Abstract
This book, written from a Human Geography perspective, uses insights from New Materialism, feminist and Deleuzian theory to make a contribution to work around early motherhood in the social sciences, particularly its spatial, embodied and material politics.
Comprised of six short substantive chapters, and drawing on a range of qualitative research studies in the UK and the USA the book addresses the question of how early motherhood in general, and breastfeeding in particular, is experienced in particular ways in particular places. To this extent, and richly demonstrating how profoundly ‘awkward’ these experiences can be (drawing on the work of Ahmed, 2008, in particular), the book contributes to debates around ‘natureculture’ to make an argument that motherhood is best understood as a state of ‘distributed agency’ across both human and non-human forces (including, for example, the built environment, equipment or even policies and ‘affects’). In thinking about how ‘at home’ (or not) women feel in enacting practices of early motherhood, it uses theoretical concepts like ‘care-work activism’ to describe the more concerted attempts of mothers to normalise breastfeeding particularly outside of the home, through activities like ‘nurse-ins’, as well as in their everyday lives. At the same time, and looking more specifically at work/care debates, the book suggests that a pernicious ideology of ‘neoliberal motherhood’ undermines attempts to combine lactation and waged work, in the US context in particular, in correlation with its less-than-supportive welfare regime.
The book is very clearly written, and is extensively sign-posted, which means that the ‘message’ of each chapter is easy to ascertain, which also lends it to being policy relevant. One of the strengths (though arguably also one of the weaknesses) is that each chapter stands alone, in part because each largely draws on a discrete research study – whether based on sets of interviews in London and the south-east of England (2008–2016), an analysis of UK policy texts or a textual analysis of online parenting discussion groups in the USA and the UK. However, for a text committed to ‘particular places’ there is a sense that we do not really ‘get to know’ the participants or hear their voices across the length of the monograph. This is a shame, and creates a slightly dissonant feel as we move from chapter to chapter, as (ironically) differences of time and place are not elaborated on. An interview in 2008 Southampton, for example, would presumably elicit a very different sort of narrative to one in 2016 London, as there has been something of a backlash to the UK-based 2000s ‘breast is best’ policy drive in recent years.
For an academic committed to thinking through the ‘distributed agency’ of motherhood, it is also interesting that there are not more accounts from other carers of children – fathers, partners, grandparents, childcare workers or otherwise. Boyer notes early on in the book that this is a deliberate choice, to reflect that childcare remains ‘women’s work’ in both the USA and the UK. It would be interesting to see her develop this theoretical commitment in her empirical work in the future, by incorporating the accounts of, for example, partners.
Lastly, the book includes a wide-ranging literature review in the introduction, and as such is relevant to work going on in a range of disciplinary fields – most obviously geography and sociology, but also anthropology, nursing and midwifery, and the fields of gender and parenting more broadly. It did seem curious, however, that there was little attention to recent work in family studies, which calls to attention the ways in which narratives of risk have become commonplace in the framing of everyday parenting practices, and infant feeding in particular. This research, known as Parenting Culture Studies, has pointed to a growing policing of reproduction, with knock-on implications for the subjectivities of mothers, fathers and children themselves (e.g. Lee et al., 2014; Lupton, 2012). In terms of the ‘breast is best’ message, this work has been important in pointing out the problems with linking micro practices of individual women (such as breastfeeding) to macro outcomes of a social scale (such as obesity). Perhaps in part because this book takes a less critical look at policy, being more readily incorporated into an advocacy perspective, it side steps these important debates, to an extent that seems both deliberate but somewhat puzzling. Drawing on Baraitser (2009), in limiting the remit of the work to describing ‘what motherhood is like’ rather than ‘what it might mean’, this seems like something of a missed opportunity.
