The Breastfeeding Problematic: Maternal Sexuality and The Performance of Gender

Abstract

ABSTRACT

In this work, I explore maternal sexuality by asking how women negotiate their gendered scripts as mothers and lovers while breastfeeding. I investigate this negotiation in the hopes of bringing light to the constraints on women's bodies that disallow an embodiment of maternal sexuality and deeply problematizes the experience of breastfeeding. I use a standpoint epistemology and in-depth interviews to give voice to 17 breastfeeding women exploring the ways in which breastfeeding "troubles" the performance of gender. Findings indicate a seemingly ubiquitous taboo on maternal sexuality and an ardent claim attesting to the "sacrificial" virtue of breastfeeding. Women's needs (sexual, emotional, social, and otherwise) appear to fall to the bottom of a hierarchy of commitments that place baby above all else, even to the (emotional and often sexual) detriment of husband, and decidedly overarching any individual breastfeeding woman's desires.