Table Of ContentSpaces and Politics of
Motherhood
Spaces and Politics of
Motherhood
Kate Boyer
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Copyright © 2018 by Kate Boyer
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Contents
Introduction 1
1 Maternal becomings: Space, time and subjectivity in early
motherhood 17
2 Mothering with the world: Spatial practice, mobility and
material agency in maternal becomings 33
3 Natureculture in the nursery: Lively breast milk, vibrant matter
and the distributed agencies of infant feeding 53
4 Breastfeeding in public: Affect, public comfort and the agency
of strangers 67
5 Mothers acting back: Claiming space through lactation advocacy 88
6 Combining care-work with wage-work: The changing policy
landscape 104
Conclusion 119
Bibliography 125
Index 145
About the Author 149
v
Introduction
This book is about the spaces and politics of early motherhood. As feminist
theorist Hannah Stark observes, ‘Politics is about how we imagine and enact
collective life’ (Stark, 2017: 99). Herein I explore the politics of how early
motherhood is lived and imagined, focusing on the first year after the birth
of a first child, examining the kinds of experiences and changes that can take
place during that time.
Like many books, this one was motivated in part by personal experience –
in this case my experience of becoming a mother in 2008. Giving birth nine
months after moving to the United Kingdom from the United States made
me especially interested in the differences in birth and parenting cultures
between these two countries. From the cost neutrality of having a baby ‘on
the National Health Service’ to the significantly longer maternity leaves in
the UK to the more robust landscape of parenting advocacy in the form of
parenting charity, the NCT (National Childbirth Trust), certain things jumped
out at me regarding differences in birth and parenting cultures between the
two countries. This included some surprises regarding the respective birth
and parenting cultures in these two places, for example, the fact that despite
its longer and more generous maternity allowance, the UK has lower rates of
breastfeeding duration than the US. This is surprising given the respective
levels of institutional support between the two countries and suggests that
there are important features of how motherhood happens ‘on the ground’ in
spaces of lived practice that can supersede policy initiatives.
This is a book about how motherhood happens on the ground, in spaces of
everyday life focusing on the embodied practices and lived experiences
of becoming a mother. Empirically this book is based on the experiences
of mothers in the UK and the US gleaned through research conducted over
a period of nine years. This included participant observation, ethnographic
1
2 Introduction
work, survey work and interviews with thirty-one new mothers in London
and South East England undertaken between 2008 and 2016; thematic
analysis of policy texts from the UK and the US; and textual analysis of
entries in online parenting discussion groups and blogs in the UK and US.1
Conceptually I engage themes of embodiment, relationality, affect and mate-
riality. Empirically I explore such questions as the role of space and place
in emergent understandings of maternal subjectivity; becoming mobile with
a small baby; the embodied socio-spatial politics of infant feeding (focus-
ing on breastfeeding); and the politics of some of the new ways care-work
is being enfolded within wage-work. I hope this book might find audiences
in disciplines of geography, anthropology, nursing and midwifery, women’s
studies, cultural studies, psychology, science and technology studies as well
as sociology and among upper-level undergraduate students in relevant fields
and interested general readers.
I would suggest that given the broad cultural resemblances between the
UK, US and Commonwealth countries, there will be resonances between
the arguments I make herein and the experiences of women in other cultural
contexts. However, this book does not purport to give any ‘universal truths’
about motherhood. Experiences of motherhood vary tremendously across
time and space and also differ within any given cultural context by intersect-
ing factors of class, race/ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, gender identity
and other vectors of social differentiation that structure advantage and dis-
advantage.2 What this means is that experiences of motherhood are highly
differentiated and occur through dual prisms of both one’s cultural context
and one’s social position/location within that culture.3 As Patricia Collins
noted in her essay ‘Shifting the Center: Race, Class and Feminist Theorizing
about Motherhood’ (1994) about motherhood in the 1990s US: ‘For women
of color, the subjective experience of mothering/motherhood is inextricably
linked to the sociocultural concern of racial ethnic communities – one does
not exist without the other’ (Collins, 1994: 47). I would suggest that this
observation holds a wider truth for the power of culture and social location to
shape maternal experience.
The experiences of motherhood and forms of maternal becoming, which
I consider here, are thus not universal but particular, culturally situated and
context-dependent. Although my data set reflects a degree of both ethno-
cultural and socio-economic diversity (discussed in the following chapter
summaries and in more detail in the chapters themselves), the lion’s share
of data on which this study is based reflect the experiences of white, British,
non-poor, heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied mothers. As such this analy-
sis of motherhood reflects a disproportionately privileged set of mothering
experiences. Relatedly, my own status as the mother of a young child while
undertaking the research and writing of this book also shaped the narrative
Introduction 3
in myriad ways. My experiences and memories influenced the kinds of ques-
tions I asked and how interviews unfolded. At the same time, as a white, het-
erosexual, cisgender woman with a professional job, my own social position
is one of relative privilege. These factors shaped my experience of mothering,
as well as shaping (and constraining) how I accessed and understood the sto-
ries and knowledge of others.
As well, I would like to say a few words about my decision to focus
on mothers in this book. I recognise the important physical and emotional
work that fathers do and believe fathers can parent just as well as mothers.4
But, after Aitken (2000), Dermott (2008), Doucet (2006) and others, I also
recognise that fathering is different from mothering and cannot be distilled
down into mothering. I am excited by the prospect of more gender-equitable
approaches to caring for young children from what they are currently. At
present, however, structural factors of (much) longer maternity leave rela-
tive to paternity leave in the UK;5 the stubborn gap in male and female wage
rates throughout the wage-labour market; and cultural norms which continue
to posit childcare as ‘women’s work’ mean that the care of young children
continues to be done principally by women in both the UK and the US (and
beyond). In the research underpinning this book it was mothers who were
doing the majority of childcare, had the time and inclination to be interviewed
post-birth and took time to share and discuss issues important to them online.6
These factors led to the decision to focus on mothering in this work.
CONCEPTUAL FRAMING
Conceptually this book builds on existing scholarship by deepening our
understanding of motherhood as a spatial practice. I extend existing con-
ceptual work by exploring the ways maternal practice occurs in and through
engagements with the non-human. This engagement is informed by the move
across the humanities and social sciences over the past decade to unseat
human subjects as the primary ontological focus of inquiry (posthumanism).
While not abandoning human agency, in this work I seek to expand our under-
standing of the myriad different agentic forces that shape how motherhood is
experienced. Building on existing scholarship, I explore what new kinds of
understandings of motherhood might emerge through a greater attunement to
interactions between mothers and the various more-than-human forces with
which they interface in the course of parenting.
Scholarship has explored the power of expert discourses in shaping mater-
nal practice (Brown, 2016), as well as the role of partners and peer support-
ers (Rollins et al., 2016), infants (Holt, 2013) and others in shaping how
motherhood happens. Spaces and Politics of Motherhood extends this work
