ABSTRACT
In this chapter I focus upon the dissonance experienced by women related to juxtaposing competing notions of breastfeeding, that is, ‘natural’ and ‘subversive’. To illuminate this issue I draw upon a recently conducted critical ethnographic study within a hospital setting, the maternity ward, in the north of England. Within this highly public place and space women are encouraged to breastfeed as a sign of natural and self-sacrificing motherhood and yet within their local community breastfeeding is rarely carried out in open spaces and carefully hidden from the public gaze. Within some northern English communities, despite the increasingly pervasive public health messages that ‘breast is best’ and ‘breastfeeding is natural’, the act of breastfeeding is often seen and indeed experienced as a subversive manifestation of women’s sexuality. The hospital culture reflects and indeed potentiates the public-private dilemmas for women who have little autonomy over their space and the ‘gaze’ of their neighbours, visitors and hospital staff. Women’s accounts are analysed with regard to the ways in which women negotiate the ‘natural’—‘subversive’, ‘private-public’ dilemmas and resist the ‘gaze’ in hospital by, for example, using their curtains to create a ‘safe place’.
