Visibility as a rhetorical strategy empowers communities to self-valorize themselves within the informal labor sector.

Although some White families used the Black breastfeeding body to profit, Blacktavists, constructing and circulating persuasive appeals to stop Medolac’s campaign, work through the Black breastfeeding body to assert Black mothers’ agency and to suggest their ability to control their worth in the marketplace. Figure 3 encapsulates these complaints with a drawn image of a Black woman exposing her breast to nurse a White infant. This image, appearing as a profile picture on the Facebook page for Breastfeeding Mothers Unite, is framed by text that reads: Why are women always being sold … told that they are doing something of “value” … but consistently devalued in the process? Once again we are being exploited for a 600% profit. When you learn how much you’re worth, you’ll stop giving people discounts. With a deliberate slippage between Black women being “sold” and “told,” this image macro highlights the profit that Medolac stands to earn from Black breastfeeding women. To imply Black breastfeeding women do not know their worth or they would not give discounts resists dominant narratives that Whites control the marketplace, and instead recenters Black mothers as both capable and responsible for valuing their own labor. A primary way that Black breastfeeding women are rendered valuable within Blacktavists’ discourse is through their relationship to heterosexuality. Specifically, within U.S. contexts, heterosexuality (like whiteness) has social value because its normativity can translate to varying degrees of influence for those who embody or can approximate this kind of relationality. As Rand (2013) explained, a framework called the heteroeconomy of desire structures social relationships, noting, “Heterosexual desire manages resources by motivating and shaping the consumption of popular culture products, and humans and identities acquire value directly in relation to the standards of the economy” (p. 131). In this way, Blacktavists construct a discourse that renders Black breastfeeding women visible in the consumer marketplace—not as objects/property but as participants within the heteroeconomy of desire whose worth is calculated basesd on the complex expectations for their performances of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Blacktavists’ efforts to render Black breastfeeding women visible as agents within the U.S. economy are also captured in a second image circulated on the Black Mothers Unite Facebook page. Figure 4 combines a historical photograph of a Black slave playing “horse” with a White child, framed by this text: “Medolac is making a 600% profit off the BACKS of our African American mothers! Selling your breast milk to Medolac will make you breastfeed longer. If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge you can buy.” The message communicated in this image macro works through several different logics. The expression “If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge you can buy” references a turn-of-the-century scam whereby con artist George Parker attempted to sell the Brooklyn Bridge to people interested in purchasing land (Cohen, 2005). This historical reference equates Medolac’s efforts to those of an infamous scam artist. In this way, Blacktavists reveal Medolac as untrustworthy and irresponsible. In particular, the textual part of the image macro addresses Black mothers as audience members capable of making decisions about how and where to invest their money and implying that they have the ability to make smarter choices than the woman in the image or the immigrants who tried to buy the Brooklyn Bridge. Image macros like those discussed here demonstrate Blacktavists’ efforts to render Black breastfeeding women visible as audience members and agents with the ability to act on their own behalf and can be contrasted with other Blacktavists’ image macros that position Black breastfeeding women as subjects within a profit-driven White industrial machine. In Figure 5, an image macro first appearing on Afrykayn Moon’s blog View From a Rack shows a hand-drawn cartoon portraying incapacitated Black women rolling down an infinite conveyer belt where octopus-like tools reach down from above, attaching to the Black women’s breasts to extract milk. The posters hanging on the wall of this illustrated factory show such statements as “We’ll pay for your milk $ $ $,” “Help NICU babies,” and “You can do it.” In this image macro, Blacktavists work through the medium of a political cartoon to make visible the profit that White interests reap from Black bodies and Black labor. Further, this image macro illustrates the embodiment of Black mothers’ oppression and engages the intersectional ways that race, gender, sexuality, and social class collude to erase Black motherhood—consuming it within a heteroeconomy of desire so that Black femininity can benefit some White, procreative, monogamous couples—and making Black women valuable only insofar as they service White, heteronormative sexuality.