The Secret Life of Breasts , feminist scholar Fiona Giles takes on the image problem of breasts in this double-D obsessed society and "outs" breasts for being what they are: Giles has compiled, through interviews, surveys, questionnaires, and extensive historical and literary research, a book that is packed with lactation information and rumination. Although most of the people who responded to her questionnaires and surveys had somehow managed to fit breastfeeding into their lives, this isn't a rigid how-to manual, or a preachy breast-is-best diatribe.
Rather, it's what Giles calls in her introduction, "a galaxy of voices, a narrative milky way. And for the most part, it works. As someone who was personally in breast-feeding hell for the first three months of my now-almost-three-years-old-and-still-nursing daughter's life, by the end of the book I felt like all my early nursing horror stories and my now much-discussed choice to keep nursing were pretty darn unremarkable. From the riveting stats on nursing mothers' breast health a 4. Beginning with the ancient connection between the universe and lactation galaxy and lactation come from the same root word, galactic and ending with her personal family history of breastfeeding, Giles has the writing and research chops to really explore lactation, drawing out important points with charm and clarity.
The facts she presents are the meat and potatoes of this book, and left me feeling, as my mother-in-law likes to say after Thanksgiving, "perfectly over-full.
The Milky Way: A Review of Fresh Milk: The Secret Life of Breasts | Literary Mama
Giles falters, however, when she leaves her comfortable domain of facts and heads into storytelling. According to Giles, "the power of a story is to create a wilderness territory that is also safe. How to put your baby to sleep. How Often Should I Breastfeed?
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How to Follow a Good Breastfeeding Diet. How to Night Wean a Baby. How to Cradle Hold a Baby for Breastfeeding. How to Latch Your Baby for Breastfeeding. The video content is inappropriate. The video content is misleading. The ad is too long. The ad does not play.
Fresh Milk
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This was such a fresh offering in what can be a lot of the same material, book after book. In a series of essays, the author boldly delves into many aspects of breastfeeding and the consequences for mothers, families, partners and babies, positive, negative and unexpected. She did not shy away from topics that might make the reader uncomfortable, inviting them instead to think, challenge their perceptions, and broaden their perspective.
There's no pressure to agree, but the table is set in a wonderful format for you to press against the edges of your comfort zone, and come away inspired. One person found this helpful 2 people found this helpful. Kindle Edition Verified Purchase. During the time I was breastfeeding my son, I found few women who would talk about the experience of breastfeeding among my friends and acquaintances. I started searching for resouces where I could learn more about this amazing time in my relationship with my child.
This book was a wonderful way for me to learn how others have enjoyed breastfeeding or not enjoyed it, in some cases and to delve deeper into the experience.
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One person found this helpful. Read this while breastfeeding my kids years ago. Aussie style, must be open minded to enjoy the humor. Great read while nursing. Need I say more? A lot of great stories and entertaining information about breasts that does not get mentioned in more Proper Books. If you have any interest in breastfeeding at all, Fresh Milk -- the secret life of breasts is an eye-opening collection of different breastfeeding stories.
Touching on everything from the sexual fetishism of breastfeeding to how mothers have successfully breastfed adopted children, Australian author Fiona Giles proves no story is taboo. And no issue, except of course, breastfeeding itself, and how our Western society has changed it from a natural practice into a pseudo-sexual shame, precluding the continuation of age-old practices like wet-nursing and public breastfeeding. This book is a fascinating read, even for the bottle-feeder. The collection of stories cover an incident where a woman's baby was breastfed by someone else without consent, a father who used to latch his baby onto his nipple to comfort her, a woman who pumped for months after her daughter died -- donating her milk to a milk bank, children who weaned from their mothers very "late", and men who fantasise about lactating breasts.
Fresh Milk: The Secret Life of Breasts
Fresh Milk isn't necessarily a pro-breastfeeding book. Included are stories by those who never wanted to breastfeed their babies, those who tried and decided it wasn't "for them", and those mothers who "admitted defeat" after battling hard to create a successful breastfeeding team with their baby. For breastfeeding does take two, and both the baby and the mother need to be able to work in tandem to create a breastfeeding success story.
Breastfeeding is as individualistic as women's breasts themselves, and no stories are alike. This collection of essays and interviews are all centred on people who have been touched by breastfeeding, or its absence. As the author writes, "together they extend the boundaries of what we consider normal when it comes to human parenting.
They reveal a glimpse into what lactation means to us, and how it might fit more amply into our lives. This book will provoke thought and discussion on breastfeeding from all perspectives, promoting tolerance and acceptance of a range of views. I just recently became a breastfeeding mom for the first time and so I have been looking for books on breastfeeding. After the September 11 attacks, the US Attorney General spent several thousand dollars to shield citizens from a bare-breasted statue "from the appalling, alarming, abominable, aluminium alloy of evil, that terrible ten-foot tin tittie".
She includes a sample of breast-milk recipes in the closing pages, delighting in tales of overstretched mothers serving breast-milk pie and tea to visitors. She then turns adroitly back to the exertions of a man, never breastfed as a child, who satisfies his curiosity by making ice cream from donated breast milk. What surfaces above all are the simple humanity, intimacy and generosity offered by this one miraculous act.
By examining the ways in which women's subjectivity is connected to their breasts, this book is far more than the sum of its many parts. Its strengths lie in how the intensely personal is made profound if not quite political. But its weakness lies in the half-hearted nature of the intellectual exercise it attempts.
As women, our choices are as much circumscribed as sustained by the norms of what Giles calls a hegemonic "cultural imaginary". Fresh Milk is soured only by the way it struggles to find a satisfactory balance between such theoretical deliberations and the cornucopia of personal experience it relates.