ABSTRACT
As Linda Blum notes in At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States , new paradigms for breastfeeding include, paradoxically, the erasure of lactation as an embodied practice of maternity. Popular and medical discourses tout the advantages of breastfeeding as part of a modern maternity that involves paid work, exercise, and travel away from the baby, all facilitated by the technological wonder of the breast pump. Blum writes, “the mother in her body, her pleasures and needs, satisfactions and pains, have been largely erased” (55). Likening this disembodiment to “the erasure of the pregnant maternal body” that occurs in the context of routine obstetrical care—emphasis on fetal monitoring and ultrasound screening for determinative information about the fetus, apart from the mother's reported experiences, for example—Blum implies that maternal disembodiment occurs when technological apparatuses mediate women's experiences of reproduction in ways that ignore the social, political, and material realities of women's lived experience. Thus, the “career-breastfeeding Supermom seems to transcend recalcitrant embodied needs, wants, or desires” (although she probably depends upon poorer women to care for her children and it isn't clear how she gets enough sleep), and laboring women are ignored by birth attendants who track fetal heart rates on the monitor print-out (59–60). Blum links this representation of disembodied motherhood directly to medical discourses of breastfeeding advocacy, noting that the American Academy of Pediatrics 1997 statement concerning breastfeeding “mentions only the need for employers to provide space and time for breast-pumping” without arguing for longer periods of paid maternity leaves. In addition, Blum suggests, “The AAP also might advocate for more on- and near-site nurseries, which are scarce, but instead it stresses the need for health insurance to cover breast-pump rentals and lactation consultant fees” (53).
