The boob diaries: discourses of breastfeeding in 'exclusive pumping' blogs

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Coffey-Glover, L. ORCID: 0000-0002-4432-8177, 2020. The boob diaries: discourses of breastfeeding in 'exclusive pumping' blogs. Discourse, Context and Media, 38: 100446. ISSN 2211-6958

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2020.100446

Abstract

This paper uses a feminist discourse analytical approach (Sunderland, 2000, Sunderland, 2004, Lazar, 2005, Lazar, 2007) to analyse a set of online blogposts and personal webpages from 'exclusive pumpers' (EPers): women who express breastmilk as an alternative to breastfeeding and using infant formula. Using tools from evaluation and stance analysis (Hunston and Thompson, 2000, Bednarek, 2006, Myers, 2010), I examine how EPers construct opinions about exclusive pumping and breastfeeding. The analysis is centred around three interrelated discourses of exclusive pumping (that are both positively and negatively valued): (1) exclusive pumping as equivalent to breastfeeding; (2) exclusive pumping as a challenge; (3) exclusive pumping as mitigating a failure to breastfeed. This nexus of discourses can be viewed as being underpinned by an 'overarching' discourse (Sunderland 2000) of ‘exclusive pumping as abnormal’. The implications of this hegemonic, overarching discourse are discussed in relation to a constructed dichotomy of ‘breastfeeding’ versus ‘bottle feeding’. I show how this dichotomy, and the hegemonic discourse of 'EPing as abnormal'/'breast is best' serves to (re)produce discourses of normative motherhood.

Item Type:

Journal article

Publication Title:

Discourse, Context and Media

Creators:

Coffey-Glover, L.

Publisher:

Elsevier

Date:

December 2020

Volume:

ISSN: