Othering the ‘leaky body’. An autoethnographic story about expressing breast milk in the workplace

Abstract

In this paper, I present an autoethnographic story about my experiences of expressing breast milk at a Dutch university department. My story illustrates how interrelated and conflicting discourses about gender, motherhood, breastfeeding, embodiment and professionalism raised issues about (in)visibility, embodied control, spatiality and discipline of my body and shaped my experience as a newly maternal employee. This paper thus aims to include bodies and embodied experiences in organization studies and highlights the need to consider spatiality as an important topic of research. I address these issues in my writing and use insights from feminist poststructuralism to show how the experiences I describe are part of a larger cultural framework of power structures that produce the ‘leaky’ maternal body as the Other, subject to (self-)discipline and marginalization. I hope my story inspires reflexivity and empathic understanding of the complex reality of experiences related to expressing breast milk in the workplace.

Keywords:

• motherhood
• breastfeeding
• gender
• workplace
• discourse
• autoethnography

Acknowledgement

This study was funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

Notes

1. Within socio-cultural feminist theory the maternal body is often theorized as ‘leaky’, metaphorically as well as literally (Shildrick 1997; Gatrell 2013). The literal leakage can be seen in the way the maternal body changes shape and produces bodily fluid such as breast milk, blood, amniotic fluid, vomit and tears. Metaphorically the maternal body can be considered ‘leaky’ because it blurs the boundaries between self and Other, nature and culture and is thus seen as uncontrollable and disruptive of the patriarchal order.

2. In reference to Foucault's (1979) theory on technologies of discipline. According to Foucault ‘disciplined bodies’ are those bodies who are subjected to regimes of power/knowledge (discourses) that (re)produce them in relation to those regimes through techniques of dominance such as normalization and (self-)surveillance.

3. A reference to Douglas’ (1966) notion of pollution as ‘matter out of place’. She argues that moral values and social rules are defined and upheld by constructions about dirt and pollution. Similarly, Puwar (2004) argues that female (maternal) bodies are often constructed as ‘out of place’ in organizational spaces because they do not conform to White male embodied standards that have historically dominated these spaces and occupy positions of privilege and authority.

4. Breast engorgement is the painful overfilling of the breasts with milk. Engorged breasts are so full of milk that it feels like they will explode.

5. For further discussion about constructions of work-life ‘balance’ and the gendered nature of the struggle people face while managing both the demands of their work and their private life, see McDowell (2004), Warren (2004), and Smithson and Stokoe (2005).

6. This corresponds with the findings of Morse and Bottorff (1988). They show how many mothers they interviewed felt that ‘expressing was sticky, messy, painful, ugly and mechanical’ and that this led to ‘feelings of self-disgust about the animal-like methods of removing the milk, akin to milking the cow’ (168).