I am working with Professor Victoria Langland, who holds a joint appointment in the History and Romance Languages and Literatures departments, on her project about the history of breastfeeding in Brazil. This project is a historical study of the development of scientific and social understandings of breastfeeding, human milk banking, and motherhood throughout the 20th century until the present. The study examines how Brazilian medical practitioners, scientists, politicians, and families have viewed breastfeeding throughout time, as well as considers how institutions and policies have challenged or upheld these attitudes. On a broader scale, the research analyses the relationship between Brazilian society, culture, and conceptions of health. My work involves analyzing secondary sources such as research articles and monographs, as well as analyzing primary sources (some written in Portuguese, some written in Spanish) to understand how the media framed breastfeeding discourse throughout the 1900s.
Within the larger scope of Dr. Langland’s research project, I will be focussing on the biopolitics of motherhood in Brazil, and how racialized and classed notions of reproduction have shaped social and health policy in the region. I am interested in how laws and policies perpetuated the idea that reproductive labor and “good mothering” were essential features of the Brazilian woman’s civic duty.
The impact of this research is multidisciplinary. For one, generally speaking, this project furthers knowledge in several fields, including gender studies, histories of medicine and health, science and technology studies, race and ethnicity studies, and political history. Further, the project contributes perspective and knowledge on the international conversation about how to effectively improve maternal and infant health. Brazil serves as an excellent case study, as the country’s infant mortality has declined by 73% over the past twenty years. The results of this project may help inform social policy and public health policy. Understanding how the popularity of breastfeeding has fluctuated throughout history allows public health researchers to design more effective initiatives to increase breastfeeding rates.
The populations that I believe will be impacted by this research are women and infants (both in Brazil and elsewhere), namely socioeconomically disadvantaged women and children of color. Brazilian history is unique in that Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery– 23 years after slavery was outlawed in the United States. The history of breastfeeding in Brazil is intrinsically rooted in its history of slavery, as affluent families relied on the labor of enslaved Black women to serve as wet nurses to their infants. The link between women of color and breastfeeding was not severed with the abolition of slavery, but rather evolved to meet Brazil’s new demands as a nation determined to keep up with the modern, industrial world. Therefore, research of this history offers us a more nuanced perspective on the current attitudes towards poor mothers and infants of color, from both a cultural and political viewpoint. This is not to say that white, affluent mothers and infants are not implicated in this research, however. Brazilian families of all backgrounds were targeted as sites of social and political intervention during the 20th century, but affluent women and poor women received different cultural messages.
The social identity groups that are impacted the least would be men, as societal efforts to address maternal and infant wellbeing in Brazil largely excluded men from the conversation. In any case, the absence of men in the breastfeeding discourse begs for deeper analysis.
As for the role of research ethics in my project, it is highly important, as a researcher, to treat the historical material in its own rite without imposing my own cultural or social biases. There is room in my analysis of the material to reflect on my existing repertoire of knowledge and understandings, but I believe it is important to initially review the material with cultural and historical relativity.