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Abstract
This study investigates the material-discursive contexts available for lactation—pumping—amongst U.S. teachers who wish to continue nursing [a] child(ren) upon returning full-time to the classroom. Guided by critical feminist methodologies, I conducted interviews and focus groups with 11 teacher-parents who chose to lactate or nurse their infants while at school. I found that teachers face overwhelming obstacles to merging the conflicting demands of their private lives as parents alongside the work demands of their public lives as teachers. In making sense of the data using feminist theories of embodiment and neoliberalism as available discourses both structuring and structured by teachers’ experiences with lactation in schools, I offer the concept of disembodied neoliberal parenthood as a way to both (1) describe the conditions of contemporary working parenthood, as well as to (2) point to some critical explanations for how the intersecting forces of global neoliberal capitalism and sexism converged in the bodies of my participants to render their experiences with pumping in schools emotionally and bureaucratically violent.