The Moral Dilemmas of Nighttime Breastfeeding: Crafting Kinship, Personhood and Capitalism in the U.S.

Abstract

This dissertation addresses the cultural construction and negotiation of moral dilemmas that arise from the embodied practices of breastfeeding and sleep in the U.S. I argue that the heated debates that surround both breastfeeding and infant sleep arrangements originate from the intertwined social histories of biomedicine and capitalism that have simultaneously led to a valuation of the properties of breastmilk for health and the erosion and stigmatization of breastfeeding’s intercorporeal praxis. I investigate the consequences of these conflicting cultural trends through a two-year ethnographic study of middle class parents committed to breastfeeding. In particular, I focus on the embodied moral dilemmas that stem from cultural concerns about personhood and the intercorporeal aspects of nighttime breastfeeding in parent-child kin relations that are amplified by contradictory medical guidelines for breastfeeding and infant sleep. First, I address the role of childbirth education courses for mediating these biomedical stances by situating them within different moral frames for kinship, personhood, and capitalism that parents consume and negotiate. Next, I explore the gendered embodied effects of stigma arising from the cultural contradictions of breastfeeding and infant sleep on mothers, and men’s role in mitigating these effects through their “kin work.” Finally, I examine how participants reckon with these moral dilemmas in their nighttime practices within the context of cultural expectations for kin relations, personhood and capitalism embodied in space and time. Using the ethnographic study of lived experiences of my participants as the core of my analysis, I illuminate how breastfeeding and sleep arrangements simultaneously participate in producing kin relations, persons, and embodied inequalities through their engagement with local-global political economic relations. Yet within these constraints, I argue that the moral ambivalence engendered by the embodied practices of nighttime breastfeeding also produces emergent moralities that foster modes of engagement in kinship and personhood that subtly renegotiate the divisive effects of capitalism in everyday life. This is the first book-length ethnography of breastfeeding in the United States and will make significant contributions to the anthropology of reproduction and kinship studies, women’s and gender studies, family studies, and studies of health, morality and capitalism.