Men, breastfeeding, and values.

Provocative title, right?

I thought I would take some time to reflect on my last paper on exclusive breastfeeding. Plus, I get to speak from my favorite position: ME!

Two items have me examining both my motivation and reason for writing on that subject:

1) In our COM 600 class, a former critical-scholar-trying-to-go-good-by-being-more-quantitative asked a question whether good research involving a specific population can be done by researchers outside the population. Or, is it more difficult to really help a community when you are an outsider.

2) I told my brother I was writing a paper on exclusive breastfeeding. His response:

So did you just decide to pick a topic you know nothing about and where you have no right to talk about it?

 Hilarious. But it did get me thinking about values and voices in research. Do I think great research can be done from the outside? Of course. But let me pose some questions to get people thinking:

1) What would you say about an all female research team conducting research into men and prostate cancer? About the experiences of men living with prostate cancer?

2) How about an all male team conducting interviews into the lived experiences of women who have had an abortion?

Do you find any issues? Is it about the values or axiology we take into the research? Is research value neutral? Is great research simply great research, regardless of gender, race, or number of arms? (except 3 arms, 3 arms would be suuuuuper weird). I would assume yes. As long as there is an attempt to understand or take on the position of the interviewee or "subject". Think about the word subject, the very word connotes a difference or distance being investigator and the people you are speaking to or studying. In fact, I believe we have moved away from using the word subject to refer to participants in a study.

I speak from an extremely privileged position-- white, well off, male. That is indisputable. If I actually did anything with exclusive breastfeeding research, I absolutely would expect that I would have to work reflexively. That I would need to constantly question my assumptions and the purpose of the research. I wrote the paper and of course there are a million things I still don't understand and a million ways to experience or think about the issue. I asked my friend Lori, who is a nurse that works in the prenatal unit, about exclusive breastfeeding. She said that they always try to have the baby nurse within the first hour, but sometimes the baby won't latch or the mother is simply too tired. She also said that there is a ton of pressure on mothers to breastfeed, that this can result in a lot of guilt. I absolutely had not thought about this last point whatsoever. There always is something new to learn and something that you can't understand from an outsiders perspective. Are any of us in this class mothers? Suffer from mental illness? Abused drugs or sought treatment for it? Something to think about.