Hey researchers!
So I have been hemming and hawing for a while about the practical impact that my research during this two-month experience will make. My hesitation comes in part from growing up thinking that research occurs with lab equipment and quantitative data or qualitative data, which normally, I guess, it does. However, within the realm of humanities research, and more specifically the kind that I am undertaking, gathering and construing qualitative data does not apply. The world of research that I have entered so far has been very similar to the hours that I would spend reading and synthesizing information for conducting discussions in classrooms and writing papers. So, I ask myself now, what is the component of the reading, synthesizing, and writing that I am currently working out, that provides that more rigorous element of research? As of now, I think the research component that provides the exceptionality of this summer compared to the regular academic year is engaging with Professor Langland and (shout out to Brianna!) in our weekly meetings. With that being said, my work with Professor Langland has allowed me to take hold of the reins towards figuring out and arriving at a thesis for the literature review that I’ll write by the end of July.
The primary hit of the impact that my literature review will make is Professor Langland’s upcoming book about the history of breastfeeding in brazil. Assuming the quality and value of the readings that I do, Langland will use my review as twice-filtered, supplemental information to aid her writing. There is a lot of work ahead for me to be able to get to the stage of composing my own abstract. I don’t think that the goals of this project entail another and more efficient way of transmitting the information that it has aggregated, as such is the nature of writing books – they’re often like isolated edifices, and the onus is on the reader to intake what they have to share.
I think my work will aid the de-stigmatization of characteristics of Brazilian populations who inhabit regions hat poignantly contrast with wealthier ones like São Paulo, and aid Langland’s readers in disabusing themselves of ideological messages that form the underbelly of popular notions like beauty and aesthetics. It seems like the social identity groups that my work will aid in contributing to the most, frankly, is all of them. My review, as of now, will dissect the relations between formative, economic progress and whiteness, and formative, economic depression and blackness. But within my work’s value for a spectrum of social identities to reflect on the uncomfortable truths and misfortunes of their respective yet incontrovertibly intertwined histories, historically marginalized groups will benefit the most in a particular way. Within Langland’s work lies the chance of their alternative narratives becoming the new yet long-overdue “normal” of Brazil’s nationalist past. What I have in mind as of now of my work, is a continuation of the ongoing academic exposé, of sorts, of the haves and have-nots of Brazilian nationalist endeavors, along with the developmentalist rhetoric and eugenic ideologies that underwrite them. I will return to this blog in the near future, in real-time, to update and refine the research purposes and thesis of my contribution to Langland’s research.
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07/16/2018
Trina Ray
Draft of Title: “A Cross-Cultural Study: Naturalism, Modernism, and Race: The False Modernity of Wet-Nursing”
Draft of Abstract:
My paper employs a cross-cultural study of how mid-twentieth century medical discourses about maternal and infant health in French and North American contexts influenced those about maternal and infant health in a Brazilian context. This comparative study examines the Brazilian primary sources of parenting guidebooks: “Livro das Mãezinhas” and “Guia Popular de Alimentação”; and secondary sources: “Progressive Mothers, Better Babies: Race, Public Health, and the State in Brazil, 1850 – 1945” by Otovo; “The Color of Modernity” by Weinstein; and “Nature, Nurture, and Nation: Nísia Floresta’s Engagement in the Breast-Feeding Debate in Brazil and France” by Liddell. My methodology employs discourse analysis, using the postmodern theoretical framework of deconstruction.
Brazilian physicians and politicians who viewed the unity, health of families as the microcosm of the nation tended to espouse a progressive, eugenic nationalism. This platform advocated for medicalizing the ordinarily private space of maternal and infant health. Within the larger nationalist discourses of developmentalism and the version of racial democracy that foresaw Brazil becoming a fortuitously whiter nation, biomedical proponents of nationalism asserted a binary hierarchy: the dominance of scientific motherhood over a traditional version of motherhood; I call the latter natural motherhood. Natural motherhood includes the traditional health labor of wet nursing which economic duress forced poor Afro-Brazilian/ women of color into. Maintaining that only physicians could properly guide the maternal instinct towards breastfeeding, proponents of scientific motherhood paradoxically derided the backwardness of natural motherhood while conceding the practical relevance of hiring wet nurses. I argue that the ways in which such proponents figured natural motherhood implicated an essentialist intersection between race and maternal instinct. As the proponents of scientific motherhood exerted a concept of motherhood that tended towards essentialism rather than universalism, I will examine the ways in which they failed to excise their dominant discourse from the irrational proclivity to mythologize the relationship between Afro-Brazilian motherhood and Brazil’s modernizing quest.
Additionally, research ethics will affect the work I’m conducting by the reminder that it poses of holding myself accountable to intellectual honesty. Intellectual honesty is a concept that I must further explore, as all of my work is made possible through reading the syntheses and writings of established academics. I’m continuing to figure out how to build my own ideas from their work, which has been and is the foundation for the more original thoughts and nationalist concerns that I am trying to create.
I’m excited to hear about all of your research endeavors!
Trina