PRO-BREASTFEEDING DISCOURSES AND THE CONFIGURATION OF CONTEMPORARY MOTHERHOOD
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12957/demetra.2019.43716Keywords:
Breast Feeding. Parenting. Gender Studies. Health Communication.Abstract
This essay aims to reflect on the historic role of the pro-breastfeeding discourses in the conformation of certain popular motherhood models in the contemporary Western world, a theme that has been provoking discussions in countries like England, the United States and Canada, among others. Its theoretical and methodological basis is comprised of two main fields: the first one is the Theory of Social Discourses or Semiology of Social Discourses, which, when applied to the empirical material by means of Discourse Analysis, understands the discourse as a constitutive/constituent element of social power relations; analyzes it based on its textual marks or clues; questions the privileged and naturalized meanings of said discourses, relating them to the pertaining ideologies, be they conscious or unconscious, in their conception and thinks communication as a process of negotiation of meanings between the producer and the receiver The other is Gender Studies, which questions the supposed sexual essence of the concepts of masculine and feminine, arguing that they are, in fact, immersed in the political sphere and act so as to legitimize the inequality in the distribution of power between the sexes in society. In accordance with the analysis of the official discourses that laid the foundation for this article, the contemporary pro-breastfeeding discourses corroborate, to a large extent, the conception of a mother's breasts, body and subjectivity as objects of external regulations, making the woman a means of providing the best food to the child. In this way, they compete for the conformation and conservation of certain motherhood models in force today, which establish a record of the social zeitgeist about what it means to be a "good mother".
DOI: 10.12957/demetra.2019.43716
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