Abstract
Rosin’s contribution to the April 2009 issue of The Atlantic entitled ‘The Case Against Breast-feeding’, created national outrage by questioning the medical literature on infant feeding upon which the mantra ‘breast is best’ is based. This article uses Rosin’s ambivalence regarding breast-feeding as a way to understand why breast-feeding is a culturally and psychically fraught practice. It explores the rhetoric of breast-feeding advocacy in two contexts: (i) the US government’s 2004 National Breastfeeding Awareness Campaign and (ii) La Leche League International. I argue that the government campaign deploys a politics characteristic of Jacques Lacan’s concept of the Symbolic Order. The approach used by La Leche, by contrast, constitutes a politics based on the logic of what Lacan calls the Imaginary realm. I will argue that breast-feeding promotion requires a politics derived from the logic of what Lacan calls the Real – an approach to which Rosin’s piece unexpectedly points us.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
It is also worth noting that within Europe there is considerable variation in breast-feeding statistics, with Scandanavian countries engaging in near total conformity with governmental regulations for breast-feeding compliance and Ireland and France representing the lowest levels of breast-feeding compliance in Europe.
Breast-feeding is permissible anywhere that a woman and her child are permitted to be; several US states have put in place explicit provisions for protecting breast-feeding from public indecency laws, even if the nipple is exposed. This information is omitted from the narrative content of the government website, but they do provide links to these laws. It is perhaps noteworthy that the sites to which they direct us for this information are sponsored by La Leche League International.
The National Breastfeeding Campaign minimizes the severe inadequacies of the Family and Medical Leave Act through the use of voluntaristic rhetoric. They blithely advise: ‘Take as many weeks off as you can. At least six weeks of leave can help you recover from childbirth and settle into a good breastfeeding routine. Twelve weeks is even better’.
Ann Oakley (2007) alerts us to exactly this reality when she adds breast-feeding to her list of conditions of embodiment that she terms ‘two-in-one’ bodies, such as pregnancy and conjoined twins, which deliver a blow to the myth of bodily integrity.
References
Badinter, E. (2011) The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Bébé Au Lait (2014) http://www.bebeaulait.com/about-us/our-story, accessed 9 October 2014.
Blum, L.M. (1999) At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Brousse, M.-H. (2007) Strange objects, immaterial objects: Why does Lacan include the voice and the gaze in the series of Freudian objects? International Lacan Review, http://lacancircle.net/MHBStrange%20objects.pdf, accessed 9 October 2014.
Copjec, J. (1991) Vampires, breast-feeding, and anxiety. October, vol. 58: 25–43.
Daly G. & lacan.com (2004) Risking the impossible, http://www.lacan.com/zizek-daly.htm, accessed 9 October 2014.
Dolar, M. (1991) ‘I shall be with you on your wedding-night’: Lacan and the uncanny. October, vol. 58: 5–23.
Fink, B. (1995) The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Harari, R. (2001) Lacan’s Seminar on ‘Anxiety’: An Introduction. New York: Other Press.
Hausman, B.L. (2003) Mother’s Milk: Breastfeeding Controversies in American Culture. New York: Routledge.
Hausman, B.L. (2007) Things (not) to do with breasts in public: Maternal embodiment and the biocultural politics of infant feeding. New Literary History 38 (3): 479–504.
Johnston, A. (2004) The cynic’s fetish: Slavoj Žižek and the dynamics of belief. Psychoanalysis, Culture, & Society 9 (3): 259–283.
Kellymom (2011) Financial costs of not breastfeeding, http://kellymom.com, accessed 9 October 2014.
Krips, H. (2007) A mass media cure for Auschwitz: Adorno, Kafka and Žižek. International Journal of Žižek Studies 1 (4): 1–21.
Kukla, R. (2006) Ethics and ideology in breast-feeding advocacy campaigns. Hypatia 21 (1): 157–180.
La Leche League International (LLLI) (2004) The womanly art of breastfeeding In: J. Torgus and G. Gotsch (eds.). NY: Plume.
La Leche League International (LLLI) (2008) http://www.llli.org, accessed 9 October 2014.
Lapsley, R. and Westlake, M. (1990) Film Theory: An Introduction. London: St. Martin’s Press.
National Breastfeeding Awareness Campaign (2014) Breastfeeding, http://www.womenshealth.gov/breastfeeding/?page=Campaign, accessed 9 October 2014.
Oakley, A. (2007) Fracture: Adventures of a Broken Body. Bristol, UK: Policy Press.
Rosin, H. (2009) The case against breast-feeding. The Atlantic, April. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/04/the-case-against-breast-feeding/307311/, accessed 9 October 2014.
Verhaeghe, P. (2001) Beyond Gender: From Subject to Drive. New York: Other Press.
Žižek, S. (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.
Žižek, S. (1991) The truth arises from misrecognition part 1. In: E. Ragland-Sullivan and M. Bracher (eds) Lacan and the Subject of Language. New York and London: Routledge.
Žižek, S. (1997) Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Friedlander, J. Breast-feeding and middle-class privilege: A psychoanalytic analysis of ‘breast is best’. Subjectivity 8, 74–91 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2014.23
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2014.23