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105 5 Rhetorical Agency and Resistance in the Context of Infant Feeding You’re challenging the person who’s taking care of your baby. . . . It’s almost like when I told the dental hygienist that I wanted her to change her gloves. . . . The thought that she had a sharp instrument went through my head. . . . Do I really want to say this? “Katherine,” in an interview, May 8, 2000 As we continue to analyze how the breast–bottle controversy impacts the mothers targeted by today’s messages about infant feeding, we turn to consider the messages that women are hearing about infant feeding from friends, relatives, and health-care professionals, and through other informal means of communication. These diverse messages can be usefully understood as what J. Blake Scott calls “disciplinary rhetorics”—that is, as “discursive bodies of persuasion that work with extrarhetorical actors to shape subjects and to work on and through bodies.”1 The concept of disciplinary rhetoric derives from Michel Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power, a uniquely modern form of power that emerged in Western civilization during the eighteenth century as part of an array of political, institutional, and cultural shifts occurring at that time. Although disciplinary power, as Foucault describes it, is invisible, in contrast to the more obvious forms of power that preceded it (corporal punishment , for instance), its ultimate effect on those individuals who are subject to it (e.g., people who seek medical advice on a topic such as infant feeding) can 106 Breast or Bottle? be a heightened visibility in relation to institutions such as medicine. That is, although institutions today do not generally threaten individuals with physical reprimands, they do closely scrutinize our behavior, and this close scrutiny constitutes a form of power that, Foucault would say, we need to take seriously in its own right. As Foucault explains in Discipline and Punish, “in discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen. Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them. It is the fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection.”2 Thus, in Foucault’s explanation, disciplinary power not only acts on individuals but actually makes us who we are by training us to monitor ourselves according to the truths that disciplinary institutions such as the medical profession establish . This means that normalizing claims about an aspect of life such as infant feeding never exist strictly in the realm of scientific or medical truth but are always brought to bear on the bodies of subjects in a manner that blurs the boundaries traditionally believed to exist among the realms of science, politics, and the economy. Communication researchers have used Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power to understand the complex dynamics and power relations that can arise when technical information on a wide array of subjects is communicated from experts to nonexperts. Communication scholars have, for example, used Foucault’s concepts to analyze the medical and legal rhetorics of HIV testing, infertility treatment and insurance coverage, and home birth and midwifery.3 Although the subject matter of such analyses is diverse, the important idea that emerges from them is that when technical information on subjects such as these is communicated to the nonexperts, such as patients and consumers who use it to make decisions about treatments or other serious matters, this is not a neutral communicative act but rather a rhetorical situation that is infused with power. Along these lines, Foucault urges us to acknowledge that “power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.”4 One of the most important questions that continue to emerge from such analyses, and a question that directly relates to the experiences of breastfeeding women, is that of individual agency. Although disciplinary rhetorics are acknowledged as intensely powerful in their ability to shape reality, it is also obvious that individuals possess the capacity to take meaningful action from within the grid of meaning that is established through disciplinary power.5 Although it is clear, for instance, that the physician who communicates expert knowledge to a patient derives a certain form of power over the patient, we also know that the patient can question the physician’s advice in a number of [18.223.171.12] Project MUSE (2024...

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