Gender Wage Gape

Gendered Spaces and Intimate Citizenship
The Case of Breastfeeding
Lisa Smyth
QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY BELFAST

ABSTRACT

This article situates breastfeeding politics in the context of intimate citizenship, where women’s capability to care in a range of social spaces is at stake. Drawing on the work of Lefebvre and Fenster, the article considers the extent to which recent breastfeeding promotion work by the Health Promotion Agency in Northern Ireland has sought to reconceive of social spaces in ways that have the potential to improve intimate citizenship for breastfeeding women.

KEY WORDS breastfeeding ◆ capabilities ◆ gender ◆ health promotion ◆ intimate citizenship ◆ Northern Ireland ◆ space

INTRODUCTION
. . . breasts are capable of transforming legislation, citizenship, and cities themselves. (Bartlett, 2002: 111)

Much research has been carried out which seeks to establish why some women breastfeed while others do not. The explanations cover a wide range of factors, including the economic and political influence of artificial milk producers (e.g. Palmer, 1993); the medicalization of pregnancy, childbearing and infant feeding and the development of ‘scientific mothering’ (e.g. Apple, 1987); the lack of significant breastfeeding role models for new mothers (e.g. Bentley et al., 2003); the sexualization of breasts and the shame and embarrassment associated with exposing breasts in public places (e.g. Bartlett, 2002; Carter, 1995); a desire to shift the burden of feeding onto others, not least fathers (e.g. Earle, 2000; Maher, 1992); and the
European Journal of Women’s Studies Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore), 1350-5068 Vol. 15(2): 83–99; http://ejw.sagepub.com DOI: 10.1177/1350506808090305

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difficulty of returning to paid work while continuing to breastfeed (e.g. Hausman, 2004). This article seeks to situate this range of reasons within two broader

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Wall, G. (2001) ‘Moral Constructions of Motherhood in Breastfeeding Discourse’, Gender and Society 15: 592–610. Ward, M. (2006) ‘Gender, Citizenship, and the Future of the Northern Ireland Peace Process’, Éire-Ireland 41: 262–83. Lisa Smyth is a lecturer in sociology at Queen’s University Belfast. She works on gender and reproduction, gendered national/cultural identities, moral politics, feminism and intimate citizenship. She has published the book Abortion and Nation: The Politics of Reproduction in Contemporary Ireland (Ashgate, 2005). She has also published work on the cultural politics of sex education and abortion debates in Northern Ireland. She is currently planning work on the gendered dynamics of public space in contemporary Belfast, as part of a large ESRC-funded project on ‘Conflict in Cities and the Contested State’, a collaboration between Queen’s, Exeter and Cambridge Universities. Address: School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work, Queen’s University Belfast, 6 College Park, Belfast, BT7 1NN, UK. [email: [e-mail]] ◆