‘It Feels Right in My Heart’: Affective Accountability in Narratives of Attachment

Abstract

This article makes a contribution to discussions around ‘affect’ in the social sciences ( Clough and Halley, 2007 ; Connolly, 1999 ; Massumi, 2002 ). It emerges from a research project involving a network of mothers – in London – who breastfeed their children to ‘full term’. Typically, this would be up to the age of three or four, though ranged, in this case, to between one and eight years old. For many women, the most fundamental reasoning in their decision to breastfeed to ‘full term’ is that it simply ‘feels right.’ The article therefore explores anthropological approaches to the ‘feelings’ that embodied experiences generate, as revealed in the accounts and practices of the people we work with (whether at the physiological, emotional or moral levels). It considers various means of describing the feelings experienced by women during of long-term breastfeeding – such as ‘hormones’, ‘instinct’ and ‘intuition’ – but ultimately argues for a theoretical framework of ‘affect’ to incorporate best the combined physiological and moral aspects of ‘doing what feels right in my heart,’ so critical to women's perceptions of themselves as mothers.