From “good mother” to a knowing body: A feminist autoethnography of breastfeeding in Java, Indonesia

This article presents a feminist autoethnography of exclusive breastfeeding in Java, Indonesia, drawing on my lived experience of nursing two children within a tightly regulated socio-medical order. I trace how cultural authority, state policy, and medical power intertwine to discipline and moralize the postpartum maternal body while systematically disregarding the mother’s own subjectivity, although this power does not always operate uniformly and without gaps. I argue that the maternal body is not merely regulated from without but also surveils and disciplines itself from within, while simultaneously reconstructing her subjectivity and tactical agency during matrescence, such that embodied maternal experience is restored as a legitimate site of knowledge from the margins. As situated knowledge, this reflection does not aim to generalize, but rather shows how bodily autonomy that is underpinned by certain privilege and social support can interrupt some patriarchal parenting patterns on a personal scale.