Post-brelfie: the limits of intersubjectivity & intersectionality in spring 2020 virtual lactation selfie culture

ABSTRACT

In 2015, brelfies, digital self-portraits taken by breastfeeding mothers, began to emerge on social media platforms. In the spring of 2020, two virtual lactation events emerged as new sites of brelfie culture: laczoom and the #dropemoutchallenge. I define these two events as evidence of a new wave in brelfie culture, what I call “post-brelfie” cultures. “post-brelfie” cultures are determined by two primary differentiating tenets from brelfie culture: 1) Post-brelfie events occur on video-based new media platforms, as opposed to through digital photography-based ones, which inhibit this trend’s potential for both self and community empowerment. 2) Post-brelfies are a product of their socio-temporal moment: the novel coronavirus pandemic and its publicly mandated stay-at-home orders. Through a hybrid methodology combining cross-platform analysis, grounded theory, and contextual visual discourse analysis, the findings of this study assert that not only has brelfie culture thus far failed to realize its feminist and public health goals, but also that such aims have been further devalued under pandemic circumstances in which digital inequities have further siloed online communities, leading to the transmission of negative affects in these networks. Such affects are further exasperated by postfeminism and neoliberalism and serve to undermine the aims of intersectional feminism.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• virtual lactation
• selfie culture
• brelfies
• online mothering

Acknowledgements

With gratitude to Sarah Brophy, Faiza Hirji, and Andrea Zeffiro, as well as to the excellent peer reviewers and editors at Feminist Media Studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The broader field of visual culture has long spectacularized the female breast in accordance with the male gaze. John Berger (1972) famously highlighted an unequal relationship wherein men are spectators and women [and especially their naked bodies] are objectified, which further compels women to engage in modes of self-surveillance.

2. Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in (1989). In order to explicate her theory of multiple forms of discrimination, she (1989) called on the analogy of traffic in an intersection, “coming and going in all four directions” (149). Crenshaw (2017) has subsequently explained intersectionality as a “lens through which you can see where power comes and collides.” Jasbir Puar (2012) reconsiders this theory within “changed geopolitics of reception” (53), querying whether it has “become an alibi for the re-centering of white feminists” (54).

3. S. Trivedi’s (2022) piece for Ms. Magazine speaks to the criticisms many women faced during the recent formula shortage for their decision not to breastfeed; however, Wolf reminds us that U.S. government and medical establishments pushed formula production and sales beginning in the 1950s (2006, 407), efforts that continue to hold sway today through intensive marketing of formula and persistent lack of education on the benefits of breastfeeding (Foss 2017, 3–4). Feminist breastfeeding advocates emphasize that increasing breastfeeding is a systemic issue and not a personal decision, and that much more could be done to support lower income and other intersectionally-marginalized folks both to begin breastfeeding and to encourage longevity of the practice.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Lyons Ontario Graduate Scholarship in New Media & Communication.

Notes on contributors

Vange Holtz-Schramek

Vange Holtz-Schramek (they/them) is a PhD candidate in Communication, New Media & Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, ON, Canada. They research online mothering. Evangeline ‘Vange’ Holtz-Schramek (they/them) holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts in English and Creative Writing from UBC and the University of East Anglia (UK) and two Master’s degrees: one in English and Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of Toronto, and the other in Social Policy (MPPA) from Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson). Vange is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellow and PhD candidate in the Communication, New Media & Cultural Studies program (CNMCS) at McMaster where their research engages with online mothering through the lenses of political economy of media, auto/biography studies, critical race theory, social media research ethics, gendered disinformation, communities of mental health and addiction online, and other urgent intersectional feminist contestations. Vange’s writing appears in Canadian Literature, The Puritan, The Humber Literary Review, Fashion Studies, the Martlet, Grain Magazine, the chapbook Poems from the Round Room, the University of Toronto Quarterly, and Plenitude. From a small island on the remote west coast of British Columbia, Vange currently resides in Southern Ontario on the traditional territories of the Mississauga and Haudenosaunee nations.