Fleshy citizenship: representations of breastfeeding politicians in the Australian media

This paper takes up Chris Beasley and Carol Bacchi notion of "fleshy citizenship" to examine media texts of two instances in which Australian politicians breastfed in parliament. We identify the predominance of trivialising and sexualising discourses in the media texts about the breastfeeding women which worked to constrain maternal subjectivities and knowledges in legislative space. Following this, we illustrate how the presence of breastfeeding bodies debunks the myth of the citizen as a disembodied individual. In conclusion, we argue that by placing bodies at the centre of citizenship theorising, the social, material, historical and embodied specificities of knowledge production, and the consequences of exclusion for policy making, are highlighted. In summary, our application of Beasley and Bacchi conceptualisation of "fleshy citizenship" reveals that the presence or absence of different bodies matters for legislative agendas.