Calling, Permission, and Fulfillment: The Interembodied Experience of Breastfeeding

• Published in: Qualitative health research Vol. 21; no. 6; pp. 731 - 742
• Main Authors: Ryan, Kath, Todres, Les, Alexander, Jo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.06.2011; SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
• Subjects: Attitudes; Breast Feeding - psychology; Breastfeeding; Breastfeeding & lactation; Female; Health professionals; Health technology assessment; Humans; Interviews as Topic; Medical personnel; Mother-Child Relations; Mothers - psychology; Narratives; Permission; Understanding; United Kingdom; Women; Womens health; phenomenology; emotions; narrative inquiry; social constructionism; bodily experiences; emotion work; breastfeeding; embodiment
• ISSN: 1049-7323; 1552-7557
• DOI: 10.1177/1049732310392591

Drawing on examples from in-depth interviews with 49 women, in this article we aim to open up a discursive space for women and health professionals to begin to explore the phenomenon of the interembodied experience of breastfeeding. Although acknowledging that social dimensions partially constitute the lived body, we further the view that the lived body’s understanding is embedded in contexts far more complex than those that can be represented by language. We argue that women’s narratives of their breastfeeding experience contained instances of the body “understanding” its emotional task at a prelogical, preverbal level. We identified three central, iterative dimensions of the phenomenon— calling, permission, and fulfillment—that occurred prereflexively in the protected space provided by the mother, a space that was easily disrupted by unsupportive postnatal practices. We offer this eidetic understanding and conceptual framework and suggest that it provides new (less damaging) subject positions and ways of behaving.