Bournemouth University, School of Health & Social Care, Royal London House, Christchurch Road, Bournemouth, Dorset BH1 3LT, United Kingdom.
Soc Sci Med. 2010 Mar;70(6):951-8. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2009.11.023. Epub 2010 Jan 13.
Women's narratives of their breastfeeding experiences are sites of construction and reconstruction of self as they undertake moral work in relation to feeding their baby. We engaged Foucault's 'technologies of the self' and his notion of ethics (the relationship with self) to examine that moral work (individual actions rather than adherence to universal moral codes) in relation to women's subjectivity constructed in interviews with 49 women from the UK. Four categories of moral work were identified: biographical preservation, biographical repair, altruism and political action. We describe each of these and conclude that women's embodied experience and sense of self are disciplined within current, limited, often punishing discourses by undertaking painful moral work in order to maintain or repair their subjective positions. We suggest the development of new subject positions around infant feeding practices.
女性在母乳喂养经历中的叙述是自我建构和重构的场所，因为她们在喂养婴儿的过程中进行道德工作。我们借鉴了福柯的“自我技术”和他的伦理观念（与自我的关系），以审查与女性主体性相关的道德工作（个人行为而非遵守普遍道德规范），这是通过对英国 49 名女性的访谈得出的。确定了四类道德工作：传记保护、传记修复、利他主义和政治行动。我们描述了每一种道德工作，并得出结论，女性的身体经验和自我意识在当前有限的、常常是惩罚性的话语中受到约束，她们通过进行痛苦的道德工作来维持或修复自己的主观立场。我们建议围绕婴儿喂养实践发展新的主体立场。
