Mother’s milk? : The gendering of feeding infants and young children in research published by the World Health Organization

Abstract: The World Health Organization recommends feeding children human milk for the first six months after birth due to its known efficacy in ensuring their health and survival. The WHO’s research is intended to educate a broad audience of caregivers, whose identity must be understood in order for them to be reached. By analysing the WHO’s three factsheets published in English on the topic of ‘breastfeeding’, this research aims to answer two questions: In the WHO’s description of feeding infants and young children, to what extent does the language assign gender to the caregiver? And, if gender is assigned to the caregiver, which features of the written language and images make this visible? The study was carried out using a mixed methods approach, where the text was first searched for markers of gender and then analysed, modelling van Dijk’s discourse-cognition-society triangle. Lexicological and collocational findings suggest the presence of both an assumption of cis-femininity in caregivers who breastfeed and a paradigm of binary cis-heteronormativity that is representative of broader societal structures and their influences on cognition.