Category Archives: motherhood

My publications in 2018

Books

  • Lupton, D. (2018) Fat (revised 2nd edition). London: Routledge.

Book chapters

  • Lupton, D. (2018) Lively data, social fitness and biovalue: the intersections of health self-tracking and social media. In Burgess, J., Marwick, A. and Poell, T. (eds), The Sage Handbook of Social Media. London: Sage, pp. 562-578.
  • Lupton, D. (2018) Digital health and health care. In Scambler, G. (ed), Sociology as Applied to Health and Medicine, 2nd Houndmills: Palgrave, pp. 277-290.
  • Lupton, D. and Smith, GJD. (2018) ‘A much better person’: the agential capacities of self-tracking practices. In Ajana, B. (ed), Metric Culture: Ontologies of Self-Tracking Practices. London: Emerald Publishing, pp. 57-75.
  • Lupton, D. (2018) 3D printing technologies: a third wave perspective. In Michael Filimowicz, M. and Tzankova, V. (eds), New Directions in Third Wave HCI (Volume 1, Technologies). Springer: London, pp. 89-104.

Journal articles

Encyclopedia entry

My publications in 2016

img_0616

 

Books

Lupton, D. (2016) The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Edited special issues

Digitised health, medicine and risk’, Health, Risk & Society (volume 17, issue 7-8), 2016 (my editorial for this issue is available here).

Book chapters

Lupton, D. (2016) Digitized health promotion: risk and personal responsibility for health in the Web 2.0 era. In Davis, J. and Gonzalez, A. M. (eds), To Fix or To Heal: Patient Care, Public Health, and the Limits of Biomedicine. New York: New York University Press, pp. 152—76. (A preprint version is available here.)

Lupton, D. (2016) Digital risk society. In Zinn, J., Burgess, A. and Alemanno, A. (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Risk Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 301—9. (A preprint version is available here.)

Lupton, D. (2016) You are your data: self-tracking practices and concepts of data. In Selke, Stefan (ed.), Lifelogging: Digital Self-Tracking: Between Disruptive Technology and Cultural Change. Zurich: Springer, pp. 61—79. (A preprint version is available here.)

Lupton, D. (2016) Digital health technologies and digital data: new ways of monitoring, measuring and commodifying human bodies. In Olleros, F. X. and Zhegu, M. (eds), Research Handbook of Digital Transformations. New York: Edward Elgar, pp. 84—102. (A preprint version is available here.)

Lupton, D. (2016) Personal data practices in the age of lively data. In Daniels, J., Gregory, K. and McMillan Cottom, T. (eds), Digital Sociologies. London: Policy Press, 335—350. (A preprint version is available here.)

Lupton, D. (2016) ‘Mastering your fertility’: the digitised reproductive citizen. In McCosker, A., Vivienne, S. and Johns, A. (eds), Negotiating Digital Citizenship: Control, Contest and Culture. London: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 81—93. (A preprint version is available here.)

Journal articles

Thomas, G.M. and Lupton, D. (2016) Threats and thrills: pregnancy apps, risk and consumption. Health, Risk & Society, 17(7-8), 495—509.

Lupton, D. (2016) Digital companion species and eating data: implications for theorising digital data-human assemblages. Big Data & Society, 3(1), online, available at http://bds.sagepub.com/content/3/1/2053951715619947

Lupton, D. (2016) Towards critical health studies: reflections on two decades of research in Health and the way forward. Health, 20(1), 49—61.

Michael, M. and Lupton, D. (2016) Toward a manifesto for ‘a public understanding of big data’. Public Understanding of Science, 25(1), 104—116.

Lupton, D. (2016) The diverse domains of quantified selves: self-tracking modes and dataveillance. Economy & Society, 45(1), 101—122.

Lupton, D. (2016) The use and value of digital media information for pregnancy and early motherhood: a focus group study. BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, 16(171), online, available at http://bmcpregnancychildbirth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12884-016-0971-

Lupton, D., Pedersen, S. and Thomas, G.M. (2016) Parenting and digital media: from the early web to contemporary digital society. Sociology Compass, 10(8), 730—743.

Lupton, D. and Pedersen, S. (2016) An Australian survey of women’s use of pregnancy and parenting apps. Women and Birth, 29, 368—375.

Sumartojo, S., Pink, S., Lupton, D. and Heyes Labond, C. (2016) The affective intensities of datafied space. Emotion, Space and Society, 21, 33—40.

Pedersen, S. and Lupton, D. (2016) ‘What are you feeling right now?’ Communities of maternal feeling on Mumsnet. Emotion, Space & Society, online ahead of print: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S175545861630010X

Lupton, D. (2016) Digital media and body weight, shape, and size: an introduction and review. Fat Studies, online ahead of print: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21604851.2017.1243392

Lupton, D. (2016) Lively devices, lively data and lively leisure studies. Leisure Studies, 35(6), 709—711.

 

 

Pregnancy apps and gender stereotypes

Pregnant women and those experiencing the early years of motherhood have used online forums for many years to share experiences and seek information. Now there are hundreds of apps that have been designed for similar purposes. As part of an integrated research program looking at apps and other digital media for pregnancy and parenting, I have been researching these apps using several approaches. In a survey of 410 Australian women who were pregnant or who had given birth in the past three years, I found that almost three-quarters had used at least one pregnancy app, while half of the women who already had children reported using a parenting app (see here for an open access report on this survey and here for a journal article about it).

With Gareth Thomas from Cardiff University, I have also conducted a critical analysis of the content of pregnancy apps themselves. This involved analysing all pregnancy-related apps offered in the two major app stores, the Apple App Store and Google Play. We examined the app descriptions, looking for how the developers marketed their apps and what they offered. See here and here for articles that have been published from this analysis. Update: we have now published an article focusing on apps for expectant fathers here.

This study found that the apps designed for pregnant women represent pregnancy as a state in which women must maintain a high degree of vigilance over their own bodies and that of their foetuses. Many apps promoted this level of self-monitoring, often seeking to render the practices aesthetically-pleasing by using beautiful images of foetuses or allowing women to take ‘belfies’ (belly selfies) and share these on social media.

Among the most surprising of our findings were the large numbers of pregnancy-related games designed for entertainment. These include pregnancy pranks such as fake foetal ultrasounds to fool people into thinking someone is pregnant. We also found many games for little girls that are on the market. The encourage girls to give pregnant women ‘make-overs’ so that they will ‘feel more confident’ and look beautiful, ready for the birth. Some even let players perform a caesarean section on the characters, who remain glamorous and serene even on the operating table. The types of messages about pregnancy and childbirth that are promoted to their young female users are troubling.

Other apps are directed at men who are becoming fathers, although there were far fewer of these apps compared with those for pregnant women. We noticed from our analysis of these apps that even though quite a few of them are marketed as being written ‘by men, for men’, they typically portray the father as a bumbling fool, who requires simplistic or jokey information to keep him interested in the impending birth of his child. Men are advised not to stare at attractive women and to constantly reassure their partners that they find them attractive. Foetuses are compared to beer bottles so that men can learn about foetal development in supposedly unthreatening ways.

Our overall finding, therefore, is the highly stereotypical gendered representations of pregnant women and expectant fathers in these apps. Women are encouraged to use apps to achieve the ideal of the self-monitoring ‘good mother’, closely tracking their bodies because they have their foetus’s best interests at heart in every action they take. They are expected to celebrate their pregnancy and changing bodies – there is little room for ambivalence. Their male partners, on the other hand, are assumed to be uninterested and to require nudging to act in a supportive role to their partners.  And little girls are encouraged to accept and perpetuate the ‘yummy mummy’ stereotype in playing the pregnancy games that are marketed to them, and to view caesarean sections as a quick and easy way to give birth.

My 2015 publications

Here are my publications that came out in 2015.

Book

  • Lupton, D. (2015) Digital Sociology. London: Routledge.

Book chapters

  • Lupton, D. (2015) Digital sociology. In Germov, J. and Poole, M. (eds), Public Sociology: An Introduction to Australian Society, 3rd St Leonards: Allen & Unwin.
  • Lupton, D. (2015) Donna Haraway: the digital cyborg assemblage and the new digital health technologies. In Collyer, F. (ed), The Palgrave Handbook of Social Theory in Health, Illness and Medicine. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

Peer-reviewed journal articles

Report

  • Lupton, D. and Pedersen, S. (2015) ‘What is Happening with Your Body and Your Baby’: Australian Women’s Use of Pregnancy and Parenting Apps. Available here.

Digitising female fertility and reproduction

Over the past few months, I have been working on writing about the findings of several research projects addressing the topic of digital technologies directed at female fertility and reproduction. These projects involve:

1) a critical content analysis of fertility and reproduction-related software and devices (especially apps);

2) an online survey of 410 Australian women’s use of pregnancy and parenting apps; and

3) focus groups and interviews with Australian and British women about their use of these technologies (these are still in progress).

Several outcomes have now been published drawing on these findings. They include a report (with Sarah Pedersen from Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen) outlining the findings of the online survey (this can be accessed here), an article on the gamification and ludification of pregnancy in apps (with Gareth Thomas from Cardiff University, available here) and a book chapter on the concept of the reproductive citizen and the range of digital technologies that are directed at helping women to monitor and regulate their fertility and reproduction (available here). Edit: two other articles have now been published: one based on the survey findings (here), and another on the pregnancy app study (here).

Some of the key findings are:

  • The survey showed that pregnancy and parenting apps were very popular among the survey respondents – three-quarters of the respondents (who were either pregnant or who had a baby in the past three years at the time of the survey) said that they had used at least one pregnancy app, while almost half had used at least one parenting app.
  • Googling information about pregnancy is very common among pregnant women, for whom too much information about pregnancy appears never to be enough (this finding emerged in the focus groups). They tend to invest their trust in the first few search findings that come up on their search engine, reasoning that because this is evidence of popularity, then these websites must be credible.
  • Despite the popularity of pregnancy and parenting apps, few women are contemplating the validity of the information presented in them, or demonstrated concern about the data security and privacy of the personal information that the apps may collect (this was evident in both the survey and the focus groups).
  • This genre of software is intensifying an already fervid atmosphere of self-surveillance, attempts at management and control and self-responsibility in which female fertility and reproduction are experienced and performed.
  • Stereotypical concepts of idealised female fertile and pregnant bodies are reproduced in apps and other software. They use highly aestheticised images and the promise of rational calculation and monitoring to seek to contain and control women’s fertility and reproduction.
  • Women in their fertile years – and particularly those contemplating pregnancy or already pregnant – are part of a highly commodified demographic. The information that they generate from their online practices possess a new form of value, biovalue, as part of the bioeconomy of personal health and medical data.

Digitised children’s bodies

This is an excerpt from the pre-print version of a chapter I have written on the topic of ‘digital bodies’. The full pre-print can be accessed here.

The sociomaterialist perspective has been taken up by several scholars writing about children’s bodies, particularly within cultural geography, but also by some sociologists and anthropologists (Prout, 1996; Horton and Kraftl, 2006a, 2006b; Lee, 2008; Woodyer, 2008). Researchers using a sociomaterialist approach have conducted studies on, for example, children’s use of asthma medication (Prout, 1996), the surveillant technologies that have developed around controlling children’s body weight in schools (Rich et al., 2011), children’s sleep and the objects with which they interact (Lee, 2008), the interrelationship of objects with pedagogy and classroom management of students’ bodies (Mulcahy, 2012) and sociomaterial practices in classrooms that lead to the inclusion or exclusion of children with disabilities (Söderström, 2014). Outside sociomaterialist studies, young children’s interactions with digital technologies have attracted extensive attention from social researchers, particularly in relation to topics such as the potential for cyber-bullying, online paedophilia and for children to become unfit and overweight due to spending too much time in front of screens (Holloway et al., 2013). However few researchers thus far have directed their attention to the types of digital technologies that visually represent children’s bodies or render their body functions, activities and behaviours into digital data; or, in other words, how children’s bodies become digital data assemblages.

From the embryonic stage of development onwards, children’s bodies are now routinely monitored and portrayed using digital technologies. A plethora of websites provide images of every stage of embryonic and foetal development, from fertilisation to birth, using a combination of digital images taken from embryo and foetus specimens and digital imaging software  (Lupton, 2013). 3/4D ultrasounds have become commodified, used for ‘social’ or ‘bonding’ purposes. Many companies offering 3/D ultrasounds now come to people’s homes, allowing expectant parents to invite family and friends and turn a viewing of the foetus into a party event. This sometimes involves a ‘gender reveal’ moment, in which the sonographer demonstrates to all participants, including the parents, the sex of the foetus . Some companies offer the service of using 3D ultrasound scan files to create life-sized printed foetus replica models for parents.

The posting to social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube of the foetus ultrasound image has become a rite of passage for many new parents and often a way of announcing the pregnancy. Using widgets such as ‘Baby Gaga’, expectant parents can upload regular status updates to their social media feeds automatically that provide news on the foetus’s development. While a woman is pregnant, she can use a range of digital devices to monitor her foetus. Hundreds of pregnancy apps are currently on the market, including not only those that provide information but others that invite users to upload personal information about their bodies and the development of their foetus. Some apps offer a personalised foetal development overview or provide the opportunity for the woman to record the size of her pregnant abdomen week by week, eventually creating a time-lapse video. Other apps involve women tracking foetal movements or heart beat. Bella Beat, for example, is a smartphone attachment and app that allows the pregnant women to hear and record the foetal heart beat whenever she likes and to upload the audio file to her social media accounts.

YouTube has become a predominant medium for the representation of the unborn entity in the form of ultrasound images and of the moment of birth. Almost 100,000 videos showing live childbirth, including both vaginal and Caesarean births, are available for viewing on that site, allowing the entry into the world of these infants to be viewed by thousands and, in the case of some popular videos, even millions of viewers. Some women even choose to live-stream the birth so that audiences can watch the delivery in real time. Following the birth, there are similar opportunities for proud parents to share images of their infant online on social media platforms. In addition to these are the growing number of devices on the market for parents to monitor the health, development and wellbeing of their infants and young children. Apps are available to monitor such aspects as infants’ feeding and sleeping patterns, their weight and height and their development and achievements towards milestones. Sensor-embedded baby clothing, wrist or ankle bands and toys can be purchased that monitor infants’ heart rate, body temperature and breathing, producing data that are transmitted to the parents’ devices. Smartphones can be turned into baby monitors with the use of apps that record the sound levels of the infant.

As children grow, their geolocation, educational progress and physical fitness can be tracked by their parents using apps, other software and wearable devices. As children themselves begin to use digital technologies for their own purposes, they start to configure their own digital assemblages that represent and track their bodies. With the advent of touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers, even very young children are now able to use social media sites and the thousands of apps that have been designed especially for their use (Holloway et al., 2013). Some such technologies encourage young children to learn about the anatomy of human bodies or about nutrition, exercise and physical fitness, calculate their body mass index, collect information about their bodies or represent their bodies in certain ways (such as manipulating photographic images of themselves). These technologies typically employ gamification strategies to provide interest and motivation for use. Some involve combining competition or games with self-tracking using wearable devices. One example is the Leapfrog Leapband, a digital wristband connected to an app which encourages children to be physically active in return for providing them with the opportunity to care for virtual pets. Another is the Sqord interactive online platform with associated digital wristband and app. Children who sign up can make an avatar of themselves and use the wristband to track their physical activity. Users compete with other users by gaining points for moving their bodies as often and as fast as possible.

In the formal educational system there are still more opportunities for children’s bodies to be monitored measured and evaluated and rendered into digitised assemblages. Programmable ‘smart schools’ are becoming viewed as part of the ‘smart city’, an urban environment in which sensors that can watch and collect digital data on citizens are ubiquitous (Williamson, 2014). The monitoring of children’s educational progress and outcomes using software is now routinely undertaken in many schools, as are their movements around the school. In countries such as the USA and the UK, the majority of schools have CCTV cameras that track students, and many use biometric tracking technologies such as RFID chips in badges or school uniforms and fingerprints to identify children and monitor their movements and their purchases at school canteens (Taylor, 2013; Selwyn, 2014). A growing number of schools are beginning to use wearable devices, apps and other software for health and physical education lessons, such as coaching apps that record children’s sporting performances and digital heart rate monitors that track their physical exertions (Lupton, 2015).

We can see in the use of digital technologies to monitor and represent the bodies of children a range of forms of embodiment. Digitised data assemblages of children’s bodies are generated from before birth via a combination of devices that seek to achieve medical- or health-related or social and affective objectives. These assemblages may move between different domains: when, for example, a digitised ultrasound image that was generated for medical purposes becomes repurposed by expectant parents as a social media artefact, a way of announcing the pregnancy, establishing their foetus as new person and establishing its social relationships. Parents’ digital devices, and later those of educational institutions and those of children themselves when they begin to use digital devices, potentially become personalised repositories for a vast amount of unique digital assemblages on the individual child, from images of them to descriptions of their growth, development, mental and physical health and wellbeing, movements in space, achievements and learning outcomes. These data assemblages, containing as they do granular details about children, offer unprecedented potential to configure knowledges about individual children and also large groups of children (as represented in aggregated big data sets).

References

Holloway D, Green L and Livingstone S. (2013) Zero to Eight: Young Children and Their Internet Use. London: LSE London, EU Kids Online.

Horton J and Kraftl P. (2006a) Not just growing up, but going on: Materials, spacings, bodies, situations. Children’s Geographies 4(3): 259-276.

Horton J and Kraftl P. (2006b) What else? some more ways of thinking and doing ‘Children’s Geographies’. Children’s Geographies 4(1): 69-95.

Lee N. (2008) Awake, asleep, adult, child: An a-humanist account of persons. Body & Society 14(4): 57-74.

Lupton D. (2013) The Social Worlds of the Unborn, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

Lupton D. (2015) Data assemblages, sentient schools and digitised health and physical education (response to Gard). Sport, Education and Society 20(1): 122-132.

Mulcahy D. (2012) Affective assemblages: body matters in the pedagogic practices of contemporary school classrooms. Pedagogy, culture and society 20(1): 9-27.

Prout A. (1996) Actor-network theory, technology and medical sociology: an illustrative analysis of the metered dose inhaler. Sociology of Health and Illness 18(2): 198-219.

Rich E, Evans J and De Pian L. (2011) Children’s bodies, surveillance and the obesity crisis. In: Rich E, Monaghan LF and Aphramor L (eds) Debating Obesity: Critical Perspectives. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 139-163.

Selwyn N. (2014) Data entry: towards the critical study of digital data and education. Learning, Media and Technology: 1-19.

Söderström S. (2014) Socio-material practices in classrooms that lead to the social participation or social isolation of disabled pupils. Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research online first.

Taylor E. (2013) Surveillance Schools: Security, Discipline and Control in Contemporary Education, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

Williamson B. (2014) Smart schools in sentient cities. dmlcentral.

Woodyer T. (2008) The body as research tool: embodied practice and children’s geographies. Children’s Geographies 6(4): 349-362.

The body-being-born: how women conceptualise and experience the moment of birth

Newborn child, seconds after birth. The umbili...

Newborn child, seconds after birth. The umbilical cord has not yet been cut. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Although there is a large body of literature about labour and childbirth in the social sciences, surprising few researchers have sought to investigate women’s experiences of the moment of birth.

Virginia Schmied and I recently published an article in the Sociology of Health & Illness that drew on interview data with Australian women who had recently given birth. We asked women to recount their birth stories to us, and the data that eventuated gave interesting insights into women’s perceptions and experiences of what we call ‘the body-being-born’. We use this term to refer to the foetus/infant, an ambiguous body at the moment of birth because it is not quite inside but not quite outside the maternal body. When inside the maternal body, this body is technically a foetus; once expelled from the maternal body, it is called an infant. But in the process of vaginal labour and birth itself, when the body-being-born is passing through the cervix, parts of this body (most commonly its head) slip inside and outside the maternal body, moving back and forth as the woman works to deliver the body.

This stage of labour, therefore, is a highly liminal one, involving the two-in-one foetal/maternal body in the process of individuating to become two separate bodies over a period of time.  Women who gave birth vaginally without anaesthetic often described this process as a ‘splitting’ of their bodies, a sensation of their bodies ‘opening to the world’ over which they had no control.

We found that most of the women we interviewed struggled to conceptualise this process, as it was so foreign to their embodied experiences. They also needed to take some time following the birth to come to terms with the idea that the foetus was now ‘my baby’: a body/self that was physically separate from their own, now foreign and strange as it was outside their bodies. As one of our interviewees put it:

The midwife handed her straight to me and I held her, but I had held her for a while, I just was — it was like looking at her and wondering ‘Where did this baby came from?’ You know, despite what I’d gone through, it was hard to associate that she was actually mine and she was out of my stomach … Even holding her for the first few minutes — just, it wasn’t like she was mine, my kid, which is weird …when you think of what you went through, it was really quite strange.

This is a time in which women have to deal physically and emotionally with the disrupted boundaries of their bodies, the significant distortion and opening that has occurred with the birth and the splitting of body/self. There is a sense of disbelief, of wonder that this amazing, unique and strange process has happened to them.

An important finding from our study was that women who had undergone a caesarean section had even greater difficulties coming to terms emotionally and conceptually with the notion that their infant was now separate from them; that they had, indeed, ‘had a baby’. Because they did not undergo the physical rigours and often intense pain of prolonged labour and the experience of actually expelling the body-being-born from their own bodies, and because their bodies were numbed to surgically deliver, women who had had a caesarean took longer to accept the fact that the infant was now out of their bodies. They talked about feeling alienated from their infants and struggling to come to terms that it was actually ‘my baby’. In the words of another of our interviewees:

It was very hard to think that she was my daughter after she was born, because I had a caesarean under general anaesthetic and all of a sudden I’m not pregnant any more. And I wake up a few hours later and you’re presented with a baby. You think, ‘Oh, why isn’t this, why aren’t I feeling any kicks in my abdomen anymore?’ — you know. And there’s the baby and it’s very hard to relate to it.

Virginia and I conclude our article by arguing that the circumstances in which women give birth are pivotal to how they experience the process of coming to terms with the body that was once inside them emerging to the outside. Our findings suggest that health professionals and attendants working with women in labour and childbirth need to allow not only for the physical and the emotional but also the ontological dimensions of how a woman experiences both her own body and that of the body-being-born, and the significant difference that undergoing a caesarean section can make to the woman being able to achieve the transition from two bodies in one to two separate bodies successfully.

My two new books on unborn humans

318px-Unborn_human_3

51JXWQMRHVL__

Last month both my new books on the topic of the unborn (human embryos and foetuses) were published. One is an authored book, part of the Palgrave Pivot series, entitled The Social Worlds of the Unborn. The other, The Unborn Human, is an open access book that I edited as part of the Living Books about Life series published by the Open Humanities Press.

Both books deal with very similar issues and theoretical perspectives, and therefore complement each other nicely. The Social Worlds of the Unborn has five substantive chapters. The first chapter examines what I call ‘contingencies of the unborn’, drawing on sociological, anthropological, bioethical, philosophical and historical perspectives to highlight the dynamic nature of the ways we think about foetuses and embryos and the debates over the extent of their humanness and personhood. I then go on in the next chapter to discuss technologies for visualising the unborn, such as foetal photography and computer imaging and obstetric ultrasound. These have been particularly important technologies in opening up the uterus to the gaze so that we can see the previously mysterious entities that inhabit this space. I argue that visualising technologies have worked to represent unborn entities as already persons in their own right, autonomous from the maternal body, and indeed as already infants. These images also represent the unborn as beautiful, fragile and vulnerable entities requiring our utmost love and protection, and thus are powerful agents in anti-abortion politics.

In the third chapter of this book I focus on pregnant women’s perspectives on the unborn entities growing within their own bodies. I highlight the ambivalence that pregnant women often feel about this Other body inhabiting their own, as well as their difficulty in coming to terms with their ‘two-in-one’ bodies that depart so radically from the contained, unitary bodily norm. The concept of the ‘good mother’ often precludes acknowledgement that pregnant women may sometimes feel as if their unborn is antagonistic and even parasitic. Yet these feelings are not uncommon in pregnant women, in addition to the more culturally accepted notions of the unborn as precious proto-infants.

The next chapter goes on to examine the dead unborn, including discussion of abortion practices, policies and politics, decisions about the disposal of surplus IVF embryos and the mourning and memorialisation of unborn entities lost in miscarriage or stillbirth. It also looks at bioscientific definitions of the unborn and how working practices in the medical clinic or stem cell laboratory operate to deal with using matter from dead unborn entities. Here again issues concerning judgements about the humanness and status of personhood of various unborn entities are to the fore. I demonstrated that the context in which these entities are created and grow (or fail to develop) is vital to concepts of their value and vitality.

The final substantive chapter examines the concept of the endangered unborn, particularly in relation to how pregnant women are represented as posing a threat to their unborn through ignorance or deliberate negligence. I argue that the increasing humanisation and personalising of the unborn and their representation as precious, vulnerable and as already infants with full human privileges work to position them as more important than the women who bear them, who increasingly as positioned as vessels rather than as individuals with their own rights and needs that may differ from those of their unborn.

The edited book, The Unborn Human, takes up many of these issues. I review the contents of the book in my Introduction (‘Conceptualising and configuring the unborn human‘), showing how each item in the collection contributes to various ways of thinking about, treating, representing, creating or destroying unborn entities. Like the other books in the Living Books about Life series, The Unborn Human is a curated collection of material that is available as open access publications. Some of this material can be viewed via links to the website embedded in the book, while others can be directly accessed under the Creative Commons Attribution licence. This means that all of the articles and other materials included in the book, which range from historical documents to scientific, medical, bioethical, policy, sociological, anthropological and cultural studies articles as well as social and other digital media material such as websites, blog posts and YouTube videos, can be accessed for free (including my introduction using the link supplied above).

Infant embodiment: how we think about and treat babies

The future King Louis XIV as an infant with hi...

The future King Louis XIV as an infant with his wet nurse (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My article entitled ‘Infant embodiment and interembodiment: a review of sociocultural perspectives’ has been published in the latest issue of the journal Childhood. In the article I argue that the ways in which we think about and conceptualise infants’ bodies have been little explored, despite what is now a huge literature on the sociology and anthropology of the human body. Much of this literature addresses adults’ bodies; some of it looks at the embodiment of adolescents; a smaller proportion has discussed young children’s bodies. But very few academic articles or books have devoted specific attention to the youngest humans of all: those aged under two.

One exception is the American writer Jean Liedloff’s book The Continuum Concept, first published in 1975. In the book she describes her observations of child rearing practices of the Yequana, an indigenous tribe living in a jungle region of South America, with whom she lived for two and a half years. Liedloff found that these native Americans engaged in constant physical contact with their infants – they slept with their babies, breastfed them on demand for several years, and carried them everywhere in their arms or a sling, never putting them down on the ground until the infant began to crawl.

Another book-length analysis of infant-care practices is The Myth of Motherhood (1981). French historian Elizabeth Badinter details her research in this book into a period in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France when aristocratic and middle-class women commonly farmed out their newborn infants to wet nurses. These wet nurses were paid to breastfeed and care for the baby, in most cases for several years. While infants of the aristocracy were usually cared for by the wet nurse at home, those of the more populous middle-class were simply sent to live with the wet nurse’s home. In both cases, the wet nurse became the ersatz mother and the actual mothers had little or no contact with their infants. Although many of these infants died due to extreme neglect on the part of their wet nurses, who usually had many infants to feed and care for, the practice continued to be extremely fashionable among members of French society who could afford it.

These two books, vastly different in terms of the human societies and the practices of infant care they describe, are similarly instructive: in detailing these diametrically opposed approaches to infants and infant care, they highlight the contingent and varying ways in which societies and cultures think about and treat their very youngest members. The one, focusing on a contemporary non-developed society that had had little contact with western ideas and practices, and the other, on a privileged social stratum in a western society some centuries ago, demonstrate that notions of appropriate infant care and ways to treat the infant body are constructed via social, cultural, historical and political processes. Infant bodies are gestated and born, but in conditions that are always subject to change in terms of how these bodies are conceptualised and treated by others, which has implications for how infants themselves experience their bodies.

In my article I discuss these aspects of infant embodiment. Drawing on the work of Merleau-Ponty (1962) on the phenomenology of embodiment, I make the point that infants’ bodies are always interembodied, or experienced in relation to others’ bodies. Indeed the care bestowed upon infants by their mothers extends the intersubjective and interembodied relationship that developed in the womb. I adopt the terminology used in a fascinating article by anthropologist Tahhan (2008) of ‘skinship’. This concept of ‘skinskip’ relates to the embodied closeness we feel to others’ bodies via acts of intimacy, physical proximity and caring that may involve blurring the boundaries between bodies and selfhoods. I think that it has great relevance to how caregivers relate to infants and goes some way to explaining the positive dimensions of concepts of infants’ bodies. Although she does not use the term, skinship is one aspect championed by Liedloff in The Continuum Concept in her describing of the benefits of constant physical contact with infants.

Via interembodiment, or skinship, carers’ and infants’ bodies interact, intermingle and are interdependent. This interdependence can be challenging and confronting in the context of contemporary western societies, where bodies are generally understood as ideally autonomous and separate from each other. While caring for an infant can be very pleasurable and sensual, it can also be extremely demanding and frustrating. It is socially unacceptable to admit this openly, but such a perspective finds expression in baby-care books such as those by Gina Ford, a British ex-nanny whose books on producing a ‘contented baby’ are bestsellers in the Anglophone world. Ford advises parents as to the importance of rigid scheduling of feeding, sleeping and even cuddling to ensure a ‘contented baby’ who does not wake its parents at night or encroach overly on their autonomy.

From this perspective the infant is positioned as an ‘uncivilised’, close to animalistic, being who requires much training to render its behaviour acceptable for entering human society. Establishing the autonomy and individuated embodiment of the infant is a priority, and the recommended bodily practices accord with this goal. The discourse of ‘training’ the infant, as if it were an animal, to conform to adults’ expectations and their ideals of autonomy and independence is common in these accounts.

As I contended in a previous post, there is often a blurring of categories between young children and animals. While companion animals such as dogs and cats have progressively become represented as child-substitutes and treated as if they are children, infants and young children in turn are often represented culturally as animalistic, not fit to occupy the ‘civilised’ spaces outside the domestic sphere such as the café, restaurant or aeroplane.

The relationship that we have with infants, therefore, can be paradoxical and ambivalent. At the same time as infants are viewed as increasingly precious, adorable and vulnerable, requiring and inspiring large amounts of caring and attention, they are also considered to be overly demanding, detracting from our own independence and right to autonomy.

References

Badinter, E. (1981) The Myth of Motherhood: An Historical View of the Maternal Instinct. London: Souvenir Press.

Liedloff, J. (1975/1989) The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost. London: Penguin.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) The Phenomenology of Perception (translated by C. Smith). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Tahhan D (2008) Depth and space in sleep: intimacy, touch and the body in Japanese co-sleeping rituals. Body & Society, 14(4), 37—56.

Can a thin person write about fat?

In recent years a field of study that has come to be entitled ‘fat studies’ has developed, largely in response to the discourse around obesity in developed countries. Just as gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgendered people have chosen to reappropriate the once pejorative word ‘queer’ for their own purposes, attempting to reinstate it as a positive self-identifying and political term, some academics and activists seek to use the word ‘fat’ to describe corpulent people in a positive, accepting manner.

In her foreword to The Fat Studies Reader, a ground-breaking collection of radical essays critiquing dominant cultural representations of fatness, well-known fat activist Marilynn Wann (2009: ix) defines fat studies as ‘a radical field, in the sense that it goes to the root of weight-related belief systems’. She contends that fat studies rejects the following assumptions: ‘that fat people could (and should) lose weight … that being fat is a disease and fat people cannot possibly enjoy good health or long life … that thin is inherently beautiful and fat is obviously ugly’ (2009: ix).

Interest in fat studies is such that there is now a new journal (Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of  Body Weight and Society) and regular conferences and sections of major conferences devoted to this topic. Taking its name from other critical areas of interdisciplinary study such as gender, queer, black, Latino/a, postcolonial studies, those who designate themselves as part of this field tend to share the following ideas:

  • they prefer the terms ‘fat’ or ‘fatness’ to what they view as the medicalised terms ‘overweight’, ‘obese’ or ‘obesity’;
  • they challenge the dominant biomedical perspective on the relationship between fatness and ill health and disease (see here for my previous post on the contentions of obesity sceptics);
  • they represent fat people as members of a minority group that contends with routine discrimination and marginalisation;
  • they seek to counter and resist such discrimination and marginalisation;
  • they often adopt a feminist or queer approach in their critiques.
The sculpture Bronskvinnorna (The women of bro...

The sculpture Bronskvinnorna (The women of bronze) outside of the art museum (Konsthallen), Växjö, Sweden. The sculpture is a work by Marianne Lindberg De Geer.  (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There is no lack of evidence to demonstrate that these writers are correct in identifying highly negative meanings and experiences around fat embodiment, many of which have been apparent in popular and medical discourses for centuries (see here for my discussion of fat phobia). A central theme for many writers in fat studies, as well as in the areas of what are variously entitled ‘fat activism’, the ‘fat acceptance movement’ or the ‘size acceptance movement’ is that they themselves identify as ‘fat’ people. Adopting the position that ‘the personal is the political’, they view their activities as part of a political project.

Other scholars prefer the terms ‘critical obesity studies’ or ‘critical weight studies’ to describe their writings on the social and cultural dimensions of obesity discourse (for example, the contributors to the collection edited by Rich, Monaghan and Aphramoor, 2011). The emphasis in these terms is on the word ‘critical’, as these scholars seek to identify and challenge the taken-for-granted assumptions circulating in mainstream lay discourses and in the biomedical and public health literature on obesity/fatness.  Here again, many of these writers actively avoid the use of the term ‘obesity’, preferring instead to use the term ‘fat’. Such writers may themselves identify as fat, but this is not the case for all or even many of them.

Some commentators in fat studies and fat activism have expressed very negative opinions about people writing on the topic who do not themselves identify as fat. When I was working on my book on fat politics and fat embodiment (Fat, published this month), this was an issue of which I was highly aware, as I have always been a thin person and have therefore never personally experienced the stigmatisation and marginalisation to which many fat people have been subjected.

However, as I point out in my book, fat people are not the only individuals who have been singled out for attention in contemporary anti-obesity discourse. Mothers of young children, regardless of their own body weight, have been positioned as key targets in anti-obesity campaigns and programs because they are viewed as responsible for monitoring and disciplining their children’s diet and weight. As one such mother, I have found myself the subject of moral discourses in relation to the ‘child obesity epidemic’ , implicated in the network of expert advice directed at mothers (see here for a previous post on the topic of maternal responsibility for children’s weight). The voices of mothers with young children have not often received attention, except when researchers want to determine how well they are conforming to advice on controlling their children’s weight. Yet there are many difficult ethical questions to negotiate as a mother in response to weight control issues. How, for example, do mothers ensure that their children are healthy without instilling a hatred and fear of fat or of their own body if they do not conform to the ideal of slim embodiment?

Another argument against the rigid categorisation of people as ‘fat’ or ‘not fat enough’ to write about the politics of fatness and obesity is that fatness is a fluid and unstable category, depending on the historical and cultural context and personal experience. People who may officially be categorised as ‘normal weight’ according to medical guidelines such as the Body Mass Index (BMI) may still feel ‘fat’, particularly if they aspire to or admire the kind of extreme thinness displayed by models and celebrities. People who were once medically categorised as ‘obese’ or ‘overweight’ but then lost a great deal of weight and reduced their weight to a  ‘normal’ BMI may still identify as  ‘fat’. Conversely, people who have always been large-bodied may resist being labelled ‘overweight’, ‘obese’ or ‘fat’ because they view their weight as normal and appropriate for them. What has been considered ‘fat’ in one historical era has fluctuated according to the prevailing norms of beauty and medical advice.

Further, it may be contended that everyone, regardless of body shape or weight, is caught up in or reacting to obesity discourse in some way or another. According to several public health campaigns and policies, we are all potentially fat people, unless we take steps to constantly monitor and discipline our bodies. Whether or not we identify as ‘fat’, it is difficult to escape the prevalence and dominance of anti-obesity discourse and fat phobia. Willingly or not, resistant or accepting, we are all implicated in the contemporary discourse that positions fat people as morally deficient, undisciplined, sick and inferior.

References

Lupton, D. (2012) Fat. London: Routledge.

Rich, E., Monaghan, L. and Aphramor, L. (2011) (eds) Debating Obesity: Critical Perspectives. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

Wann, M. (2009) Foreword: Fat Studies: An invitation to revolution. In Rothblum, E. and Solovay, S. (eds), The Fat Studies Reader. New York: New York University Press, pp ix-xxv.