“Teamwork to Make the Dream Work”: Representations of Non-Birthing Partners in Infant Feeding Advice Materials

Infant feeding advice typically focuses on mothers, reflecting societal expectations of women as primary caregivers responsible for most aspects of childrearing, and the message that ‘breast is best’ when it comes to infant nutrition. The representation of partners in infant feeding materials is currently an under-represented area of critical discourse studies. However, neglecting partners’ involvement in infant feeding only hinders the efforts of feminist movements to improve women's rights, change cultures of toxic masculinity, and increase men's engagement in fatherhood, thereby promoting ‘caring masculinities’ as a mechanism of gender equality Using a 300,000-word corpus of web-based infant feeding materials, we first examine the (lack of) space dedicated to, and (limited) discursive construction of, fathers and other non-birthing parents. This then leads us to a more nuanced, qualitative feminist multimodal critical discourse analysis of two pamphlets targeting non-birthing partners, and particularly fathers: ‘Championing breast milk’ ( Philips Avent, 2019 ) and ‘Off to the Best Start’ (NHS/Start4Life, 2015). Our analysis identifies dominant gendered discourses of men as ‘protectors’ of women and of breast/chest-feeding, and providers of ‘technical support’ for breast/chest-milk feeding. We highlight feminist goals of encouraging the involvement of all parents in infant feeding, while respecting women's control of their own breasts/bodies, as we develop recommendations for more inclusive and independent (non-commercial) infant feeding communications.