TO BREASTFEED: TO WHOM IS THIS DECISION?

This paper aims to provoke a reflection, in the light of Discourse Analysis, on advertising campaigns in defense of breastfeeding. We understand that a discussion on this discourse, which is becoming more popular in society, deserves a review, especially when the subject seems to transpose the field of the debatable, since it is given as non-controversial. What stands as problematic – which does not relate to the benefits of breastfeeding – is the existence, in these campaigns, of a social problem concerning the treatment that the female body receives when public policies come into play, taking as their responsibility a choice that should be left exclusively to women. The discussion focuses on a discursive practice of expropriation of the mother’s own body when public authorities unilaterally support the discourse of breastfeeding, publicly exposing, through the unsaid, the women who, by choice or impossibility, do not breastfeed. This discursive order conveys questionable judgments on the good mother (the one who gives herself entirely to maternity) and the bad mother (the one who, by choosing not to breastfeed, is seen as less dedicated to the child and, even worse, as the one that deprives her child of better health). The campaigns that comprise the corpus of this study reveal silencing practices that cause a complex process of non-autonomy of women over their own bodies.