‘At the breast is best?’ A corpus-informed feminist critical discourse analysis of the marginalisation of expressing human milk in online infant feeding promotional discourse

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Coffey-Glover, L ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4432-8177 and Howard, V, 2023. ‘At the breast is best?’ A corpus-informed feminist critical discourse analysis of the marginalisation of expressing human milk in online infant feeding promotional discourse. Discourse, Context and Media, 55: 100730. ISSN 2211-6958

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2023.100730

Abstract

Existing feminist analyses of infant feeding practices have examined the promotion of long-term exclusive direct breastfeeding (DBF) as symbolic of “total motherhood” (Wolf 2011), where formula feeding is framed in contrast as “risky” (Murphy 1999, 2000; Brookes et al. 2016; Woollard 2018). Discourses of expressing human milk (EHM), and their discriminatory potential, are currently under-researched. However, researchers note that rhetorical strategies that exclude EHM as a form of breastfeeding can reinforce the perceived normalcy of feeding at the breast and relegate breastmilk expression and formula feeding as “deviant” practices (Murphy 1999; Hunt and Thomson 2017; Rasmussen et al. 2017; [author] 2020; Anders et al. 2022).
To that end, this study integrates Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (Lazar 2005, 2007, 2014) and corpus linguistics (e.g. Baker 2014) to examine discourses of breastmilk expression (EHM) in a corpus of online infant feeding promotional literature taken from seven organisations, with a particular focus on the largest two organisations in the corpus: La Leche League Great Britain (LLLGB) and the UK National Health Service (NHS). The analysis reveals language choices that marginalise EHM in servitude of “breast is best” (Murphy 1999), and specifically reinforce the message that ‘at the breast is best’. We show how EHM is marginalised in the texts via representations of exclusive DBF as the ‘gold standard’ of infant feeding, recirculating discourses of “total motherhood” (Wolf 2011), “natural mothering” (Bobel 2003) and “intensive motherhood” (Hays 1996).

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Discourse, Context and Media
Creators:	Coffey-Glover, L. and Howard, V.
Publisher:	Elsevier
Date:	October 2023
Volume:	55
ISSN:	2211-6958
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1016/j.dcm.2023.100730 DOI 1871150 Other
Divisions:	Schools > School of Arts and Humanities
Record created by:	Jonathan Gallacher
Date Added:	24 Apr 2024 13:02
Last Modified:	01 Oct 2024 03:00
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/51315