I am sitting in the dark, trying to persuade my son - my third, and last, child - to sleep. “Un-gee”, he insists. “Ung-ee”. Hungry. Or angry. Or both? As his eyes grow heavier and his breathing changes, his grip on my breast softens. Easing my nipple from his mouth, I brace - for pain, for sound, for the starting-again that so often follows. The quiet is dense and sacred, and I slip away for a few more precious hours of sleep, the combination of relief and loss still powerful and bittersweet after 18 months of feeding him. He is the third baby I have fed. The rhythms of feeding, waking, sleeping, have dominated my life for more than half a decade, yet each version is different, each time  the difficulty is new and overwhelming, the joy surprising and profound. In her recent book, The Portrayal of Breastfeeding in Literature (2022), BJ Woodstein notes the general absence of breastfeeding represented in contemporary literature. Women’s breasts, she observes, are “bearable, and bareable”, only  in the service of  capital; that is to say, breasts are about consumption, but not the kind associated  with lactation. While breastfeeding is glibly promoted as the only appropriate way to nourish an infant, the reality of breastfeeding in contemporary culture is a great deal more complex than “breast is best”. As both a researcher interested in the body, and a parent who has been either pregnant or nursing an infant (or both) for almost seven years, it is slightly surprising to me that it has taken so long for breastfeeding as a physical and cultural act to have infiltrated my work. In recent years, I have been fascinated by contemporary portrayals of breastfeeding (I am focusing on breastfeeding in cis women exclusively largely because while transmasculine chestfeeding and even induced lactation in trans women has been recorded, fictional portrayals of these experiences are vanishingly rare). Tracing patterns of representation across texts from America, Ireland and the UK, I find that – like many cultural engagements with nourishment – representations of breastfeeding come imbricated with questions of history, race, gender roles and, especially, class and labour. I find that I cannot escape connections between breastfeeding, capital, labour and consumption, and in contemporary representations of the breastfeeding body in literatures of the recent past, I see an image of the lactating body as a rebuke to advanced capitalist preference for the measurable, the replicable, the saleable, the visible. Portrayals of breastfeeding in contemporary culture – both ostensibly positive and ostensibly negative – coalesce around a reductive vision of reproductive labour. This vision capitulates to a significant problem with narratives of contemporary parenthood that reinforces individual responsibility and independence, focusing on ever smaller relational networks of child-rearing (especially the nuclear family and the nursing dyad), and sits in an uneasy juxtaposition with other forms of labour. Thinking through my own experiences as a breastfeeding parent and working scholar, I wanted to explore some of those points of contact and friction where the labour of nourishment butts up against forms and functions of labour and capital, and how that affects and is affected by cultural understandings of infant nourishment.  For me, this has offered a way of grappling with and more clearly understanding my changed and changing relationship to the world, and the changed and changing ways in which my body operates as a signifier in that world. 

     Certainly, contrary to my pre-pregnancy understandings, breastfeeding has been about a great deal more than nutrition. In looking back, I understand now that I imagined it as somehow transactionary, as a kind of additional duty, like feeding a cat, or emptying a dishwasher. Necessary, time-consuming, fundamentally prosaic. I have found, instead, that for me, breastfeeding is a kind of alchemy, a space of shifting and liminality that converts my body into someone else’s body; there is a face-squeezingly trite joke about breastfeeding being the only time in one’s life when cake goes on someone else’s thighs (I groan at the idea, the sexist assumptions, and more at my own recognition of the humour). Nevertheless, there is some truth - or honesty, perhaps, is a better word - in the jest. Consumption and appetite are understood and constituted in a rich variety of contexts, including those related to pregnancy, infancy and breastfeeding. In pregnancy, the body is subject to the whims of a new subject; it is more than usually vulnerable to exogenous threats like bacteria; it is more bloody and more leaky and more creaky; it is more visible; it is simply more. The pregnant body exists in a state of necessarily anterior alienation. This alienation is often represented, in popular culture particularly, by the shorthand of cravings, played mostly for comedy (in Mad About the Boy, Bridget Jones requests “a baked potato? Oh and a chocolate croissant and some bacon”) and sometimes to set up the plot’s dramatic turn, as in the many versions of Rapunzel, where the instigating incident of the text is a pregnant mother’s desire for rapunzel lettuce from a neighbour’s garden; the theft is repaid by a curse on the child. The idea of indiscriminate appetite, and its total governance of the pregnant subject is a powerful one, connecting the appetites of pregnancy to the same broad narratives of plenty, purity, power and excess that govern our gustatory imaginaries. To this general, loosely moralising framework of appropriate appetites is added the threat of harm to the pregnancy, by the consumption of something poisonous or otherwise contaminated, which is freighted with a discourse of individual responsibility that is compounded by the infantilising cultures of pregnancy, as exemplified in alcohol most obviously, but also associated with caffeine and other less commonly known “threat” foods, which offer a socially sanctioned space of control, of public jurisdiction over these unruly female-coded appetites. 

The maternal body, then, is a particularly contested site, being both specifically sexual and specifically desexualised; it is troubling and disruptive, permeable, divisible, unruly. Its appetites are unpredictable, ungovernable and not fully its own. A pregnant body instantiates the porousness of the human, the fundamental liminality of the self. Similarly, the post-partum body is a site of contested subjectivity, power struggle and blurred borders, where boundaries shift and the coherence of the subject is wholly renegotiated – we might think here of The Yellow Wallpaper, where the divided maternal subject is finally externalised, completely and violently, or more recently of Maggie Nelson’s question in The Argonauts, “How does one submit to falling forever, to going to pieces”? It is this term, “going to pieces”, that reflects the fundamental incoherence of motherhood – or maternity, more specifically, which I have talked about previously in these pages. Here, the maternal body is subordinated in a new way to the needs of its issue, moving from the hypervisibility of pregnancy to the invisibility of new motherhood, and for lactating parents in particular, moving from the infantilising narratives of pregnancy to the often animalising totality of early post-partum feeding, including the loss of a sense of time, the disruption of sleeping patterns, the reduction of language that is at once a new lexicon to be learned, and – again – the sense of porousness occasioned by bleeding, incontinence, sweating, and – of course – lactation. In this vein, Mary Douglas argues that “We cannot possibly interpret rituals concerning excreta, breast milk, saliva and the rest unless we are prepared to see in the body a symbol of society”. With this in mind, then, how does the lactating maternal body function as a symbol of society, as Douglas suggests it must? 

     Religious texts are replete with references to both maternal breastfeeding and wet nursing, including the Hindu Vedas, the Quranic injunction that mothers should breastfeed for two years and the many Christian references to breastfeeding, like the familiar Madonna and Child images. It is interesting, however, to  consider  that the primary chest bared for succour in Christian imagery is the male chest of the Christ figure; indeed, it is this bared male chest that is the primary visual association with charity, seen within religion as a form of social and spiritual nourishment. Though these are no longer the dominant sources of cultural understanding, the association of breastfeeding with ritual in religious texts is significant for an understanding of its changing role in contemporary culture. Religious representations of breastfeeding are unsurprisingly desexualised, associated with giving of the self in ways that resonate with the underpinning ethea of the texts in which they appear. However, in vernacular cultures, the desire to control and codify the pregnant body, to measure consumption and delineate appropriate appetites, spills over to infant feeding, often using the same monstrous language as that applied to pregnancy; Amy Brown writes of the wide range of customary practices around breastfeeding and wet nursing around the world that involve  ritualised attitudes to hygiene, cleanliness and disgust, including delayed initiation of feeding until  a specific prayer is uttered or until stars appear in the sky, physical cleansing rituals, and the discarding of colostrum due to its colour and thickness. Breastmilk, then, is seen as Other, conforming to Julia Kristeva’s conception of the Abject both in its ambivalent status and its physically and metaphysically transgressive potential, disregarding the borders of the self and intruding into social and professional contexts. Anne Enright, writing of her own experience feeding, recalls both the proximity of milk to waste – how “the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bodily products here is very fine” – and the parasitic quality of the feeding infant, the “white Dracula”, and later refers to her own self as “lowing and leaking like a cow past milking time”. In her luminous A Ghost in the Throat, a text that explicitly connects lactation and creativity, Doireann Ní Ghríofa dreams of a flood of milk and a woman with eyes “full and white, staring with milk” as she weans her daughter. Enright and Ní Ghríofa’s descriptions of breastfeeding share a common thread of the slightly uncanny reality of the lactating body, the wild hormonal swings, the exhaustion, the elation and isolation. Both also call attention to the slight removal of lactation from conscious control, the association of feeding with nebulous emotion unrelated to the baby; Enright recalls that “there were things that do not move me, that move my milk. Or that, sometimes, I only realise I am moved when I feel the pain [of letdown]”, while Ní Ghríofa says as her daughter is taken to the NICU that “milk seeps from me, unseen: a pale text in pale sheets”. In this passage she feels the presence of Eibhlín Dubh, the subject of her research, as the only constant while she pumps milk for her baby. Later, she writes “milk was inextricable from my labours”, that feeding unloosed some stream of creative thinking in her, connecting the successful feeding of her daughter with the continuation of her research and writing. While the two texts are widely different, they also share a sense of joy – Enright’s ludic, Ní Ghríofa’s lyrical and meditative – at discovering the purposefulness of breastfeeding, and of deep frustration – again, Enright’s wry and transient, Ní Ghríofa’s raw and agonising – when it is disrupted. In both texts, separation from the feeding infant occasions overspill, leakage, incontinence, what Hanson calls the “mutability” of the maternal body, its propensity to shift in in size and shape, its leakiness, “losing mucous, blood and milk”.

     Writing for the Wellcome collection, historian Joanna Wolfarth’s personal account of breastfeeding difficulty offers a useful contextualising tool for public and private cultures of feeding in Western history, from ancient bottles and the myth and magic of the Milky Way to the labour force shift of the Industrial Revolution, from tongue tie treatments that date back millennia to archived nipple shields of wood, ivory, the silver that is still used, from the invention of formula as a safer alternative to animal milks to the contemporary tension over education about alternative feeding and the behemoth of formula marketing and research. Wolfarth’s account of struggling to breastfeed her son encapsulates and contextualises many of the contemporary debates on the subject played out on pages and screens. While the heightened individualism of contemporary society and the increase in women’s participation in the labour market may work together with social and mass media to amplify the challenges of direct breastfeeding, the struggle to feed is not a new one, and the bitterness and frequency of the challenge echoes throughout literary history. While alternative options have been part of infant feeding narratives since ancient times, the invention of formula in the nineteenth century heralded a new (relative) safety in alternatives to direct breastfeeding, its emergence as a commercial endeavour also changed the calculus of  infant feeding practices on individual, cultural and systemic levels.   In a further association of feeding with capitalist production, Ireland is the world’s largest exporter of formula milk, complicating even more the existing renegotiation of the maternal body in its relationship to consumption. One of the perceived advantages of formula feeding, of course, is that the burden of infant nourishment can be shared among caregivers; in WEIRD societies, and most notably in the United States, where paid leave for parents is largely absent, this advantage has been commuted in the service of mothers’ early return to the labour market;  if someone else can feed your baby, you can go back to work. There is, then, a direct but complex set of associations between infant feeding, commodity production and wage labour. 

     This tissue of associations between breastfeeding and economic production and consumption is visible, too, in literary and cultural representations of breastfeeding. In Mary McCarthy’s 1963 novel, The Group, Priss Hartshorn, the idealistic young woman whose job in the National Recovery Administration – an agency devoted to creating fair labour practices, whose “idealism” is mocked by Priss’s paediatrician husband –  is cut short by a Supreme Court decision, she moves to a role in the League of Women Shoppers, which she relinquishes to give birth to her son, Stephen. Priss’s pregnancy is already associatively linked, then, with her own role as a labour market participant, as well as with labour practices, economic policy and commercial exchange. In the hospital after Stephen’s birth, Priss is instructed to feed Stephen a “supplementary bottle” of formula. Despite her awareness that her husband – the paediatrician, associatively linked with the medicalisation of infancy and feeding, authority and patriarchal control – will object, Priss acquiesces. In the discussion that follows, the nurse confides to Priss that “there is still a prejudice  against breastfeeding”, and that “They [the ward patients] feel that a bottle baby is socially superior”. Priss asks whether “higher-income women have a lower milk supply?”, a question  the nurse delicately evades. Later in the same scene, the nurse discusses the hospital’s ambition to “train” the babies under their care “before you leave the hospital, to sleep right through to six in the morning […] A baby works like a little clock, and  we like to have it set right before the mother takes  over”. Priss muses, approvingly, that the hospital “was like an up-to-date factory: no baby was sent out until he was in good working order”. The advantage of formula feeding as it is presented here, then, is not that it provides a safe alternative food source for a malnourished or starving infant, but that it regulates the infant, rather literally incorporating him into a system of docility, productivity  and managed social mobility. 

     More recently, in Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age (2019), where one of the protagonists, the White influencer Alix Chamberlain hires Emira Tucker, a young, slightly aimless Black woman, as nanny to her daughters, Briar and Catherine, in an employment situation observed by her friend Zara to evoke the dynamic of Black enslaved women caring for White children. Alix’s business, LetHerSpeak, emerges from her history of writing letters to get what she wants, a habit that develops into a career as a social media influencer. Alix’s ambitions are more political, though, and she writes a book proposal that does not appear to be going anywhere. This changes when Alix takes part in an event called Small Business Femme and, visibly pregnant, breastfeeds the toddler Briar while on stage. It is this act, specifically, that changes the course of her career: “Two baby magazines wanted to interview her about child-led breast-feeding and the stigmas and benefits that come along with it […] the Clinton campaign phoned her cell […] Within ten days, Alix sold her book to an editor”. Alix’s breastfeeding during a work event acts as a symbol for idealised contemporary motherhood, in which infant nourishment and attachment parenting can coexist with girlboss feminism, a juxtaposition undermined by the occlusion of the caring work of a precariously employed Black nanny. Through the novel’s subtle and complicated portrayal of the demands of parenting, caregiving, and remunerative work, Reid highlights the vexed ways in which we both reify and idealise the idea of “having it all”.

    That pernicious image of multifacted competence remains a tricky one to escape. Thanks in no small part to the combined flexibility and stability of my employment, I have been able to continue breastfeeding my children to a natural conclusion, a relationship that has defined my approach to parenting. I have also had other forms of support, from my partner, my own family of origin, many friends, and perhaps most importantly, from my own body. We do not, in Ireland or in neoliberal Anglophone Western cultures generally, support parents well as they find their way with children, and breastfeeding is no exception. What we see of it in popular culture, as I have said, falls largely into the categories of the grotesque. What we learn of it, especially in Ireland, with its complex and evolving relationship to the body and reproductive autonomy, is vague, impatient and poorly resourced, even with the best will in the world. I have been extremely, unusually lucky in the confluence of circumstances that have made this the easy choice for me; I hear many, so many, stories from parents who have struggled with physical and social impediments to breastfeeding, and those whose decision to feed their children formula, either exclusively or along with breastmilk, has been met with judgement and hostility, though they have made these choices advisedly and sometimes under serious duress. For those who have chosen and been able to breastfeed, I hear other stories of judgement for feeding their children in public (especially past infancy). It is hard, given the pervasive sense of shame that accompanies parental decisions about infant feeding, to avoid the conclusion that this foundational, hugely significant set of choices has been subsumed into the logic of capital entirely, suborning the maternal body back into perhaps premature circulation as an agent of consumption, playing on the fear and confusion of early parenthood so that every choice feels like the wrong one, in need of some form of remediation. Our literary and cultural depictions of lactation reflect and amplify this ambivalence, as in the few examples I have given here, making it harder and harder to think clearly about breastfeeding as a practice. It is hard, sometimes, not to be angry about this. It is exhausting, daily, to question the actions we take, the choices we make, that often do not feel like choices at all. But here, in the dark, with the weight of my son’s dreaming, it is easier to forget, to give in, to slow down. The endless present of infancy takes over, and my body obeys the logic it knows. I do not think about why, or how, or the systems that make possible or impossible these decisions. I surrender, in the absence of other feasible choice, to the insistent, ordinary magic of nourishment, and I am nourished.