Emotion, Space and Society 26 (2018) 41e48

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Emotion, Space and Society

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/emospa

Misshapen motherhood: Placing breastfeeding distress

Catherine Robinson 1
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney, Australia

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: In this article, my general aim is to give place to the experiences of breastfeeding distress which emerged
Received 9 February 2016 during narrative research with mothers in Australia. I suggest that breastfeeding distress must be read
Received in revised form not only in terms of the specific socio-spatial landscape through which it takes hold but also in terms of
15 September 2016
the lived and often non-compliant landscape of the body itself. Informed by accounts of the dominant
Accepted 19 September 2016
context of idealized or exclusive motherhood in nations such as Australia, the UK and USA, and drawing
Available online 9 November 2016
on conceptual work concerned with connecting the cultural and corporeal through thinking about place,
I explore two instances of breastfeeding distress: pain and inauthenticity. In both of these contexts
Keywords:
Breastfeeding
women battle with the shameful fallout of being unable to perform what Rebecca Kukla describes as
Distress ‘proximate mothering’, exemplified in the figure of the breastfeeding mother exclusively able to latch her
Pain baby directly to her breasts. As I discuss, women's experiences of extreme pain during breastfeeding and
Inauthenticity their use of alternative ‘inauthentic’ modes of feeding (such as bottled pumped breastmilk or formula)
Failure shatter their expectations of living the ideal of extended maternal embodiment. Also emerging through
these distressing experiences, however, is a potentially resilient awareness of the inherently misshapen
nature of motherhood which always overflows its idealized state.
© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Preamble: breast-led research
I became intrigued with the lived dynamics of breastfeeding
struggle after being thoroughly immersed in the world of breast-
feeding remedies and lactation support as a mother-patient (for
reflections on this, see Robinson, 2015). From the birth of my first
child in 2008 to my third in 2014, the grief and frustration at failing
to ever exclusively breastfeed slowly translated into a drive to shed
narrative light on the maternal underworld of breastfeeding
struggle. In the specific Australian context of well-serviced metro
Sydney, through the repeated non-compliance of my own breasts
and babies I stumbled on a staggeringly complex, professionalized,
well-institutionalised and densely populated zone in which all
effort is focused on supporting women in meeting their varied
breastfeeding goals. To find that such an extensive apparatus
existed to support breastfeeding was both shocking and comforting
e comforting because it was clear there were a lot of women who,
like me, needed a lot of help to establish and maintain
E-mail addresses: c.robinson@uts.edu.au, catheriner@anglicare-tas.org.au.
1
Present address: Social Action and Research Centre, Anglicare Tasmania, GPO
1620 Hobart, Tasmania, Australia 7001.
breastfeeding, and shocking because of the ghostly ways in which
this thriving breastfeeding support industry so quietly shadows the
simplified broadcast of ‘breast is best’.
As both a distressed mother and academic researcher it was
difficult to find lived accounts of what exactly brought women into
this zone of struggle and support, of what it was like, of how they
and their babies survived, and of how they experienced and made
sense of the clash between the unthinking expectation to breast-
feed and the surprising corporeal and emotional mess this could
end in. I developed a great hunger, as the women who took part in
my eventual research likewise reported, to encounter alternative
narratives of breastfeeding where anger, disappointment, fear,
intense pain, struggle, failure, deep sadness and an enormous
corporeal workload were vocalized, nutted out, engaged with front
and centre. Further, I knew both from my own experiences and
from emerging research that, in the current neo-liberal context of
‘total motherhood’ (Wolf, 2011), the experience of breastfeeding
failure was suddenly crystalising into a highly politicised flashpoint
through which to both reveal and challenge unrealistic notions of
motherhood and a lack of grounded engagement with daily
maternal practice and struggle.
As a result, in 2014, using a modest internal grant, I undertook to
collect and thematically analyse other women's narratives of

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2016.09.008
1755-4586/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
42 C. Robinson / Emotion, Space and Society 26 (2018) 41e48
breastfeeding distress.2 My focus was on the experiences of women
who wanted to exclusively breastfeed but who unexpectedly faced
difficulties in doing so. I wanted to know how this difficulty was
experienced and what significance this difficulty had in women's
lives. In the broad tradition of narrative inquiry, my aim in working
with other women's breastfeeding narratives was to read these as
personal materializations of broader social and cultural dynamics.
This is an analytical drive to sense the fleshings out of the socio-
cultural world and to also trace what rifts and ripples in this
world stubborn flesh itself triggers.
Working in eastern and inner-city Sydney with the support of
staff in eight public Early Childhood and Family Health Centres, a
public hospital-based parenting group and public lactation support
service, I recruited 22 women willing to story their difficult
breastfeeding journeys.3 These women voluntarily made contact
with me to register interest in sharing their breastfeeding narra-
tives after they picked up fliers or saw posters detailing the
research, heard my short presentation about the project at general
parenting groups or were given fliers about the project by breast-
feeding support professionals or other mothers. I mostly met with
women in their own homes or sometimes at their local cafe
and,
reflecting the dominant, inner-eastern Sydney demographic, all
were well-educated with well-established professional lives. All of
the women were aged 30e42 and all had babies under 12 months
old at the time of the interview. All but three were first time
mothers; three second-time mothers participated but focused on
their breastfeeding experiences with their now older (between
three and four years old) first child. I recorded women's stories with
many talking for several hours. All received a full transcript of our
conversations for their records or to provide corrections and
additions.
In this article, my general aim is to give place to the experiences
of breastfeeding distress which emerged during this research. I
mean this both in terms of arguing for the social importance of
narratives of unsuccessful breastfeeding and in terms of demon-
strating the value of thinking about the spatial dynamics which
underpin breastfeeding distress. In bringing together my interests
in place, the lived body and complex feelings of distress, I
contribute to valuable work within cultural geography which pre-
dominantly focuses on the transgressive maternal body and
breastfeeding and public space (see for example Boyer, 2011, 2012;
Lane, 2014; Longhurst, 2008; Mahon-Daly and Andrews, 2002) and
within midwifery, public health and health sociology which offers a
growing critique of simplistic breastfeeding advocacy and growing
engagement with damaging experiences of guilt and shame
emerging in a general climate of intensive motherhood (see for
example, Thomson et al., 2015; Groleau and Sibeko, 2012; Lee,
2007; Schmied et al., 2001; Taylor and Wallace, 2012; Williams
et al., 2012).
Whilst I find the recent focus on breastfeeding and shame
particularly productive (see Robinson, 2015), in this article my
concern is to empirically chart a profound distress triggered by
ruptures to the very specific and cannonised body-geography of
mother and infant e described by Rebecca Kukla (2005) as that of
the fetishised proximity of the infant to the maternal breast. As will
be discussed, the breastfeeding distress I focus on here also
emerges within a broader socio-spatial context of ‘total
2
This research was supported during 2014 under the University of Technology
Sydney (UTS) Research Re-establishment Grant Scheme, for UTS staff with signifi-
cant caring responsibilities.
3
Ethics approval was granted through the Sydney Children's Hospital Network
Human Research Ethics Committee and ratified by the UTS Human Research Ethics
Committee. Further access requests were granted by the health services supporting
dissemination of project information to potential participants.
motherhood’ (Wolf, 2011) and within privileged, white, middle-
class motherhood with which the principles of total motherhood
most closely align. I will argue that it is the particular coalescence of
these corporeal and sociospatial geographies which works to frame
and maximize feelings of maternal distress e including grief, loss,
shame and failure. As such, this research can be understood as a
micro case study of how notions of the ideal proximate mother-
hood Kukla outlines are currently being socio-culturally amplified
and with deep effect on maternal feelings, practices and identities.
Responding to Schmied and Barclay's (1999: 325) still pertinent
observation about the rarity of depth accounts of breastfeeding
distress and informed by accounts of the dominant context of
idealized or exclusive motherhood in nations such as Australia, the
UK and USA, I explore two instances of breastfeeding distress: pain
and inauthenticity. As I discuss below, women's experiences of
extreme pain during breastfeeding and their use of alternative
‘inauthentic’ modes of feeding (such as pumped breastmilk or
formula) shatter their expectations of living the ideal of extended
maternal embodiment, the form of relational embodiment through
which the psychological bonding of mother and infant is imagined
to take place.
This research confirms and extends that of Schmied and Lupton
(2001) which largely captured successfully breastfeeding women's
distress at the unexpected, negative feelings breastfeeding pro-
duced and their resultant sense of failing to reproduce an
‘authentic’ maternal identity. In focusing specifically on women's
unexpected struggles to even establish breastfeeding and on their
stricken experiences of using alternative feeding methods, this
study further broadens understanding of how breastfeeding
distress pervades the practice of early motherhood. Similarly
building on the seminal work of Schmied and Barclay (1999), it also
points to the troubling experiential extremes of breastfeeding pain
and failure, exploring the profound ‘existential’ (Palme
r et al., 2012)
distress framed for mothers in which they imagine themselves as at
best, disturbingly distanced mothers, and at worst, as abandoning
their infants all together. Through the lens of emotional geography,
however, the non-compliant, distressed maternal body can be seen
to productively offer a critique of the newly intensified landscape of
disembodied, fetishised motherhood which informs it. This is a
critique that is hurtfully yet powerfully worked-up through the felt
experiences of some but one which arguably has potential value for
all mothers.
2. The call to breastfeed and maternal makeover
Perhaps the most important change to maternal ideology in the
neo-liberal Anglophone world is the complete incorporation of
breastfeeding into expected performances of motherhood. As
recent literature convincingly establishes, the call to breastfeed has
currently taken a totalizing turn with Sheehan and Schmied (2011:
55) arguing for example, that ‘in Australia there is now a well-
constructed cultural imperative to breastfeed’. Whatever ‘re-
sistances’ were once celebrated about the risky, exposed, unpre-
dictable yet tantilising leakiness of breastfeeding breasts have well
and truly been rationalized and depoliticized by the scientific and
moral call to breastfeed. Whilst the ideological absorption of
breastfeeding is certainly ahead of its practical acceptance in many
places (for further discussion of this conflict see Groleau and
Sibeko, 2012; Boyer, this volume), within white, middle class
Australia taking time and space to breastfeed, especially in public, is
explained, justified and proudly celebrated with reference to a
moral, medical imperative and right to feed.
Such an imperative to breastfeed, Joan Wolf (2011) argues, is
framed by the emergence of a form of ‘total motherhood’ in which
mothers are held responsible for the complete risk-management of
 C. Robinson / Emotion, Space and Society 26 (2018) 41e48
their own and their infants' bodies. This is a style of mothering
which requires proximity, monitoring and information gathering,
and which emphasizes the role of personal choice. In this context,
breastfeeding becomes a widely relevant venue through which
contemporary anxieties about general health risks and healthy
choices play out, with extraordinary public pressure being brought
to bear on mothers to mobilize scientifically evidenced best-
practice in their feeding. Under conditions of total motherhood,
the total responsibility for doing this falls to individual mothers
with attention turned away from structural health inequalities and
economic and cultural constraints. In the place of a maternal body
striated by multiple responsibilities and social barriers, arising in
the era of total motherhood is the figure of the privatized, rational,
instrumental maternal body-subject (Baker, 2014: 170; Smyth,
2012: 185) who always can and must simply ‘do the right thing’
and choose breastfeeding exclusively. Here personal morality
powerfully melds with risk-management such that the breast-
feeding mother is unquestionably the good mother who not only
knows that breast is best and but who is prepared to make every
sacrifice to ensure breastmilk is what her infant receives.
In this way, it can be argued that breastfeeding aligns with the
broader self-transformative work demanded of the neoliberal
subject and becomes a contemporary mode of individualized body-
work and health risk management par excellence. Under neo-
liberalism, breastfeeding emerges as vital symbolic corporeal cap-
ital and absolutely vital to the production of a personal maternal
identity understood as successful. The performance of breastfeed-
ing can be understood to be about the specific scientific concern to
give babies optimal nutrition but more broadly about corporally
demonstrating commitment to being the kind of mother who aims
to reach breastfeeding benchmarks. This is a mother who certainly
has the health of her child at the centre of maternal practice but
who also has the symbolic mother at the centre of her own
maternal identity.
As a challenging and involved corporal skill involving bodily
mastery, and along with all of its associated maximizing consumer
paraphernalia, breastfeeding can become read as a strong symbolic,
bodily demonstration of post-feminist ‘empowered motherhood’
(Baker, 2014: 177). As Lane (2014: 201) argues, ‘breastfeeding in
effect works to class the good mother’ (see also Blum, 1999) and is
absorbed into the corporeal mode of the ‘aspirational’ ‘yummy
mummy’ who must juggle the requirements of intensive and ‘chic’
mothering (Baker, 2014: 177). This is a context which potentially
underscored the intense breastfeeding pressure, investment, and
distress experienced by the mothers taking part in this research.
Successfully establishing and maintaining breastfeeding has
arguably become a woman's ultimate maternal makeover, a
healthful body-project and ‘class-enhancing practice(s)’ (Blum,
1999: 188). The growth of a specifically maternal instance of
broader ‘makeover culture’ (see Jones, 2008) supports breastfeed-
ing as important transformative work. Again, this is a maternal
makeover culture largely available only to middle class mothers
who have the educational and financial means to engage with it.
Undertaking extensive research on breastfeeding, for example, was
discussed by many women, as was accessing both private and
public birth and breastfeeding classes prior to giving birth. Their
immersion in detailed information arguing for the physiological
and emotional benefits of breastfeeding predetermined it as a non-
negotiable, expected component of their future mothering.
Further, the breastfeeding makeover is furnished by all manner
of expensive consumer and fashion products special to the
breastfeeding body. Women prepared for breastfeeding by buying
expensive nursing bras and singlets designed to be seen, breast-
feeding clothing (including gym-wear), comfort cushions, footrests
and armchairs. Whilst feeding they used phone applications for
43
tracking and timing feeds, bought specially designed breastfeeding
teas, snacks and herbal and prescription supplements, and one
woman discussed her interest in breast surgery to aide the return of
pre-maternal breasts when their feeding life was finished.4
Most importantly, breastfeeding's needed time and space as
specific middle class affordances mean that it is middle class
women who have the capacity to forego paid work, access both
paid and unpaid maternity leave, and focus on developing this
tricky bodily competency e commonly understood as taking up to
12 weeks to properly establish e in the privacy, safety and comfort
of their own homes. Likewise, in the context of breastfeeding
struggle, it is middle class women who have the social and financial
means to access and buy in professional support and assistance
where this is needed. As women discussed, this involved booking
private rooms in public and private hospitals during the critical
post-birth phase of breastfeeding initiation, making appointments
with pediatricians, and the private hiring of lactation consultants
and mothercraft nurses who visited mothers in their own homes.
In Australia, breastfeeding is a practice specifically afforded and
aspired to by wealthier women but promoted as essential and
accessible for all women. Thus middle class women are favourably
positioned in relation to established breastfeeding norms and
arguably seek to access the benefits of social status which flow from
this.5 Whether or not Australian mothers actually enjoy the physical
experience of breastfeeding e and in fact research suggests that a
good proportion do not (see for example, Schmied and Barclay,
1999) e it plays an important role as a site of personal achieve-
ment and as a productive and encompassing symbol of trans-
formed subjectivity and of maternal style. Who doesn't want to be
understood as the kind of mother who is risk-aware, self-sacri-
ficing, disciplined, baby-centered and physically capable?
3. Pain and the precarious breast
As discussed above, for Kukla (2005: 162), the contemporary call
to make motherhood so specifically through exclusive, direct
breastfeeding remains dangerously structured by a ‘dichotomous
spatial logic of proximity and distance’. The fetishising of breast-
feeding as the key or even only venue of authentic infant-maternal
connectedness positions all other infant-maternal contact as a form
of separated and artificial interaction (Kukla, 2005: 162). This
stigmatizing spatial logic and the broader embeddedness of
breastfeeding as ‘trope’ of ‘risk culture’ (Wolf, 2011: xiiiexiv)
combine to produce a paralyzing maternal landscape in which the
effects of not breastfeeding creates social and emotional risks for
women. If, ideologically, breastfeeding is the route through which to
make oneself into a mother, if breastfeeding is not about what you
want to do but about who you want to be, then the stakes have
never been higher for the successful achievement of breastfeeding.
Not only are women expected to negotiate breastfeeding as an
ideologically individualized practice severed from its social context
however, they must also negotiate breastfeeding as an ideologically
instrumentalised practice severed from its corporeal context. That is,
as Lisa Smyth (2012: 189) argues, it seems assumed in breast-
feeding promotion ‘that maternal and infant bodies can be simply
instrumentalised, in pursuit of the twin goals of health enhance-
ment and strong emotional bonding’. This is to ignore the
4
See Nash (2012) for a discussion of ‘yummy mummy’ embodiment in
pregnancy.
5
Alternatively ambivalence and opposition can mark feeding experiences for
non-white, non-privileged women, who for a myriad of reasons, find breastfeeding
relatively inaccessible, unsupported, unnecessary and incompatible with complex
lives (see for example, Blum, 1999; Kaufman et al., 2010).
44 C. Robinson / Emotion, Space and Society 26 (2018) 41e48
unpredictable and often uncontrollable character of embodied ac-
tion (Smyth, 2012: 189), to ignore the realities and imperfections of
lived maternal and infant flesh.
Thus, for the socially well-placed and supported middle class
participants in my research, the first sign of impending breast-
feeding trouble was encountered not through experiencing social
or cultural barriers to breastfeeding but through experiencing
corporeal barriers e in particular, intense and enduring pain. In the
context of pain, the body rears up as a pervasive, thematised, ‘alien
presence’ (Leder, 1990: 76) obstructing the expected experience of
seamless breastfeeding. Interestingly, whilst women commonly
described feeling prepared for pain and unforeseen disruptions in
birth there were rarely expectations that breastfeeding could or
would be disrupted:
Virginia: I didn't think it was ever an option to not breastfeed, it
was just always e I was just supposed to do this….Yeah, that's
kind of, yeah, it's really weird, because with giving birth I had to
have e if I need the caesarean I need the caesarean, I'm not going
to e that was just up to whatever happens, happens…But with
the breastfeeding, I was just, like, that's it. It's going to happen.6
Ivy: My obstetrician said to me, “Do you have a [birth] plan?”
and I'm very much of the view that…you're better off not having
a plan and just going with whatever works and whatever gives
you a healthy baby….But I think that if I couldn't breastfeed I
would feel that I'm not living up to your end of the bargain kind
of thing, because there is so much saying that breastfeeding is
the way to go.
Unlike birth, breastfeeding seemed largely conceptualised by
participants as an unproblematic personal choice, with a few, like
Sara below, reflecting on their ignorance prior to having breast-
feeding problems themselves.
Sara:…I was completely ignorant about breastfeeding. So I
thought you put the baby on your breast and it breastfed and
that was that…So I thought that women that said they didn't
breastfeed was a choice to, not because they were encountering
problems…also I thought maybe women's nipples cracked
because they were unhealthy or they didn't look after their skin.
Thus severe pain was for most a completely unexpected prob-
lem in breastfeeding and also an unexpected physical experience e
a doubled shock that ‘knocked me sideways’, as one participant,
Rebecca, described. Some participants connected breastfeeding
pain to the pain of childbirth e as an accepted and understood
experience and symbolic measure of extreme pain e whether or
not they themselves had experienced vaginal childbirth. Indeed
some women described breastfeeding pain as more painful than
childbirth because of its repetition and because of the ongoing
stress of constantly anticipating and managing pain:
Rose: …breastfeeding naturally is not natural….I would like it if
the midwives had been a bit more supportive that yes, it can be
worse than birth. I would give birth once a week rather than go
through that again.
Janice: It's the worst thing ever. I rate that worse than childbirth.
Others described physical injuries such as nipple damage and
recurring breast infection (requiring hospitalization for two
6
All participants have been assigned pseudonyms to help preserve
confidentiality.
women) and tried to capture the physical intensity of their pain:
Katherine: The right nipple completely burst open so it was
cracked and bleeding…it wasn't a supply issue, it was just
actually the pain and trying to get my nipple to heal which was
pretty, it was pretty disgusting and you can see the scar actu-
ally…because I lost a big chunk of the actual nipple came off.
Brenda: I mean, I couldn't stop myself from screaming when I
put him on. They'd [midwives] say “Just relax because you'll
disturb the baby. If he thinks that you're upset, then he's going
to be upset.” And I'm like, well, I can't. You have to give me
something to bite down on to stop me from screaming. So we'd
get out the Tramadol, just before I had to do it…
For Brenda, extreme pain was associated with her (in the end,
successful) attempts to breastfeed with inverted nipples. For all
other women, however, there was no solely identifiable cause of
pain, though some suffered recurrent mastitis (breast infection)
and had babies later diagnosed with tongue and lip ties which
restricted their ability to attach comfortably on their mothers'
breasts. Women found themselves negotiating this difficult-to-
diagnose pain with bewilderment. Several described breastfeed-
ing struggle as the first major ‘failure’ encountered in their lives and
one which seemed impervious to their ever increasing efforts to
improve it. Along with little help-seeking experience or knowledge,
an underlying expectation that breastfeeding would happen
‘naturally’ also encouraged a reticence to ask for help. As Elizabeth
observed, ‘I was not prepared for the struggle of breastfeeding…I
didn't think it was supposed to be hard and I didn't think I was
supposed to need help’.
Not only did women have to manage being in pain they also had
to manage the emotional conflict of experiencing their precious
infants as inflictors of pain. Many women described feelings of
terror of their pain, terror of their infants, and a deep dread of
impending feeds:
Tamlin: I'm like, oh my God, she was like a devil, kind of sucked
the life out of me and hurt me, and I was in so much pain…And
then this weird fight with her to put her on the breast, like, no I
can't, not yet, not yet, not yet… Just simple little things like
picking her up was painful, and like feeding her was painful…I
know I needed to concentrate on her, but I couldn't…So as soon
as she'd finish I'd put her down…I couldn't believe you could
still feed through that pain, because sometimes when she would
wake up to feed, I'd get so anxious about hearing her waking up,
because I knew that I'd have to feed her. And I just kind of fro-
ze….I was just like, I don't want her to get up, please stop crying,
kind of thing, because I knew that I'd have to feed her.
As Patricia described, experiencing dread at feeding her baby
destroyed the ideal image of a special, privately shared maternal-
infant connection at the breast, an image powerfully passed
down to her by her own mother:
Patricia: I'd watched the clock [crying], yeah, and dread every
feed, which is not what like my idea of breastfeeding was e is
really natural thing, that'd I have happy hormones and she'd
have happy hormones and Mum had told me stories about when
she fed me and how she had really enjoyed that time. She said
she remembers getting up in the early morning and looking at
me and I'd look at her and she just remembers it being a really,
beautiful, beautiful thing. And that's what I was looking forward
to. And here I was instead, looking at my baby and looking at the
clock and thinking, oh shit, in 30 minutes I have to try and feed
 C. Robinson / Emotion, Space and Society 26 (2018) 41e48
you again [crying]. Or she'd be asleep and they'd tell me to wake
her every two or three hours to feed her, and I just think God,
she's like, I wanted her to sleep for as long as she possibly can.
In such pain, the maternal body itself blocks the formation of a
‘one-body state’ (Leder, 1990: 163) which the seamless breast-
feeding experience may be understood to involve. Pain, according
to Leder (1990: 75e77), effects a distancing of the body from
oneself and from others e a ‘spatiotemporal constriction’ e and
exerts an urgent, encompassing and distracting call for attention
now. For Tamlin, in the context of pain, breastfeeding was emptied
of embodied meaning and became a problem which e like many
other participants e she endlessly sought to resolve:
Tamlin: …I was just really a mess. I think because instead of
focusing on her, on the baby, on being a mum, which I thought
would be more like settling and soothing and holding her and
being with and e it was just about breastfeeding, and it was just
like, oh, just sick of it, just sick of talking about it, sick of reading
about it.
For Rebecca, who could not even bear to have clothing touch her
breasts, breastfeeding pain similarly became consuming, dis-
orienting and isolating:
Rebecca: That horrendous pain continued for six weeks. So that
was six weeks where I couldn't leave the house and it was tricky
to have visitors. I mean, I would get dressed for visitors. But I
also found it so hard to communicate with friends e I just, I also
thought I was doing something so wrong. I felt like a - why can't
I sort this out? And it also meant that you couldn't e there were
so many e the first six weeks there were so many things to
adjust to, like how to use the stroller and how to tie, just all
these minor things and just sleeping and so there were all these
practical, technical things I thought I was getting so behind on
because I was so completely overwhelmed by the pain factor. I
was taking paracetamol, I think, every four hours for the pain.
As Schmied and Barclary (1999: 331) similarly discuss, for many
participants, pain centrally effected a distressing context of mental
and physical distance e women were forced to withdraw from
others, including from their babies, and focus on resolving their
pain. Women described their endless engagement in the search for
ways to end their pain through using pain medication, antibiotics,
soothing creams, gel adhesives for damaged nipples, heat and ice
and through seeking advice on, and assessments of, their infant
attachment technique. They nonetheless had to continue to deal
with the highly pressured and time-sensitive need to feed their
babies and maintain their breastmilk supply.
As I now move on to discuss, along with the daily workload of
countless visits and phonecalls to all manner of medical pro-
fessionals (midwives, general practitioners, obstetricians, pedia-
tricians, pediatric surgeons, psychologists), allied health
professionals (physiotherapists, chiropractors, naturopaths, herb-
alists), breastfeeding professionals (early childhood nurses, lacta-
tion consultants, Australian Breastfeeding Association consultants)
and time spent on internet research and online forum discussion,
women had to quickly learn and implement often multiple and
always changing alternative feeding strategies. Thus because of
women's powerful association of breastfeeding and good mother-
hood, the mentally and physically distancing effects of breast-
feeding pain triggered what was for some a more painful scenario in
which they faced not just the painful precarity of breastfeeding, but
the precarity of their own maternal selfhood.
45
4. ‘That's just not who I wanted to be’: inauthentic mothering
The threatening experience of pain had serious consequences
for women's breastfeeding journeys, their performance of proxi-
mate motherhood, and their related self-concepts as successful and
‘good’ mothers able to care for and bond with their infants. Women
endured the personal misery and social isolation of physical pain
and the emotional pain of feeling physically distanced from their
babies whom they struggled to hold, let alone feed. Lauren, for
example, emphasized the emotional pain of what she saw as her
loss of the ‘only connection’ between mother and baby in
breastfeeding:
Lauren: I love the bond…and probably that was more important
to me than thinking well, I'd be getting the nutrients, the im-
munity and so on…it was that closeness that I e that was
hurtful, not having that was hurting me more…You know that
this is the only connection to you and your baby, and it's not
working.
Importantly, however, women also expressed profound distress
about the ways in which they saw themselves being distanced from
motherhood itself. Distance in their breastfeeding relationships
translated for most women into a distanced, flawed or ‘weak’
achievement of what they understood as their maternal role. Many
women discussed feelings of failure, of ‘failed bodies’ as Blum
(1999: 115) also discusses, of letting themselves, their babies and
even wider families down. For some women this failure translated
into a sense of shame as researchers have elsewhere discussed (see
discussion of some of this work in Robinson, 2015).
The overriding emotions emerging for women taking part in this
research, however, were grief and sorrow closely related to a dis-
turbing self-perception of being an inauthentic mother. For
example, like Lauren, Brenda, who continued to breastfeed through
extraordinary pain but also used nipple shields and formula top-
ups, mourned her disrupted ability to perform breastfeeding as a
practice which she believed to uniquely constitute her mothering
identity:
Brenda: Because you are so isolated. Even though there's all
these other mums around you who are doing the same thing,
until you get into one these mums' groups and start talking to
more people, which is not until about eight weeks, that's, that's
a long time to wait for any kind of affirmation that you're not the
only one. Because by that point you really feel like you're going
crazy, and what's wrong with me, I'm failing, like I'm failing it
you know, being a mother. Because this is the only thing that
you can do for him that no one else can do, is breastfeeding.
Everything else can be done by someone else. This is the one
thing that you can give them, and I can't do it. So that's just
devastating.
Again, as Kukla argues, the naturalized and fetishised shrinkage
of the special maternal role to direct, exclusive breastfeeding e ‘the
one thing’, ‘the only connection’ e sets women up for intense ex-
periences of grief where breastfeeding is difficult or not possible
and elides the full range of practices of care and connection that
constitute mothering. In a current social context in which breast-
feeding is ‘best’ and ‘close’ mothering, and in which breastfeeding is
not breastfeeding if anyone or anything other than the biological
mother delivers milk into the baby's mouth through her own
breasts, then precarious breastfeeding will inevitably lead to pre-
carious motherhood.
Notably as Brenda's powerful comments reveal, grief over
46 C. Robinson / Emotion, Space and Society 26 (2018) 41e48
breastfeeding pain and disruption was focused on a perceived loss
of, or damage to maternal identity rather than on the perception of
real risk e for example, of ill-health or starvation e for their infants:
Brenda: I just, I felt very strongly like I was failing. Failing at
being a mother, and definitely failing at breastfeeding obviously.
But also at being a mother, because it was tied so closely with
idea of, like all the pictures that you see on all the posters
everywhere to promote…and you know, they've done a good
job of bringing breastfeeding back from the ‘70s and all…but the
promotion of it is so strong that you really feel like that’s the
only way to go. So I definitely felt like I wasn't achieving that…
Yeah, you really feel like you just e you're just not any good at
being a mother.
Whilst not all women taking part in this project experienced
pain as the primary source of breastfeeding struggle, the multiple
distancing effects of pain were mirrored in other struggles dis-
cussed, such as problems with milk supply, nipple attachment and
baby weight gain in the contexts of premature and traumatic births
and infant admission to neo-natal care. Whether or not they
managed to fight through or resolve pain-related or attachment
and supply problems, many women described wrestling with
profoundly distressing feelings of failure in their mothering. In
particular, feelings of failure and inauthenticity were strongly
connected to the alternative feeding methods they were forced to
employ in the context of temporary or lasting non-exclusive
breastfeeding. For example, in their use of nipple shields (a sili-
cone sheath attached to protect the nipple during breastfeeding),
expressed (by hand or pump) breastmilk, and in particular formula
milk, women remained deeply troubled about their identities as
mothers and women. Elizabeth, for example, equated bottle-
feeding with not really being a mother:
Elizabeth: I went though, I got the natural birth I wanted…got a
perfectly healthy baby now I can't feed her, what sort of a
woman am I? And so that e for health reasons and feeling like a
failure otherwise is really what pushed me to keep going…If I
was bottle feeding, how would I create that bond? I'm not really
a mother if I'm just bottlefeeding.
Natalie, who was breastfeeding and feeding with pumped
breastmilk and formula, located feelings of inauthenticity in her
own body and described her sense of failing to corporeally mate-
rialize herself as ‘a breastfeeding person’:
Natalie: I feel different than I thought I would ‘cause I don't have
those e I was always saying, oh [husband], when my milk comes
in, imagine how big my boobs are going to be. And you go and buy
breastfeeding bras before, and it's like well, they're all a bloody
waste of money weren't they? I just feel almost like my body's,
apart from the flabby tummy, is almost like it was before I was
pregnant. It doesn't really feel like a breastfeeding person…I said
to [husband], I said, ‘my body's failed me.’…It's just this innate
sadness and feeling that my body's failed me I suppose.
For Natalie, the lack of the ‘veiny breasts’ of her fully breast-
feeding friends was made even more painful by her use of ‘un-
natural’ technologies to support her feeding. As many other women
also described, alternative feeding methods such as the use of
bottles, pumping breastmilk and the use of supply lines were not
only understood as distanced forms of feeding but also e because of
their related workload e as disrupting their ability to be physically
present to spend time with their babies:
Natalie:…the way that in the special care nursery that they
showed me how to feed him was very far away from my body
and sort of supporting his neck, holding his neck like that and
sitting him on my lap and putting the bottle here. So it wasn't
even close to my body, no skin on skin or closeness between us.
And I would get maybe jealous of my husband if I'm sitting on
the pump and he's feeding [baby] and doing all the nice things.
I'd sit on the pump and then I'd get the bloody syringe out and
taking colostrum out and then I'd go and wash the bottles up…
and he's got the nice cuddles.
Similarly to Natalie, Rose, who was exclusively bottlefeeding her
baby expressed breastmilk, positioned expressing as failing to
deliver closeness and bonding, despite also acknowledging that
breastfeeding was not the only way to bond with a baby:
Rose:…I still felt a huge amount of guilt that he wasn't getting e
that I wasn't going to bond with him because I was expressing…
Very like, failure, guilt; guilt really I think would be the main
feeling. That he's missing out, when I started the expressing,
that he's missing out on that bonding, which is crazy because
there's lots of other ways you can bond with the baby besides
breastfeeding [laughs].
Even worse for Natalie, however, was her experience of using a
supply line in which her baby was supplemented through a thin
feeding tube taped near her nipple which, when sucked on by her
baby, delivered milk from a bag of formula hung around her neck:
It made me feel more of a failure. It felt really inhuman and very,
I don't know, I felt e there's no way I'd do this outside, I wouldn't
want people to look at me and think God, what's going on there?
It just felt pretty, I don't know, yuck to me. Even the thought of a
nipple shield I thought oh, that just feels really weird too….-
Mechanical almost.
In this case, Natalie distressingly points to an experience of not
only being undermined as a mother and woman but as a human.
Whilst it might be expected that such a physically involving device
as a supply line may provoke such distress, it was also clear that
most women who had to resort to formula likewise understood this
in turns of extreme failure and extreme artificiality. Some partici-
pants made intensely negative associations between formula and
other stigmatized substances such as street drugs and cigarettes,
with chemicals such as chemotherapy drugs and poison, and also
with a generalized notion of ‘evil’. Formula use was also associated
with feelings of deep devastation and grief:
Petra: You know, I had this vision of me being able to breastfeed
and this is what I really wanted. I invested so much time into
researching and reading about breastfeeding and being pre-
pared and doing courses and everything else and what you're
telling me now that I have to give formula? And I was devastated
e devastated in hospital e crying and I just could not believe it…
When I started feeding her formula, the first e I don't know how
many bottles e the first dozen bottles, I was giving her top-up
formula, I was crying and saying, “I'm sorry I failed, I'm sorry I
failed you” and just e I was miserable, I was so miserable. Yeah,
just remembering me now is making me feel miserable…It was
down to feeling like a failure and letting her down and not
giving her the breastmilk, the benefits of breastmilk.
Whilst women clearly had concerns about the artificial and
possibly risky nature of formula, what appeared to much more
 C. Robinson / Emotion, Space and Society 26 (2018) 41e48
fundamentally drive their experiences of distress was the way in
which the use of formula disrupted their self-understanding. For
example, as Bia explained, it was not being able to breastfeed and
deliver the ‘best’ that was more distressing than actually feeding
with formula:
Interviewer: …and what is it about formula do you think that
could have upset you so much had you had to use it?
Bia: It wouldn't be the fact of using formula, it would have been
the fact that you couldn't breastfeed if that makes sense. So it
wouldn't be the fact that I had to give my baby something else,
it'd be the fact that I couldn't give him what I knew and what is
drummed into you more and more and more about why, and it's
the best, it's the best…
This was similar to Natalie's thoughts about formula:
Natalie: I didn't feel guilty about e one of my friends said to me,
“Don't feel guilty about giving your child formula.” I said, “I don't
feel guilty about that.” What I felt was really upset that I couldn't
breastfeed…it's just this personal experience that I feel that's
been stripped of me…’.
Similarly to the experiences of breast pain and pumping
breastmilk, formula use was consistently and powerfully connected
with personal failure and not being able to deliver, as Katherine
described, ‘the particular style of parenting that is the breast is
best’. To be clear, formula feeding was not understood as an un-
fortunate mishap in mothering but in quite radical terms of exis-
tential failure, a failure at being a mother, and even as Natalie
briefly suggested, at being a human. So strongly did Katherine
connect breastfeeding and being a mother, that she described being
totally ‘blinded-sided’ when she struggled to deliver breastmilk:
Katherine: For me is because everything that I, you know, all the
preparedness that I'd done when I was pregnant was all about
that whole, the particular style of parenting that breast is best,
you know…We didn't have a pump, we didn't have bottles, we
didn't have anything, and so we just were blindsided by the fact
that I couldn't give him breastmilk because that was what you
should do when you're a mother…the concept of not being able
to do it was just horrific…
It was clear that many women felt deeply committed to deliv-
ering a particular ‘style’ or ‘kind’ of proximate motherhood un-
derstood as the ‘best’ and that breastfeeding was the pivot on which
this mothering identity depended. In short, women desperately
wanted to be understood and experience themselves as being good
mothers e and to be anything else was simply unthinkable. As
Patricia revealingly commented about mothers who use formula: ‘I
don't think they're bad mothers, but that's just not who I wanted to
be…I'm not a mum that has an elective C-section and gives my baby
formula because I don't want her on my breast.’. Instead, as Rebecca
argued, for her breastfeeding motherhood was ‘a nice new iden-
tity…a far more real, more authentic way of being’ that somehow
stood in opposition to perfected and hypersexualised womanhood
plastered on the front pages of glamour magazines. For Patricia,
however, in the end, her enduring commitment to battle on with
breastfeeding was neither clearly a commitment to delivering the
best for her baby nor about experiencing a more ‘real’ self-identity.
Instead her ‘breastfeeding obsession’ seemed just as likely to be
about her desperate need to embody the socially embedded ideals
of best motherhood and healthy, responsible citizenship:
47
Patricia: Like I was looking at her [baby] just thinking, God, it's
all worth it, because I love you and, you know, it's lucky you're so
adorable. And then I thought, am I doing it for you or am I doing
it for me, is this breast e how much is this breastfeeding
obsession about the best for her and how much is it about my
image and who I am as a mother, and what my family is and my
family is natural and healthy and all the rest of it. So I don't know
the answer to that. I think it's probably both, and it's all tied up
in society and what you want people to think of you…
5. ‘Why wasn't I told?’: misshapen motherhood
Maternal self-understanding, so strongly framed through fet-
ishised, breast-focused notions of maternal-infant proximity, be-
comes hugely challenged by the unwanted pain this proximity can
entail. In other contexts of breastfeeding struggle which shared the
necessitated use of alternative feeding methods, women likewise
described immense distress about not being ‘real’, proximate
mothers. Employing ideologically inferior and ‘distanced’ feeding
methods was not understood as a difficult but acceptable moth-
ering experience to move through, but as concrete evidence of
unmaterialised motherhood and thus as a global threat to women's
self-understanding as mothers. Women mourned what they
perceived as their failed achievement at motherhood, a kind of
‘existential lostness’ as Palme
r et al. (2012) describe which strik-
ingly produced profound experiences of grief and inauthenticity. As
Palme
r et al. (2012: 1) argue (and problematically naturalise),
‘mothers experience breastfeeding as a way into and a confirmation
of motherhood’, a scenario which in turn frames the fight to suc-
cessfully breastfeed as a fight for existential survival as a mother.
The bodies of infants and mothers and the fight to establish and
sustain breastfeeding cannot be usefully read, however, outside of
their sociospatial context e something which the phenomenolog-
ical approach of Palme
r et al. cannot consider. And yet this is the
deeply (in)formative context through which mothers learn to read,
articulate (or not) and give meaning to the pain and other breast-
feeding difficulties they face. Thus, to return to Kukla, the histori-
cally enduring cultural landscape of the Fetish Mother e given a
powerful neoliberal flourish through the contemporary figure of
the Total Mother e is precisely what provides a wholly encom-
passing framework only within which women can come to define
and experience breastfeeding struggle as a struggle with maternal
identity. Further, the distressing distance which women in this
research experienced as opening between their own breasts and
infants' bodies is hugely magnified in a culture fetishising infant/
maternal ‘oneness’ in which maternal/infant bonding is problem-
atically imagined as being arrived at through breastfeeding alone
(Kukla, 2005: 148e9).
Further, and to extend Kukla's thinking, I would argue that the
peculiar silence about women's breastfeeding struggles settles in a
culture which also produces the figure of the Fetish Child who must
receive the best at an invisibilised cost paid by the individual
maternal body. Thus as Patricia articulated, in the project of doing
everything it takes to establish and maintain exclusive, direct
breastfeeding, it might be that contemporary mothers are caught in
the service of two idealized figures of the Fetish Mother and the
Fetish Child e ‘am I doing it for you or am I doing it for me?’ This is a
situation in which romantic notions of bonded oneness are not
constituted in terms of the compassionate oneness Leder (1990:
162) outlines which relies on the concernful relation held between
two bodies. Instead the prioritized needs of the infant body fully
eclipse those of the maternal body such that the ‘me’ mothers seek
to be is only and always the ‘me’ that is best for ‘you’.
48 C. Robinson / Emotion, Space and Society 26 (2018) 41e48
Thus those women able to adjust to, or less emotionally
affected by the experience of breastfeeding struggle or failure
were still caught up in narratives about the risks of alternative
feeding methods and experienced a sense of letting down their
babies. Those women less concerned about the risks of alternative
feeding methods were nonetheless caught up in narratives of
maternal and corporeal self-doubt and failure. It makes sense
then that, given the erasure of the situated maternal body
through the dual cultural focus on proximity and infant risk
management, there now exists a pervasive and paradoxical moral
emphasis on breastfeeding as best for baby coupled with a
disregard for enabling social conditions under which all mothers
can breastfeed e hence the relative failure of breastfeeding pro-
motion to increase overall rates of breastfeeding in Anglophone
nations. Likewise, under these conditions, it makes sense that
women reported feeling very prepared for the corporeal stress
and unpredictability of birth but totally unprepared for pain, dif-
ficulty, and draining struggle in breastfeeding. A repeated
theme in women's narratives was the astonished and angry
question, ‘why wasn't I told?’.
Also emerging through women's narratives of breastfeeding
distress were hard fought realisations that temporary or lasting
struggle in breastfeeding was an early immersion in the brutal
realities of lived motherhood. In experiencing a struggle to mate-
rialize a perfectly assimilated bond through breastfeeding and
nonetheless experiencing a fiercely loving relation with healthy
infants, women learned the hard way that seemingly misshapen
motherhood was actually the only kind of motherhood, and
seemingly misshapen mothers are the only kind there are. As might
be expected, this was particularly evident in the reflections of the
three second-time mothers who reported a much more relaxed
approach to breastfeeding and breastfeeding problems with
consequent children. As Linda observed about her calmer moth-
ering of her second child, ‘In the end, I'm just so pleased to be a
mum.’ Over time, breastfeeding became contextualized by a
broader spectrum of relational care.
All mothers, in various ways, made calls for breastfeeding nar-
ratives to be returned to their embodied roots in women's lived
maternal bodies. Women expressed frustration at the redundant
appeal by infant-focused breastfeeding promotion to already-won
hearts and minds which left them hopelessly unprepared for the
realities of feeding using their actual breasts. The reinsertion of
maternal flesh into instrumental breastfeeding narratives requires,
however, not just an appreciation of the unpredicability of maternal
bodies but of their situated sociality. This is to do much more than
expect mothers struggling with breastfeeding to individually
‘integrate’ e with professional guidance e their feelings of guilt and
failure (Labbok, 2008: 83). At stake is precisely a rebellion against
such silencing and the progression of a more fundamental chal-
lenge to ways in which maternal bodies are imagined as ‘free’ e
socially and physically e to ‘choose’ breastfeeding. Thus what the
distressed experiences of women in this research teach is that
complex engagement with breastfeeding as an emplaced practice is
crucial to the future of breastfeeding and emotional wellbeing for
all mothers.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express deep gratitude to the women who shared
their breastfeeding and mothering journeys with me and also to the
range of health professionals working to support women who saw
value in, and supported, this project.
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