Sharing Milk: Intimacy, Materiality and Bio-Communities of Practice

This dynamic new analysis explores the motivations and meanings behind the growing phenomenon of breast milk sharing in the West.

Through examples of infant feeding communities and a bio-communities of practice framework, it explores the journeys of mothers who give and receive breast milk. Unique in its ethnographic approach, the book seeks wider meanings, interpreting moral aspects of the practice, the interactional privilege and subversiveness that it represents, as well its implications for femininity, individual responsibility and community. Ranging widely across themes of motherhood, gender and sociology, this is a compelling empirical account of infant feeding that stimulates new thinking about a much-debated practice.