Choreographing pumping: remaking the ‘ideal’ worker through maternal embodiment in the workplace

The negotiation of employed mothers’ identities as mothers and workers has often been theorized through separation, where women perform their maternal and professional identities differently and distinctly in the home and workplace. However, milk expression in the workplace, as a form of maternal embodiment at work, challenges this separation and the ‘ideal’ worker dedicated entirely to the goals and desires of the firm. This study analyzes how mother-workers negotiate milk expression to suggest that identity practice in the workplace is a choreography between co-workers and supervisors that have the potential to produce hybrid subjectivities outside of the logic of the ‘ideal’ worker or the separation of spheres. Critical moments of performance occur in the movement between spaces within the workplace when maternal and professional work occur simultaneously or maternal embodiment becomes visible to co-workers and supervisors. This paper extends the conversation about gendered organizations to suggest that working mothers are already engaging in the production of hybrid subjectivities in the workplace that have the potential to remake the ‘ideal’ worker.