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Abstract
This article explores how understandings of parental and infant personhood are negotiated in and through the space of the home. We argue that through spatial practices of creating and using (and not using) nurseries, understandings of parental and infant personhood are both made and unmade. Analysis is based on a rich body of ethnographic research undertaken between 2006 and 2009 with eighteen middle-class breastfeeding families and their communities in the United States, which we analyze through lenses of new materialist and Deleuzian theory. We begin by considering some of the ways in which homes are modified by parents-to-be prior to birth, positing these changes as an effort to call forth both particular kinds of embodied interrelations between parents and babies, as well as infant subjects who possess the specific capacity to sleep independently from a young age. We then argue that lived nighttime practice postbirth often confounds planned bodily, affective, and somatic geographies, driven by agentic infants themselves who express their own strong preferences about staying near their parents’ bodies to both sleep and breastfeed. Our research reveals parents negotiating how and where they sleep in collaboration with their new infants, often settling on spatial arrangements that do not reflect either expert advice or their own prebirth plans. This work advances scholarship in and beyond geography by furthering understanding of the intimate spaces of early parenting (including nighttime domestic geographies) about which little is currently known, thus extending scholarship across fields of children’s geographies, geographies of parenting, geographies of the home, geographies of the night, and geographies of sleep. Key Words: breastfeeding, geographies of the home, infant sleep, materiality, nighttime, parenting.
本文探讨对育儿和婴儿特质的理解，如何在家庭空间中、并通过家庭空间进行协商。我们主张，通过打造和运用（以及不使用）育儿室的空间实践，同时形塑与拆解对育儿和婴儿特质的理解。我们的分析是根据2006年至2009年间，对美国十八个中产阶级哺乳家庭及其社群所进行的丰富民族志研究，我们并通过崭新的物质性与德勒兹理论对其进行分析。我们以考量即将成为家长者在生产前改造家庭的若干方式开始，主张这些改变是同时呼唤家长与婴儿之间特定的身体相互关系、以及具有自幼年时期便独力入睡的特定能力的婴儿主体之努力。我们接着主张，产后经历的夜间实践，经常因具能动性的婴儿自身表达其对于睡觉和哺乳时待在父母身体近处的强烈偏好，导致计画好的身体、情感与细胞地理变得混乱。我们的研究揭露家长与其新生儿协商他们如何以及在哪入睡，并经常以不符合专家建议或其生产前计画的空间安排作结。此般研究通过促进我们对于当前鲜为人知的早期育儿的亲密空间（包含夜间家户地理）之理解，推进地理学与其他的学术研究，因而扩展儿童地理学、育儿地理学、家的地理学、夜晚地理学， 以及睡眠地理学领域之学术研究。 关键词: 哺乳, 家的地理学, 婴儿睡眠, 物质性, 夜间, 育儿。
Este artículo explora el modo como son discutidos los entendimientos de la condición humana parental e infantil dentro y a través del espacio del hogar. Argüimos que a través de prácticas espaciales para crear y usar (o no usar) guarderías, los entendimientos de su condición de personas en padres e infantes son tanto hechas, como no hechas. El análisis se basa en un rico cuerpo de investigación etnográfica realizada en Estados Unidos entre 2006 y 2009 con dieciocho familias de clase media que alimentaban sus bebes con lecha materna, y sus comunidades, que nosotros analizamos a través de la lente del nuevo materialismo y la teoría deleuziana. Empezamos considerando algunas de las maneras como las casas son modificadas por los futuros padres desde antes del nacimiento, planteando estos cambios como el esfuerzo para convocar tipos particulares de interrelaciones personificadas entre padres y bebés, lo mismo que sujetos infantiles que tienen la capacidad específica de dormir independientemente desde edad temprana. Luego argumentamos que la práctica nocturna en vivo después del nacimiento a menudo confunde las geografías corporales, afectivas y somáticas planeadas, impuestas por los propios infantes caprichosos, que expresan sus propias preferencias fuertes sobre estar cerca de los cuerpos de sus padres para dormir y amamantarse. Nuestra investigación revela padres adaptándose a cómo y dónde dormir en colaboración con sus nuevos infantes, a menudo acomodándose a arreglos espaciales que no reflejan ni el consejo de expertos ni los propios planes de antes del nacimiento. Este trabajo contribuye a la erudición en geografía y en otros campos incrementando la comprensión de los espacios íntimos en el comienzo de la crianza (incluidas las geografías domésticas nocturnas) sobre lo que poco se sabe actualmente, ampliando así la erudición a través de los campos de geografías de los niños, geografías de la crianza, geografías hogareñas, geografías de la noche y geografías del sueño.
Acknowledgment
We are deeply grateful to study participants for making our research possible.
Notes
1 Between 70 and 80 percent of adults in the United States, Australia, China, and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries become parents at some point in their lives. Rates of parenthood in the developing world including India and Africa are estimated at closer to 95 percent (see https://www.quora.com/Children-What-percentage-of-people-become-parents).
2 See, for example, special issues of Geoforum in 2004 and Social and Cultural Geography in 2003.
3 Although see the work of Gorman-Murray (Citation2006).
4 This field of material geographies is becoming a subfield in its own right and it is beyond the scope of this article to cover it completely. See Tolia‐Kelly (Citation2013) for a good review of this field.
5 This study received ethical approval from the University of Michigan. Details of this study can be found in Tomori (Citation2015).
6 Observations were scheduled around participants’ schedules, sickness, family travel, and so on.
7 In accordance with anthropological conventions of immersive multiyear field projects, the number of hours spent with each family was not tracked.
8 Two participants were laid off, but one had found a new job by the time of the study’s conclusion.
9 Although three states have recently adopted paid parental leave policies, no comprehensive legislation is in place at the time of this writing.
10 This reflects prices as of May 2007 (see https://www.census.gov/construction/nrs/pdf/uspricemon.pdf). Roughly the same difference in home values persisted in 2017.
11 Shared sleep could occur on many different surfaces, with different safety implications. We use the term bedsharing to avoid confusion.
12 See also Thompson et al. (2011, 229).
13 All names are pseudonyms.
14 There was variation across the group regarding the extent of the father’s involvement in prebirth preparations.
15 This sense of chaos and disorder echoes Luzia’s (Citation2011) findings in her work with lesbian new parents in Australia.
16 This resonates with T. Miller’s (Citation2005) work on womens’ experiences of early motherhood in the United Kingdom.
17 Luzia (Citation2011) discussed one couple in her study who coslept without planning to.
18 Ten of the eighteen couples continued to practice partial or full-time bedsharing at one year.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Cecilia Tomori
CECILIA TOMORI is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Parent–Infant Sleep Lab, Durham University, Durham DH1 3LE, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include biocultural aspects of breastfeeding and sleep, social and historical aspects of childbirth and infant care, kinship, personhood and reproduction, and political economy and health inequities.
Kate Boyer
KATE BOYER is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Geography and Planning at Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales CF10 3WA, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include motherhood and parenting, embodiment, breastfeeding, care work, identity, gender and other forms of social justice, materiality, and sociospatial practice.