Babydaze

Abstract

As an example of the gendering of time, this article considers the ways which women have available to construct their experience of time spent breastfeeding. Many women struggle to accommodate the time it takes to care for babies into their already established regimes of temporality. The struggle, I suggest, is in assuming that maternity is a temporary or passing stage, after which everything will return to ‘normal’. As our experiences of time are intimately linked to the language available to conceptualize it, this article seeks alternative discourses which expand maternal agency and the ontological value of maternity and care.