MEDIO SOCIOECONÓMICO

It is possible to detect a host of utopian urges in the women’s moves to talk and

write about sustained breastfeeding. Such acts of speech and enunciation come to hold aspirations that are not dissimilar to those that the women expressed for their children in relation to the act of sustained breastfeeding (see Chapter Four). For example, whilst women aspired to children being able to speak freely, I read a related urge that women might also desire such an environment for themselves: to be able to speak with relative freedom about their experiences of sustained breastfeeding, and for their voices to be heard. Whilst women aspired to physical and emotional wellbeing for their children, frequently I read them as also desiring conditions that support maternal wellbeing, perhaps minimising the operation of guilt. In the words of one research participant, there are not many

environments that are “supportive” of mothering. Women desired connection and positive relationships for their children. So, too, they sought situations in which they and other mothers feel more supported in their breastfeeding practice, and able to reach out to one another. I do not read such utopian

desires as separate from women’s hopes for the next generation, but as

coexisting with such urges (perhaps merging with them) in an expression of aspiration for mothers as well as for children.

The practices of talking and of writing to which I refer in this chapter frequently emerge in the context of women opening up to that which sits messily and uneasily outside of idealised images of what mothering and/or breastfeeding should or could be. Such practices offer possibilities for articulating (and listening) in relation to the jettisoned other, the excluded experiences, the stutters and repetitions in mothers’ voices. I read a number of the women’s narratives as gesturing towards, albeit obliquely, a future in which such

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discursive practices impress upon the very experiences of breastfeeding itself.2 Yet the kinds of situations into which such fragments of articulation and of listening (of alternate utopian constitutions) might grow remain unclear. It is uncertain what sustained breastfeeding might ‘become’, for example, in circumstances in which the notion of child-led weaning were able to be openly (and without attack) discussed for both the aspirations it harbours (and there are many) and the difficulties (moments of abjection) some women might experience in attempting to bring it into being. Questions emerge, for example, around how such talk might impact upon feelings of maternal guilt and deficiency. For Jameson utopia “is most authentic when we cannot imagine it” (2004, p.46). To not know opens the contemporary knowing subject to moments of dissolution and of abjection. Perhaps these are also moments that provide opportunity for further discursive exploration and attentive listening, and as such constitute points from which futures might grow that are less bound by current ideologically constituted subjectivities and knowledge.

The women who participated in this research are inspirational in this respect. They often spoke of having shifted from previously not contemplating sustained breastfeeding (perhaps having considered it abject) to breastfeeding their children through and beyond toddlerhood. In this sense they spoke of having opened themselves up, time and time again, to the unthinkable; and they had frequently not stopped moving. In the words of Amanda, speaking in relation to

the idea that her child may still be breastfeeding at the age of three: “oh my

gosh, am I gonna be, am I gonna get surprised by that, [laugh] that that's who I've become, you know?” In a similar vein, Melody spoke of being influenced by attachment parenting philosophy, and of later encountering different parenting philosophies that she also found helpful as her children grew. She gestured

towards her parenting as “…just kind of, I guess, morphing into a slightly

2

The practices of articulation to which I refer, if they are to avoid the anticipated pitfalls of a new symbolic mandate, might perhaps – at times - inevitably fail. Just as there were moments when sustained breastfeeding felt impossible for some women, so too there were occasions when

Olivia, for example, didn’t find her writing practice therapeutic. And research and research

participation, of whatever varieties, are alive with their own limitations (see Chapter Two). In such a context, perhaps ‘failures’ of practices of articulation provide further opportunities in which it might be possible to work in relation to a threatening, and potentially horrifying, Other.

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different path than we were at but not always knowing how the two meet.

[laugh]”

If the lack of a planned destination feels daunting, perhaps it is useful to return

to Jameson’s sense that the most powerful encounters with utopia may indeed confront us with anxiety (2004, p.51). It may not be possible to map the future. However, perhaps it is possible to visit the anxieties of not doing in such a way that they might begin to operate differently, and with more of a hint of the utopian about them. Maybe such fears gesture towards threatening and murky borderless spaces that might gradually, and tentatively, be explored through language rather than be pushed aside and forbidden. In so far as that is the case, the work of utopia - in the realm of sustained breastfeeding and perhaps far beyond - has already begun.

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Chapter Eight.