The ‘milkmother’: an intriguing way of conceptualising motherhood

National Museum (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The other day I came across a new term in the feminist journal Hecate – ‘milkmother’, a term invented and used by Pamela Douglas (2010). Douglas uses ‘milkmother’ to ‘denote the pregnant, birthing, and physiologically, or metaphorically lactating woman’. She argues that ‘lactating’ not only incorporates its literal meaning — secreting breast milk for the consumption of an infant — but also a metaphorical meaning  — ‘offering the particular minute-by-minute physical nurturance that very young children require, regardless of feeding method’. Lactating in this metaphorical meaning, therefore, involves the giving of the self to one’s child in the myriad of ways that is demanded of mothers: touching, cleaning, holding, cuddling, stroking, feeding, dealing with illness, rocking to sleep, constantly thinking about and meeting the child’s needs.

The concept of the milkmother for me encapsulates the blurring of the boundaries of the body/self a woman experiences during pregnancy, childbirth and caring for infants and young children (Lupton 2012). As I noted in an earlier post ‘Pregnancy and loss of control’, pregnant bodies are considered permeable and uncontained. So too, for women engaging in caring for their infants and young children, their bodies/selves become intertwined with those of their children. This involves what sociologists of the body describe as ‘intercorporeality’, or the blurring of boundaries between bodies. Milkmothers find themselves as embodied subjects, thinking through and with their bodies as they interact with their children. Their sense of self becomes intersubjective, or linked to that of another/s. No longer autonomous and individuated, milkmothers respond to their children in relational and interdependent ways.

This blurring of subjectivity and bodies, however, can be confronting. Some women experience pregnant embodiment as confronting in its two-bodies-in-one state, and feel as if their own body is being ‘taken over’ by the preborn body. They even describe pregnancy as like being occupied by an alien Other. Many women feel challenged by the demands made upon them by their infants and young children. These feelings are articulated when women discuss their embodied relationship with the breastfeeding infant. Many find the intercorporeality of the experience highly pleasurable and contributing to strong feelings of intimacy and tenderness with the infant. Others find this intercorporeality confronting and engulfing of their own sense of body/self. In one of my articles (Lupton, 2000) I referred to the ‘love-hate’ relationship some women talked about in interviews about their early mothering experiences. They had invested in the ideal of the ‘good mother’ as always ‘being there’ for her children, but also found this to be difficult to live up to.

My research suggests that the experience of motherhood, at least during the period of infancy and early childhood, may never fully include a strong sense of individuation from one’s child’s body (see Lupton 2012). Nor does this process necessarily follow a clear trajectory: mothers may move between states of interconnectedness, at times feeling very close and ‘at one’ with their foetus/infant, at other times experiencing their bodies/selves as very separate from, and even in conflict with, the infant body/self.

Being a milkmother clashes with the independent, autonomous self that is so valued in post-femininist western societies. It also conflicts with the ‘Yummy Mummy’ persona that Douglas discusses in her article. The ‘Yummy Mummy’ appears to be supremely untroubled by any bodily or emotional effects of caring for her children and expresses the same autonomous self of those without children. Her body is slim, fit and attractive, not leaking fluids such as breast milk or rendered flabby from excess weight put on during pregnancy. Unlike the ‘milkmother’, therefore, this maternal archetype appears to be able to contain and discipline her body, and to individuate her sense of self and embodiment from her children. She appears serenely unchanged by the enormous physical and emotional alterations caused by pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood.

Douglas calls for more positive representations of the milkmother that goes beyond the unrealistic ‘Yummy Mummy’ persona. The emotional and bodily experiences of mothers of infants and young children, she asserts, need to be recognised and celebrated but not airbrushed. The blurring of bodily boundaries, the heightened emotions of the caring experience (including the frustration, anger and even hate that women may feel at times towards their children) and the physical changes, both reversible and irreversible, wrought by motherhood — all these should be acknowledged and accepted as integral to the experience of early motherhood.

References

Douglas, P. (2010) Yummy mummy and the medicalised milkmother. Hecate, 36(1/2), 119–35.

Lupton, D. (2000) ‘A love/hate relationship’: the ideals and experiences of first-time mothers. Journal of Sociology, 36(1), 50–63.

Lupton, D. (2012) Configuring Maternal, Preborn and Infant Embodiment. Sydney Health & Society Group Working Paper No. 2. Sydney: Sydney Health & Society Group. Available here.

The new mobile digital technologies, health and the body

I’ve just had an article accepted in the journal Social Theory & Health (see link below). It looks at the phenomenon of ‘m-health’, or the use of mobile digital devices such as smartphones and tablet computers to promote health. There are now a plethora of apps available for downloading onto these devices that measure and monitor aspects of the user’s health: blood pressure and heart rate, ovulation, hearing function, body mass index (BMI), adherence to a medication regime, alcohol and cigarette intake, diet, sleep quality and length, exercise frequency and level and other bodily functions and activities can all be monitored using such apps. Apple has produced technologies and apps that allow users to hook up a blood pressure monitor or a set of scales to their mobile devices to record blood pressure and weight, produce tables and readouts of these and compare daily (or hourly) fluctuations. These data can then be shared with other people via social media, so that friends or followers may keep a close eye on how many kilometres a user has run that week, what her or his heart rate was for each run, how the user’s weight has changed (or not), what kind of diet they have consumed, whether they have stuck to their medication and so on.

Many of these apps are produced by commercial developers. However health promoters are beginning to see their potential and to consider and adopt the capabilities of mobile digital devices to individualise and target health promotion messages so as to change people’s behaviour. As one writer argued in a recent blog post on the use of messaging for public health objectives, such apps can be used to ‘become a “personal health coach”‘ to remind people to takeup health-related behaviours.

The use of mobile digital devices in health promotion endeavours represents a significant shift in the methods of health promotion. Health promotion has traditionally been a low tech area of public health in comparison with the vast array of medical technologies used in the clinical setting. The primary use of technology in health promotion has tended to be in employing communication media to disseminate illness-prevention messages to a wide audience. Health promotion has borrowed extensively from commercially-oriented social marketing, advertising and public relations approaches and methods to do so. These industries are now embracing social media and mobile devices as part of their publicising efforts. Here again, therefore, health promotion can be seen to be taking the lead from commercial enterprises which are directed at marking and selling commodities.

Writers from medical and health promotion backgrounds about the new social media and mobile devices tend to confine themselves in their discussions to describing how these technologies could be most effectively used as tools in their efforts to help people deal with medical conditions or improve their general health and wellbeing. From a sociological perspective, a more critical analysis may be undertaken of how these technologies may operate to construct various forms of identities and ways of experiencing and viewing one’s body. This analysis includes identifying the kinds of assumptions that are made about the target of these technologies and what the moral and ethical ramifications of using them may be. Moral implications include the kinds of meanings and the representation of the ideal subject that are related to the use of these technologies in the interests of promoting health. Ethical issues include questioning the extent to which health promotion practice should intrude into their targeted populations’ private lives and what kinds of messages and practices they employ when using digital surveillance devices. The article addresses these and other issues, drawing upon a range of social and cultural theory to do so.

I argue that m-health technologies produce a digital cyborg body. They are able to act not only as prostheses but also as interpreters of the body. The subject produced through the use of m-health technologies is constructed as both an object of surveillance and persuasion and as a responsible citizen who is willing and able to act on the health imperatives issuing forth from the technologies and to present their body/self as open to continual measurement and assessment. The implications of this new way of monitoring and regulating health have yet to be fully explored. These include privacy issues, questions about the intrusion of health promotion even more insistently into everyday lives and the possible ways in which concepts of ‘health’ might be reconfigured via the use of these new technologies.

References

Lupton, D. (in press) M-health and health promotion: the digital cyborg and surveillance society. Social Theory & Health. Advance online pre-publication details are here.

See my pinterest board on ‘M-health and the Digital Cyborg‘ for images related to this topic.

How sociologists (and other social scientists) can use Pinterest

English: Red Pinterest logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have recently discovered Pinterest, a social media platform which has recently become very popular. The concept of Pinterest is overwhelmingly visual and draws upon the idea of older techniques of collage or scrapbooking: collecting interesting images, grouping them together under a theme and displaying them to others. As a visual bookmarking site, self-described as a ‘virtual pinboard’, Pinterest allows users to ‘pin’, or transfer digital images to an interest ‘board’, or webpage that they make themselves and give a title to. The images are then collected together on this board and made available for others to see. Users may ‘repin’ images from other people’s boards, pin images they have found on other websites or use images of their own (their own photographs or infographics, for example). A wealth of high-quality and diverse images are available to use for Pinterest purposes.

One important feature of the site is that each pinned image has a commentary box below it which allows the user to provide details of the image or comment on it. There is quite a bit of space provided for such commentary: up to 500 characters. The website is set up so that pinning or repining is extremely quick and easy. Users can install a ‘Pin It’ button (bookmarklet) on their computer so that when they come across an image they wish to use it is simply a matter of clicking on the button and the image is added to one of their specified boards. Other people may ‘follow’ boards, comment on them and may be invited to contribute pins to them.

Statistiques: la croissance de Pinterest (Photo credit: La Fabrique de Blogs)

When I first investigated Pinterest it seemed that it was simply a forum for people to collect and post images of cute children or animals, fashion outfits, holiday options, objects they would like to buy, home décor, wedding ideas, recipes and so on. These do indeed seem to be among the most popular of board topics and the website’s own description of what it offers focuses on these kinds of uses. However the platform is becomingly increasingly used not only used for private purposes, but also to publicise commercial enterprises or sell goods, create employment resumes and even for political campaigning. I notice that school teachers have also begun using Pinterest to display lesson plans and collect relevant material for their work to share with other teachers or with their students.

It seems that few academics are using Pinterest at the moment, or have even heard of it. But closer inspection and reflection on the capacities of the platform led me to think that Pininterest had the potential to be a very useful tool for sociological research and teaching (as well as for other academics in the humanities and social sciences).

Because of its emphasis on the visual, it is most relevant for the purposes of curating and displaying images that are related to the subject matter one is researching or teaching about. Pinterest boards can be used by sociologists for the following purposes:

• To display images which are related to the topic of a book or research article you have published. The weblink for the relevant board can be given in the article or book so that interested readers can view the images which you have collected on that topic. The commentary box allows you to provide some analysis or contextualising material under each image.
• To display infographics: data represented as graphs, tables, social maps, flow-charts and figures relevant to the board topic.
• As a repository for images you have collected that can be used and analysed as part of a current or planned research project.
• To display images of book covers written by others on topics related to your boards that you have found especially useful or interesting.
• Boards can be used to publicise and promote your own academic writing. This only really works with books and blog posts or website pages, given that Pinterest is overwhelmingly a visual medium and has limited space for text. However if you wanted to promote your research article, you could include an image of the journal’s cover and give the title of your article in the commentary box below, along with a link to its online version.
• Universities or individual academic departments or research groups can set up their own Pinterest sites and use boards to promote research and teaching initiatives.

Some ideas for university teaching include:

• Giving your students access to a set of images that are related to the unit subject are teaching. The images can be displayed on your computer during class-time, or the link can be provided to students for them to view the boards out of class time. You can use your own boards or others’ boards. (If there is a good board already existing on a particular topic there is probably no point replicating yourself unless you curate a substantially different set of images or one specifically tailored to the content of the subjects you are teaching.)
• Engaging students and promoting their understanding of the visual and cultural dimensions of a topic by asking them to make their own boards and curate images relevant to a topic, or together contribute to one big shared board. Part of this activity could be asking students to provide analytical commentary for images, or to write an accompanying essay that analyses the images or contextualises them in relation to academic scholarship on the topic.
• Collaborating with other academics to share ideas and resources for teaching.

Last, there is the opportunity for sociologists and other social scientists who are interested in researching digital cultures or commodity culture to use Pinterest boards that others put together as a source of research data. The questions of why Pinterest is currently so popular, what types of photographs and topics are selected by users and what all this may imply for concepts of identity and the presentation of the self, media use, social relations and so on offer great potential for academic research.

Some commentators on blog sites and newspaper opinion pages have already begun to speculate about how and why users are using Pinterest. One commentator has argued that using Pinterest to display commodities one would like to buy is a kind of ersatz consumption, satisfying the desire for the real thing and therefore replacing consumption (‘Can Pinterest and Svpply help you reduce your consumption?’). Others have commented on the representation of women’s bodies on Pinterest boards (‘Pinterest’s  Thinspiration problem’ ) and how women use Pinterest (‘Pinterest and feminism’). It has been suggested that Pinterest allows users to display their taste to others (‘The real reason Pinterest is so popular’) and engage in creative pursuits involving the collection of striking or beautiful images, just as people once enjoyed making collages, photo albums, scrapbooks or collecting and displaying stamps (‘A picture gets a thousand likes’).

So far I have made seven boards of my own on Pinterest. Each of them is related to a recent or current research topic. For example, the third edition of one of my books, Medicine as Culture: Illness, Disease and the Body, was recently published. The book discusses the ways in which medicine, health and illness are understood, represented and experienced via social and cultural processes. There are many examples in the book of the ways in which medical practitioners, patients and particular illnesses or diseases have been represented in popular culture. I have created a virtual pinboard that I have entitled ‘Medicine as Culture’ and collected images there that are relevant to the subject matter discussed in the book. Images on this board include an 18^th century wax anatomical model of a skull, doctors from medical television shows, doctors working in a surgical theatre in different historical eras, contemporary and historical anatomical drawings, plastinated bodies from the BodyWorlds exhibition, digital m-health technologies, artistic representations of the body, anatomy and illness, health promotion campaign materials and the pages from a latter-day doctor’s journal. I also included images of the cover of my Medicine as Culture book and other related books I have published, as well as books by others which were seminal to my own work in this area.

Some other interesting Pinterest boards on sociological topics I have discovered include:

• The Sociological Cinema: many boards, including ‘The Environment”, ‘Social Theorists’, ‘War and Military’, ‘Gender and Physical Violence’. ‘Teaching Sociology’ and ‘Bodies’.
• Sociological Images: includes a range of boards on topics such as ‘Racial/Ethnic Objectification’, ‘Deconstructing Disney’,’ Social Construction of Everything’ and ‘Social Construction of Race’.
• LSE Review of Books: boards include such topics as ‘Sociology and Anthropology’, ‘Politics and International Relations’, ‘Philosophy and the Humanities’ and ‘Urban Studies and Architecture’.
• Prof Jess: her boards include ‘Sociology of Emotion’, ‘Sociology (Music)’ and ‘Sociology of Sport(s)’.

Further information about Pinterest for beginners can be found here.

Is being fat bad for your health? Obesity sceptics disagree

Obesity Campaign Poster (Photo credit: Pressbound)

For some years now,  obesity sceptics have argued against the mainstream medical and public health perspective on obesity. Writers such as Paul Campos (2004), Michael Gard and Jan Wright (Gard and Wright, 2005; Gard, 2011)  have published closely argued critiques of the obesity science literature. They persuasively identify the many inaccuracies, distortions, misleading assumptions and generalisations made in scientific and epidemiological research which have contributed to the idea that obesity is at ‘crisis’ or ‘epidemic’ levels and that being over the arbitrarily defined ‘normal’ BMI automatically damages people’s health.

Some specific points obesity sceptics make are as follows:

• It is not the case that there are far greater numbers of fat people now compared to several decades ago. While there has been a modest increase in average weight, this does not represent an ‘epidemic of obesity’.
• Life expectancy in western countries has risen, not fallen, despite alleged growing rates of obesity and the supposed life-threatening health conditions caused by obesity.
• There is no statistical evidence that being fat necessarily equates to a greater risk of ill health or disease. Statistics show that only those people at the extreme end of the weight spectrum (the ‘morbidly obese’ in medical terminology) demonstrate negative health effects from their weight. The data show that higher body weight may even be protective of health in older people.
• The epidemiological literature has been unable to demonstrate that significant weight loss improves fat people’s health status. Indeed continual attempts by fat people to lose weight can actually be negative to their health status if it involves extreme diets, being caught in a cycle of losing and gaining weight or poor dietary habits.
• Fatness is often a symptom rather than the cause of ill health and disease.
• There is no consensus from the scientific literature that people in contemporary western societies are less active now than in previous eras: indeed many people, particularly those from the middle-class, are highly physically active.
• No clear association has been found between activity levels and childhood overweight and obesity, or between children’s television watching habits and their body weight.
• Nor have studies conclusively demonstrated that relative levels of physical activity influence health status. Medical research has not been able to show how much exercise should be undertaken and how often to achieve and maintain good health and which diseases are affected or prevented by taking regular exercise.
• It is also very difficult to demonstrate scientifically the relative influence of genes in body weight.

In all these areas there are many contradictory and conflicting findings from research studies, making it difficult to anyone to make confident statements about these issues. As these obesity sceptics point out, many of the generalisations made by obesity scientists and public health experts simply disregard the lack of consistent, clear or conclusive evidence for such statements as ‘obesity is caused by lack of exercise and eating too much’ and continue to reiterate these assertions.

What obesity sceptics present, in essence, is a detailed critique of the ways in which political agendas and pre-existing assumptions shape the reporting and interpretation of medical and epidemiological data relating to body mass. Quite apart of its relevance to debate about whether the obesity epidemic exists and how serious it is, such an analysis is valuable in drawing attention to the work practices and knowledge claims of medical and public health researchers.

The assertions and critiques of obesity sceptics have failed to make an impact on mainstream obesity science, government health policy and anti-obesity public health efforts. Journal articles concerning the dangers of obesity continue to appear in medical and public health journals with monotonous frequency. Alarmist predictions continue to receive attention in the mass media. Governments in western countries have also continued to invest large sums to fund health promotion campaigns seeking to counter obesity. For example, the American ‘Let’s Move’ campaign, directed at controlling childhood obesity, was launched by First Lady Michelle Obama in early 2010, while on the same day President Obama created a Taskforce on Childhood Obesity. The Australian ‘Swap It, Don’t Swap It’ anti-obesity campaign commenced in early 2011. It would seem that there are powerful political and career investments in continuing to ignore the arguments of the obesity sceptics.

References

Campos, P. (2004) The Obesity Myth. New York: Gotham Books.

Gard, M. and Wright, J. (2005) The Obesity Epidemic. London: Routledge.

Gard, M. (2011) The End of the Obesity Epidemic. London: Routledge.

Pathologising young children’s emotions

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Australian government has announced a new screening program for three-year-old children to determine whether they have a mental health problem. All children of that age will be offered the Healthy Kids Check from next month, predominantly conducted by general practitioners. As part of this check, which also seeks to identify health problems such as allergies and developmental delays and checks hearing and eyesight, doctors will ask questions of the children’s parents in a bid to identify children who are showing signs of having or developing a mental illness or condition such as anxiety disorder, autism, bipolar disorder or attention deficient hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Those who are identified as demonstrating such behaviour will be referred to paediatric psychologists or paediatricians for further diagnosis and treatment. Doctors will be looking for such behaviours as shyness, aggression, difficulty with impulse control and the desire to sleep at night with a light left on.

This is a troubling move towards pathologising young children’s emotions as indicators of mental illness. It may be seen as a progressive medicalising of what previously have been understood as normal responses and behaviours. The singling out of such emotional responses as fear of the dark, difficulty in controlling impulses and aggression represents such emotional responses as abnormal and in need of treatment and control, despite the fact that the children involved in the screening are so young that they are barely out of nappies.

Over forty years ago, sociologists such as Freidson, Zola and Illich began to write about the tendency of medicine to exert its power and authority over an increasingly large domain of human behaviour and experience. More recently, Nikolas Rose and others have noted the rise of the ‘psy disciplines’ in particular — psychology, counselling, psychiatry — as well as developments in neurobiology as progressively gathering behaviours under their authority. Rose (2010) has commented on the emergence of the concept of the ‘risky brain’, or the brain considered most likely to potentially cause its owner to behave in irrational, criminal, risk-taking or other ways considered inappropriate. He notes that attempts to identify susceptible individuals is part of a culture of ‘precaution, pre-emption and prevention’, in which it is considered important to identify potential difficulties with the ways in which people conduct themselves, even if there is only a small possibility that these difficulties may occur.

In the Australian government’s new initiative to identify young children who may be susceptible to mental illness in later life, thousands of children and their parents will be incorporated into a web of surveillance in which what seem like very minor behaviours common to many children (such as fear of the dark) will position these children as potentially at risk. Such a program  is overtly prescriptive in assuming that young children should not feel fear or shyness or sometimes aggressive towards others, or fail to control their impulses. The notion that children should be able to control their emotions underpins these assumptions. This conforms to a general societal trend towards lack of tolerance of the inability of children to behave in a ‘civilised’ fashion and increasingly high expectations that they should demonstrate emotional control similar to that achieved by adults (see my previous post ‘Animals as children, children as animals’).

While it is important that young children with significant mental illness receive an early diagnosis and treatment, this mental health screening directed at all children in the target age bracket will inevitably result in many children being identified as potentially at risk. It will label them with a possible mental health problem and create great anxiety in their parents. Moral judgements and stigmatisation are inevitably involved in diagnoses of what is considered ‘abnormal’ behaviour in children. Being singled out as ‘at risk’ of mental illness and requiring further medical intervention may lead to the stigmatising of children, potentially for many years.

What is more, there is a continuing debate about how to treat such conditions in children as ADHD, and indeed whether the behaviours incorporated into these conditions should be considered abnormal and requiring treatment. Some critics have argued that ADHD is simply the expression of normal, albeit challenging, childish behaviour that is pathologised because it causes disruption in contexts such as classrooms in ways that adults find difficult to manage and therefore seek to control via medical intervention and treatment with drugs (Visser and Jehan, 2009). The same might be said of aggressive, fearful or anxious behaviour in very young children. Yet it is likely that diagnosis rates of such conditions — and associated therapeutic and pharmaceutical treatments — will rise steeply in the wake of the Healthy Kids Check initiative.

References

Rose, N. (2010) ‘Screen and intervene’: governing risky brains. History of the Human Sciences, 23(1), 79–105.

Visser, J. and Jehan, Z. (2009) ADHD: a scientific fact or a factual opinion? A critique of the veracity of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties, 14(2), 127–40.

Can a ‘good mother’ have a ‘fat child’?

Chrissie Swan with her sons

This week an Australian television and radio personality, Chrissie Swan, appeared in a cover story of a well-known national women’s magazine talking about her family. Swan has two sons, one a baby and other aged three. The story included photos of Swan and her sons, which demonstrated to readers that her elder boy, Leo, was rather chubby. Following publication of the story, social media forums erupted with a debate about whether Swan should have ‘allowed’ Leo to become fat and proffering advice about what she should be doing about it, including comments highly critical of Swan.

This criticism received much attention in other parts of the internet and on mainstream Australian news media. Swan was forced to appear on television and radio programs to defend herself. She noted that she herself had struggled with her weight throughout her life and had recently become aware that Leo was ‘a bit heavy’ and was working to do something about it. Swan also commented on the unkind nature of the comments and that she had been reduced to tears in response.

It is not surprising that this debate received so much attention. It brings together two extremely potent and value-laden cultural concepts: that of the ‘good mother’ and that of the ‘fat child’. Dominant concepts of the ‘good mother’ contend that mothers should closely monitor and regulate their children’s bodies, paying careful attention to their health and wellbeing and acting upon any problems that may arise. They should consult expert advice as part of their efforts to promote their children’s health.

The figure of the ‘fat child’ has received a high level of public health and mass media attention since the late 1990s. A moral panic has developed around the issue of ‘childhood obesity’ and it has been argued that children are now more overweight than at any other time in human history. Fatness in general is surrounded with moral meanings concerning lack of self-control, greed and laziness. When small children are considered to be overweight, these moral judgements are transferred to their mothers. As in the case of Swan, such women become positioned as ‘bad mothers’ who have neglected their children’s health.

What is also evident from the criticism of Swan is that mothers, particularly those in public life but also ordinary women, are constantly placed in a position in which their parenting and the way in which they care for their children are open to judgement from others. This begins when pregnant women in public spaces may be castigated by strangers for smoking or consuming alcohol. Judgement of mothers follows into early infancy, when women who do not breastfeed, or those who breastfeed in public, may be reprimanded and called to account by others. Throughout their children’s early years, problems or health conditions experienced by their children are frequently positioned as the result of a mother’s failings to heed expert or lay advice about how best to care for her children.

I have found in my own research with mothers about their beliefs and experiences of promoting their infants’ and young children’s health that they are highly aware of conforming to the ‘good mother’ ideal in taking responsibility for their children’s health, development and wellbeing. They are also aware of the judgements that other people made of their actions, including other mothers. Most mothers in my study were concerned about the ‘obesity problem’ and attempted to ensure that their children ate a healthy diet and exercised. They even tried to act as role models for their children in relation to these behaviours by disciplining and regulating their own bodies. But the women were also confronted with the fact that they do not have full control over their children’s health, development and wellbeing. Despite their mothers’ best efforts, children sometimes become ill or have an allergy, developmental or behavioural problem, or may refuse to eat the ‘right’ kinds of foods.

Concepts of health risks have become privatised to the sphere of the home and to the figure of the ‘good mother’. Notions of fate as causing ill-health or disease have given way to the idea that these conditions are the result of the individual failing to take up medical or public health advice to engage in health-promoting behaviour. As a result, women blame themselves for their children’s health problems, or are blamed by others. And the role of the fathers of these children in caring for them and protecting their health are barely mentioned.

References

Bell, K., McNaughton, D. and Salmon, A. (2009) Medicine, morality and mothering: public health discourses on foetal alcohol exposure, smoking around children and childhood overnutrition. Critical Public Health, 19(2), 155—70.

Lupton, D. (2011) ‘The best thing for the baby’: mothers’ concepts and experiences related to promoting their infants’ health and development. Health, Risk and Society, 13(7/8), 637—51.

Lupton, D. (2012) ‘I’m Always on the Lookout for What Could be Going Wrong’: Mothers’ Concepts and Experiences of Health and Illness in their Young Children. Sydney Health & Society Group Working Paper No. 1. Sydney: Sydney Health & Society Group. Available at http://hdl.handle.net/21238351.

New book: (Re)thinking Violence in Health Care Settings

This comprehensive volume explores various forms of violence in health care settings. Using a broad range of critical approaches in the field of anthropology, cultural studies, gender studies, political philosophy and sociology, it examines violence following three definite yet interrelated streams: institutional and managerial violence against health care workers or patients; horizontal violence amongst health care providers and finally, patients’ violence towards health care providers. Drawing together the latest research from Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US, (Re)Thinking Violence in Health Care Settings engages with the work of critical theorists such as Bourdieu, Butler, Foucault, Latour, and Žižek, amongst others, to address the issue of violence and theorise its workings in creative and controversial ways.  As such, it will be of interest to sociologists and anthropologists with research expertise in health, medicine, violence and organisations, as well as to health care professionals.

• Contents:   Foreword, Dave Holmes; Introduction: (re)thinking violence in health care settings, Dave Holmes, Trudy Rudge, Amélie Perron and Isabelle St-Pierre; Part I Institutional and Managerial Violence: A critical reflection on the use of behaviour modification programs in forensic psychiatry settings, Dave Holmes and Stuart J. Murray; The violence of tolerance in a multicultural workplace: examples from nursing, Trudy Rudge, Virginia Mapedzahama, Sandra West and Amélie Perron; Changing discourses of blame in nursing and healthcare, Hannah Cooke; Hospital policies regarding violence in the workplace: a discourse analysis, Penny Powers; Exploring violence in a forensic hospital: a theoretical experimentation, Amélie Perron and Trudy Rudge; Nurses’ failure to report elder abuse in long-term care: an exploratory study, Gloria Hamel-Lauzon and Sylvie Lauzon. Part II Horizontal Violence: Foucault and the nexus between violence and power: the context of intra/inter professional aggression, Isabelle St-Pierre; Examining nurse-to-nurse horizontal violence and nurse-to-student vertical violence through the lens of phenomenology, Sandra P. Thomas; The rise of violence in HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns: a critical discourse analysis, Marilou Gagnon and Jean Daniel Jacob; Bullying in the workplace: a qualitative study of newly licensed registered nurses, Shellie Simons and Barbara Mawn; Sexual health nursing assessments: examining the violence of intimate exposures, Patrick O’Byrne and Cory Woodyatt; Bullying on the back-channels: everyday interpersonal communicative relations in telephone talk as a space for covert forms of professional manipulation, Jackie Cook and Colette Snowden. Part III Patients’ Violence: Assessment of risk and special observations in mental health practice: a comparison of forensic and non-forensic settings, Elizabeth Mason-Whitehead and Tom Mason; Policing pornography in high-secure care: the discursive construction of gendered inequality, David Mercer; Warning – this job contains strong language and adult themes: do nurses require thick skins and broad shoulders to deal with encounters involving swearing?, Teresa Stone and Margaret McMillan; Prison nursing: managing the threats to caring, Elizabeth Walsh; The mentally ill and civil commitment: assessing dangerousness in law and psychiatry, Cary Federman; Working in a violent environment: the pitfall of integrating security imperatives into forensic psychiatry nursing, Jean Daniel Jacob; Index.

About the Editor:  Dave Holmes is Professor and University Research Chair in Forensic Nursing, School of Nursing, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Ottawa, Canada and co-editor of both Critical Interventions in the Ethics of Healthcare and Abjectly Boundless: Boundaries, Bodies and Health Work. Trudy Rudge is Professor at Sydney Nursing School, University of Sydney, Australia, and co-editor of Abjectly Boundless: Boundaries, Bodies and Health Work. Amélie Perron is Assistant Professor, School of Nursing, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Ottawa, Canada.

New book: Bio-Objects: Life in the 21st Century

Increasing knowledge of the biological is fundamentally transforming what life itself means and where its boundaries lie. New developments in the biosciences – especially through the molecularisation of life – are (re)shaping healthcare and other aspects of our society. This cutting edge volume studies contemporary bio-objects, or the categories, materialities and processes that are central to the configuring of ‘life’ today, as they emerge, stabilize and circulate through society.

Examining a variety of bio-objects in contexts beyond the laboratory, Bio-Objects: Life in the 21st Century explores new ways of thinking about how novel bio-objects enter contemporary life, analysing the manner in which, among others, the boundaries between human and animal, organic and non-organic, and being ‘alive’ and the suspension of living, are questioned, destabilised and in some cases re-established.

Thematically organised around questions of changing boundaries; the governance and regulation of bio-objects; and changing social, economic and political relations, this book presents rich new case studies from Europe that will be of interest to scholars of science and technology studies, social theory, sociology and law.

• Contents:   Introduction: bio-objects: exploring the boundaries of life, Andrew Webster; Part 1 Changing Boundaries of Human, Nonhuman and Society: Challenging bio-objectification; adding noise to transgenic silences, Tora Holmberg and Malin Ideland; Pluripotent promises: configurations of a bio-object, Lena Eriksson; Water – an exploration of the boundaries of bio-objects, Ragna Zeiss; Bio-objectification of clinical research patients: impacts on the stabilization of new medical technologies, Conor M.W. Douglas. Part 2 Governing Bio-Objects: Beasting biology: interspecies politics, Nik Brown; Comparing public engagement with bio-objects: implementing co-existence regimes for GM crops in Denmark, the UK and Germany, Janus Hansen; Governing hereditary disease in the age of autonomy: mutations, families and care, Aaro Tupasela; At the margins of life: making fetal life matter in trajectories of first trimester prenatal risk assessment (FTPRA), Nete Schwennesen. Part 3 Generative Relations: The fruit of love: the German IVF-embryo turning from abject into bio-object, Bettina Bock von Wülfingen; On why states still matter: in vitro fertilization embryos between laboratories and state authorities in Italy, Ingrid Metzler; Growing a cell in silico: on how the creation of a bio-object transforms the organisation of science, Niki Vermeulen; Genetic discrimination 2.0: the un/differentiating gene in insurance, Ine Van Hoyweghen; Still life? Frozen gametes, national gene banks and re-configuration of animality, Sakari Tamminen; Index.

About the Editor:  Niki Vermeulen, is Wellcome Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, Centre for the History of Science, Manchester, UK, Sakari Tamminen is an Academy of Finland postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland and Andrew Webster is Professor of the Sociology of Science & Technology and Director of the Science and Technology Studies Unit at the University of York, UK.

Pregnancy and loss of control

A recent review of the pregnancy film What to Expect When You’re Expecting observed that it conforms to the ‘frat house movie of the 1980s’ genre in its focus on unruly bodies and leaking body fluids such as vomit and urine (http://tinyurl.com/6wxpf8x ). This film joins a long line of cinematic representations of pregnant women as ruled by their hormones, emotionally volatile, permeable and altogether departing from the conventions of orderly embodiment. The pregnant woman who cries, loses her temper, eats strange things or eats excessively, balloons to huge proportions and experiences her waters breaking in public have all become stock-in-trade images of pregnancy in popular culture.

These depictions of pregnant women conforms to a general societal view that women in general, and pregnant women in particular, are emotionally and physically unstable. The film’s trailer features one of the pregnant women crying on a television show, saying ‘I have no control over my body or my emotions’, something that clearly distresses her. Control over one’s embodied self is a central dimension of contemporary western societies. The contained, tightly controlled body is privileged over what is viewed culturally as the unregulated, uncontained, excessive body. Pregnant women and women in childbirth are the archetypal uncontained bodies, leaking and permeable both literally and symbolically. Pregnancy is a highly culturally ambiguous state. The pregnant women is an anomaly because of the ways her body transgresses boundaries between self and other. She is, for a time, two bodies in one, a state experienced by no other human body.

Women often experience pregnancy as a time in which their bodies no longer seem to belong to them. Pregnant bodies are seen by others as no longer private: they become public bodies, viewed as public property. Other people constantly make observations about pregnant women’s size and monitor pregnant women for their behaviour to ensure that they follow what is deemed to be appropriate for their own health and that of their baby. Pregnant women also express concern that their bodies will let them down in public places by leaking inappropriate body fluids: vomit due to morning sickness, for example, or their ‘waters’ (amniotic fluids) breaking. They all too aware of the public censure and disgust which accompanies such loss of control. Many feel as if they should withdraw from public space because of self-consciousness about their bodies, physical discomfort, concerns about losing control over their bodies and the difficulty of conforming to expectations of how a ‘proper’ pregnant woman should comport herself (Longhurst, 2005).

The age of the first-time pregnant woman can make a difference to how she feels about her pregnant body. British research (Thompson et al., 2011) using interviews with women from a wide range of age groups found that for younger women (aged under 25) pregnancy was seen by many as part of their youthful capacities, the body as taken-for-granted youthful femininity, part of their physical capital. Their pregnant bodies may also have been viewed as a source of shame, however, something that others judged them about because they were pregnant so young. For women in the age group 25 to 35, the body and maternity was a more self-conscious project. They were often aware of their lessening capacity to become pregnant and of the need to juggle career imperatives with maternity, involving much forward planning. Older women (those aged over 35) still sometimes viewed their bodies anxiously as vulnerable, unruly and likely to let them down, particularly if they had previously experienced fertility problems or miscarriage.

Interestingly, at a time in which the pregnant body is viewed as deviating from the norm in its inability to contain and regulate itself, it is also portrayed in popular culture as valuable, precious and a state to be aspired to: the apotheosis of true womanhood. This is particularly the case for celebrities who are pregnant and for the models who feature on pregnancy magazines and websites, glowing with health and radiating ‘natural’ beauty. These pregnant women are positioned as ideal-type pregnant women, with nary a varicose vein, stretch-mark or morning-sickness vomit stain in sight. Such women seem to have contained their permeability, their tendency towards bodily uncontainment, through sheer will-power. They are particularly esteemed if they have managed to control excessive weight gain during their pregnancy, suggesting their ability to exert power over any pregnancy-related cravings or appetites (Gentile, 2011). Such pregnant women are viewed as especially virtuous because they have managed to tame their unruly bodies at a time when it is expected that the body is very much in control of the self.

References

Gentile, K. (2011) What about the baby? The new cult of domesticity and media images of pregnancy. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 12(1), 38–58.

Longhurst, R. (2005) Maternities: Gender, Bodies and Space. London: Routledge.

Lupton, D. (2012) Configuring Maternal, Preborn and Infant Embodiment. Sydney Health & Society Group Working Paper No. 2. Sydney: Sydney Health & Society Group. Available at http://hdl.handle.net/2123/8363.

Thomson, R., Kehily, M.J., Hadfield, L. and Sharpe, S. (2011) Making Modern Mothers. Bristol: The Policy Press.

Edgework 2: going beyond the white, middle-class male perspective

In my previous post ‘Edgework: the fun of risk-taking’, I discussed the emotional dimension of voluntary risk-taking. Edgework research has predominantly focused on male risk-takers, the vast majority of whom are white and middle-class. These men are able to afford to engage in ‘adventure holidays’ or such ‘extreme sports’ as skydiving, BASE jumping or white-water kayaking. Other research suggests that such individuals engage in voluntary risk-taking for different reasons than do people who are less socially and economically privileged. Gender also influences why people take risks and how they feel about risk-taking.

In her study of young Scottish women imprisoned for engaging in violent behaviour and other criminal activities such as stealing and illicit drug use, Bachelor (2007) argues that these women were initially drawn to engage in this behaviour because of the shared adrenaline ‘rush’ or ‘buzz’ they felt, a desire to escape boredom and to feel as if they could foster friendships and belong to a group. Some of these young women displayed an attraction towards traditionally masculine behaviour such as violence and the feeling of power and toughness engaging in afforded them. However the women increasingly came to undertake such activities as a means of blocking out powerful emotions such as grief and rage caused by life experiences of abuse, family dysfunction and institutional care, or by eliciting more pleasurable emotions. They remarked that they often felt ‘emotionally numb’ and ‘detached’ and that risk-taking was a way of making them feel more alive.

For these young women, violent behaviour, self-harm and drug use were ways of feeling different, either by helping to avoid conscious thoughts which were distressing, evoking feelings of power and control when feeling helpless or venting feelings of anger and hurt by hurting others. These young women were not taking risks to escape the alienating world of work and to achieve a sense of authenticity and hyperreality, as do privileged white men. They were attempting to achieve a sense of control over a world in which they felt increasingly disempowered and looking for a way of feeling close to others (their peer-group) in a context in which their families had not provided intimacy and caring and a sense of belonging.

While men may experience feelings of exhilaration and omnipotence in their edgework experiences, this research showed that when reflecting on their behaviour young women were more likely to feel ambivalent about it. They viewed such risk-taking activities as irrational and expressed feelings of guilt and shame about the violent and criminal activities in which they engaged. They may have felt in control at the time of the behaviour, but when they looked back at what they had done viewed it as being ‘out-of-control’ and as ‘going too far’. In interpreting their behaviour in this way, the young women are drawing on discourses of normative femininity, which position such behaviours as abnormal and inappropriate for women.

As this research suggests, edgework has many different nuances. It is not simply about evoking and controlling intense emotion. It is not simply about engaging in risk-taking as part of legally sanctioned and expensive leisure pursuits. Edgework also incorporates criminal behaviour, perhaps one of the few avenues for members of the underclass to seek out risky pursuits. It may not represent an escape from the banality of the safety and routines of a privileged life, but may also be a way of escaping the misery of a life including experiences of abuse, poverty and family dysfunction.

Reference

Bachelor, S. (2007) ‘Getting mad wi’ it’: risk seeking by young women. In Hannah-Moffat, K. and O’Malley, P. (eds), Gendered Risks. Milton Park: Routledge-Cavendish, pp. 205—28.