12 Towards Social Maternity: Where’s the Mother? ... 299best’ might support its direct associations with the body, even though
there has at times been a regrettable disembodiment of breastmilk and
breastfeeding through its separation conceptually from maternal sexual-
ity, and through the focus on pumping for women at work which may
have both positive and negative effects on breastfeeding rates (Johnson
et al. 2012 ; Lapore 2009 ).
Whatever the choice of individuals, the variation in terminology
indicates the tension between the characterisation of breastfeeding as
an intimate and private act, which resists both commodification and
sharing, versus its public health attributes, inscribed within the health,
welfare, and food economy. Breastmilk underscores the exclusive breast-
feeding arrangement, whereas human milk points to its potential value
beyond mothering.
Thus, the possibility that breastmilk (rather than human milk) might
be traded contradicts the values within which contemporary breastfeed-
ing is upheld, as opposed to human milk expression, pumping, dona-
tion, or sale. This is because the former, more commonly used term
connotes embodiment and intimacy, reinforcing the virtuous circle of
the mother-infant dyad and the ideal of the good mother breastfeeding
for duty rather than pleasure.^7 Similarly, the term ‘exclusive breastfeed-
ing’ to describe breastmilk feeding without the use of infant formula or
solid food until the age of six months has the benefit of sustaining the
imaginary of the maternal body which feeds the child (Tugwell 2013 ).
However, an unintended consequence of the term has been to rein-
force the exclusivity of the breastfeeding relationship between a nursing
mother and her biological offspring. Additionally, the socio-economic
pressures on mothers to bear individual responsibility—sometimes
without assistance—for their children’s well-being results in an exclu-
sionary approach to mothering, or, at best, parenting as a couple where
the partner is wholeheartedly engaged.
The conflation of exclusionary and exclusive breastfeeding adds to the
difficulty of conceiving of human or breast milk either as sharable, or
as a commodity for exchange or sale. Furthermore, the possibility that
human milk might be conceived of as food is occluded by both these
terms, confining it to a narrow utilitarian function within early moth-
ering, and, as Rebecca Kukla argues, reducing it to one of the ‘signal