This thesis is a study of dominant forms of Pākehā banal nationalism within Aotearoa/New Zealand. A diverse range of contemporary non-fiction texts from Aotearoa/ New Zealand are analysed in order to explore the ways in which notions of a ‘New Zealand national identity’ are created. These texts include television programmes, advertisements, opinion columns, editorials and letters to the editor. The analysis of these texts reveals a complex circulation of ideas around innocence and guilt, history and nostalgia, childhood and good motherhood/bad motherhood. These ideas, as this thesis demonstrates, are central to the functioning of nationalism. Yet they also serve as a focus for the anxieties of nationalism: anxieties which arise from the impossibility of securing the desired nation. Drawing on Freudian psychoanalytic concepts such as repression and projection, and on Kristeva’s notion of abjection, this thesis examines the way in which attempts to secure a comfortable, homelike nation are forever undermined by the return of repressed elements of the nation’s past and present. Within Pākehā nationalism, a nostalgic vision of a unified, innocent, childlike nation is used as a defence against undesired knowledge of national disunity. National discomforts, which are generated by the impossibility of repressing the nation’s history, are projected onto those assigned an abject position in the nation. As a result of this process of projection, mediated by the association of national identity with childhood and home, the fantasised figure of the ‘bad Maori mother’ emerges as the ultimate uncanny element within the nation.

During this unique moment of feminist inquiry wherein breastfeeding has been a focal point of interdisciplinary research, little sociological scholarship has been presented which has centered on the various meanings that African American mothers, as a diverse group, attach to their experiences with breastfeeding and/or infant formula use. While patterns of behavior have been explored in a cross-racial context, most social science studies have not focused on how the choice between breastfeeding, using infant formula, or using a combination of the two has impacted (or has been shaped by) African American mothers’ constructs of self, motherhood/mothering, their birth experiences, and their sexuality. In order to understand the interplay of the decision-making process and these constructs, I conducted a qualitative study in which I participated in face-to-face interviews with a diverse group of thirty African-American mothers. They ranged in age from 18 years-old to 50-years-old. At the time of her interview, each mother had at least one child who was three-years-old or younger. Through our discussions, we explored how pre-pregnancy perceptions, lived experiences as a mother, familial influences, and the discourses surrounding motherhood within an African-American context affected the perceptions and experiences that the mothers in the study had with their infant feeding practice(s). Findings suggest that while African Americans mothers know that “breast is best,” that knowledge is not the only reason for their decisions. The first step in understanding why African-American mothers choose the feeding method(s) that they choose is embracing the reality that choosing is an ongoing and dynamic process which is often informed by what she does versus “is supposed to do” versus how she is portrayed weighed with the consequences of her choice(s) for herself and her family. Further, African American mothers are in the active process of negotiating an evolving definition of themselves within this post-Civil Rights, Affirmative Action context wherein choices appear abundant, but the choosing always comes with a price.