Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
2-2026
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
Psychology
Advisor
Michelle Fine
Committee Members
Dána-ain Davis
Barbara Katz Rothman
Subject Categories
Health Psychology | Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | Women's Studies
Keywords
breastfeeding, biopower, medicalization, affect theory, reproductive justice
Abstract
For parents and birthing people, the birth of a baby requiring admission to a hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) is likely a traumatic experience. Separated from their babies, who may be housed in NICU incubators for days, weeks or months after birth, they nevertheless labor to engage in relationships marked by closeness, grappling, simultaneously, with the heavier than is typical hand medical professionals play in the early life of NICU babies. This dissertation looks at infant feeding in the NICU as a site in which these tensions and turmoil play out. Using biopower as a lens, I examine how parents understand, respond to, and construct themselves in relation to medicalized knowledge and authority in the NICU. I invoke affect theory to explore how parents enact embodied forms of resistance against medicalized ways of knowing, and I draw upon reproductive justice as a framework for imagining what a landscape of liberation for birthing people might look like. Through this work, I look closely at parents’ narratives of knowledge, desires and bodies, seeking to develop an understanding of how intimacy is felt and negotiated in a context shaped by ideological and structural constraints.
Recommended Citation
Hooberman, Laura, "“With Eyes on Me, and Regulated”: Breastfeeding in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6802
Included in
Health Psychology Commons, Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Women's Studies Commons
