of Magdalena’s changes is a benign androgen-producing tumour of the Introduction 5 ovary – what is now termed an androblastoma (Tunbridge, 2011). Lactation and breast development in men (gynaecomastia) were re- marked upon by early commentators such as Aristotle and, in Spain, have at times been viewed as an unusual but generally non-pathological occurrence in men, and later as indications of intersexuality or lack of sexual differentiation between the sexes (Cleminson & García, 2009). Although in this painting Magdalena is performing what is often un-
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