The Rhetoric of Online Exclusive Pumping Communities: Tactical Technical Communication as Eschewing Judgment

ABSTRACT

“Exclusive Pumping” straddles the most common infant-feeding methods: breastfeeding and bottle feeding. Exclusive pumpers express milk and feed with bottles. Yet experts rarely recommend exclusive pumping, creating a need for information outside of formal communication outlets. This article argues that exclusive pumping forums are sites of tactical technical communication – operating as “anti-institutional” – and explores these forums as places of inspiration and support, as well as spaces where mothers seek to solve technical feeding problems while avoiding institutional judgment.

KEYWORDS:

• Tactical technical communication
• health and medical rhetoric
• DIY feminism rhetoric

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Though this manuscript uses the terms woman and mother to discuss breastfeeding, I would like to acknowledge that not all people who breastfeed identify as a woman or refer to their role as mother.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jessica McCaughey

Jessica McCaughey is an Assistant Professor in the University Writing Program at George Washington University, where she teaches academic and professional writing. In this role, Professor McCaughey has developed a growing professional writing program consisting of workshops, assessment, and coaching that helps organizations improve the quality of their employees’ professional and technical writing and editing. Her research focuses on the transfer of writing skills from the academic to the professional realm and on teaching multi-lingual writers. In 2016, she was nominated for the Columbian College’s Robert W. Kenny Prize for Innovation in Teaching of Introductory Courses and in 2017 she was awarded the CCCC Emergent Researcher Award.