Article Outline

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Promoted primarily in terms of its nutritional benefits for babies, breast milk and the place of breastfeeding in Western culture remains virtually unexplored territory. Most texts send a strong ‘breast is best’ message and focus on the why, how and the when of breastfeeding. Alison Bartlett Director of the Centre for Women's Studies at the University of Western Australia has not written a ‘how to … ’ book. Instead, she presents us with a beautifully written, thought provoking exposition on what it means to breastfeed in the twenty first century. Breastwork arose out of Bartlett's need to make sense of her maternal self and her desire to mesh her newly acquired and gendered role of breastfeeding mother with her pre-breastfeeding identity of professional woman. She brings to the surface dilemmas many of us have considered – usually before dawn – when only a mother and a suckling baby are awake. ‘How do I incorporate my maternal self into my professional work’? And, ‘How does my work affect my maternity’?

Bartlett explores the cultural meanings of breastfeeding, reminding us that popular cultural forms are increasingly important in generating social meanings and values. She explores these cultural meanings through Christian iconography, the media, politics and the controversy of pictorialising breastfeeding. According to Bartlett, the most pervasive image of the breastfeeding mother is the Virgin Mary, one that has done much to create an idealised and asexual, vision of motherhood and continues to permeate public representations of breastfeeding (p. 149). It is little wonder that a woman breastfeeding in public scandalises sections of the Australian community.

Narratives about breastfeeding are ‘impossibly contradictory and inexplicably knotted around the meanings of women's bodies and sexuality’ (p. 3) and have much to say about women, irrespective of whether or not they are breastfeeding. Thinking of breastfeeding as performance enabled Bartlett to attend to the competing and contradictory meanings that arise when women breastfeed in different times, places and with variously aged babies. By viewing breastfeeding as a transformative act, rather than a moral duty she challenges some of midwifery's fundamental and precious beliefs and argues that breastfeeding is not natural, neutral or even ‘scientific’. She argues for the acceptance of breastfeeding as a potentially erotic or sexual experience, and wonders what would happen if breastfeeding were considered a form of maternal sexuality? Would women welcome this? And, if they did view breastfeeding as a sexual experience what would happen?

The act of breastfeeding is as much a product of current cultural perceptions as it is a ‘personal decision’. A strong advocate for breastfeeding Bartlett explores the rhetoric of choice and personal decision-making and deliberates on the relationship between individual agency and the deceptive ideology of ‘individual choice’. Decisions about whether or not to breastfeed or when to wean is about much more than individual ‘choice’. As Bartlett explains:

Breastfeeding proliferates meanings which are constantly negotiated by individual women in their social and cultural relations with others over time and place. It is naïve to suppose that breastfeeding is simply something one can choose to perform without reference to these factors and their impact on the mother and her baby (p. 172).

To accept that women make choices about breastfeeding that are ‘individually devised and practised’ (p. 172) is to overlook the cultural meanings associated with breastfeeding and just as importantly not breastfeeding as cultural practices. ‘To ignore such consequences will mean that advocates and professionals continue to position women as individual failures, either in their choices or practices’ (p. 172). Breastwork offers women incentives to breastfeed that extend past the ‘breast is best’ rhetoric. In doing so, she highlights the possibility for women of exercising agency beyond merely deciding to breastfeed or to not breastfeed. Hopefully, Bartlett is correct when she says that if enough of us breastfeed the transformative act of breastfeeding will cease to be an issue of controversy.