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Gender, Place & Culture A Journal of Feminist Geography

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Healthy discretion? Breastfeeding and the mutual maintenance of motherhood and public space

Rebecca Lane

To cite this article: Rebecca Lane (2014) Healthy discretion? Breastfeeding and the mutual maintenance of motherhood and public space, Gender, Place & Culture, 21:2, 195-210, DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2013.791251

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2013.791251

Published online: 29 May 2013.

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Healthy discretion? Breastfeeding and the mutual maintenance of motherhood and public space

Rebecca Lane*

Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, 817 Patterson Office Tower, Lexington, KY 40502-0027, USA

(Received 14 December 2011; final version received 30 August 2012)

Although idealizations of motherhood are ever in flux, specific historical moments can be said to produce distinctive tropes of ‘good’ motherhood that have very real impacts on how women act and conceptualize themselves as mothers. This article examines good motherhood in its current iteration, and how now-common beliefs about breastfeeding are implicated in its construction. Furthermore, it looks at the ways in which idealizations of motherhood discipline the breastfeeding body so that it will fit into public space without disruption. I discuss the contradictory impacts of characterizations of the good mother as they appeared in the pro-breastfeeding dialogs that arose following a 2007 incident in which a mother was asked to cover herself up while nursing in a Kentucky restaurant. I posit that while these characterizations helped to make breastfeeding a more widely accepted public activity, they also had the effect of reifying a very narrow conception of what it means to be a good mother. I make this claim through an analysis of two common refrains heard in pro-public-breastfeeding arguments: breast milk is exceedingly healthy and mothers should not be persecuted if they nurse discreetly. Although these assertions together are compelling to the general public in that they provide a scientific justification for breastfeeding while at once assuaging fears of discomfort presented by a reproductive act being performed in a public space, I suggest that they also work to discipline women and maintain public- space-as-usual.

Keywords: breastfeeding; public space; motherhood; sexuality; performativity

Introduction: a disturbance and its dissipation

On 14 June 2007, Holly Joyce, 1 a mother of eight, decided she would take several of her

children out to dinner at a local Applebee’s restaurant to celebrate her wedding

anniversary. While Applebee’s works hard to convey an image of neighborly conviviality

and familial togetherness, not everyone is necessarily encouraged to eat within its confines.

This was the case with Matthew Joyce, Holly’s 7-month-old son. When Matthew started to

whimper, Holly knew exactly what it meant, and so without hesitation, she lifted up one

side of her shirt to feed her hungry son. This mother had breastfed in public before without

any problems, and considering she was sitting in a booth with only one other dining couple

in sight, she did not anticipate this time being any different. She was wrong. The events

that would take place in the restaurant that day would spark protests that would, if only

ephemerally, transform space and bring public breastfeeding to the nation’s attention.

Holly was still nursing when a server approached her and told her that she had to ‘cover

up’ while she was breastfeeding. Because it was a hot summer day, Holly did not think to

q 2013 Taylor & Francis

*Email: [email protected]

Gender, Place and Culture, 2014

Vol. 21, No. 2, 195–210, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2013.791251

bring a baby blanket with her. Not only did she inform the server of this, but she also pulled

out a copy of Kentucky’s breastfeeding law, Kentucky Revised Statute chapter 211.755,

which had just been passed the previous year, in order to prove that her being asked to cover

up was actually unlawful. The law, echoing legislation now on the books in most states,

mandates that no mother be bothered while breastfeeding in any place, public or private, that

she has the right to be. The restaurant’s manager, with whom Holly requested to speak,

briefly scanned the copy of the legislation and proceeded to counter that he indeed

understood the law, but that other diners were disturbed by the sight of Holly feeding her

child. Holly was so shaken up by the confrontation that she and her family left the restaurant.

From her car and in tears, she called the lactation consultant at the county health department,

who advised Holly to send a letter of complaint to Applebee’s corporate headquarters.

A few months went by before Holly read the response she received from Applebee’s at

a meeting of the Lexington chapter of La Leche League International, a well-established

mother-to-mother breastfeeding support group. In the letter, the president of Thomas &

King, the company that owns Applebee’s, declared that the restaurant would consider

stocking all Applebee’s with blankets in the case that a similar problem should ever arise.

Taken aback and displeased by what they heard, the women of La Leche League (LLL)

decided to react by organizing a protest and reporting Holly’s experience to other chapters

of LLL. The story of Holly Joyce quickly made national headlines as supporters of

breastfeeding across the nation planned protests at Applebee’s and other locations. Many

of these events were what are often called ‘nurse-ins’ – protests in which nursing mothers

gather in an open-to-the-public place just to breastfeed their children, temporarily

transforming that space and bringing to the fore the often overlooked exclusion of the

breastfeeding body from public space.

The lactation activists who organized and attended the protests defended a woman’s

right to breastfeed in public using various justifications; however, the most pervasive

rationales dealt with two specific things: infant health and maternal discretion. Many

breastfeeding supporters cited scientific evidence showing that breast milk is the healthiest,

safest and most natural thing for an infant to consume. During a protest at Fayette Mall in

Lexington, for example, Jane, a 30-something mother of one and member of LLL, talked to

reporters about the nutritional and immunological benefits that breastfeeding provides,

telling me in an interview that she made sure to stress to reporters that ‘a mother feeding her

child, something so healthy should never be considered a crime.’ And in response to

accusations that breastfeeding is an inappropriate activity to perform around strangers,

activists repeatedly insisted that breastfeeding is not a sexual or indecent act, but that it is

simply, to quote a sentiment from Laura, who attended two nurse-ins with her two young

children, ‘mammary glands doing what mammary glands are supposed to do.’

I argue that while the defense of public breastfeeding that appeared in media reports

and activism following the Holly Joyce incident did indeed work to make breastfeeding a

more accepted public activity – in that it at once portrayed mothers as the ultimate

nurturers while downplaying the sexuality of breasts – it also tacitly reified constrictive

notions of what it means to be a ‘good mother.’ It is these idealizations of motherhood –

the mother as a nurturer who provides only the best for her child and who performs her

motherhood wholly separately from her sexuality – that, when upheld, make

breastfeeding fit into normalized spaces of the public sphere without causing so much

as a ripple of disturbance. Crucial in this non-transformation of public space is the constant

affirmation of a separation of sexuality from the act of breastfeeding, so that when the

public must subject its gaze to the breastfeeding form, it sees not a display of lewdness, but

an act of nurturing being performed by a good mother.

196 R. Lane

This assurance does not come in a purely ideological form: in addition to the discursive

construction of breastfeeding as something that is non-sexual and predominantly maternal,

women discipline their own bodies while nursing in public so as to perform the act in a

way that falls into line with the culturally condoned version of nursing. Through their

bodily comportment, women’s breastfeeding is thus made safe for public consumption.

This disciplining includes things such as temporarily removing oneself from the public’s

gaze by, for example, retreating to a car in order to breastfeed. It also includes strategically

placing clothing or a blanket so that any view of the breast – and especially the nipple – is

essentially absent from the act of breastfeeding.

Holly Joyce, it seems, did not follow the rules of discretion while nursing her son in

public. Lacking the self-discipline of the good mother, Holly was instead disciplined by

external means and asked to cover up by the restaurant staff, who insisted that other

customers were uncomfortable. And while the LLL took issue with the fact that

Applebee’s considered the stocking of their restaurants with blankets a fair compensation

for what Holly went through, I argue that, in the end, LLL themselves both explicitly and

indirectly promote discretion while breastfeeding, especially through their espousal of an

idealized mother–child relationship. The Holly Joyce incident and the activism that

followed were momentary ruptures in the normalized production of public space. But

those ruptures were soon thereafter repaired by some of the very same people who made

them: the supporters and activists, who, in their advocacy of public breastfeeding,

perpetuated certain myths about motherhood, myths that serve to mitigate the perceived

threat of the reproductive body in public space.

In order to investigate just how ‘proper’ breastfeeding might be constitutive of public-

space-as-usual, I utilized a multiple methods approach within a case study research design.

My three primary methods were in-depth semi-structured interviews, participant

observation and archival research. Between October of 2009 and March of 2010, I

conducted 15 interviews with women living in Lexington, KY, who have breastfed in the

past or were breastfeeding at the time of our interview. Of the women I interviewed, all

were of middle to upper-middle socio-economic status, all were white, and all but two of

the women did not work outside of the home at the time of our interview. In addition, I

attended two meetings of the Greater Lexington Area’s chapter of LLL. During these

meetings, not only did I observe mothers and their interactions with each other and their

children, but also I was able to have short conversations with several of the attendees

before and after the meetings. I made it a point to ask the majority of the women I

interviewed both formally and informally what they thought about the case of Holly Joyce.

Finally, in terms of archival research, I utilized the library and Internet in order to access

and analyze resources such as state laws regarding breastfeeding, media coverage of the

Holly Joyce case, LLL literature, and historical and contemporary medical advice

regarding nursing.

In what follows, I will demonstrate my claims through first explicating a theoretical

framework, drawing largely from Butler and Foucault, in which normative space and good

motherhood work to simultaneously create each other. I then give a brief overview of the

medicalization of infant feeding, relating it to breastfeeding trends and fluctuating

constructions of motherhood. This is followed by a critical look at a prolific breastfeeding

institution, LLL, focusing on how their philosophy presents a challenge to public

breastfeeding. Finally, and most substantively, I will address how nursing mothers

perform discretion, the boundaries this performance (re)creates, as well as how it

concurrently contributes to idealizations of motherhood and the perpetuation of normative

public space.

Gender, Place and Culture 197

The co-constitution of space and motherhood

Public space, defined within this context as any place outside of the home, is constructed

so as to by and large exclude breastfeeding, and, most importantly here, to regulate the acts

of breastfeeding that do take place within it. Within the past several decades, geographers

have described space as a product of social interactions, asserting that the repetition of

certain socially sanctioned activities produces a fac�ade of spatial stability, thus creating

normative space (Bondi and Domosh 1998; Massey 1994; Valentine 1996). Speaking in

very broad terms, modes of domination, such as capitalism and patriarchy, can be said to

structure space in such a way that certain social relations seem normal in certain spaces,

whereas other activities seem decidedly out of place. Longhurst (2001) discusses how

public space in the West is coded as space that is orderly and rational. The need for order

has to do with the fact that space outside of the home is socially and materially produced as

a place for politics, work and commerce (Longhurst 2001; Staeheli 1996). Breastfeeding is

often thought of as the antithesis of all that public space stands for. Lactation is personal,

not political; it is not thought of as productive labor, but a reproductive task and a motherly

duty. In her work on reproductive bodies, Longhurst asserts that bodily signs of

reproduction overtly mark women as the Other, and the visibility of the Other poses a

threat to masculine, rational space:

Bearing the status of a leaking, secreting embodied Other plays a crucial role in pregnant women’s withdrawal from public space, which is, after all, the realm long associated with Rational Man whose body is considered to be solid and in control. (2001, 41–42)

Barring overt force, the mechanism through which ‘leaking bodies’ are regulated

within public space is self-discipline. Rose’s (1993) notion of the male gaze is instructive

here. Though Rose talks about the gaze in terms of artistic depictions of ‘natural’

landscapes, it is not a stretch to say that built environments are constructed through the

male gaze, and that the events that are allowed to happen in such environments are dictated

in part by patriarchal demands. Spatial hegemony, however, is not maintained through

force and coercion, but is instead (almost always) voluntarily, though not usually

consciously, created through the actions of those who enact space on a daily basis.

Foucault (1995) talks about panoptical public space and the ways in which people conform

their actions to the strictures of the public’s gaze, even if there is not a single set of eyes

upon them. In the most extreme instance – and, in fact, in the case of the majority of

women in the USA – mothers, if they do indeed breastfeed, will choose not to actually

breastfeed publicly. Mothers who do nurse in public navigate space and coordinate nursing

by, for example, only leaving the house for a few hours at a time so that they do not miss a

feeding and/or are not forced to nurse in public (Baumslag and Michels 1995).

The conception that women must discipline their lactating bodies and learn how to

breastfeed in a socially acceptable manner flies in the face of the assumption that

breastfeeding is inherently and wholly natural; moreover, conceiving of breastfeeding as a

learned activity puts it on the table to be examined in the critical manner that most

‘natural’ activities are not. I contend that breastfeeding is a learned activity, and that

women’s performance of public breastfeeding is scripted by the intertwining and co-

constitutive demands of public space and good motherhood. I draw on Butler’s concept of

performativity to illustrate how women learn to perform breastfeeding, and how this

performance is implicated in the construction of motherhood. Butler (2006) posits that

gender, and identity in general, is not something that has any stable and internal reality –

instead she characterizes identity as performative. To successfully ‘be’ a gender, one must

perform ‘male’ or ‘female’ in a way that does not stray too far from what the matrix of

198 R. Lane

intelligibility deems as acceptable (Butler 2006). Likewise, breastfeeding must be

performed in a specific way in order for idealizations of motherhood to be perpetuated.

This performance is dictated by a cultural demand to separate the sexual and the maternal

body. As Stearns says:

Women engage in a variety of behaviors to try to make their breastfeeding fit into a hostile environment. In doing so, women actively create the good maternal body before an audience that is more familiar and comfortable with the sexualized breast than the nurturing breast. The construction of the good maternal body involves constant vigilance to how the breastfeeding is viewed by others . . . To transgress the precarious boundaries of the good maternal body is to risk being labeled a bad mother and/or sexually inappropriate or deviant. (1999, 321–322)

Ultimately, the breastfeeding body is (ideally) produced in a way that distances itself from

the sexual female form. This, naturally, is a difficult feat to execute, especially in a society

in which breasts are generally seen as sexual objects. The fear of transgressing the

maternal/sexual divide can be seen by virtue of absence in discourses surrounding

breastfeeding, which typically lack any sexual connotation and center predominantly upon

the nutritional benefits of breast milk. Consequently, mothers feel pressured both by the

medical community and society writ large to do what is best for the health of their child

(Bailey, Pain, and Aarvold 2004; Blum 1999; Murphy 1999; Stearns 1999). Some assert

that the focus on infant health has been to the detriment of the female doing the feeding, as

an assumed and monolithic motherly subjectivity (that of the selfless caregiver) conceals

the myriad feelings women may in reality have about breastfeeding (Schmied and Lupton

2001; Smyth 2008).

By examining the connections between public space and motherhood, I hope to

contribute to the geographic literature that contests the strict distinction of public and

private space (Longhurst 2001; Staeheli 1996; Staeheli and Mitchell 2008). As Staeheli

(1996) has argued, private actions occur in public space and vice versa, but taken-for-

granted notions of what type of activity is appropriate for what space has occluded the

politicality of activities that are thought of as private, even if they occur in public space.

But while noting the political nature of the public breastfeeding, I also question the

emancipatory potential of public space. In other words, it is not enough to reveal the

shakiness of the public/private binary and the ideals it is built upon; one such ideal, the

inclusivity of public space, is especially relevant here. While we should celebrate the

inclusion of previously banned groups in public space, it is also important to turn a critical

eye towards what this inclusion does – who and what it empowers, and who and what, by

association, it disempowers (oftentimes – as in the case I present here – this distinction is

not clean-cut). As Ehrkamp (2008) demonstrates, for example, representations of

difference that arose from Turkish and Kurdish men claiming public space in Germany

have had less-than-savory implications for some women. It is with the ambiguity of

publicity in mind that I argue that, although the promotion and acceptance of breastfeeding

in public has been lauded as a success for mothers and their children, it has also had

dubious consequences for mothers and for women as a whole.

Mixed messages in the hospital and LLL

Relative to other places and times, mothers in the USA today breastfeed very little. In

terms of the number of mothers who choose to breastfeed at all and the length of time they

continue to nurse, women in the USA keep breastfeeding to a minimum, with a 14.8%

national average for mothers exclusively breastfeeding their child at 6 months of age

[Center for Disease Control (CDC) 2011]. If breastfeeding rates in the USA in general are

Gender, Place and Culture 199

suboptimal, then, from a regional perspective, the US South, including Kentucky, where

this study was carried out, is in a particularly dire situation. In descending order,

Kentucky, Alabama, West Virginia, Mississippi, and Louisiana take the lowest five

rankings on the Center for Disease Control’s 2011 Breastfeeding Report Card for the ‘ever

breastfed’ category. The factors that account for the South’s distressing breastfeeding rates

are beyond the scope of this study. However, it might be the case that the oft-cited factors

that contribute to the usage of the bottle over the breast (e.g. the lack of breastfeeding

support and women’s employment outside the home) are exacerbated by the economic

depression that plagues many parts of the US South. Indeed, as the CDC notes, in the USA,

low breastfeeding rates are strongly tied to low socio-economic status. 2 It is easy to

speculate that the low breastfeeding rates across the South have made the public

breastfeeder an even rarer sight than elsewhere in the country; this has perhaps added a

sense of urgency to the performance of discretion in the South, as the breastfeeding body,

being an anomalous sight, runs up against an exceedingly large amount of friction as it

tries to stake out a place in public space.

Whatever the case, it is clear that these low numbers reflect that, rather than being a

‘natural’ activity that mothers automatically know how to do, or a ‘rational’ behavior

that judicious mothers will choose because of it healthiness, breastfeeding is a learned

activity with a malleability of meaning and practice. The ownership and dissemination

of lactation knowledge shapes trends in breastfeeding conceptions and rates throughout

history, as well as idealizations of motherhood vis-á-vis nursing (Lepore, J., “Baby

Food: If Breast is Best, Why are Women Bottling Their Milk?” The New Yorker,

January 19, 2009; Palmer 2009). While once breastfeeding knowledge was passed on

through a ‘lay’ knowledge base constituted by women themselves, infant feeding, like

most aspects of women’s reproductive lives, is now preeminently the domain of

medicine. LLL might be viewed as a well-intentioned intervention/reappropriation

spurred by the ‘assault’ on breastfeeding that in part came from the medicalization of

infant feeding. Nevertheless, LLL’s philosophy works to enhance idealizations of

motherhood now generated by the medical community; LLL, however, interpolates

mothers on a more profound level, transforming the medical community’s imperative to

breastfeed into a universal ethos of womanhood. Finally, both LLL and the medical

community, as discussed below, are marked by tensions that make the ‘injunction’ to

breastfeed, in public or otherwise, no straightforward matter.

In combination with a deep cultural reverence for science, the medicalization of

lactation has worked to deploy breastfeeding and the knowledge surrounding it as a

particularly impactful mechanism of power (Blum 1999; Foucault 1990). Since its medical

inception, breastfeeding has been the subject of countless studies, but its position within

medicine has never been constant (Baumslag and Michels 1995; Blum 1999; Lepore, J.,

“Baby Food: If Breast is Best, Why are Women Bottling Their Milk?” The New Yorker,

January 19, 2009; Palmer 2009). For example, only 40 years ago, US doctors were

recommending that mothers feed their children homemade formulas – consisting largely

of water, bread and sugar – rather than breast milk. To the physician of the early- and mid-

twentieth century, and also to progressive mothers of the time, formula feeding, or

‘scientific feeding’ as it was otherwise known, was the most efficacious and healthful way

to feed a child; breastfeeding was essentially outmoded. And while the supreme health

benefits of breast milk were beginning to become known around the middle- to late-

twentieth century, infant formula – this time in pre-packaged forms – began to take hold

(Baumslag and Michels 1995; Blum 1999; Palmer 2009). Though not backed by scientific

data, infant formula companies claimed that their product was healthier than breast milk.

200 R. Lane

And in order to reach their targeted market as effectively as possible, these formula

companies would provide their product to hospitals, where, instead of teaching a new

mother how to breastfeed, the maternity ward staff would regularly bottle-feed newborns.

Mothers would then be sent home with free formula samples. This practice, as well as the

claim that formula was healthier than breast milk, soon came under scrutiny. But while

formula companies are now forbidden from making claims of formula’s superiority, they

continue to have a foothold in hospitals, where free samples are still provided (Palmer

2009; Tanner, L., “Hospital’s Formula Freebies Undermine Breast-feeding,” USA Today,

September 26, 2011). Here, it becomes clear that science/medicine should not be conflated

with the everyday activities that go on in the maternity ward: while there is a strong

consensus in the medical community regarding breast milk’s supreme healthiness (see, for

example, American Academy of Pediatrics 2012; Galson 2009), and while US hospitals

now have resources (e.g. lactation consultants) that make them arguably more

breastfeeding-friendly than ever, the injunction to breastfeed is muddled on the hospital

floor, where, although it is discursively present, is not always materially supported or

facilitated by hospital staff, nor is it desired by mothers in any consistent manner.

Although the injunction to breastfeed is not always heeded, however, the knowledge of

the healthiness of breast milk alone has had immeasurable impacts as the lynchpin in the

modern-day ‘case for breastfeeding.’ All of the women I spoke with cited health as the

number one reason why breastfeeding should be an acceptable public activity. Amber, for

example, put it very bluntly when she said that, ‘breast milk is good for kids. Period. Why

aren’t more people getting in trouble for feeding their kids junk in restaurants? We are just

giving our kids something that’s really healthy, and there’s nothing wrong with that.’ The

idea that public breastfeeding should be advocated on account of its health supremacy

should not be taken lightly, and I am in no way saying that this argument is trivial or

should be dismissed. However, like the argument for discretion, the focus on health in

breastfeeding advocacy has inadvertent consequences. Because infant health takes top

billing, the breastfeeding mother is relegated to a supporting role, albeit a highly

congratulatory one: her decision is touted as a commendable demonstration of motherly

responsibility (Murphy 1999; Smyth 2008; Wall 2001). Consequently, though, this script

reinscribes the image of the good mother as someone who is concerned with nurturing

above all else and is self-sacrificing in her desire to provide only the best for her child. The

focus on health, in short, paints a one-dimensional portrait of motherhood and leaves little

room for motherly subjectivities that stray from the script (Marshall, Godfrey, and

Renfrew 2007; Pain, Bailey, and Mowl 2001; Schmied and Lupton 2001; Smyth 2008).

Moreover, any mother who does not, for whatever reason, breastfeed her child is indicted:

she is not providing the best for her child and thus does not live up to the idealized trope of

the good mother. This has class connotations, as we see breastfeeding rates drop

dramatically when looking at women of lower socio-economic status (CDC 2011).

Breastfeeding in effect works to class the good mother.

The pressure for mothers to breastfeed is driven by more than just health concerns,

however, and it is here that LLL has been especially instrumental. If the medical

community’s advocacy of breastfeeding can be described as clinical, rational and

generally infant-focused, LLL’s is personal and evocative, highly appealing to women

who see breastfeeding as part of their maternal identity. An international mother-to-

mother support group, LLL represents a realm in which medical experts do not have a

monopoly on lactation knowledge. That is not to say, however, that medical knowledge

about breastfeeding does not factor into LLL philosophy. To the contrary, LLL has

embraced and promoted scientific studies that show breast milk to be the healthiest food

Gender, Place and Culture 201

available to infants. But, importantly, unlike medical advice, LLL theorizes the former

half of the mother–child dyad in a much more extensive manner.

With millions of members worldwide, LLL has been one of the driving forces behind

the contemporary idealization of motherhood – and, in fact, womanhood – via its

philosophy of breastfeeding. Kentucky has 15 LLL chapters, and of the 15 women that I

interviewed, 6 were in some way associated with LLL: one is a former leader, one is a

current leader, three attend meetings on a regular basis, and one has attended meetings in

the past, but no longer participates. An integral part of LLL’s philosophy, captured best in

the LLL guidebook The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, is the notion that women should

revel in breastfeeding as one of the most satisfying experiences of womanhood. Sarah,

who was a LLL leader throughout the 1970s and 1980s, summed it up well:

La Leche League is important, because we believe that breastfeeding is the most natural thing a mother can do for her child. We are kind of . . . taking back the breast. We know what they’re really for. And we know how much breastfeeding can mean to a mother. It just makes you feel like a mother, in ways that bottle feeding just can’t. Their book, the one they talk about at meetings, is called The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding for a reason.

LLL’s philosophy and sentiments such as Sarah’s have done much to promote infant

health amongst women far and wide, and LLL has indeed wrested breastfeeding power-

knowledge from the hands of medical authorities. Nevertheless, like the medical

injunction to breastfeed, LLL’s philosophy contributes to the societal pressure on mothers

to nurse, but it does so through more than just an appeal to health. LLL depicts

reproduction as the pinnacle of womanhood, and breastfeeding as an integral reproductive

experience, thereby transforming the ‘choice’ (which, of course, is not equally available to

everyone) to breastfeed or not into a potentially psychologically wrought decision.

But beyond the guilt that LLL might elicit through its essentialization of women and its

romanticization of reproduction – about which much has already been written (see, for

example, Badinter 2012; Blum and Vandewater 1993; Ward 2000) – I believe that LLL’s

philosophy produces a tension that might in fact work as a subtle deterrent to public

breastfeeding. LLL not only dwells on the part breastfeeding plays in womanhood, but

also the bonding experience between mother and child and the intimacy it produces.

Indeed, a recent edition of The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding begins by observing that

‘milk gets all the glory’ and insisting ‘breastfeeding is a connection as well as a food

source’ (2010, xxi). But although the focus on the mother–child connection is a departure

from the health focus of much breastfeeding advocacy, there is a certain discord between it

and the promotion of public breastfeeding. Intimacy and bonding – let alone anything

described as inherently ‘womanly’ – are not typically welcome in public space; although

LLL is certainly not single-handedly responsible for transforming breastfeeding into a

‘womanly art,’ its colorful conception of breastfeeding is at odds with normative ideas of

public space. Nonetheless, LLL was the driving force behind pro-breastfeeding campaigns

after the Holly Joyce incident, and its members are prolific promoters public

breastfeeding. So, how is the contradiction between the intimacy of breastfeeding

reconciled with the antithetical ideals of public space? 3 Discretion, it seems, is key.

Performing discretion

For women who breastfeed with the public’s gaze upon them, nursing almost becomes a

choreography, one that many women are quite masterful at performing. While not all of

the women I interviewed breastfed outside the home on a regular basis, all who did can be

described as having great success at the often tricky endeavor. When asked how they

202 R. Lane

managed to nurse in public, these women frequently espoused similar tricks and

maneuvers. For example, many of the women told me that they would use a nursing bib,

which is a piece of fabric designed to drape over the child and the upper body of the

mother. Whatever their breastfeeding protocol, for these women, breastfeeding in public

entailed concertedly performing the act in as unobtrusive a manner as possible by

deflecting and/or mitigating any gaze that might construe the activity as inappropriate.

Breastfeeding is made safe for public consumption by expunging all that may be perceived

as private, including intimacy in all its varying degrees, most notably sexuality. Indeed,

the demand that public space be ostensibly asexual – but actually highly heterosexually

charged (Hubbard 2000; Valentine 1996) – shapes the performances and characterizations

of the good mother as they pertain to breastfeeding outside of the home.

When done properly, breastfeeding is done with discretion. This imperative was a

common refrain in the majority of the interviews I conducted, as well as in the

instructional literature that many of my informants told me they used. For example, LLL’s

website has a section about public breastfeeding that offers many tips on how to nurse

discreetly, which include the following:

Before you breastfeed in a social setting or a public place, you may want to practice in front of a mirror so that you’ll be able to see what others will see and make adjustments. Learn to recognize your baby’s pre-nursing cues. It’s easier to get a baby latched on discreetly when he’s [sic] not crying and calling attention to you while your [sic] fumbling with the clips and your clothes.

But what exactly does discretion mean in this context of breastfeeding? In terms of its

bodily performance, discretion involves, to put it quite simply, making sure the breast is

not overtly or overly exposed. In addition, and perhaps even more importantly, discretion

entails that a woman makes sure that her efforts in attaining this goal are evident to those

around her. According to the women I interviewed, the demand that their body not be too

exposed can be met in a number of ways: a strategically placed blanket, the use of a

nursing bib, turning away the front of her body from the view of others. This seeming

pragmatism is at once a symbolic display, as the performance of public breastfeeding must

involve some sort of gesture or form of bodily comportment that will convey to others the

mother’s modesty. In talking to my informants, this gesture seems to almost have

reparative function, acting as a signal of apology to the public that must witness that act.

This ‘apology’ can also include gestures such as the cessation of conversation or an

aversion of eyes. Jane, for example, told me that she knows ‘it makes some people

uncomfortable when I feed him, so I just kind of step back and keep it between me and

Jack [her son] when I do it.’

Interestingly, however, it seems that the public that must witness the act of

breastfeeding is sometimes equally – if not more – apologetic and accommodating. In a

sense, then, the public also performs discretion. When asked about the reaction of those

around them, six women noted that many people, and especially men, tended to back off

and give them plenty of space. Jessica exclaimed that ‘men will avert their eyes, and make

it very, very obvious that they are not looking at you!’ In cases such as these, a woman’s

performance of discretion acts in concert with the others’ feeling of uneasiness, as their

consequent avoidance of the woman works to alleviate and dissipate any potential

disturbance that the breastfeeding form may present. Perhaps it can even be said that these

signals of modesty prompt others to view and treat nursing women as delicate, vulnerable,

and in need of their own space.

A woman’s modesty prompts a deflection of attention, but in cases where this modesty

is not adequately performed, such as with Holly Joyce, the illicit nursing body demands

Gender, Place and Culture 203

attention, thereby rupturing everyday space-as-usual. For some breastfeeding supporters,

namely the ‘militant’ activists, this disruption is a necessary jolt through public space; for

other supporters, however, the illicit nursing body detracts from the cause. For example,

when asked what she thought about lactation activism and militant breastfeeding, LLL

member Audrey told me:

Some lactation enthusiasts are TOO militant. I’m all for the rights of nursing mothers, for their right to nurse their infants in public. But I would not be comfortable with a group that believed that it’s okay to expose your breasts in public to feed your child without making an effort to cover up.

Performing motherhood in a modest manner makes it possible for breastfeeding to fit into

public places without much disruption, and thus makes it more widely accepted. It is

interesting to note that the militant activists’ stance is that just the opposite – the flagrant

breastfeeding body is what will make public breastfeeding more accepted. But to seek

acceptance through this route would entail transforming norms of public space, norms that

have expelled the fully exposed breast as sexual and therefore inappropriate (the partially

clothed breast, of course, is a different story). In effect, the discreetly nursing woman and

the discreetly (un)observing public create a space of non-transformation through their

mutual performances.

Interestingly, not all performances of public breastfeeding have an audience, so to

speak. Judging from the women with whom I talked, much of the breastfeeding that

happens in public is in actuality being performed in private, through what could be called

‘discretion through retreat.’ That is, some mothers who breastfeed in public remove

themselves from the public’s gaze, essentially performing the act in as private a way as

possible. Many of the women I interviewed reported retreating to their cars or an empty

room in order to nurse. In instances such as these, women discipline their lactating body

and help to reproduce public-space-as-usual by ensuring that the act of breastfeeding is

performed in a private area, thus precluding almost all risk that it might be considered

indecent or a disturbance. Heather, for example, explained that she never actually let

somebody see her breastfeed in public if she could help it, telling me that her car was

where she most frequently retreated in order to nurse. While the women discussed above

considered themselves public breastfeeders, the nursing they performed outside of the

home was actually done out of the view of the public’s gaze.

Demonstrating that the physical design of a building is an apparatus of control and a

purveyor of discipline (Foucault 1995; Marotta 2005), the phenomenon of public-but-

private breastfeeding is something that is increasingly facilitated by the built environment

of public places. This is best exemplified by the prevalence of lactation rooms in places

such as malls. Lactation rooms are specially designated rooms where mothers can go to

breastfeed their children in a private and comfortable area, away from the gaze of the

public. The Fayette Mall in Lexington has one such room, and several of the women I

interviewed said that they had indeed used it. While many praised the mall and other

places that included lactation rooms in their layout – sometimes even mentioning that, in

addition to offering privacy, the rooms are more conducive to cooperation from their baby

since there are fewer distractions – there is a certain ambivalence about this type of space.

On the one hand, while they provide women with a secluded and comfortable area to

nurse, they also conceal the lactating body from the public eye. Lactation rooms are often

marked by the blue and white international symbol for breastfeeding, a highly stylized

representation of a mother nursing a child. In its explanation of sign, the Kentucky Cabinet

for Health and Family Services asserts that ‘The purpose of the symbol is not to segregate

breastfeeding, but to help integrate it into society by better accommodating it in public.’

204 R. Lane

However, it is obvious that the sign actually has the opposite function. That is, instead of

making breastfeeding more acceptable anywhere, the sign has the effect of making it

acceptable in the places where the sign exists, leaving it an ambiguously (un)acceptable

activity elsewhere.

Breastfeeding boundaries

By adding legal legitimacy to the distinction between motherhood and sexuality, public

breastfeeding laws like the one Holly Joyce showed the Applebee’s staff serve also as an

attempt to make breastfeeding fit into public space. These laws not only demonstrate the

importance and social function of foregrounding health in breastfeeding discourse, but

also encapsulate the cultural imperative to differentiate the sexualized breast from the

lactating breast. Almost every public breastfeeding law, including Kentucky’s, includes a

clause that states that women cannot be accused of, to quote Kentucky’s, ‘public

indecency, indecent exposure, sexual conduct, lewd touching or obscenity’ for

breastfeeding their children in public. This clause in and of itself is very telling, as it

directly confronts the otherwise taken-for-granted construction of breasts as sexual

objects. As Amber, who is in her early thirties and the mother of an 8-month old, put it:

It is sad that we have to have a law that confirms a woman’s right to breastfeed her baby wherever she needs to be, and not be harassed doing it. It is sad that we have to do this. But we have so many incidents of women being harassed! But, O-M-G. [feigning shock] Heaven forbid that you should breastfeed your baby in your bikini next to the wading pool, while you’re supervising your other children. ‘Cause then it’s just so sexual. And, you know, bikinis are not. [rolls eyes] But, you know, we have to say, ‘It’s for the health of our children!’ because if we just said, ‘Well, that’s what breasts are for, and it’s your problem that you’re attracted to them in a sexual way,’ no one, the lawmakers wouldn’t buy it.

Laws stating that breastfeeding is not an indecent exposure are indicative not only of the

domination of the breasts by sexual characterizations, but also of the uncomfortable

ambiguity that arises when the predominately sexualized breast must perform a motherly

function. This ambiguity is something which both lay and legal discourses actively try to

resolve in an effort to keep sexuality separate from motherhood. In the case of Holly Joyce,

when discretion was evidently not heeded and ambiguity thus laid bare, complications can

ensue. So while such laws may be helpful to mothers who do wish to breastfeed in public

(though not always, as we have seen), and while they strive to make breastfeeding a more

widely accepted public activity, they also have covert and questionable consequences. To

put it concisely, laws like Kentucky’s further compartmentalize motherhood and

sexuality, implicitly prescribing a very narrow way to experience breastfeeding while at

once idealizing motherhood.

With that being said, however, it seems as though the exhortation to distinguish breasts

as a source of food from breasts as a source of pleasure can never be fully heeded. No

matter what, an ambiguity still remains; this is the very thing that drives women to

concertedly and continually perform discretion while nursing in the first place. Although

the ambiguity can never be fully remediated, the woman’s effort at doing so is taken as

proof enough of her good motherhood. For all that the discourse of proper breastfeeding

stresses that the act is not sexual, but merely an act of sustenance, breasts, even during the

act of breastfeeding, cannot be fully dissociated from their sexual connotations. As a

result, the uncomfortable ambiguity surrounding nursing, out of which laws pertaining to

breastfeeding and indecent exposure are born, can never be fully assuaged. Regardless of

this futility, however, breastfeeding laws do substantial work in the ‘battle’ to keep the

Gender, Place and Culture 205

sexual breast away from the motherly breast, as they lend the legitimation of law to this

distinction.

For some, however, efforts at legally and symbolically separating the nurturing breast

from the sexual breast mean very little, as the breast’s inherent sexuality is

inextinguishable and therefore always inappropriate in public. This view undoubtedly

has to do not only with ‘discretion through retreat,’ as discussed above, but also with

women never breastfeeding at all, public or otherwise. On a 2007 airing of his television

show, political commentator/comedian Bill Maher, responding specifically to the pro-

breastfeeding activism generated by the Holly Joyce incident, illustrated this view

superlatively, equating nursing in a restaurant to masturbating in public. Women who

nurse in public, contended Maher, are either bad at planning or spotlight-seekers. Not

unlike most public breastfeeding supporters, Maher and those who share his view believe

that there is a proper decorum for breastfeeding. For the former, this entails following the

rules of discretion while breastfeeding in public, while for latter, it involves planning

ahead so that public breastfeeding is never necessary. Both views imply that mothers who

do not follow breastfeeding etiquette are in some way deficient as mothers, and perhaps

even attention-seekers. Indeed, when I brought up the Holly Joyce case in an

undergraduate class I taught, several students wondered whether Holly might have been

‘looking for trouble,’ citing the fact that she had the breastfeeding law on hand. Of course,

the characterization of publically nursing mothers as attention-hungry provocateurs

conflicts sharply with the portrayal, ubiquitous in promotional discourse, of breastfeeding

mothers as selfless and generous caregivers.

The situation becomes even more complex when we realize that breastfeeding is not

only seen as intimate because breasts are constantly sexualized by others: as discussed

above, sometimes it is the mothers themselves who feel an intimacy when nursing their

children. Occasionally, though extremely rarely, women may describe this intimacy as

sexual. Young, who asserts that ‘patriarchy depends on the border between motherhood

and sexuality’ (2003, 158), offers us a real-life glimpse of an illicit performance of

motherhood, a transgression of this patriarchal border:

When I began nursing, I sat stiff in a chair, holding the baby in the crook of my arm . . . After some weeks, drowsy during morning feeding, I went to bed with my baby. I felt that I had crossed a forbidden river as I moved toward the bed, stretched her legs out alongside my reclining torso, me lying on my side like a cat or a mare while my baby suckled. This was pleasure, not work. I lay there as she made love to me, snuggling her legs up to my stomach, her hand stroking my breast, my chest. She lay between me and my lover, and she and I were a couple. From then on I looked forward with happy pleasure to our early-morning intercourse, she sucking at my hard fullness, relieving and warming me, while her father slept. (2003, 160)

The bodily pleasure attained from breastfeeding is not something that women will

willingly admit to, and this bad performance of motherhood is certainly not something one

would expect to see in public.

While several of the women I interviewed spoke of a strong emotional bond with their

child that they felt while breastfeeding, most did not go into to detail about any physically

pleasurable aspects of nursing, although one did use the word ‘euphoric’ to describe the

experience. The vast majority of the women I talked to, even those who intimated that

breastfeeding produced physical pleasure, were squeamish or downright disgusted at the

thought of a blurring of the line between sexuality and motherhood. It seemed apparent

that this was a boundary women actively policed through their own self-discipline. This is

perhaps best illustrated in a phrase that frequently came up when women were explaining

the inappropriate way to breastfeed in public: ‘whip it out.’ For example, Heather said:

206 R. Lane

‘Well, you just don’t want to whip it out in public – you know, whip your boobs out for

everyone to see.’ And Jessica stated, ‘People who just kind of whip them out and start

feeding, I don’t think that’s very considerate.’ The expression ‘whip it/them out’ is

indicative of the fine line that is negotiated between the good/nurturing mother and the

sexual female. To ‘whip it/them out’ is to do something that can be seen as vulgar, sexual,

or lewd – all of which the good mother is not. Discretion, such as covering your child with

a blanket while nursing in public, mitigates the sexualizing tendencies of the gaze upon the

female breast. With the blanket acting almost as a symbol, the good mother is able to

(somewhat and sometimes) successfully navigate the highly, yet tacitly, gendered and

sexualized arena of public space.

Conclusion

Although breastfeeding women do nurse in public space with much success, these women

discuss and perform the act of breastfeeding in an almost prescriptive manner. ‘Discretion’

is the key word, becoming the mechanism through which breastfeeding women conform to

the gaze and the demands of public space. This discretion has implications for the

construction of motherhood and women’s identities. In short, to be considered a good

mother, women, if they do nurse their children, must perform breastfeeding a specific way

– that is, in a manner that does not have any ostensible (or, worse yet, flagrant) overlap

with the performance of sexuality. Many women, including breastfeeding advocates, think

that motherhood and sexuality should not be mixed.

As Longhurst (2001) notes, public space is perceived as orderly and clean, a place

where bodily excretions – such as milk from a breast – do not belong, and may be

considered disruptive or disturbing. In her own work, Longhurst has studied pregnant

women and their withdrawal from public space. She asserts that others may believe that

‘[p]regnant women’s bodily fluids pose a threat to social control and order’ (2001, 41) and

that, perceiving this, pregnant women may avoid public space altogether. This statement

can be said of breastfeeding in public as well, which is perhaps why it is so rarely done in

the USA. While it is true that when a woman breastfeeds in public, she usually adheres to a

very specific lactation performance, those mothers who do nurse but do not do so in public

are also adhering to the culturally sanctioned version of breastfeeding, through their

selective ‘non-performance’ of nursing, that makes their lactating bodies congruent with

public space.

So what of Holly Joyce? Here was a woman who did not acknowledge the ‘laws’ of

discretion. As Butler (2006) says, any performance that deviates too far from what is

recognizable can make waves, and this is exactly what happened that day at Applebee’s. In

my interview with Holly, she revealed that after the incident, she would purposefully

breastfeed in as blatant a manner as possible, paying attention only to the demands of her

hungry child. For instance, Holly explained to me how she has breastfed in line at the

grocery store, and how she has made it a point never to cover up while nursing in public.

But in these convictions, Holly seems to diverge from the activists that were created in her

wake. Because while the nurse-ins inspired by Holly’s confrontation did indeed briefly

transform some public spaces, the waves that were made slowly died down, their roar

replaced with discreet performances of breastfeeding. And while 50 breastfeeding women

sitting in an Applebee’s parking lot is a sight to behold, a sight that one cannot in fact

avoid, a single woman following rules of discretion and good motherhood is a sight to

ignore, a sight thats transformative potential has been virtually diminished so as to

maintain public-space-as-usual. Moreover, in a certain sense, Holly’s story aided in the

Gender, Place and Culture 207

proliferation and acceptance of breastfeeding discipline, as women set out to prove that

breastfeeding could indeed be done in public without ruffling any feathers – and,

certainly, they did not want to suffer the same sort of humiliation that Holly suffered that

day. Breastfeeding women thus discipline their bodies in accordance with the mandates of

good motherhood, the only type of motherhood that can be performed in public space

without the risk of transgression. When viewed in this way, it is evident that the inclusion

of the breastfeeding body in public space is dependent on the ideological and actual

exclusion of certain other performances of motherhood.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Patricia Ehrkamp for her guidance on this project, as well as Anna Secor for her help with this paper. I would also like to thank Patrick Bigger, Nate Millington, Jairus Rossi, Derek Ruez, Christine Smith and Sandra Zupan for their helpful feedback on this paper during a writing workshop. Finally, thanks goes to two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments, as well as Benjamin Davidson and Donna Lindquist for their careful readings of the previous drafts.

Notes

1. This is a pseudonym. Although her story made national headlines, Holly Joyce is a very private woman and requested that I not use her real name in any publications.

2. This, of course, is not a universal phenomenon. The United Nations Children’s Fund reports extremely high rates of breastfeeding in impoverished countries within Southeast Asia and Africa. Rwanda ranks number one: http://www.childinfo.org/breastfeeding_countrydata.php.

3. Tellingly, the women I interviewed talked about breastfeeding inside and outside of the home in a different manner. References to bonding were by and large in regard to nursing done in private. Conversely, when speaking of public breastfeeding, descriptions of the logistics of discretion abounded.

Notes on contributors

Rebecca Lane is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky. She got her MA in Geography at the same institution in 2010; her thesis, presented here in article form, focused on breastfeeding and public space. Rebecca is currently performing dissertation fieldwork in Atlanta, Georgia, researching reproductive healthcare access among undocumented Latina immigrants. Very generally speaking, her research interests center on gender and health.

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ABSTRACT TRANSLATIONS

¿Saludable discreción? El amamantamiento y el mantenimiento mutuo de la

maternidad y el espacio público

Aunque las idealizaciones de la maternidad están siempre en proceso de cambio, hay

momentos históricos especı́ficos que pueden ser señalados como productores de tropos

distintivos de la ‘buena’ maternidad, que tienen impactos reales sobre cómo las mujeres se

comportan y se entienden a sı́ mismas como madres. Este artı́culo estudia la buena

maternidad en su actual iteración y cómo las ahora comunes creencias sobre el

amamantamiento son implicadas en su construcción. Además, estudia las formas en que

Gender, Place and Culture 209

las idealizaciones de la maternidad disciplinan al cuerpo que da de mamar de forma que se

ajuste al espacio público sin disrupción. Discuto los impactos contradictorios de las

caracterizaciones de la buena madre como aparecen en los diálogos pro-amamantamiento

que surgieron luego de un incidente en 2007 en el que se le pidió a una madre que se cubra

mientras daba el pecho en un restaurante de Kentucky. Argumento que mientras estas

caracterizaciones ayudaron a hacer el amamantamiento una actividad pública más

ampliamente aceptada, también tuvieron un efecto de cosificar una concepción muy

acotada de lo que significa ser una buena madre. Afirmo esto a través de un análisis de dos

refranes comunes que se escuchan a favor de los argumentos pro amamantamiento en

lugares públicos: la leche materna es sumamente sana y las madres no deberı́an ser

perseguidas si dan el pecho en forma discreta. Si bien estas afirmaciones juntas son

convincentes para el público en general, en el sentido de que proveen una justificación

cientı́fica para el amamantamiento, a la vez que calman los temores a la incomodidad

generada por un acto reproductivo llevado a cabo en un espacio público, sugiero que

también funcionan como disciplinadores de las mujeres y para mantener los espacios

públicos inalterados.

Palabras claves: amamantamiento; espacio público; maternidad; sexualidad; performa-

tividad

健康的裁量？哺育母乳和母性与公共空间的相互维持

虽然理想化的母性不断在变化，但特定的历史时刻可以说生产了特殊的‘优良’母性 之比喻，并对女性如何从事及概念化自身做为母亲有着相当真实的影响。本文检视 优良母性于当下的重复性，以及现今对哺育母乳的普遍观点如何牵涉此一建构。此 外，本文检视理想化的母性如何规训哺育母乳的身体，使之得以融入公共空间而不 引发混乱。我将讨论优良母亲特质的矛盾影响，2007年发生一位母亲在肯德基餐厅 哺育母乳时被要求以衣物遮蔽的事件后，便涌现支持哺育母乳的对话，并从中出现 上述之影响。我假定，这些特质虽有助于将哺育母乳塑造为更被广泛接受的公共行 为，它们却也同时具体化了相当狭隘的‘好母亲’之概念。我透过分析支持公开哺育 母乳的论述中两个普遍的说法，做出上述宣称：母乳是非常健康的，而母亲不应因 慎重地哺乳而受到谴责。虽然这些宣称对一般大众而言相当具有说服力，因为它们 为哺育母乳提供了科学的辩护，并同时减缓了在公共空间中展演再生产的行为所引 发的不舒适之恐惧，但我仍主张，这些宣称同时规训了女性，并维持了公共空间的惯 习。

关键词：关键词乳、公共空间、母性、性慾、展演性

210 R. Lane