problematizing human milk

8/14/2019 Problematizing Human Milk

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PROBLEMATIZING HUMAN MILK

The case of Bogotas Food and Nutrition Security Policy1

Breastfeeding has been the subject of social policy, concentrating on the bodies of women and

infants and the ways they interact between each other and the greater social space. Although

concentrating its effort with an ideal of the productive body, it goes beyond economic spheres in its

search towards adequate and secure livelihoods, although also as a space where social and

economic development converge, where tensions between individual decision-making and

household/community interests arise, where boundaries between the natural and the modernly

artificial are debated, and coming along an imagination of a hygienized, fit and healthy citizen

subject. This has meant the development of a system that frames human milk as a public/social

good. However, given its particularities it conflicts with other provisioning systems that imaginegoods as the result of an industrializable production process.

This is first paragraph is not clearyou need to make a the statement that breastfeeding appears a

natural private process but within the modern state / economies/ breastfeeding has become the

subject of public interest and concern in relation to biopolitical concerns around security hygiene

food

breastfeeding is subject to different imaginaries and policies around the modern citizens

You need to position yourself and your interest in it theoretically and politically

Is this your introduction to the RPyour problem statementcan you clarify that

Use some quotes, pictures, get some interest in here from the start

Food and nutrition policies, and food and nutrition security (FNS) policies in particular, have become

the space in which breastfeeding (BF) policies are currently locatedin Bogata?. The extent of which

such a statement is true will be illustrated through certainexplored in an analysis of debates

embedded in the 2007 FNS of Bogota (the capital of Colombias capitalColombia) and its historytime

frame?. The RP looks at how the concerns of security are played out in public policy and the

resistances and tensions between global worries about risk and the local responses and challenges.

Security has become a major concern of public policy, especially at a global level, where risk and

probability have become the new lingua franca. However, the global power transmission

mechanisms are met with local power networks that incorporate their messages only partially and

with resistance. The implementation of securitization of human milk poses a gendered resistance

where spaces of possibility [outside the neoliberal loci] emerge.

This RP will explore relevant policy-making of global governance institutions (which are?) and the

conceptualization of [the political economy of] the baby food market (defined by big business,

consumers, governments. It will then ask how the promotion of a universal body (what do you

mean?) came to play a role in such a context. With insights from teratology and the perverse I will


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argue that the body was framed to incorporate risk narratives into the natural body, leaving out

other bodily accounts. With this framework in mind, the discursive translations from the global into

the histories of F(NS) policy at the local (Bogota) will be traced. In particular, it will focus on the

exclusions and resistance during implementation that lead to the incorporation of local resistance inlocal policy.(the actors ?)

This text will continue by analysing whereRP will map out howBF policies are placed into Bogotas

FNS policy, then exploring the conditions of BF policy as biopolitics of BF in Bogato and in the globall

market. and finally the insertion of BF inside the globalized market. The BF policies tend towards

discrimination but not necessarily to individuation or essentialization. They are less deterministic

due to the dynamic framing of metabolism and hormones, also connected to the fluctuating

conception of the female. These last sentences are not clear what are you referring to

conceptualising bodies? Female essentialism? The mapping of individual body onto the social? Vice

versa?

Refer to your theoretical framework what inspired and interested you, why you chose this approach

NOTES ON METHODOLOGY

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

[I]

BRIEF FRAMING OF BF IN BOGOTAS FNS POLICY

Before discussing the problems behind the juridical appropriation of breastfeeding inside the

spheres of policy and its relevance for the debates such action entails, this is the core of the RP?

Then it should be explained what does juridical appropriation of breastfeeding mean? Which policies

made by who, who resists etc -let me review briefly a history of BF policy of Bogota departing from

the current locus of policy and venturing into an imagined past.

The current Bogotas FNS policy dates from March 2007 when it appeared in written form by the

Inter-sector District Committee on Food and Nutrition (CDIAN 2007), the citys administrative

organism created with the purpose of creating a framework to deal with FNS issues. The document

frames the policy in terms of the right to food resorting to a definition of foods as double natured

(economic) goods: merit and of public interest (p. 18). Food-as-merit-good appeals to food as a need

for individual and social life2, and complementing and not restricted to the UN rights framework.

The second category, goods of public interest, reveals an intention that sets it apart from mere

public goods. The policy goes further and remarks the social, cultural and ecologic values that food

entails (aside from exchange value), even claiming it part of the local immaterial cultural heritage

(CDIAN 2007:19).

This policy text solidifies an effort to bring together in practice life-cycle, gender and environmental

adequacies. When distinguishing the policy dimensions of food, availability, access, consumption and

use3 it makes the case that this last one is fundamental for enjoyment4 (CDIAN 2007:22). It is in

2Merit good is a term revived from 1970s debates after the coining of the term by Musgrave (1957). Thedevelopment of de/merit distinction of goods contributed significantly to the justification of policies suchas food stamps, although the 1970s would marginalize the concept for some years to the neoclassicalschema of externalities.3These categories are shared with the dominant FAO food security framework although Colombiasnational policy differs in the last terming using utilizacin while in Bogotas it is aprovechamiento. A

Formatted:Highlight


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this dimension that the policy places BF, broadening nutrition to the cares during pregnancy and

early age.5 This framing sets an epistemic (?) change with a history of local policy making that

privileged medical discourse. In contrast with policy from a century ago, the emphasis is now on the

pleasurable instead of centring on the avoidance of death.

A HISTORY OF BREASTFEEDING IN BOGOTA (OR TAKING VS. GIVING LIFE)

With the construction of the Colombian nation at the dawn of the twentieth century, productive and

scientific changes were associated with social, cultural, and environmental ones, where hygiene and

eugenic discourses were central to the constitution of social/moral hierarchy through race (Castro-

Gmez 2005). Milk was incorporated into such dynamics following French policy discussions on

vulnerable women and their children (but also the motherless adopted by the state), particularly

with the establishment of milk-stations, Gotas de Leche[Drops-of-Milk6], places created to combat

infant mortality. Centred on the child, mothers are not perceived primarily as birth givers but rather

are depicted in relation to three moral images of potential degeneration or abandonment, nurture-

providers, baby-killers and illness-vectors in relation to breast milk, infanticide and vertical

transmission respectively.

Two works from Bogotas first half of the 20thcentury will serve to illustrate this. They are Troconis

(1912)Apuntaciones sobre la mortalidad infantil en Bogotand Pardo (1920) Consideraciones sobre

las Gotas de Leche. The first one makes the case for the creation of the French devised institutions

in Bogota. The second one is the first study of them after their implementation and which would

contribute to the emergence of the local (and national) public policy in terms of law for its support

(Consejo Municipal de Bogot 1919) diffusion (Congreso de Colombia 1924) and funding (Congreso

de Colombia 1928).

broad distinction can be made turning to their latin roots: the first goes back to profectomeaning truly,really, indeed, while usussignifies use, experience, skill, advantage, profit.4The word in used in the Spanis original is goce from the Latin gaudeo: to rejoice, take delight(University of Notre Dame 2013)5 Los cuidados durante la gestacin y la edad temprana entre otros, son aspectos que modulan elaprovechamiento de los alimentos y determinan el estado de nutricin de los individuos (CDIAN2007:22)6In England these institutions were namedMilk Depots. In some respects, these places resemble currentmilk banks.

Comment [AS1]: Can this be interpretedan hedonistic turn of the time-space

compression in the age of Empire? The use

translation strategies to resist or even

overturn powers from the macro only arise

from within its own possibility space.

Comment [AS2]: The focus of current

reproductive policy anxieties has changed

towards giving life, debating pre-birth comi

into-being leading to debates around

abortion.


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Figure 1. The front pages of the works by Troconis (1912) and Pardo (1920)

The first municipal agreement concerning infant feeding was named By which aid is given to the

Drops-of-Milk institution established in Bogota (ConsejoMunicipal de Bogota 1919) and based its

first consideration on the high infant mortality rate of the nation (Art. 1). The first estimates of infantmortality rates in Bogota appeared at the dawn of the 20th century inside the medical (academic)

establishment. One such early estimate comes from Troconis (1912)7. In a pre-demographic

transition society8, addressing lactation as a strategy towards modernity was a novel import, adding

to the hygienic and eugenic discourses prevalent in the Colombian medico-political establishment9.

They imported the French anxieties of declining and (re)vitalizing populations (as motivated by late

19th century depopulation concerns10). Comparing local statistics to French ones, Troconis affirms

that Bogotas are insufficient and makes the case of the quantitative importance of infant mortality

affirming that the latter ones prove the point for the former case.

7These are the earliest estimates I have found. Further archival work could be useful, especially the citysofficial statistical bulletin Registro Municipal. Troconis (1912:13) complains about the lack of official data,especially by emphasizing available ones elsewhere. His permanent references are, notwithstanding,French.8According to CEPAL (???) Colombia reached the phase of demographic transition near the middle ofthe 20thcentury. Standardization of life/death statistics through the consolidation of measuring systemsare a basis to the current understanding of the demographic transition. The French Loi Rousselof 1874implemented the first efforts to make infant mortality statistics uniform and national, as a response toearlier estimates of declining birth rates. It is through the Law 48 of 1924 (Congreso de Colombia 1924:art.10) that infant birth and mortality statistics become mandatory at the municipal level an centralized atthe national.9 Castro-Gomez (2007) shows how hygienists, physicians and lawyers positioned these advances inscience in the policy-making sphere and how they shape the (capitalist) production of subjectivities duringthe years 1910 and 1930, the time he considers Colombias industrialization beginnings took place.10Declining birth rates during the second half of the 19 thcentury in France became a matter of concernthat as were materialized in the 1874 Loi Roussel. Jacques Bertillon, physician turned statistician andincubator of an international system for the classification of the causes of death, was a founding memberof theAlliane National pour lAcroissement de la Population Franaise.Offen (1984) links geopoliticalchange, mainly the decline of France as world power during the Ancien Regime, to the ordering ofhegemony in terms of population at the interior of patriarchal medical and political discourse to theframing of debates on womens reproductive role or the French thought on the woman question(p.652).

Comment [AS3]: The recurrent use of

French (medical) scholarship and policy in t

early stage is an example of the coloniality

power. Check on Castro-Gomez


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Figure 1 Estimates of infant mortality in Troconis (1912:15-16), Bogotas are presented on the left and French ones on theright.

These types of comparisons are recurrent in Troconis text. His analysis will lead him to state misery

and ignorance are the two overarching factors of infant mortalitys etiologyaetiology(p.37) similar to

(BertillonXX?). After discussing infant mortality and depopulation by cause of death he reaches four

main conclusions (p.37) of which I will centre on two 1) that respiratory infections, gastroenteritis

and stillbirth are the main contributors of infant mortality and 2) that food related illnesses follow.

On his section on illegitimacy (p.16-17) he compares the municipal laws that deal with

(unsupported claims of raising11) infanticide to the French Roussel Law of 1874. In pages 26-27 he

stresses the importance of breastfeeding practices with the irrefutable arguments of Variot . He

also makes claims about Bogotas mothers with syphilis (mothers as vectors) and stillbirths based on

the statistics reported by Fournier, Julien and Le Pileur (p.23-24).

Infanticide

Legitimacy is the moral context by which infant mortality is first understood. Generally, Troconis

argues, the mother and the child are both abandoned by the father, thus forcing the former to work

for both their cares. Illegitimacy thus derives in either the absence of a natural food source or in

infanticide. This is said to be the consequence of mothers taken away from a natural conditionand

from their natural duties, further suggesting that governmental response should be framed into

paternalistic institutions. Private charity, the also private Hospital de la Misericordiaand the public

Hospicio(poorhouse) are presented (p.37-39) as the sole institutions that address infant mortality. It

is the third one that the author considers to implement prophylactic measures against infanticide

(p.38)12.

It is the public institution that faces the heinous crime (p.17). Despite a positive stance about

saving many children from death, [it also acquits] adults from their responsibilities, it does not

tackle the root of evil and Troconis does not doubt for one moment of the powerful influence of

illegitimacy on infant mortality (p.17). Calderon (1920:20) frames the problem similarly referring to

the mothers perverse feelings resulting from a cruel misery that drowns maternal sentiment and

11Being a question of the quantitative kind, the author states later (p.17) that the information is underreported and lacking. He again assumes the universal nature of foreign (European) estimates to state therelevance of infanticide in accounting infant mortality.12It is to be noted that local newspapers reporting on infanticides moved the municipal government intopolicymaking. However, Pardo (1920: 20) also notes the media fixation with these deaths eight years later.Studying the rhetoric of such press articles is outside the scope of this text.


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resorts to institutional response, this time making the case for the already existing Drops-of-Milk. It

is in this last text where the class component is made most explicit, when Calderon exalts the

importance of these places as corrective of the perverse and criminal behaviour of poverty. It is

the misery they find themselves in, he continues, what drives women (and not their agency) toattempt abortion and infanticide, because the hunger and nakedness that threatens them entails an

uncertain future.

Calderon (1920:24) is convinced that a majority of Bogotas women are capable of concupiscent love

only, which lead him to conclude that the love they can profess as mothers is only selfish; professing

only amoral manners, they can only consider their child as disrupting their liberty. The nature of

woman is therefore wicked and in need of re-education.

Such an account denies women as active subjects and marginalizes them from any public debate

This contrast with infanticide as recounted by Spicker (2000), where feminine slaves in the

Viceroyalty of New Granada practiced it as a means of resistance.

Figure 3 Classification of infant deaths according to cause (Troconis 1912).

Gotas de Leche

Troconis deploys all his knowledge in pediatrics as learned in Europe to explain infant mortality,bringing infant feeding as the central theme. A mothers breast milk is argued as the best baby food

of the lot, over artificial feeding and wet nursing.

The Drops of Milk, a private initiative of individual doctors and associations of them, were

inaugurated throughout the country (as was the Latin American trend) and funded initially through

(the higher class and clerical) charity, and with national government support since Law 48 of 1924

(Congreso de Colombia 1924). The Colombian Congress (1928) decreed the (financial)


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encouragement of these centers at the national level13. The national example followed Bogotas

transposition of the French invention.

They were perceived by the public as promoting bottle feeding in the absence of motherly care

(which was indeed done), but to inform, protect, and invigilate (pregnant) women onbearing/rearing normal and healthy organisms, specially through breastfeeding, was their prime

goal (Pardo 1920:18).

Vicious milk

Syphilis is portrayed as a sub registered cause of infant mortality due to the moral stance that

sexually transmitted diseases had (Troconis 1912:23-24). The discussion, however, does not end

there. Pardo (1920:48) comments on the cases which, like this one, breastfeeding is contraindicated.

Milk coming from a non-healthy/non-hygienic body becomes a matter of concern.

Degenerate bodies here are linked once again with the consumption of the poor. Of all things,

physicians and politicians converge on the problems of consuming chicha, a fermented beverage

made out usually from maize. Blood impurity was and race degeneration were transmitted through

the milk of degenerate mothers.

The discussion on substitution is brought up. The slave origins of the nutrix. Wet nurses as evil and

giving classist-racist value to breast milk.

Distances between breasts and milk

The value of distancing a mothers breast form her child as incarnated by wet nurses and/or through

wages would be accelerated by the technology and capital intensification. The conception and

subsequent production of breast milk substitutes would expand the policy space so that the policy

should have a say on what is best.

The introduction of pasteurization techniques and the commercialization of baby formula, (both of

francophone origins) swiftly navigated the global space from the enlightened centre to the

ex/colonies, this time with less help from the medical establishment.

The popularity of pasteurization plants among urbanizing and modernizing projects was rising. In asimilar way hospitals with maternity wards [hospitales materno-infantiles]. The rise of the child at

the centre of the policy agenda as the nations future was materialized in Nestles powder milk

infant formula. Redefinition of the public/private space in terms of child rearing being inserted into

the public spheres of medical and mercantile logics14.

13Artculo 2 Auxliase con la cantidad de veinte mil pesos ( $20,000) anuales, durante el trmino de tresaos, la construccin del edificio destinado al funcionamiento de la Gota de Leche de Bogot, queproyecta llevar a cabo en esta ciudad, en el lote que ha comprado para el efecto, la institucin denominadaPatronato de Gota de Leche de Bogot.La cantidad asignada le ser entregada al Patronato de Gota de Leche de Bogot, previo el visto buenodel seor Director Nacional de Higiene.Artculo 3 Aumntase en tres mil pesos ( $3000) el de la Salacuna que funciona en el barrio de LasCruces, de la ciudad de Bogot(Congreso de Colombia 1928).14Cows as the mayor input for Bogotas consumption worked both for the meat and for the milk market.The former was widespread while the latter was destined primarily for small cattle-raisers. Stateintervention was needed to associate small milk producers into a supply force capable of coping with theincreasing demand for cow milk. Also from the State were the hygienic processes of standardization thatshaped consumption practices. (Brigitte Baptiste et al Carne????? 2009???)

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Technical betterments in production and consumption of cow milk intensified earlier disdain for

human milk. At the same time it did also with in the opposing breast milk side. Cow milk was

becoming a symbol of nutritious and hygienic and therefore physically and morally desirable. Bad

food and nutrition habits of mothers, especially when their work environments were related to anti-hygienic (dirty) or anti-ethical (poor and symbolizing socio-economic failure).

More generally, the way in which corporal fluids were perceived was changing due to the social,

cultural and environmental consequences of technical and scientific imports, in particular from the

biology-medicine discourses that supported the European expansionist project. Human milk, as

other practices of human reproduction, was inserted into a public practice as caption through

nationhood where once it was part of private/communal ideals.

If global commerce as pioneered by Europeans in the 16 th century compressed time and space

through their particular risk-taking inclination as suggested by Sloterdijk (2005), milk-banks propose

a risk alleviation strategy by establishing a market economy free of debtor/creditor binomials

(disregarding state-led investments). But can it be rendered global, the materiality of human milk,

transported, distributed, exchanged outside the volunteers communitte?

THE INCORPORATION OF BREASTFEEDING BY FOOD AND NUTRITION SECURITY

The current international legal framework

The rhetoric of rights introduced through the second half of the 20 th century by global governing

institutions. UNICEF, FAO and WHO as main players of baby food international policy. Other

organizations outside the UN system such as Save the Children, WABA and IBFAN. Joint WHO-

UNICEF 1989 Declaration (Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative), Innocenti Declaration, the International

Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes and absence of UNIFEM/ONUWOMEN.

Interactions with the national

Bogotas breastfeeding policies (and not peculiarly different from elsewhere) have centred their

actions in two main subjects: children and their caregivers15

. However, there is one caregiver who is

given major importance. The adoption of the above mentioned vitalizing and populating aspirationsin the dawn of the 20

thcentury raised the child to the centre of policy attention. However, a century

later the stance doesnt seem as clear. It is mother- focused up to the sense where all others are

taken as mother-substitutes. This is best acknowledged by the fact that breastfeeding is most

referred as motherly (lactancia materna). It is also diffused from the executive government, which

engages the most of public advocates (and more times than not, the only public actor addressing the

subject16), as for example in the making of consecutive Ten Year Plans of Maternal Lactation after

UNICEFS 1990 World Summit for Children.

The relational definition of caregiver implies the childs reign over the former and in particular over

the mother. This has been raised by various anti-breastfeeding (promotion) feminists that consider

women interests subjected to those of the child, the idealization of the unconditional life-bearer. It

15 This is not to say there are no others, as is the case of health institutions and their personnel,employers, firms, schools, police and military forces, and so on. However, they are all subjected to theexistence of the infant/caregiver dyad.16This is not a unified stand. For example, consider the Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar FamiliarICBF. As a semi-autonomous part of the Ministry of Health in charge of provisioning services includingbreastfeeding promotion, has held views at odds with those of the regulatory entity (the Ministry) andinside its internal structure (e.g. local vs. national discrepancies). Decentralization is the source of evengreater incongruities between entities such as public hospitals, that coming from the central,departamental and municipal jurisdictions that coexist within the city boundaries. Political interests andpriorities vary, as well as information and engagement.


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also associated with the (patriarchal) medicalization of the maternal body (but also of the infant

body). The building of the female and infant body by medical discourse admitted the breast-feeding

as the best practice (for infants, not the mother) although diminished motherly/female knowledge

on how to realize it, it emphasized the difficulties of breastfeeding without scientific appropriationand ended up creating disincentives for lactation in a time when bottle-feeding was more readily

available (Van Esterik 2002). Other discourses overtly proposing other diets as better than

breastfeeding also became available inside medical institutions. There are undocumented histories

of resistance and compliance that helped shaped medical practice.

This has been accompanied by a shift from the communal to the individual practice, especially

through a modern hygienic imperative, as it is best exemplified by the ghost of AIDS and the vertical

transmission problem. The use of wet nurse services became a rarity as other cheaper substitutes

became available, such as access to water, milk, certain foods, but also the use of commercialization

strategies by the growing industries.

Although the objects addressed by breastfeeding policy are named all over, there has not been a

wide focus on what they, the objectified subjects want. Certain psychoanalytic works and from child

psychology have tried addressing the question of what pre-spoken language babies experiment and

desire. Anyhow, this is not usually the case with policy. What mothers, caregivers in general, and

women in general want is usually not put into consideration for what social policy has to say about

them.

The case has been (briefly) made that breastfeeding policies have primordially focused on women as

a subordinate of the child as the future-productive-entity. The policies rely on a small set of policy-

making disciplines (such as nutrition, medicine, especially obstetricians and pediatricians, public

health, clinical nursing, health education, epidemiology, and economics) which have traditionally

preferred quantitative over qualitative research. A set of measurements have been constructed

seeking to govern subjects.

The only national level indexes have been measured according to initiatives from international

organizations, by Profamilia, an NGO promoting sexual and reproductive rights (the most important

one of its kind), through the Demographic and Health Surveys sponsored by USAID and whose

purpose is to gather quality information to plan, monitor and improve population, heath, andnutrition programs(Measure DHS ).

Since the 1990 to the 2010 surveys there have been changes in the way maternal lactation has

been termed. While in 1990 breastfeeding was understood as an important variable for reduced

exposure to pregnancy due to postpartum amenorrhea and was measured through three indicators

(initiation, complementary foods, and duration), the 2010 survey frames the practice as relevant for

babies and its immunologic properties and other health related benefits and now compiles seven

sets of indicators. It must be said that government entities now participate importantly with funding

and that ICBF now funds a new survey on nutritional status that also includes lactation indicators.

Although these are not the only actors in the debate and recognizing breastfeeding has gained

complexity in its depiction, breastfeeding as policy has not been usually framed as a complex process

shaped by environmental and sociocultural forces. Breasts, children, breastfeeding rates,

complementary feeding, child and maternal mortality and morbidity, infant and maternal health,

mind-motor development, and so on appear throughout lactation policy documents. What social

policies address is concerned with life, death, and productivity.

Translating policy

The adoption of enlightened French policy-making in the beginning of the 20th

century was in line

with the celebration of a century of independence from Spain, the expansion of water supply and

sewerage services, innovations in milk pasteurization and the emergence of a milking and baby-food

industry, developments in pediatrics and immunology. The nascent state was willing to enter


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modernity and the policy-making elites sought English/West-European fashions. As noted,

transpositions from the French medical establishment were made adamantly in regards to vitalizing

and populating concerns.

Embedded in broader biopolitical government practices of the early 20th century, milk wasinstrumentalized for the maximization of national fitness through hygienic and eugenic strategies.

The former consisted on adding an individualized attention to the habits of subjects to the earlier

hygienic concern with securing the external conditions of health through town planning, sewage

systems and the like while the latter meant to improve the body politic and to relieve it of the

economic and social burdens of disease and degeneracy in the future by acting upon the

reproductive decisions and capacities of individuals in the present (Rose 2001:3-4). Following

Pedraza (??Zandra), the hygienization of milk is in line with the pursuit of moral cleanliness starting

through physical and social hygiene.

The biopolitics of the first half of the 20th century, both in its ne/hygienist and in its eugenic form,

involved more than the idea that, other things being equal, healthy individuals were more desirable

than those who were unhealthythe political rationalities of our present are no longer inspired by

the dream of taking in charge of the lives of each in the name of the destiny of all in this new

configuration, the political meaning and salience of health and disease have changed.

In this domain as in so many others, the images now are of the enabling state, the fa cilitating state,

the state as animator. On the one hand, the state retains the responsibility that it acquired in the

18th or 19th century / the precise timing varying across national contexts / to secure the general

conditions for health> regulating the sale of foodstuffs, organizing pure water and sewage disposal,

sometimes mandating the addition of health-promoting elements into the diet vitamins, fluoride in

water and the like. On the other hand

From the places where breastfeeding is enunciated there exists a tension in translation, from an

organ-based framing of a practice to one centered in a fluid, from breast to milk, breastfeeding vs.

lactation. From the international multilateral organizations, where global policies take shape, to the

national framework, where they are brought into the local and from where they are contested with

other policies at other levels, different actors are putting policies into practice and making the

former out of the latter. In Colombia, the disparities describing the connection between the bodies

of women to those of babies are framed in the tension between English-dominant international

multilateral organizations or NGOs and a Spanish-speaking government/activism, and their particular

administrative narratives. Of course, there are translation problems other than [written] policy-

making English-Spanish to the [spoken], everyday practice of not-necessarily Spanish-speaking

practitioners (e.g. indigenous communities).

From the latin lac, milk, and lactare, to contain or give milk, (University of Notre Dame 2012)

Colombia's policies term the practice referencing a fluid, while international policies appeal to a

[usually non-implanted women] breast. This is not to say it is a Colombian initiative. UNICEF, WHO,

and FAO spoke/wrote of lactancia in their own Spanish versions of policy-recommendation/making,

and it is also from such inheritance that Colombian policies speak.

The epistemic order seems to be always English first, Spanish second. For Malaysia-based World

Alliance for Breastfeeding Action (WABA) Latino members, the translation of the English spokenyears slogan into the Spanish/Latin American version is always an end-of-the-year email-based

discussion consolidated in Costa Rica. However, Spanish has its own inner struggles. In an intent to

capture left out meanings, certain Spanish-speaking lactivism has retermed lactancia as

amamantamiento, turning the focus from physiology to mama, not just a mammalian gland, but the

mother, to women and to love. This gives space to breastfeeding/lactation as a biocultural process in

a more complex fashion than the one depicted by strictly medical engineers. A shift from mothers


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milk to human milk, although both used as medical jargon, has been used by social movements as a

decentering of infant nutrition from the mother-as-unique-caregiver17

.

The creation of a web-based Spanish speaking breast-milk promoting community began as a

consequence of the connectivity already fostered by international/regional conferences.

The particular take of the FAO (1996) FNS framework into Bogotas policy. Decoding global and local

lactivism infiltrated into

TRANSLOCATIONS OF BREASTFEADING POLICY

How does the story of BF given here relate to its framing inside the current FNS policy of Bogota?

The fear of death is still present although its form has changed. Infanticide has moved from the

degenerate to the insane, appropriated by psychiatric discourses, the mother-as-vector is leaving the

immoral into the prophylaxis of virology and toxicology, and the medical enclosures for human milk

feeding have intensified in communality in the form of milk banks.

Psychiatrization of infanticide

The fear of infanticide was ever present in a thread of emails I started receiving on Sep 9, 2013, thatgave me a first-hand example of the relation between monstrosity and food security and the

different policies that mediate among such poles. The imprint of motherly instability in the

likelihoods of postpartum depression (PPD) and postpartum psychosis, and the risk of infanticide.

The puerperal state as a moment of instability of motherhood blurs the divide between the

psychological and the physiological. Drug administration, from Biperidene to Oxytocin-substitues.

The life-giver/life-taker monstrosity of this mater potestas is inscribed into a legal instability

framework that contrasts with the Roman patricius held pater potestas. The Colombian Penal Code

recognizes/legally frames infanticide as a crime in its article 328 with a lenient penalty, in at least

the sense that it is made comparable as less in the amount of years of incarceration. The killing by a

mother of an offspring resulting from violent sexual intercourse, abusive or non-consented artificial

insemination, given that it occurs during the eight days after birth, will be penalized with arrest of

one to three years18. This taxa of homicide does not name the crime as infanticide (as is the case in

other Latin-American law) and restricts the unmotherly to three horror-images. This sets it apart

from the previous shame rhetoric used to justify infanticide, where dishonour was the prevalent

motive, as an inheritance from French/Helvetic law.

The monstrosity of the molecular

Vertical transmission19and its manipulation (usually to prevent an undesirable trait) refers to (non-

genetic) inheritance and selection. Risk rhetoric has veiled the social anxiety of monstrous/de-

naturalized motherhood due to the low incidence rates of psychiatrically framed phenomena. It has

instead centred on the tragedy of the unintended. AIDS and risky choices: the prevalence of HIV in

vertical transmission through lactation. Human milk biomonitoring and the imperfections of

toxicological assessments of the risk for nurser/nursed.

17The term leche(milk) has been depicted as both materna(maternal) and humana(human), while lactanciagoes along with materna and natural. In both cases the terms have been incorporated occasionally intowritten and practiced policy.18La madre que durante el nacimiento o dentro de los ocho das siguientes matare a su hijo, fruto deacceso carnal violento o abusivo o de inseminacin artificial no consentida, incurrir en arresto de uno atres aos19

Comment [AS4]: Check if it does not

distinguish it from parricide (meaning that t

same considerations are made even if the

killing is of a child not her own)


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Partial/partitioned bodies and zoomorphisms

On October 22, 2010 I received an email from [Lactared] asking me to sign a petition against an

article published by El Mundo, a Spanish journal that pictured the breastfeeding mother as a cow.

The horned image of the cow-mother, bringing with the analogy of the sensuous devil, the antithesisof the Christian Mary-mother-of-God offended many and deserved considerable amount of blogging

and other social networking. The monstrosity of the horned woman concerned the inhumanity in

which breastfeeding mothers were depicted. In terms of the sender of the petition, the article is a

threat even against humanity20.

In Haraways (2008) words , fears here can be understood in contrast to the long dominant Western

fantasy that all that is fully human is fallen from Eden, separated from the mother, in the domain of

the artificial, deracinated, alienated, and therefore free the way out of *cultures+ deep

commitments to human exceptionalism requires a one-way rapture to the other side of the divide.

To return to the mother is to return to nature This is not only a return to a pristine natural, but to

the commoditized and industrialized characteristics of 2010 nurturing technologies and strategies

that by hyperbolic means makes the apparently gruesome figure of babies suckling a cows udder.

The divide

Figure 4 Left side: Cover of October 22, 2010, Magazine of El Mundo. Right side: Fouquet (1452)

Madonna Surrounded by Seraphim and Cherubim

Recap on distancing between production and consumption. Milk banks vs commercialization. The

framing of milk banks in Bogotas policy. The incorporation of the International Marketing Code of

Breast-milk Substitutes in the text through programmed (budgeted) surveys of its violation. The

holes of the Code, The Icecreamists human milk ice cream, the neoclassical take on incentives for

a human milk market (Waldek 2002) between Roman Charity and galactophilia.

20Original text in Spanish: dicho artculo atenta contra la salud pblica y contra organismos oficiales tanserios como la OMS y el UNICEF e incluso contra la humanidad


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CONCLUSIONS

Food and breastfeeding policies share the common in their origins the fears of death throughingestion and nutrition, the constitution of a fit citizen-subject of a nationalist endeavour towards

productively machinic. However, the discourse has shifted into what Rose (2001) calls risk politics.

REFERENCES

problematizing human milk

Documents