Nighttime Breastfeeding: American Cultural Dilemma by Cecilia Tomori (review)

In the book Nighttime Breastfeeding: An American Cultural Dilemma, Cecilia Tomori investigates one of the most intimate areas of social life that is by nature unseen and is “rarely shared with others” (1). Tomori uses ethnographic research methods to follow nighttime breastfeeding and sleep experiences among middle-class American families experiencing the birth of their first child from late pregnancy until the baby’s first birthday, skilfully bringing together two fields of research that have rarely been studied at the same time. To gain access to this unseen element of social life, Tomori conducted participant observation in two childbirth education centres, where strategies for infant feeding and infant sleep are an essential part of the curriculum. Several families from each centre filled out a sleeping and feeding log for Tomori. A smaller number of families participated in a series of in-depth interviews with Tomori where nighttime breastfeeding was discussed. Because discussions about sleep take place during the day, these meetings were also a form of participant observation wherein Tomori was able to collect mothers’ narratives about sleep.

Tomori’s research reveals that these two fields—breastfeeding and sleep—are intricately intertwined not only in practice but also theoretically through analysis that exposes the contradictions inherent in the cultural norms governing these intimate embodied experiences. As such, Tomori characterizes the parents in her study as “moral pioneers” (38) navigating the “moral minefields” (120) of parenting culture in contemporary America. Like many other parents in the United States and Canada, Tomori’s participants struggled with doing what “works” or following official biomedical recommendations about proper protocols for breastfeeding and infant sleep.

Within the contemporary field of breastfeeding research, there is an ongoing project started by anthropologist Penny Van Esterik (1989), and expanded by women’s studies scholar Bernice Hausman (2003), to use research on reproduction and reproductive technologies—breastfeeding in particular—to develop a concept of relationality that “not only encompasses the inter-corporeal relationship between mother and child, but also espouses a broader, ecological approach that includes other social relationships and human-environmental interactions” (80-81). Tomori’s work is explicitly part of this project since she conceptualizes the embodied practices of breastfeeding and sleep as never simply biological but also equally relational, taking on a biosocial approach.

Drawing on Marcel Mauss’ (1973) concept of habitus and Talal Asad’s (1997) work on embodiment, Tomori’s exploration of the various strategies used by parents for breastfeeding and sleeping draws attention to “the relational way in which people acquire habitus” (27). These “techniques of the body,” Tomori argues, are shaped by dominant cultural norms, which have developed over time to accommodate the ideological and temporal needs of industrial capitalism and to privilege the selfsufficient and autonomous individual. But as Asad suggests in his work, when these bodily techniques are carried out, they too have an effect on the culture that instructed them. The nighttime breastfeeding strategies actually carried out by parents in Tomori’s study are not a perfect reflection of dominant norms because the temporal-spatial demands of a capitalist ideology that idealizes self-sufficiency and solitary sleep do not resonate with the embodied needs of nighttime breastfeeding. As a result, all parents end up negotiating between the demands of culture and biology by crafting a variety of “in-between” practices, depending on each family’s own characteristics and needs.

Tomori offers to further this project by situating breastfeeding studies within the well-established field of kinship studies. This is a logical move, since bonds of relatedness are formed between parents and between parents and their child through the affective embodied engagements of breastfeeding and sleeping. In the process, new forms of personhood are crafted. Her book has seven chapters and covers four themes: the first theme, which Tomori describes as her exploration of “embodied moral dilemmas,” outlines the theoretical tools she will use to interpret her data. The second theme provides an overview of the relationship between biomedicine and capitalism. The third theme explores the role of childbirth education classes as...