Shared breastfeeding, homoaffective motherhoods, and life-making in the gaps of normativity: an analysis based on the experience of cisgender women in the Global South

Introduction: Over the past few years, a new perspective - removed from the cisheteropatriarchal viewpoint - has become necessary to reflect on the parenthoods of LGBTQIA+ individuals, based on their practices and knowledge. Shared breastfeeding has thus gained space as one of the practices emerging from the uniqueness of marginalized experiences, although it still occupies limited space in scientific production. Objective: To narrate, investigate, and interpret how couples of women who relate to other women perceive, describe, and give meaning to the experience of co-breastfeeding and its possible developments in the different social spaces in which they are inserted. Methods: A qualitative study conducted through semi-structured interviews carried out from March to December 2024 with three couples of cisgender women and one woman whose partner chose not to be part of the sample. Participants were recruited via social media, through search mechanisms using hashtags such as #duplaamamentação, #amamentaçãocompartilhada, and #duplamaternidade, as well as through key contacts established in a previous study. The analysis and interpretation of the data were carried out using thematic content analysis, with categories built inductively after an immersion process in the data produced. Finally, a dialogue was established between the analytical categories and the theoretical frameworks from the fields of Nutrition, Social Sciences, and Public Health. Results: We analyzed the meanings attributed by these women to their experiences with shared breastfeeding based on two axes: 1) description and discussion of the intersections and negotiations that precede childbirth among cisgender women couples who chose co-breastfeeding, according to the ways these women negotiate their daily lives, their conceptions of motherhood, and their logics of care--highlighting how gender constructions and the relationship with paid work intersect with the desire for motherhood, the negotiations around gestation, and their experiences with stigma; and 2) description and discussion of these womens experience with the induced lactation protocol, in articulation with the information available and the dualities of following a protocol designed by and for cisheteronormativity within a non-normative family configuration. Conclusion: We observed the existence of a complex web that constructs the meanings of shared breastfeeding for these women, deeply interwoven with cisheteronormative structures, yet also going beyond them--creating, in action, new care arrangements rooted in the uniqueness of dissident experience.