“Making a Way Out of No Way”: Rhetorical Navigation of Workplace Lactation

Danielle De Arment-Donohue

Advisor: Heidi Y. Lawrence, PhD, Department of English

Committee Members: Bernice Hausman, Courtney Wooten

Horizon Hall, #4223
March 31, 2025, 10:00 AM to 01:00 PM

Abstract:

Breastfeeding inhabits a rhetorically complex, interdisciplinary space that is rife with controversy. Women face judgement for a variety of infant-feeding practices, and despite some expansion of legal and policy protections, working mothers continue to experience difficulty implementing workplace lactation. For teachers working in the public school context, local conditions create time and space constraints that are difficult to surmount, especially given the expectation that teachers exhibit total devotion to their professional work, aligning with the ideal male worker despite inhabiting a feminized career.  

To learn how teachers draw on métis, a notion from classical rhetoric that refers to the cunning required to navigate systems and spaces, to navigate workplace lactation, this dissertation reports on a hermeneutic phenomenological analysis of interview data from 15 K-12 public school teachers in the greater Washington, D.C. area. Findings reveal that institutional reliance on enforced efficiency privileges chronological time over workers’ sense of kairotic time, fosters self-discipline, and forecloses rhetorical space for workers to share their knowledge. In such conditions, workers rely on métic action informed by their personal sense of embodied efficiency to cobble together resources, develop tactics, and adapt spaces and their bodies to meet their double and divergent goals of teaching and caring for their children. They exhibit agency but also struggle. In addition, many teachers rely on their hard-earned reputation, which functions as a métic tool that allows them to procure more of what they need. Professional reputation serves as a currency workers can cash in, but it can be depleted, and it is not equally available to all. Some teachers face suspicion and negative consequences when their innovations are discovered. 

Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates that collaborative, relational, and recursive métis can break down the unhelpful binary that pits workers against supervisors and create rhetorical space for women to share their embodied knowledge. Such knowledge is the key to more efficient and effective solutions that would benefit both workers and institutions.