Post-brelfie: the limits of intersubjectivity & intersectionality in spring 2020 virtual lactation selfie culture

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 2015, brelfies, digital self-portraits taken by breastfeeding mothers, began to emerge on social media platforms. In the spring of 2020, two virtual lactation events emerged as new sites of brelfie culture: laczoom and the #dropemoutchallenge. I define these two events as evidence of a new wave in brelfie culture, what I call “post-brelfie” cultures. “post-brelfie” cultures are determined by two primary differentiating tenets from brelfie culture: 1) Post-brelfie events occur on video-based new media platforms, as opposed to through digital photography-based ones, which inhibit this trend’s potential for both self and community empowerment. 2) Post-brelfies are a product of their socio-temporal moment: the novel coronavirus pandemic and its publicly mandated stay-at-home orders. Through a hybrid methodology combining cross-platform analysis, grounded theory, and contextual visual discourse analysis, the findings of this study assert that not only has brelfie culture thus far failed to realize its feminist and public health goals, but also that such aims have been further devalued under pandemic circumstances in which digital inequities have further siloed online communities, leading to the transmission of negative affects in these networks. Such affects are further exasperated by postfeminism and neoliberalism and serve to undermine the aims of intersectional feminism.