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Milk’s Flows: Making and Transmitting Kinship, Health, and Personhood

Milk provides a way of thinking about how the body is enacted in science, policy and popular culture. This paper follows the currents of moral and biomedical epistemologies circulating around milk, including via notions of inheritance, the practices of wet nursing, and emerging scientific knowledge...

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Autor principal: Malcolm, Roslyn
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BMJ Publishing Group 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8394753/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34031186
http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2019-011829
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author Malcolm, Roslyn
author_facet Malcolm, Roslyn
author_sort Malcolm, Roslyn
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description Milk provides a way of thinking about how the body is enacted in science, policy and popular culture. This paper follows the currents of moral and biomedical epistemologies circulating around milk, including via notions of inheritance, the practices of wet nursing, and emerging scientific knowledge about the health-related benefits of breastfeeding. By situating milk’s flows historically and culturally it shows how constructions of milk production, lactation, and infant feeding have long served as a ‘cultural signal’ of prevailing conceptions of bodies and social identities. In so doing, it explores the simultaneous power of milk as both a source of dispositional and somatic health, and an index of customary forms of unity and division. A focus on breast milk further contributes to augmenting and expanding recent debates about the biology-society nexus in science and technology studies (STS), anthropology, and sociology. Seen within biomedicine today as a carrier of somatic signals about the environment, the article reflects on how milk is bound up in the responsibilisation of women’s bodies and the internalising of potential risks to the health of their offspring. This implies an unlimited agency for women in averting health risks and in future-proofing their children to be better than well, elides the socioeconomic, and environmental forces pragmatically limiting this assumed agency, and the distinct lack of material and inter-personal support for the perinatal period in many nations.
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spelling pubmed-83947532021-09-14 Milk’s Flows: Making and Transmitting Kinship, Health, and Personhood Malcolm, Roslyn Med Humanit Current Controversy Milk provides a way of thinking about how the body is enacted in science, policy and popular culture. This paper follows the currents of moral and biomedical epistemologies circulating around milk, including via notions of inheritance, the practices of wet nursing, and emerging scientific knowledge about the health-related benefits of breastfeeding. By situating milk’s flows historically and culturally it shows how constructions of milk production, lactation, and infant feeding have long served as a ‘cultural signal’ of prevailing conceptions of bodies and social identities. In so doing, it explores the simultaneous power of milk as both a source of dispositional and somatic health, and an index of customary forms of unity and division. A focus on breast milk further contributes to augmenting and expanding recent debates about the biology-society nexus in science and technology studies (STS), anthropology, and sociology. Seen within biomedicine today as a carrier of somatic signals about the environment, the article reflects on how milk is bound up in the responsibilisation of women’s bodies and the internalising of potential risks to the health of their offspring. This implies an unlimited agency for women in averting health risks and in future-proofing their children to be better than well, elides the socioeconomic, and environmental forces pragmatically limiting this assumed agency, and the distinct lack of material and inter-personal support for the perinatal period in many nations. BMJ Publishing Group 2021-09 2021-05-24 /pmc/articles/PMC8394753/ /pubmed/34031186 http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2019-011829 Text en © Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2021. Re-use permitted under CC BY. Published by BMJ. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to copy, redistribute, remix, transform and build upon this work for any purpose, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the licence is given, and indication of whether changes were made. See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Current Controversy
Malcolm, Roslyn
Milk’s Flows: Making and Transmitting Kinship, Health, and Personhood
title Milk’s Flows: Making and Transmitting Kinship, Health, and Personhood
title_full Milk’s Flows: Making and Transmitting Kinship, Health, and Personhood
title_fullStr Milk’s Flows: Making and Transmitting Kinship, Health, and Personhood
title_full_unstemmed Milk’s Flows: Making and Transmitting Kinship, Health, and Personhood
title_short Milk’s Flows: Making and Transmitting Kinship, Health, and Personhood
title_sort milk’s flows: making and transmitting kinship, health, and personhood
topic Current Controversy
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8394753/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34031186
http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2019-011829
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