Introduction

This chapter looks at the online circulation of breastfeeding selfies – or brelfies – and asks what their benefits might be in terms of making breastfeeding easier. It looks at brelfies as social media activism, drawing attention to embodied mothering, and upending assumptions about the solitary nature of maternity. It argues that brelfies provide a means through which breastfeeding can emerge from its existing practical, conceptual and imaginary confines, by communicating images of breastfeeding to an almost limitless audience.

Not only have brelfies attracted extensive media coverage, raising awareness about breastfeeding in the community, the images also provide a unique form of communication between breastfeeding mothers and their friends, families and children, as mothers see themselves in the act of taking their own photos. By considering the implications of increased images of women breastfeeding in public – as well as the increased circulation of images of women breastfeeding generally – this chapter argues that brelfies invite us to reconceptualise breastfeeding in public as breastfeeding in social contexts more broadly: in short, to reimagine breastfeeding in relation to its many publics.

To date, the challenges of breastfeeding in public have been conceived against the norm of breastfeeding in private. The two spaces are regarded as distinct, with private breastfeeding referring to the mother breastfeeding her child in her home, either alone or with her family. Breastfeeding in public has referred to a contrasting experience, when a mother breastfeeds anywhere outside this space. Yet breastfeeding at home may also take place in social if not public contexts, with family, friends or other visitors present, and the mother may feel obliged to withdraw into a more private space. Private breastfeeding is therefore solitary, the only human company being the feeding child.

Breastfeeding in public may also require the mother to find spaces that accommodate solitude, so that so-called ‘breastfeeding in public’ takes place in a toilet cubicle, parents’ room, or a secluded corner of a shopping centre or car park. Is a breastfeeding mother sitting in her car while parked on the street engaged in public or private breastfeeding? If she has retreated to a toilet cubicle, has she achieved privacy, or merely a moment of solitude in a public space?