Introduction

Breasts: as previously noted, among other things, they can feed a baby and they can titillate an adult, but it seems that in some societies, they can only do one or the other. This might especially be the case in picturebooks, where the readers and the read-to might be confronted with breasts and breastfeeding in both words and images. As Perry Nodelman discusses, in reference to nudity in picturebooks, ‘boys can be naked without their clothes on, whereas traditionally, naked girls are nude’ (1984, 28). In other words, an image of a woman breastfeeding her child in a picturebook may not be acceptable, because women (and girls) without clothes are always nude and sexualised, even if they are carrying out non-sexual tasks. Arguably, girls’ and women's bodies are not behaving in a sexual manner in the great majority of picturebooks, and yet I would suggest that they are nonetheless viewed as nude, and thereby as sexual, which influences the depiction of breastfeeding.

In this chapter, I compare English-language picturebooks to Swedish ones to explore how babies are fed and how this reflects or comments on the society in which the books are produced. As stated in the foregoing chapters, I take a feminist approach, arguing that breastfeeding is a feminist activity, and here that means that women's breasts can be bare and naked in public – including in literature – without being nude, even if the authors and illustrators do not necessarily agree with this viewpoint at this moment in time. It was interesting and somewhat surprising to me that even in some of the major recent texts on picturebooks (such as Kümmerling-Meibauer 2018), I found little mention of bodies, nudity/nakedness, breastfeeding, issue books or some of the other subjects and themes discussed here. Pregnancy, birth, infant feeding and the early years of childhood are very physical and embodied, so I had anticipated finding more representations of the body in picturebooks and more analysis of such representations, and yet there seems to be a shyness, or a shame, about depicting or discussing this.