Feeding the “Good” Mother? Knowing through Maternal Work

The child-centred development discourse and neoliberal health policies have reorganised child feeding into a moral minefield, reshaping what it means to be a “good” mother in contemporary India. In this talk, I discuss how some first-time mothers manage lactation, feeding work, and inhabit “new” maternal anxieties concerning risk, accuracy, and nutrition in New Delhi, India. By positioning mothers as legitimate subjects, I highlight mothers’ epistemic negotiations and how they navigate maternal responsibility. In telling their accounts, mothers mock unhelpful advice, question the purity of breast milk, and adopt silence in family settings, electing greater autonomy in making their feeding decisions. Through a constructive grounded theory analysis, I discuss infant feeding as a dynamic sensemaking process, where the lived experience of feeding, caring, and bonding with children shapes maternal knowledge. In turn, I theorise the situated emergence of maternal subjectivity and psychological negotiation of epistemic authority through feeding labour.