Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION Advocating for Breastfeeding: An Uphill Battle A New Chapter with Familiar Patterns: Biomonitoring Infant Feeding under Wraps Breastmilk's Significance Environmental Toxicity Laying Out the Players CHAPTER 1. THE EVOLVING NARRATIVE OF INFANT FOOD CONTAMINATION:HISTORICAL VIGNETTES Part I: Wet Nursing Contamination Narratives: A Series of Supremacist Gestures Defining Terms Addressing the (Colonizing) Dangers of Overgeneralizations Wet-Nursing and Semen-Curdled Milk: Assessing the Myth of the Constitution Too Delicate to Suckle Classism, Sexism, Ageism, and Lookism: Assessing Some Trends The "Threat of the Dangerous Stranger": Wet-Nursing in Select Mid-nineteenth-Century American Contexts Human Milk Banking White Supremacy and the Colonization of Black Women's Bodies Part II: Mathematical Formulas The Advent of Scientific Infant Food and the Era of "Scientific Motherhood" The Growing Impact of Advertising Medicine and Markets Colonization and the Search for New Markets:Exporting Infant Food as the More "Civilized" Choice Breastfeeding and Population Debates Debates Around the Possibility of HIV Transmission Through Breastmilk:A New Chapter or an Old Story? The True Unborn Victims of Violence CHAPTER 2. TOXIC DISCLOSURE: THE GROWING AWARENESS OF ENVIRONMENTALLY CONTAMINATED BREASTMILK IN THE CONTEXT OF MUCH-NEEDED BREASTFEEDING ADVOCACY Rachel Carson's Legacy The Impact of Changing Rates of Breastfeeding in the United States on Interest in Environmental Pollutants in Breastmilk Burgeoning Environmentalist Attention and Pulling Back Environmentalists' Reluctance Children's Health Campaigns: The Power of the Internet Impacts of the Breastfeeding Advocacy Community Developments in Related Campaigns: Movements to Curb Formula Advertising and Use and to Protect Infant Health Breastfeeding and Environmental Advocates: Friends or Foes? The Role of the Press in Disseminating Stories of Breastmilk Toxicity The Press on Toxic Fish Developments in Related Campaigns: The Environmental Justice Movement The Sensitive and Unusual Nature of Breastmilk on a Policy Level and as a Fluid Vital to Life CHAPTER 3. BREAST FETISHIZATION, BREAST CANCER, AND BREAST AUGMENTATION: THE CURIOUS OMISSIONS OF BREASTFEEDING AND BREASTMILK CONTAMINATION AS SIGNIFICANT FEMINIST ISSUES A Lack of Feminist Attention Feminist Silence on Infant Feeding: From Preoccupation with the Sexual Division of Labor to Fights for Reproductive Freedoms Structural Impediments Results of the Lack of Feminist Attention to Infant Feeding Feminist Attention to Infant Feeding: "The Scientific" versus "the Political"? Feminists Critiquing (and Embracing) Science Who's Doing the Feeding? Racism, Classism, and Colonization in Childcare Work Immigrant Women Doing Childcare(In)Attention among Feminists to the Environmental Contamination of Breastmilk What Science Can Offer: The Benefits of Breastmilk When the "Personal Is the Political": The Ecological Impacts of Formula-Use Findings on the Environmental Contamination of Breastmilk and Resulting Health Effects on Women and Children Feminist Attention to the Environmental Contamination of Breastmilk Feminists, Environmental Justice Activists, and Breastmilk Toxicity Structural Problems Impeding Breastfeeding in the United States: Women in the Workplace and in Environmentally Devastated Communities CHAPTER 4. POLLUTING THE "WATERS" OF THE MOST VULNERABLE: ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, AND BREASTMILK CONTAMINATION Toxic Breastmilk as an "Environmental Justice" Issue The Environmental Justice Movement: A Range of Documented Cases, with the List Still Growing Chemical Colonization: Toxicity on the Akwasasne The Mother's Milk Project The Continuing Legacy of Chemical Colonization: The Case of Latina Farmworkers Breastmilk Toxicity among U.S. Farmworkers Buying Organic and Protecting "Our" Children: How We Forget the "Others" Moving Toward Environmental Justice Urban Women and Those at Risk due to Occupational or Other Exposures Approaches to Remediation: Community-based Participatory Action Research The Watchperson Project in the Greenpoint/Williamsburg Neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY: Bringing Awareness to Subsistence Fishing Hazards Greater Movement Toward Environmental Justice: The Institute of Health's Vision and the La Duke, Bonnie Raitt, Indigo Girls Consciousness-Raising Team Breastmilk as a Powerful Symbol of Desecration and Hope CONCLUSION: A NEED FOR MORE ATTENTION, AND MORE CAREFUL ATTENTION TO BREASTMILK TOXICITY Assessing Coverage: Two Widely Divergent Approaches The Center for Children's Health and the Environment-Basically Appropriate, Bold Attention NOTES APPENDIX A APPENDIX B REFERENCES INDEX

About the Author

Maia Boswell-Penc is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York.

Reviews

"Boswell-Penc clearly delineates the significance of the issues involved with toxins in breastmilk and the alarming ways that this contamination matters deeply to us all. She does a very good job helping us understand why most Americans lack any knowledge of the issue and why those we might expect to hear from about it have, for the most part, failed to adequately communicate it."