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Book Review Symposium: Kate Boyer, Spaces and Politics of Motherhood

very different sort of narrative to one in 2016 London, as there has been something of a backlash to the UK-based 2000s ‘breast is best’ policy drive in recent years. For an academic committed to thinking through the ‘distributed agency’ of motherhood, it is also interesting that there are not more accounts from other carers of children – fathers, partners, grandparents, childcare workers or otherwise. Boyer notes early on in the book that this is a deliberate choice, to reflect that childcare remains ‘women’s work’ in both the USA and the UK. It would be interesting to see her develop this theoretical commitment in her empirical work in the future, by incorporating the accounts of, for example, partners. Lastly, the book includes a wide-ranging literature review in the introduction, and as such is relevant to work going on in a range of disciplinary fields – most obviously geography and sociology, but also anthropology, nursing and midwifery, and the fields of gender and parenting more broadly. It did seem curious, however, that there was little attention to recent work in family studies, which calls to attention the ways in which narratives of risk have become commonplace in the framing of everyday parenting practices, and infant feeding in particular. This research, known as Parenting Culture Studies, has pointed to a growing policing of reproduction, with knock-on implications for the subjectivities of mothers, fathers and children themselves (e.g. Lee et al., 2014; Lupton, 2012). In terms of the ‘breast is best’ message, this work has been important in pointing out the problems with linking micro practices of individual women (such as breastfeeding) to macro outcomes of a social scale (such as obesity). Perhaps in part because this book takes a less critical look at policy, being more readily incorporated into an advocacy perspective, it side steps these important debates, to an extent that seems both deliberate but somewhat puzzling. Drawing on Baraitser (2009), in limiting the remit of the work to describing ‘what motherhood is like’ rather than ‘what it might mean’, this seems like something of a missed opportunity.