Food for thought: A comparative analysis of online narratives of maternal practices of infant feeding in Hungary and Bulgaria

This paper examines the narratives mothers construct about their solid food introduction practices. Feeding a baby is a deeply gendered act which establishes a performative relation between culturally specific gender ideologies and the everyday mother-work of women, through which they agentically construct their maternal subjectivities. I draw upon data from the most popular Hungarian and Bulgarian childrearing Internet forums. Using the tools of critical discourse analysis, I present a contrasting comparison of the 'good mother' construct in the two postsocialist societies in question: a 'choosing mother manager' in Bulgaria and a 'mother-domestic-angel' in Hungary. The differences in my findings are attributed to the historically conditioned ways in which the hierarchical relationship between the value of 'productive' and 'reproductive' work is continuously re-negotiated in women's narratives about everyday life.