COMPONENTE FÍSICO

The women had different understandings of what others might object to in sustained breastfeeding. This diversity perhaps suggests difficulties in articulating what are frequently unspoken ideological premises. At the points in the interviews when women talked in relation to this, they were not merely attempting to pin down the specificities of ideology. They were simultaneously grappling with how to wrap words around that which is excluded, and is therefore virtually unimaginable, in particular systems of representation: that

which is, to use Kristeva’s terminology, rendered “abject” (1982). Indeed, in

describing how they perceived others to view sustained breastfeeding and its participants, some of the women used words that are highly suggestive of abject objects: “gross”, “freaky” and “dirty” for example. Such terms designate, in varying ways, aspects that violate order and form; phenomena that threaten the (perhaps sanitized) norms upon which collective and individual stability rest.

Esther: But I did feel like it would be kind of perceived as being erm gross or not right, which is why I didn't do it in public.

Janie: … I don't want to have to feel dirty about doing what

I think's natural…

Monique: … I think people do, you know, they sort of think you're a bit freaky. [laugh]

Some of these women’s words also resonate with wider research, according to

which breastfeeding is frequently perceived as “dirty work” (Battersby, 2007, p.101) and long-term breastfeeding in particular is viewed with “disgust” or

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When speaking in more detail about how they viewed others’ perceptions of their sustained breastfeeding, some women referred to fears that others may

have around a child never stopping breastfeeding: in the words of Janie “…that he'll be feeding at eighteen like some people say.” Others perceived a related anxiety that the practice may thwart a child’s independence: “So that's sort of how it feels in the community that independence is very, is high on everyone's agenda and breastfeeding doesn't go with that…” (Allanah). The possibility of adult gratification from sustained breastfeeding was also mentioned: “that whole thing that it's something that I need …” (Allanah). Implicit in such descriptions is a sense that the mother is seen to be, in one way or another, pervading – saturating – the child who is viewed as requiring separation from the maternal body. Whilst breastfeeding in itself may not be problematic, the size and age of the child appear inappropriate for such a practice. Perhaps also, as Shaw (2004) has suggested in relation to cross nursing, the physical exchange of bodily fluids, the engulfing of body parts by another body, the fulfilment of one person’s needs through another, and in a context deemed

“inappropriate”, threatens “the coherence with which maternity is currently constructed by white, Western individualism” (p.288).

This contravention of predominant systems of representation is the factor that I interpret as rendering sustained breastfeeding abject. In this sense sustained breastfeeding is not intrinsically abject. Rather the act of breastfeeding an older child is constituted as abject in contemporary Western society because it threatens dominant ideological renditions of maternity and prevailing assumptions regarding the acquisition of individual autonomy from an early age. I draw upon Kristeva’s words to support this premise:

For abjection, when all is said and done, is the other facet of moral, religious and ideological codes on which rest the sleep of individuals and the breathing spells of societies.

Such codes are abjection’s purification and repression.

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If this is the case, abjection shakes ideology out of its “sleep”. The apparent calm of psychical or social congruity is ruptured by the visitation of unruly elements. For Kristeva, the term “horror” speaks strongly of the manifestation of abjection and in this context it is pertinent that some women chose such terminology to describe how they perceive particular others to view sustained

breastfeeding. In the words of Joanne: “… having to contend with the, the horror

or disapproval of other people hasn't really been that fun.” In the words of

Allanah, referring to the people she works with, “[t]hey’dbe horrified.”

On describing how the relatives of a friend reacted to her breastfeeding her child (then aged around two years old) Janie said “I think they were like ‘Eeww’.” She then laughed. Janie’s is a description of abjection that works as abjection itself appears to. The sound that Janie makes, that I later transcribe as “Eeww”, suggests a psychical state of aversion. And yet “Eeww” also escapes the formal codes of language, upsetting the categorisations and demarcations of syntax, grammar and vocabulary. The sound demonstrates - perhaps in ways that words cannot – that attempts to capture abjection in strings of signifiers at least partially fail. There is a physical quality to Janie’s use of sound over word that evokes a sense that the couple she is referring to may have had a visceral response to seeing her son breastfeeding. Furthermore, Janie then laughs. Whether it is in the awkwardness of the social situation of which she speaks, or in the failure of words to capture the experience of abjection that laughter erupts is perhaps irrelevant. Both of these possibilities point to an undermining of convention, the bursting through of abjection as the underbelly of codes and regulations (be they linguistic or social). And in those contexts laughter gestures towards, perhaps even serves as a means of partially releasing, the tension

produced by the violation of ‘what should be’.