Book review: Others’ milk. The potential of exceptional breastfeeding

Others’ Milk does not hold back. Opening on a story of a boy 'nursing' his foster sister, it draws the reader right into the world of 'exceptional breast-feeding' which challenges the idea of breastfeeding as necessarily 'maternal'. In Wilson’s tremendously engaging book, this vision of individualised breast-feeding, perpetuated by public health discourses and popular media, gives way to a more complex, more nuanced picture. Wilson’s retelling of stories of people who variously achieve the status of 'exceptional breastfeeders 'pushing the boundaries of breast-feeding' either as birth parents and adoptive parents using donor milk, non-gestational breastfeeding parents, breastfeeding grandmothers, fathers and other kin, breastfeeding 'outliers' feeding to term against classed and racialised expectations or breast milk providing strangers weaves a rich tapestry of embodied experiences.