People
Laura Hooberman
ERI/PS2 Public Research Fellow
Laura Hooberman (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Critical Psychology at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Broadly, her research interests center on the interweaving of reproductive injustices, biomedicalization, structural violence, and resistance. Her dissertation focuses on breastfeeding experiences in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs), exploring how intimacy emerges within, and is disrupted by, the highly medicalized environment of the NICU. Laura is a 2025 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellow.
This summer, I continued developing my dissertation research, a qualitative study exploring parents’ experiences breastfeeding in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). As a social practice, breastfeeding is laden with meaning. It evokes essentialist ideas about gender and women’s bodies, discourses of intensive mothering and maternal sacrifice, and the history of the medicalization of pregnancy and birth, a history which is inseparable from the landscape of stratified reproduction in the U.S. today, in which disparities in pregnancy and birth largely fall along lines of race, gender, and class.
In this work, my aim is not to reproduce a socially constructed hierarchy in which breastfeeding is constructed as the ‘optimal’ way to feed a baby. Rather, I regard breastfeeding in the NICU as a ‘charged’ practice occurring in a ‘charged’ environment. I view the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) as a site of trauma, as well as a context in which medicalization casts a long shadow, creating a reality in which early parenting is marked by exaggerated medical presence and authority. Breastfeeding in the NICU emerges as a practice which requires birthing people to negotiate multiple elements simultaneously: 1) their own desires, the roots of which may be embodied or socially constructed or both (and this may be difficult to untangle); 2) medicalized authority, which emerges in expansive ways in the NICU; and 3) constraints and possibilities harbored by bodies whose dimensions may appear reshaped in the aftermath of traumatic births.
This summer, I developed a chapter of my dissertation focused on how parents constructed their breastfeeding bodies in the NICU. The meaning parents made of their bodies were complex and paradoxical; while pumping milk for their hospitalized babies, they often constructed their bodies as sites of discipline and intensive management, and, simultaneously, as vehicles for intimacy. The body debilitated by birth was often experienced as a burden, challenging parents’ ability to perform the labor necessary to be viewed, by NICU providers, as ‘good’ or ‘competent’ parents. How providers perceived parents often emerged as a central concern, given the role that NICU doctors and nurses play in facilitating babies’ trajectories through, and ultimately out of, the NICU.
My engagement with this chapter encouraged me to reconceptualize the public facing element I hoped to integrate into my dissertation research. Previously, I had intended to reflect back my findings to parents and to create space for an open forum centered on parents’ NICU experiences; in place of this, I began conceptualizing a body mapping project, laying groundwork with community members for the development of a workshop in which former NICU parents might create visual representations of the complex and shifting meanings they made of their bodies during the time in the NICU.
