Social reproductive metabolisms of human milk banking in Brazil

Brazil is currently home to the most extensive, publicly funded donor human milk banking network in the world. While this formalized donor network is only a few decades old, it is haunted by long histories of exploitative wet-nursing in the country. In this paper I examine how Brazil's human milk banking network is a metabolism - founded on social reproductive, breastfeeding labour - that is based in, but also transforms, racialized, gendered, and classed assumptions of milk and motherhood. Drawing on interviews, policy analysis, and participant observation, I argue that this social reproductive metabolism is constituted through: biomedical understandings of milk and lactation; gendered and racialized norms of altruism in the public sphere; legal infrastructures to curb exploitative wet-nursing; public health policies to decrease infant mortality; and embodied sensations of breast fullness. I pay particular attention to how human milk sharing in this context is a multi-scalar metabolism, drawing together global and national health policy with intimate dynamics and affects of breast engorgement and care. Overall, examining this human milk flow demonstrates how metabolisms are embodied, racialized, multi-scalar, and social reproductive in ways that are geographically situated and that relate to, but exceed, commodification.