Copyright by Ashley N. Mack 2013
The Dissertation Committee for Ashley N. Mack Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:
DISCIPLINING MOMMY: RHETORICS OF REPRODUCTION IN CONTEMPORARY MATERNITY CULTURE
Committee:
Dana L. Cloud, Supervisor
Joshua Gunn
Barry Brummett
Sharon J. Hardesty
Christine Williams DISCIPLINING MOMMY: RHETORICS OF REPRODUCTION IN CONTEMPORARY MATERNITY CULTURE
by
Ashley N. Mack, B.A.; B.A.; M.A.
Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
The University of Texas at Austin August, 2013
Dedication
To Tiffany—for being an awesome lady, thinker, worker, “true” sister, daughter, and mother.
Acknowledgements
My family has something of a “curse”: Multiple generations of women have been single, working mothers. Therefore, the social pressures, expectations and norms of motherhood have always permeated my experiences of reproduction and labor.
Everything I do has been built on the backs of the women in my family—so it is important that I thank them first and foremost. I would be remised if I did not also specifically thank my big sister, Tiffany, for sharing her experiences as a mother with me.
Hearing her stories inspired me to look closer at rhetorics of maternity and this project would not exist if she were not brave enough to speak up about issues that produce shame and fear for many moms.
Dana Cloud, my advisor, is a shining light at the end of the many dark tunnels that academic work can produce. Her openness, patience, and rigor helped me form and finish this project. Thank you, Dana. I also want to thank all of the professors and teachers I was guided by at UT, especially my committee members Joshua Gunn, Barry Brummett,
Christine Williams and Sharon Jarvis. Josh, you have always inspired me to take risks as a thinker and writer, and every time I write with humor I will whisper thank you to you.
Barry, you are a wizard who reigned in my brain and use of theory. Christine, your rigorous questions made me demand more of myself. Sharon, you brought humanity and clarity to what I was working on. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Additionally, thanks must go out to the Graduate School at UT-Austin for providing me with a continuing fellowship so I could work on this project while living out of state.
v
To all my parents—biological, step and everything in between—thanks for conceiving me, feeding me, and supporting me through it all. Mom, you especially are just unbelievably awesome! And Dave: thanks for annoying me enough about finishing this that I forced myself to do it just so I wouldn’t have to hear you ask about it again.
Special thanks to my Grandma Gladys, who passed away while I was in the middle of writing this dissertation and who in so many ways inspired me to love writing, thinking and imagining. I want to also thank my brother and photography partner, Ryan, who when I was using our business as an advanced method of procrastination, had enough sense to change the password of our e-mail account and not tell me it. Thanks for that one, Pookie. Thanks must go out to my friends and colleagues: Brandon Bumstead and my UT family, for helping me have fun when I needed it; Tiara Na’puti, for sending the best friendship, support, and care packages; Matt Morris, for always gut-checking me when I was too hard on myself; and, Katie Feyh, for always being an inspiration.
Lastly, Bryan, my partner in life and work, you are the best lady a girl could ask for. Thank you for never following gender roles and rules. Also, thanks for being an excellent personal assistant when I got so overwhelmed I couldn’t function. Your labor is much appreciated and I will pay you back someday in craft beer and so many giggles.
You listened to me rant for hours when neither of us had any idea what I was talking about. You typed my dictated notes when I couldn’t settle down. You moved us across the country, sold all my old books, decorated our house, and hid things from me you knew would stress me out. You’re like a magical love leprechaun and I want to make out with you so hard. vi DISCIPLINING MOMMY: RHETORICS OF REPRODUCTION IN CONTEMPORARY MATERNITY CULTURE
Ashley N. Mack, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2013
Supervisor: Dana L. Cloud
In this dissertation, I argue that the maternal body is a chief site of discursive political and cultural struggle over gender, family, and work in a neoliberal America. I consider contemporary discourses of maternity, an aggregate I call maternity culture, as cultural products and rhetorical expressions of the antagonistic arrangements in contemporary capitalism since the neoliberal turn. The complexities of maternity culture discourses can therefore be better understood when they are historicized alongside changing economic and political realities. Using materialist feminism as my primary methodology, I contend that maternity culture discourses express the ethics of neoliberalism including the privatization of social/political responsibility and self- actualization through entrepreneurialism and labor, while simultaneously justifying the intensification of maternal labor and the continued surveillance of women’s bodies. I argue that maternity culture discourses are, therefore, rhetorics of reproduction and reproducing rhetorics. That is to say, they are a part of a larger set of discourses about the reproductive function that are themselves caught in the logics of capital that may result in the reproduction of unequal arrangements in material and symbolic life. In order vii to illuminate how maternity culture operates in neoliberal public life as a reproducing rhetoric, I provide a historical analysis of rhetorics of women’s health, and analyze two case studies involving discourses surrounding breastfeeding and natural childbirth, major sites of struggle within maternity culture.
viii Table of Contents
Chapter One: An Introduction to Rhetorics of Reproducing Motherhood ...... 1 Maternity Culture and Communication Studies ...... 7 Rhetorics of Reproduction in Communication Studies ...... 7 Rhetorics of Science, Health, and Medicine ...... 11 Agency, Power, and Rhetorics of Personal Responsibility ...... 12 Analyzing Maternity Culture ...... 18 Materialist Feminism ...... 19 Maternity Culture in (New) Publics ...... 25 Analysis of Case Studies ...... 32
Chapter Two: Neoliberalism and the Maternal Body ...... 45 Family and Reproduction in Industrial Capitalism ...... 46 Motherhood and Feminism in the Mid-20th Century ...... 49 Neoliberal Ethics and The Post-1970s Maternal Body ...... 52 Depolicitization of Feminism ...... 62
Chapter Three: From the Pill to the Nipple: Rhetorics of the Women’s Health Movement and the Privatization of Women’s Health ...... 69 Rhetorics of the Radical Women’s Health Movement ...... 70 A Crisis in Women’s Health ...... 71 Beyond Boston ...... 78 A Backlash and Radical Retreat ...... 80 The Privatization and Surveillance of Women’s Health ...... 87 Conclusion: The Rise of Maternity Culture ...... 92
Chapter Four: “Whip ‘em out!”: Macho Maternalism in TheBump.com’s Boob- olution Campaign ...... 97 Macho maternalism ...... 100 TheBump.com’s Boob-olution ...... 105 Show Me Your Dick! … and other Narratives of Entrepreneurialism108 The Science of Rugged Individualism ...... 115
ix Conclusion ...... 126
Chapter Five: The Self-Made Mom: Home Birth Videos on YouTube and Rhetorics of Hard Work, Redemption and Masochism ...... 136 Rhetorics of the Self-Made Masochist ...... 140 Masochistic Motherhood ...... 145 The Self-Made Mom on YouTube ...... 147 Self-Sufficiency and Rugged Individualism ...... 153 Pain, Self-Optimization, and Redemption ...... 157 Conclusion ...... 166
Chapter Six: Conclusion: Disciplining the Maternal Body ...... 175 Theoretical Contributions ...... 177 Rhetorics of Reproduction as Reproducing Rhetorics ...... 177 Cultural Rhetorics of Health, Medicine and Science ...... 179 Feminist Discourse Analysis Under Neoliberalism ...... 180 Future Research in Maternity Culture ...... 181 Forging the 21st Century Motherhood Movement ...... 183
Bibliography ...... 187
Vita...... 210
x
Chapter One: An Introduction to Rhetorics of Reproducing Motherhood
In 2004, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services launched a National
Breastfeeding Awareness Campaign, featuring television, radio, and print advertisements, aimed at persuading women that “babies were born to be breastfed.”1 The campaign contends that expecting mothers should prepare to breastfeed and that mothers of infants should exclusively breastfeed. One commercial, entitled “Ladies Night,” features a pregnant woman riding an electronic bull until she is bucked off, the crowd moaning in the background. Text appears on the screen: “You wouldn’t take risks before your baby’s born. Why start after? Breastfeed exclusively for 6 months.” An announcer proceeds to explain that “recent studies” show that breastfed babies are less likely to get sick, because
“babies were born to be breastfed.”2 Another commercial in the series features two expecting mothers participating in a dangerous logrolling competition. In each case, the message being propagated by the advertisements is simple: a mother choosing not to breastfeed is akin to her willfully putting her baby at risk of harm or even death.
The debate over whether or not the “breast is best” (a common slogan used by proclaimed “lactivists” who want to promote breastfeeding throughout the developed world) is not new. Advocates claim that breastfeeding is undeniably superior to formula.
However, studies show that women are actually less likely to breastfeed when they are single, poor and/or working class, and who therefore lack sufficient social support.3
Following a coordinated effort in the 1990s between mothering activists and the
1 American Academy of Pediatrics, the “breast is best” mantra became the dominant narrative told in feminist culture and public health circles in the developed world by the mid to late 2000s.4
However, breastfeeding culture has not gone uncriticized. A small chorus of individuals, including journalist Hanna Rosin and gender scholar Joan Wolf, argue that the “breast is best” culture inadvertently demeans women by devaluing their labor, colonizing their time, and placing unbearable burdens of care solely on their shoulders— all on the basis of inconclusive science linking breast milk directly to healthier babies.5
As the debate over infant feeding practices rages on, the only thing that is clear is that
“mothers’ infant feeding experiences are becoming increasingly fraught with emotional burdens, including anxiety, frustration, guilt, feelings of failure, and worry about living up to the standard of ‘good motherhood.’”6
The practice of obligating the female body to the moral, cultural, and political demands of the public is not a new phenomenon.7 On the contrary, the denotation of such obligations is a central practice in American public life. Scholars have noted the many ways that the female material body in general, and the maternal body in particular, “is a site of political struggle” that has been controlled and obligated.8 For Susan Bordo, the
“material” is not just the matter of the body, but how culture has a “direct grip” on our bodies
through the practices and bodily habits of everyday life. Through routine, habitual activity, our bodies learn what is “inner” and what is “outer,” which gestures are forbidden and which required, how viable or inviable are the boundaries of our bodies how much space around the body may be claimed, and so on. These are often far more powerful lessons than those we learn consciously, through explicit 2 instruction concerning the appropriate behavior for our gender, race, and social class.9
From birth control and abortion, to childbirth and breastfeeding, what a woman consumes, wears, discusses, and does with her body before, during, and after pregnancy has been of peculiar public concern. Beginning in the 20th century, the debate over access to abortion and contraceptives took center stage in national political discourses.10 The political and discursive struggle over the female body, in particular her reproductive capabilities, occurs precisely because giving birth is the most basic form of
(re)production in capitalism: The production of subjects and workers.11 Linda Blum argues that, “Motherhood and breastfeeding have been and continue to be public matters.
This public interest at first seems appropriate because of the biological realities and actual concerns with health: Primarily with infant health and survival, but occasionally with pregnancy and maternal health.”12 However, Blum contends that we should suspect popular discourses that seek to denote “obligations of the maternal body to the larger social body.”13 Considering the complexities of discourses about the maternal body, it is important to ask: What rhetorical forms make up maternity culture, and what interests do these formations serve?
The primary aim of this dissertation is to argue that the maternal body is a chief site of discursive political and cultural struggle over gender, family, and work in a neoliberal America. I maintain that discourses about the maternal body are deeply tied to economic and social arrangements, and therefore the complexities of these discourses are better understood when they are historicized alongside changing economic and political
3 realities. I consider contemporary discourses of maternity as cultural products and rhetorical expressions of the antagonistic arrangements in contemporary capitalism since the neoliberal turn. Neoliberalism is a market driven approach to both economic and social policy and an ideological paradigm that privileges private enterprise as the primary ethic of culture and civilization (manifested in discourses such as individual liberty, personal responsibility, and entrepreneurialism). I argue that contemporary discourses surrounding the maternal body, an aggregate I call maternity culture, has emerged since the early 1990s alongside the increased privatization of social responsibilities, the death of the single family wage, the intensification of austerity policies, and changing familial structures. Broadly speaking, maternity culture is discursively produced and sustained in a variety of contexts by a variety of rhetors, including but not limited to: Scientists, advertisers, companies, doctors, mommy bloggers, parents chatting at the playground or participating in online communities and forums, entertainment media, feminists, midwives, doulas, conservative Christians, politicians, public health officials, and, advocacy organizations. While maternity culture is expansive, not all discourses about motherhood and the maternal body are crisply ideologically aligned. I do, however, assert that maternity culture expresses the ethics of neoliberalism including the privatization of social/political responsibility and self-actualization through entrepreneurialism and labor, while simultaneously justifying the intensification of maternal labor and the continued surveillance of women’s bodies.
It is in this way that discourses of maternity are both rhetorics of reproduction and reproducing rhetorics. That is to say, they are a part of a larger set of discourses 4 about the reproductive function that are themselves caught in the logics of capital that may result in the reproduction of unequal arrangements in material and symbolic life.
Situating discourses of maternity culture and the maternal body (such as those associated with breastfeeding practices) in cultural, political, and economic history makes it not just a question of whether breast milk really does make healthier babies, but rather, how and in what ways the maternal body is defined, controlled, and obligated by cultural discourses and in whose interests such discipline and constraint serves.14 To understand how our culture represents and struggles over the maternal body reveals not only the affect of these rhetorics on women’s material and corporeal agency, but also exposes the broader antagonisms that propel, sustain, and reproduce economic, racial, and gender inequality in the United States.
In the pursuit of this sizable endeavor, I examine 21st century maternity culture in new media contexts. From parenting and mothering blogs, to online communities like
TheBump.com and vast social media networks, the Internet has emerged as a primary space where motherhood is publicly negotiated in the 21st century.15 Samuel notes that virtual communication enabled the formation of dynamic communities that offered women simple reassurance that they “are not alone.”16 While Webb and Lee note that there is an entire community of “mommy blogs” who organize themselves into a public body through citing, referencing, dissenting, and supporting each other across platforms.17 It is for these reasons, that examining maternity culture as it has emerged through new media contexts is of particular importance in the contemporary moment.
5 I analyze several case studies where public controversies concerning the maternal body in general and surrounding breastfeeding and childbirth in particular are engaged.
Through these discourses, representations of “good” and “healthy” maternal figures are constructed and recirculated. To limit the scope of this project while still attempting to provide a thorough picture of maternity culture, I focus my analysis on two discrete cultural spaces in interactive online environments: a virtual pro-breastfeeding campaign produced and circulated by the website TheBump.com, and series of popular user- produced videos of natural home births on YouTube. My analysis is primarily focused on these cultural productions (made up of videos and website text), not necessarily the deliberation of individual users in comment sections or on discussion boards. Both
YouTube and TheBump.com are popular sources for information about maternal health and motherhood, making them fitting sites for an analysis of the ways that maternity culture is represented and negotiated in online discourses. In addition to examining these specific rhetorical texts, I also historicize maternity culture in the broader context of contemporary capitalism and neoliberalism by charting a history of rhetorics about women’s health discourses and motherhood.
A number of questions guide this dissertation. Chiefly, in what ways does the maternal body operate as a site of rhetorical invention and hegemonic struggle? How do discourses of the maternal body function in relation to political, economic, and social arrangements? And, how is women’s corporeal agency affected by discourses of maternity?
6 Additional more specific questions follow: What are the discursive contours of maternity culture online? What role do discourses of personal responsibility play in maternity culture? How do scientific and expert discourses function in maternity culture?
How do feminist empowerment discourses function in contemporary configurations of maternity culture? How do discourses of maternity culture achieve identification among audiences? How does maternity culture use words, image, and sound in new media contexts?
These questions, though largely premised upon the theoretical assumptions I shall outline in the following chapter, also enable me to test those very assumptions through a reading of the maternal body as a cultural commodity, site of public controversy, and vessel of scientific discourse. In what remains of this introductory section, I shall briefly review relevant literature and describe communication studies’ role in engaging rhetorics of reproduction, rhetorics of medicine, and finally, agency, power, and personal responsibility. I will not only review relevant scholarship in each of these areas, but also articulate the importance and salience of the current project to continuing those conversations. Following this section, I will outline my methodological approach to studying maternity culture, and give brief chapter summaries.
MATERNITY CULTURE AND COMMUNICATION STUDIES
Rhetorics of Reproduction in Communication Studies
Myriad scholars have explored the relationship between rhetoric and abortion or other forms of birth control connected to women’s reproductive health. Since abortion 7 and birth control have been politically divisive and popular subjects in the public imaginary over the last fifty years, they have foreseeably become rich sites for rhetorical analysis.18 However, Susan Bordo writes, “Although abortion rights are a prominent issue, both pro-choice and pro-life arguments are locked into rhetoric and strategies that fail to situate the struggle within the broader context of reproductive control.”19 The reproductive function is an expansive discursive space—from birth control to breastfeeding—yet, analysis of rhetorics of reproduction beyond those associated with abortion and birth control is not prevalent.20 It is my aim in the current project to show that discourses associated with the reproductive function participate in the same regime of assumptions, norms, and ideals that must be historically and politically situated if they are to be understood. Further, the same interests that participate in the surveillance of women’s bodies regarding their “right to choice” also operate in maternity culture.
But why should maternity culture and rhetorics of reproduction concern communication scholars? Practically speaking, maternity and the cycle of reproduction are connected to the production of citizens and in defining the domestic and public spheres.21 Many communication scholars have also noted the importance of exploring motherhood and its connection to work and economic structures since academic-mothers are workers themselves.22 In addition to these practical matters, for a field committed to the study of rhetoric and culture, maternity and reproduction are themselves salient sites of analysis. First and foremost, women’s status as reproducing persons is arguably the foundation for all gendered constructions, which is a chief concern for those interested in the study of rhetoric and gender. As R.W. Connell notes, social relations of gender have 8 historically been fundamentally “organized in terms of, or in relation to, the reproductive division of people into male and female.”23 The status of reproduction as a biological difference between “man” and “woman” has been used as a basis for constructing those very same categories.
Furthermore, motherhood itself is a social construction that arises from its roots in the presumed “naturalness” of the reproductive function. Evelyn Nakano Glenn argues,
“Perhaps because the gendered allocation of mother appears to flow inevitably from the division based on reproductive function, mother—more than any other aspect of gender—has been subject to essentialist interpretation: seen as natural, universal, and unchanging.”24 It is because of the communicative character of motherhood and reproduction that communication scholars have begun to engage questions surrounding maternal identity and motherhood. For example, Lynn Stearney argues that rhetorics often invoke universalizing concepts of motherhood that conflate the concept with womanhood.25 She suggests that essentializing norms of motherhood ignore the very real complexities of “motherhood as an ideologically and socially constructed institution.”26
Additionally, Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels contend that there is a new social construct called “new momism” which is a set of ideals, norms and practices most often represented in the media that seem to celebrate women and motherhood, but in actuality construct unattainable standards of perfection that undermine women.27 They argue, that the creation of idealized subject positions for mothers restricts women’s ability to succeed at home or in the work place. Moreover, Sarah Burke Odland contends through her analysis of news representations of motherhood during the 1950s that maternal 9 identity is a socially constructed practice that transforms with changing political realities.28
These scholars gesture towards the importance of understanding the ideal of motherhood and maternal subjectivity as social and ideological constructions. I wish to not only reaffirm these assertions, but also to demonstrate how changing economic, social, and political realities since the 1980s have altered the expectations, norms, and ideals of maternal subjectivity. In her work on the entrepreneurialization of motherhood,
Davi Johnson Thornton argues that expert discourses in contemporary self-help books for mothers frame motherhood as a self-interested practice that produces entrepreneurial subjects under American neoliberalism.29 In this case, the neoliberal logic of individual entrepreneurship is imbued into the discourses present in books designed to help mothers make decisions about how to act during pregnancy and raise children post-birth.
The ironic, often paradoxical, logics at work in rhetorics of reproduction are a key feature of their elusiveness and influence. Through an analysis of abortion rhetoric in contemporary cinema, Kristen Hoerl and Casey Ryan Kelly introduce the concept of the post-nuclear family, which is a set of narrative configurations that seem to be rejecting traditional notions of the nuclear family (such as two parent households) but maintain a commitment to a depiction of neo-traditional motherhood as women’s imperative.30
Judith Stacey notes that paradoxical discourses such as those described by Hoerl and
Kelly are implicit in a larger discursive turn towards neo-family values in the 1990s. This set of values blamed fatherless families for social depravity and juvenile delinquency
(such as crime rates and teen pregnancy), supported the reduction of social services that 10 supported single mothers, and claimed that women should choose to put familial needs above their own attempts to achieve “male modeled” success.31
The aforementioned projects do the important working of connecting rhetorics of reproduction to logics of choice, neo-traditional values, and self-serving entrepreneurship
(primary discourses of neoliberalism), and my project reaffirms these articulations.
Additionally, my project locates the maternal body as a site of struggle over antagonistic arrangements under neoliberalism. This means that I am interested in looking at public controversies over maternity culture that highlight the antagonistic and ideological struggle over ideas throughout a variety of texts within a particular time period or mediated modality.
Rhetorics of Science, Health, and Medicine
Because maternity culture discourses engage issues regarding the maternal body and the health of women and children, studying maternity culture is also the study of how sciencitific and medical discourses are used as resources for rhetorical invention in public life. Scholars such as Davi Johnson Thorton, John Lynch, and Lisa Keränen have discussed contemporary rhetorics of medicine and science as being central to understanding the public sphere.32 One could not discuss the far-reaching functions of reproductive and maternal discourse without first understanding how science, medicine, and rhetoric are intertwined. Maternity culture is science-based discourse, according to
Carolyn Miller’s definition.33 Science-based controversies use science as a rhetorical resource in public discourses, yet are not necessarily scientific or empirical themselves.34
11 Through an analysis of multiple sources that engaged maternity culture on a public level, we can make better sense of not only how motherhood and maternity discourses influence health decisions, but also the ideological functions of scientific discourse in the public sphere.
The notion that discourses of and about science participate in the creation of public life is central to this project. Davi Johnson Thorton notes that medicine and science always operate at the level of culture, influencing the practices of individuals in everyday life.35 Maternity culture is a chain of discourses about science and medicine and the mystique they produce in public and private spheres. In this project, I explore how maternity culture is enacted through discourses in online contrversies where the public itself is participating in the circulation and definition of rhetorics of science and medicine. Furthermore, this study contributes to a large body of work that explores rhetorics of expertise. The women’s health movement in general, but the motherhood movement in particular, have formed in response to the medical establishment and the desire for feminist narratives that countered expert medical discourses during the 1960s.
Agency, Power, and Rhetorics of Personal Responsibility
Rhetorical theory has, as Karlyn Kohrs Campbell notes, been interested in the subject of agency from its beginnings. This means, Campbell writes, that throughout the history of rhetorical theory “there is a sense that language mattered, that influence through symbolic action in speech and/or writing was possible and occurred, for good or ill.”36 Agency, then, is a major, if not the major, concern for rhetorical studies as we
12 attempt to define rhetorics power to constrain, enable, or empower subjects to act (or not to act) or speak (or not to speak). A major component of the current project is to understand how discourses within maternity culture discipline or place demands on the maternal body, ultimately restricting material and corporeal agency. Agency is key to understanding the reproduction function—according to Bordo—because rhetoric often demands that female agency be symbolicly relinquished when a female body becomes
“host” for a fetus.37 Understanding the nature of agency is therefore of particular importance in the field of rhetoric, and to this project.38
In the past, the question of agency (partcularly as it relates to the body vis-à-vis social and information networks) has often been discussed through Foucault’s concept of biopower.39 Power, for Foucault, is therefore not something that some individuals have and others do not have, or that only institutions exercise over individuals, but rather, is something that is manifested through social relations in experience and life. Biopolitics is based on the assumption that human life (actual life itself and then also what we do with it) has become an object of power and knowledge, and therefore needs to be understood, regulated and controlled.40 Chiefly, self-surveillance is a potent socially networked mechanism of control that produces bodies.41 The powerful network of forces that work to discipline bodies is “not random or haphazard, but configure[d] to assume particular historical forms, within which certain groups and ideologies do have dominance.”42 Mary
M. Lay et al. argue that as scientific technology advances, our control over our bodies, or our biopower, decreases.43 Bodies in society are monitored and controlled through these
13 new technological advances, and individuals become disjointed parts in a large network of discursive practices.
Drawing heavily on the work of Hardt and Negri, Ronald Greene argues that rhetoric should use Foucault’s concept of biopower to define a new “materialist rhetoric” that acknowledges that rhetoric distributes bodies on circuitries of dominance and power in post-industrial capitalism.44 Hardt and Negri capitalism has entered a period dominated by biopolitics (what they call empire).45 Biopolitics is the key way that capitalism functions and sustains itself contemporarily. The biopolitical turn has occurred as the communicative economy has boomed and industrial capitalism has declined.
In each of these instances, the scholars acknowledge the importance of the body and its relationship to agency. However, contrary to the popular, contemporary post- humanist reading of Foucaultian biopolitics that rejects collective action and systemic critique, critical scholars can approach Marxist theories of social arrangement (and collective action) and Foucaultian biopolitics as compatible perspectives on the realities of global capitalism.46 For both Foucault and Marx, bodies are material beyond the symbolic domain, not just empty containers of discursive discipline. Human beings are active and corporeal objects working in relation to material and social arrangements in public and private life, even when they are alienated from those very circumstances.
Further, as Bordo notes, despite the fact that Foucaultian conceptions of biopower have been used to justify the rejection of collective action and systemic critique, a
Foucaultian perspective is actually quite commensurate with a materialist reading of bodies under capitalism that still sees systemic critique of capital and collective action 14 against its tentacles primary modes of resistance.47 Despite Foucault’s criticisms of
Marxism for creating a discourse of totality, Chandra Kant Kumar explains, “Foucault regarded the success of ‘discourses of right’ [of sovereignty] as having had the effect of concealing ‘the face of domination’ in social life.”48 Foucault writes that disciplining power is “one of the great inventions of bourgeois society...a fundamental instrument in the constitution of industrial capitalism and of the type of society that its accompaniment.”49 Far from denying the existence of capitalism and its role in creating systems of domination, Foucault suggests that while juridical or sovereign power distracts us from seeing domination—disciplining power, dispersed onto individual bodies, serves to obscure and rationalize networks of domination under global capitalism.
Although Foucault and Marx may at first glance seem like strange bed fellows, a framework informed by both can more aptly approach the discursive and material disciplining of the maternal body under neoliberalism.
The complexities of concerns over agency and power have been particularly laid bare in debates throughout the field of communication about rhetorics of personal responsibility, individualism, and therapy. In her work on rhetorics of therapy and control, Cloud asserts that when rhetorics of therapy personalize (and therefore depoliticize) political opposition. Cloud writes, “The therapeutic provides a frame for complaints against the system but ultimately recuperates and neutralizes political opposition by rendering protest private.”50 Additionally, in her analysis of Oprah
Winfrey’s biography, Cloud articulates that rhetorics of individual responsibility are deeply ideological discourses that serve to naturalize ideals of liberalism while obscuring 15 the “structural economic and political obstacles to achievement and survival posed in a racist society.”51
Contrarily, many rhetorical scholars have developed theories or approaches that valorize self-determination, self-empowerment, and self-governance, and accordingly personal responsibility. Most prominently, Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin have advanced invitational rhetoric, an alternative rhetoric supposedly built on primary feminist principles (which they determine are equality, immanent value, and self- determination).52 Foss and Griffin’s conception of rhetorical agency is radically individualistic and self-determinant. Foss, working alongside Waters and Armada, furthered a rhetorical conception of radical individualism in their work on agentic orientation, where according to Gunn and Cloud, they conceive agency as magical volunteerism, disregarding structural constraint and material limitations in favor of
“wish-fulfillment.”53 “Magical voluntarism,” according to Gunn and Cloud, stresses “a radical individualism in two ways: (a) by insisting the individual alone has the power to transcend limitation without the help of others; and (b) by insisting that individuals must take full responsibility for their material, social and cultural existence.”54 Foss and her collaborators codify an outdated (and false) dualism between structural/material constraint and agentive possibility. This stark false bifurcation is a crude articulation of the complex relationship between power and agency under advanced capitalism. Further, their corrective of “agentic orientation” inextricably links the possibility of agency to radical individualism and personal responsibility: In order to have any agency, you must have a total, pure agency, which is accompanied by an expectation that you not only take 16 full responsibility for the entirety of your circumstance, but that you forgo systemic critique and the possibility of collective action.
Rhetorics of personal responsibility and individualism in maternity culture are self-surveilling, disciplining discourses disguised as empowering, agency-granting discourses. They seem empowering—encouraging bodies to agentively take control over circumstances—yet in the dispersal of “power” to individual bodies the systems of values, norms, principles, and expectations that produce life and material conditions are obscured. This practice, of course, undermines the very ability for individual bodies to be agentive and self-determinant. Rhetorics of personal responsibility have been particularly salient in the domain of health. Discourses surrounding obesity, cancer, and women’s health have long been framed in terms of “self-empowerment,” self-governance, and personal responsibility.55 As previously noted, discourses of individualism and personal responsibility mirror neoliberal ethics that emphasize self-sufficiency, entrepreneurialism, freedom from restraint and freedom of choice. Rhetorics of personal responsibility naturalize self-regulation and self-surveillance, while obscuring unequal arrangements and systems of discipline under globalized capitalism. They, in a sense, manufacture consent to circumstance by dispersing economic, political, and social responsibility to individual bodies.
The rhetorics of personal responsibility and individualism present in maternity culture also function in this way. As I will show, discourses suggest that the maternal body is responsible for everything from ballooning health care costs to their children’s ear infections to their own breast cancer. Previously, Shari L. Dworkin and Faye Linda 17 Wachs examined the phenomenon of “fit pregnancy” within maternity culture and contended that contemporary motherhood is primarily corporeal and that discourses that emphasize “fit pregnancy” rhetorically define new mothers as responsible for the increased burden of child care and household responsibilities, as well as the bodily labor necessary to “get your body back” after giving birth.56 They argue that postindustrial fit motherhood “draws on empowerment discourse derived from feminist gains of access to the public sphere while paradoxically (re)inscribing women to the privatized realm of bodily practices, domesticity, and family values.”57 It is in this way that discourses of maternity culture reflect logics of empowerment, neoliberal freedom, and personal responsibility, while simultaneously reinforcing cultural norms and expectations of femininity.
ANALYZING MATERNITY CULTURE
I will use the methodological resources of materialist feminism and cultural studies to map how maternity culture disciplines the material and corporeal agency of the maternal body in the contemporary United States. To highlight the essential elements of this materialist feminist reading, I turn to the theoretical foundations of materialist feminist critique and discuss the prospects and difficulties of studying discourses of maternity in new media public modalities. Then I describe how I will rhetorically analyze contemporary maternity culture using these theoretical tools. I will then discuss the main texts for my analysis, and give a brief chapter overview.
18 Materialist Feminism
Materialist feminism is a useful method of criticism because it emphasizes the dialectical relationship between social relations and rhetoric. Karl Marx argued that dialectics should be the “basic principle of theory,” because dialectics is a method of investigation that steers an interlocutor through a series of interrogations, antagonisms, or dialogues, which narrows the “thing” down to its essence.58 This methodology emphasizes the importance of placing ideas and discourses in antagonistic relation with material conditions.59
Charting a trajectory from the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, to modern theorists such as Hester Eisenstein and Sharon Smith I understand materialist feminism as a critical tool that highlights the conditioning role of economic relationships and arrangements in the creation of meanings, particularly those associated with gender, sex, and sexuality.60 Although many scholars have abandoned such a perspective as an outmoded, reductionist, and essentialist theory of gender and social struggle, I hope to illuminate how it is a sophisticated analytical lens that can account for the complex (and often elusive) constructions of gender and sexuality in modern culture and the relationships between these meanings and material economic, political, and social arrangements in public life. To describe a materialist feminist posture toward texts, I first highlight the intellectual origins of materialist feminism in historical materialist critique; second, enlist the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to describe the relationship between gender and social relations; and third, reveal how a materialist feminist analysis
19 is a useful method for examining contemporary discourse about gender, family, and reproduction in the so-called “post-feminist context.”
Defining materialist critique in communication studies is difficult considering that the term “material” is itself contested. Recently, much work has been done exploring the materiality of communication, or the force of rhetoric in the production of the “real.”61
However, many scholars have discussed the usefulness of a historical materialist perspective, based on the work of Karl Marx, in lieu of privileging the materiality of discourse in rhetorical studies.62 Cloud notes that the turn towards a discussion of the materiality of discourse in rhetorical theory is symptomatic of the larger poststructuralist and anti-humanist turn in critical theory that privileges language as the constitutive of reality.63 In contrast, a historical materialist perspective focuses upon the dialectical relationship between discourse and historically constituted social relations.64 That is to say, “a materialist view of history suggests that economic forces and relations of power motivate discourses that justify, obscure, or mystify the workings of powerful interests and structures of power.”65
A rhetorical criticism informed by historical materialism investigates not only how ideological discourses dialectically function to maintain material relations
(economic and social arrangements) and their systems of power (in a sense, produce
“reality”), but also how material arrangements (imbued with interests) motivate discourses in public life. It is my view to suggest that a historical materialist perspective is more fruitful because it does not see discursive constitution as a one-way street. On the contrary, material relations and symbolic discourses work in dynamic tandem to produce 20 the other. For the current project, I argue that a feminist critique rooted in the tradition of historical materialism is essential as it aims “to make visible the reasons why representations of identity are changing, why they do not take the same forms they did a century or even fifty years ago, and how these changes in identity are connected to historical shifts in the production of life under capitalism.”66
A critical perspective informed by materialist feminism is useful for several reasons. As stated, this form of critique acknowledges the dynamic dialectical relationship between material relations and symbolic systems.67 Through such a perspective, I am able to contextualize discourses of maternity culture as products of gender and familial relations historically rooted in economic and political arrangements.
It is through these theoretical resources that I am able to argue that rhetorics of reproduction (about the reproductive function) participate in the reproduction
(duplication) of material relations and that we can trace this phenomenon by investigating how this occurs under the ideological regime of neoliberalism in particular.
Although the term “materialist feminist” is contested, I have opted for this terminology because the critical perspective invoked in this project lies at the intersection of historical materialism and feminist political theories of liberation. Historically, theorists have struggled marrying socialism and feminism, because of the assumption that one would have to privilege feminism (which is seen as a political theory primarily dedicated to the liberation of women) or socialism (which is characterized as a political theory primarily dedicated to the destruction of class inequality). Earlier theoretical debates in the United States and Britain between Marxism and feminism did aim to 21 possibly integrate or synthesize the two theoretical trajectories, but this goal “shifted due to the emergence of identity politics, concern with post-colonialism, sexuality, race, nationalism, etc., and the impact of postmodernism and post- structuralism.”68
I hope to suggest that, as Martha Gimenez also contends, we can find a way to synthesize the issues at stake in both Marxism and feminism to create a complex theoretical critique of oppression under capitalism that accounts for the dynamic, dialectical relationships between social systems (such as class systems, gender/sexual relations, race relations, and familial//kinship systems) — which are expressions of material conditions under capitalism (the economic base) — without rejecting Marxism and historical materialism as reductionist.69 On the contrary, historical materialist critique provides us with the very tools to understand social systems and relationships as expressions of the basic and material relationships and arrangements under the economic conditions of capitalism. In what remains of this section, I outline how a feminist perspective, informed by historical materialism, is useful for examining rhetoric in relation to ideology, power and everyday experiences of gender and culture.
Materialist feminism provides critics with unique tools for analyzing and interrogating how discourses sustain dominant ideologies that function to rationalize and naturalize antagonistic class and social relations under capitalism. Ideology, according to
Terry Eagleton, is about the production and sustainment of power. Put another way, ideology is a framework of ideas, actions, values, and meanings that are often taken for granted in a given cultural context.70 Dominant ideologies constitute unity at an imaginary level through discursive signifiers, which orbit around us, between us, and 22 through us.71 Eagleton notes that, “a particular social sign is pulled this way and that by competing social interests, inscribed from within the multiplicity of ideological ‘accents’; and it is in this way that it sustains its dynamism and vitality.”72 Ideology is, therefore, a dialectical, antagonistic struggle “between social interests at the level of the sign.”73 Over time, dominant signs naturalize and become part of the ideological terrain and they grow to be part of the fabric of our symbolic grammar of the world. It is in this way that ideologies function to secure and cohere social formations: They naturalize, rationalize, universalize and legitimate ideas and sustain social power.74 There are interests at stake in a capitalist society, and ideologies often serve to obscure material conditions, while simultaneously working against the interests of a majority of people.75 It is in this sense that, “The study of ideology is among other things an inquiry into the way in people invest in their own unhappiness.”76 A Foucaultian perspective on biopolitics and the disciplining of bodies under global capitalism is consistent with this kind of ideological critique. Foucault writes:
Modern society, […] from the nineteenth century up to our own day, has been characterized on the one hand, by legislation, a discourse, and organization based on public right, whose principle of articulation is the social body and the delegative status of each citizen; and, on the other hand, by a closely linked grid of disciplinary coercions whose purpose is in fact to assure the cohesion of this same social body. Though a theory of right is a necessary companion to this grid, it cannot provide the terms of its endorsement.77
The symbolic forces that seduce subjects to commit to a legal or economic system of beliefs that are not necessarily in their own material interests are entangled with the cultural and symbolic forces that sustain and naturalize gender inequality at a legal and cultural level. Ehrenreich notes that sex and class oppression are not always enforced 23 through violence or material force, but through the social atomization of individuals. She writes “the forces which have atomized working-class life and promoted cultural/material dependence on the capitalist class are the same forces which have served to perpetuate the subjugation of women.”78 Investigating maternity culture as an ideological practice reveals a rich tapestry of conflicting logics upon which the very meanings of female citizenship are negotiated.
Perhaps the most widely known materialist concept developed to understand the role that cultural discourses play in the hegemonic struggle over the power associated with economic and material relations are the concepts of the (economic) base and
(cultural) superstructure. Engels’ writes, “The production of the means to support human life [the base] and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure [the superstructure].”79 In this way, social, cultural, and everyday life experiences are enmeshed with material relations. Barbara Ehrenreich writes that “in its search for markets, capitalism is driven to penetrate every nook and cranny of social existence,” and therefore a materialist feminist critique seeks to analyze not only the economic arrangements under capitalism, but also, how culture and everyday experiences operate in antagonistic relations with those arrangements.80 However, the concept of the base and superstructure is often criticized for being reductive and outdated. For example,
Louis Althusser and members of the Frankfurt School argued that the superstructure is not necessarily subordinate to the economic base.81 Engels, in defense of this position, writes,
24 According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure…also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form.82
The acknowledgement that there is a dialectical relationship between culture and everyday experiences and basic material and economic arrangements is central to my project. I argue that rhetorics of reproduction emerge from basic material relations and are iterated and reiterated in culture and public life in ways that rationalize, naturalize, and sustain the very same material relations from which they emerged. It is in this sense that maternity culture (a superstructure) is a site of struggle over economic and political arrangements.
Maternity Culture in (New) Publics
In this dissertation, I examine maternity culture through an analysis of discourses in new media contexts. The emergence of new media (the Internet, social networking and media, new technologies, etc.) creates an interesting opportunity for rhetoricians to study communication in general, but cultural discourses and public controversies in particular.
Online we can track the circulation of news stories, cite the emergence of “publicness” or
“virility” through the popularity of a YouTube video, and investigate deliberation and argument among individuals who more often than not, would never interact with each other and have the luxury of anonymity. New media contexts provide rhetorical scholars with a rich basin for studying not only the rhetoric of news media and campaigns, but 25 also audience reaction, interactivity, and deliberation in 21st century democratic life. It is precisely because the “public” is a central figure in understanding social and political life in new media contexts, that attempting to articulate its curvatures is so vital. In this section, I first, review relevant literature associated with studying publics and examine the role of the Internet and new media technologies in modern publicity; second, explore how a rhetorical critic must approach public cultural controversies online; and finally, discuss the texts that I have chosen for my analysis.
Unlike other concepts in communication theory that attempt to define pluralistic assemblages of peoples (such as “audiences,” “networks,” and “movements”) the concept of “the public” is paramount for rhetorical scholars for several reasons. First, the concept helps to describe the (often rhetorical) distinction between what is deemed public and private space. Additionally, naming “the public” gives a vocabulary for analyzing how discourses of the people work together, against, and around discourses of the state.
Despite the usefulness of the defining and interrogating “the public,” Daniel C. Brouwer and Robert Asen suggest that the public is a difficult concept to discuss because it
“maintains no regular address. We cannot discover the public in our physical environment. And yet public exerts a powerful force in our everyday lives, with significant symbolic and material consequences.”83 For example, as Engels noted, what is deemed labor for the “public” good (as opposed to for the “private” family) determines the exchange value of that labor in the marketplace. In light of material and symbolic consequences such as these, a substantial amount work has been done articulating and defining the nuances of the “public.” The concept of the “public” has generally been 26 organized through metaphors or modalities like “spheres, lines, networks, screens — these terms render distinctly intelligible the qualities, realms, collectivities, or processes signified by multiple meanings of public.”84 John Dewey argued in The Public and Its
Problems that the public only exists when it is able to articulate negative externalities caused by an outside source (like the market or the government) communally.85
Perhaps most central to the study of rhetoric and the public sphere has been the work of Jürgen Habermas. Habermas argued that the public (an aggregate of localized individuals) can participate in critical rational deliberation (in spaces free from state intervention) that enables social change.86 Despite Habermas’ dismissal of the potentiality of mass media to aid in the production of a rational public sphere, rhetorical scholars have begun celebrating Internet and blogging as new public modalities through which we can activate citizenship. Because (in most countries) citizens can communicate “openly” and globally online, scholars contend that new public modalities such as Facebook,
Twitter, and blogs offer exciting possibilities for redefining public activism and engagement between citizens.87 Since new media technologies create the social context of micro and macro public spheres online, scholars argue that they also open up the possibility for emancipatory politics.88 Barlow contends that the new technical modality of the “blogosphere” has provided new ways of negotiating citizenship and publicness in modern society.89 While Trenz argues that, “digital media have multiplied the symbolism of representation, which is continuously in the making, by providing new offers for the identification of publicness through shared problems and solutions.”90
27 Over the last two decades, scholars have begun investigating the role the Internet plays in enabling and/or disabling politics and public life.91 Cyberculture — which is the culture that continually emerges from the use of digital and networked communications—has grown exponentially through the proliferation of online communities and the dawn of social media. By examining public discourses and interactivity in cyberculture critics recognize the importance of the interaction between technology, culture, and politics in public life. New media contexts are often glorified for the ways it can potentially enhance democracy and democratic culture by realizing norms of publicity including, “openness, inclusivity, visibility, equality, accessibility, and rationality.”92 New media technologies are sometimes hailed as the salvation of a deliberative democracy whose public sphere has out grown its ability to create opportunity for the face-to-face deliberation Habermas envisioned. These new “modes” of public deliberation (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) are what Brouwer and Asen term public modalities, new media platforms where publics are formed, circulated and maintained.93 However, the celebration of publicity and the dispersal of deliberation in networks often privilege contingency and the instability of meaning. Michael Warner has argued that publics no longer need to make demands on the state in order to be effective, because producing visibility and subjectivity (especially through new media) is “political enough.”94
Despite their potentiality, other scholars contend that the instability of meaning and the lack of mobilization in network technologies forestall the potential for democratic politics. Robert McChesney contends that any democratic potential in the digital age has 28 been neutralized by the corporate and government colonization of the Internet.95
Similarly, Jodi Dean does not see blogs as “cutting-edge forms of participatory journalism,” saviors of the public sphere, or even experiments in exhibitionism. While it seemed as if new media technologies would provide democratic subjects with the means and opportunity to participate in politics in ways that would enhance democracy, the proliferation of communication and entertainment networks did not produce a better democracy, but an entirely new form of participation and consumption that Dean calls communicative capitalism.96 Dean argues that with the proliferation of new media technologies there has been a shift in the political participation of subjects: as an increased emphasis is placed on networked technological forms, and our mediated- communication itself becomes a commodity for consumption and a demand for democratic participation.97 Democracy now requires that to participate we must log on, click, watch, poke, and create new content to be seen and consumed. Blogs promote “the intensification of mediality in reflexive networks,” the development of subjects who belong but “not to anything in particular,” and the increased circulation of affects.98
McChesney and Dean’s criticisms of new media technology and democratic politics are warranted. Clay Shirky points out that Dean is right to suggest that new media, and social media in particular, is a context in which people, subjects, and ideologies gain “organization without organization.”99 However, despite the drawbacks and shortcomings of discourses in new media contexts, they are still worthy sites of analysis because for many they are now their primary or only mode of communication about certain subjects. Michelle Rodino notes that beginning in the early 2000s new 29 media technologies were not only feminized, but “matronized”— translated into products and mediums that can help women work in and outside of the home with more efficiency.100 Further, the promotion and creation of products contribute to the cult of domesticity, that is, according to Rodino, live and well.
Rhetorical critics can engage with discourses online in order to examine how dynamic, though often disjointed, publics are formed and constituted. In examining how new public modalities contribute to the formation of communities and cultures, critics must explore what is not said, and who is not speaking in new media discourses.
Alongside the proliferation of information and communication technology in the 1990s, scholars became painstakingly aware of the structural and material inequalities between groups and the divide between those who have access to these technologies, use them regularly, or have the necessary knowledge and fluency to actively participate, and those who do not or cannot use new media and communication technologies.101 Referred to as the digital divide, this partition between segments in society often results in information poverty, since telecommunication and new media technology are becoming primary modes of communication in the 21st century.102 Those who are in lower socio-economic classes or geographically located in rural areas are all less likely to use and be conversant in the technologies.103 Therefore, when analyzing discourses online (especially those that are user-produced) critics must not only acknowledge who is talking, but also who is not talking, why they are not participating, and what that lack of participation means for the rhetorics that are present. Cloud notes that exploring the silence of rhetors is often as important as spoken rhetoric itself. Cloud writes, 30 The process of being negated, or the formation of a silenced silhouette, can also apply to the speaker or rhetor. If the first persona is the rhetor, perhaps the phenomenon of self-silencing noted in these transcripts could be referred to the constitution of oneself in the role of "null persona." The null persona refers to the self-negation of the speaker and the creation in the text of an oblique silhouette indicating what is not utterable. The crafting of a null persona might signal critics to examine extradiscursive constraints on a group's rhetorical agency.104
Therefore, it is essential that when exploring discourses online that I pay attention to the precarious ways that silences are produced, and the extradiscursive apparatuses that constrain a group’s rhetorical agency in a particular rhetorical situation.
Finally, one of the most fascinating characteristics of new media technologies is their status as sites of struggle over and performance of identity and subjectivity.105
Individuals present (and control) their identities on their social media profile pages, while others might remain anonymous when publishing comments to blogs, articles, or on discussion boards. Considering the centrality of identity creation and presentation, as a critic I must examine if and how identities are being formulated, constrained, and performed through maternity culture discourses.
When studying discourses in online contexts, it is essential that one reflect on key questions about how new public modalities disable and enable the discourses that are presented. Who is participating and who is not? What kind of participation is occurring?
Intertextual? Interactive? Conversant? How does anonymity affect the discourses?
Finally, how are identities constituted, presented, displayed or marked in the virtual environment?
31 Analysis of Case Studies
I have thus far outlined how the resources of materialist feminism and public sphere theories will be utilized to contextualize rhetorics of maternity in social relations.
These methods scrutinize the mutually conditioning relationship between symbolic language and social arrangements. Materialist feminism considers how rhetoric can quell anxieties over social and economic arrangements (particularly those associated with gender and sexuality), while public sphere theories provide a basis for examining public culture in new media contexts. This combined framework offers a unique vantage point for investigating the relationships between technology, gender, and health within specific cultural contexts.
Now that I have developed a vocabulary for approaching the study of the maternal body and maternity culture in new media contexts from a materialist feminist standpoint, and described how I use that vocabulary to thoughtfully and thoroughly analyze discourses in case studies, I must review the chapters and content that will follow this introduction.
My second chapter, “Neoliberalism and The Maternal Body,” expands upon issues and concerns brought up in this introduction by theorizing what it means to study maternity culture as a rhetoric of reproduction and a reproducing rhetoric. I historicize maternity culture and rhetorics of reproduction in material relations by outlining how discourses have evolved alongside changing neoliberal policies and ideologies. Primarily, this chapter sets the foundation for studying rhetorics of maternity culture as
32 personalizing and depoliticizing discourses that function to disperse social responsibility onto individual bodies.
Once I have charted a historical and theoretical foundation for examining maternal figures in the age of neoliberalism, chapter three provides a much-needed history of rhetorics of women’s health. In particular, I trace the early rhetorical history of the Women’s Health Movement and its resistance to dominant medical, scientific, and expert institutions. I connect this history to the popularization of breastfeeding and natural childbirth, and the incorporation of neoliberal ethics of entrepreneurialism and personal responsibility.
Chapter four, entitled “Whip ‘em out!: Macho Maternalism in TheBump.com’s
Boobalution,” examines the vibrant breastfeeding community and pro-breastfeeding campaign on the popular website TheBump.com, often referred to as the “Boobalution.”
The Bump is the largest online community of mothers and is the number one local guide for expectant mothers. Their accompanying print magazine is the top distributor to
OB/GYN offices.106 Further, their breastfeeding resource, www.breastfeeding.com, is the number one breastfeeding website in the world.107 For these reasons, the complex and dynamic community at TheBump.com is one of the richest sources for examining the discourses about breastfeeding and maternity culture.
In conjunction with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services National
Breastfeeding Awareness Month, TheBump.com, a for-profit website, created a celebrity- mom driven campaign to encourage women to start a boob-olution, “whip it out” and breastfeed. The Boob-olution campaign consists of videos, online marketing and profiles, 33 and online informational webpages. I interrogate the ways that empowerment discourses in the Boob-olution campaign invoke macho maternalism: A set of strange gender normative discursive characteristics that seem to glorify pain, corporeal violence, and personal responsibility as empowerment, while simultaneously sexualizing the female body, reinforcing sex-biology and celebrating hyper-femininity. I chart how these discourses rationalize shifts in the intensification of maternal corporeal expectations at the same time that those expectations are hyper-privatized, and reflect the evolving political, economic, and social relations in the wider public sphere. Although this is one specific case study, I chart how it is exemplary of wider breastfeeding culture that appropriates the progressive cosmopolitan ethos of the Women’s Health Movement, while making the maternal body and her choices public concern: The decision of what to do with her body is no longer her own, but driven by interested discourses. By critically scrutinizing discourses of breastfeeding as rhetorics of reproduction and reproducing rhetorics I reveal a broader understanding of the central role of maternity culture in shaping gendered maternal bodies.
The final case study chapter examines thriving YouTube communities where users post videos of their children being born naturally at-home, deliberate over the medicalization of childbirth in comment sections, and use visual and multi-medial citations to advocate for natural at-home childbirth. I will examine the most watched videos of at-home births and reveal how they participate in maternity culture through the ironic use of empowerment discourses that champion “female strength” while simultaneously naturalizing the reproductive function and gender norms. Specifically, I 34 demonstrate how the at-home birthing narratives presented in YouTube videos naturalize and reflect the neoliberal narrative of the “self-made mom.”
At-home birth videos are a particularly rich site of analysis, because YouTube is one of the most interactive user sites, with over 1 billion unique visitors to the site each month.108 Furthermore, the practice of posting natural childbirth videos is a growing trend, documented in national news outlets such as the Los Angeles Times.109 These videos have ultimate saturation— the largest being posted only one year ago by user
Marin8D entitled “A Commentary on the Birth of Love,” which as of July 29, 2013, has over 74 million views.110 The video shows the birth of a child, Love, and includes voice- over commentary by the two parents, while the original sound and screams of the mother are kept in.
Similar to the breastfeeding movement’s critique of pediatrics, the natural childbirth movement heavily critiques the emergence and growth of obstetrics and gynecology (OB/GYN) as a medical specialty for participating in the unnecessary medicalization of childbirth. Unlike breastfeeding discourses, however, the Natural
Childbirth Movement has yet to be sanctioned by medical experts, such as the AAP.
Women’s bodies have therefore become the battlefield upon which the medical establishment and the natural childbirth movement fight for legitimacy.111 Discourses within the Natural Childbirth Movement encourage women to be distrustful of doctors, empowered by their bodies, and to believe that by experiencing the pain of natural childbirth they will develop a stronger bond with their children. The graphic videos posted of natural childbirth on YouTube specifically highlight the necessary pain and 35 sacrifice that a woman must feel in order to give birth, have a healthy baby, and bond appropriately with their child. For many users, pain is an essential component of an authentic childbirth and the production of the videos express this perspective. Through an investigation of natural childbirth communities on YouTube, we can not only gain a better understanding of the rhetorics of reproduction and reproducing rhetorics in maternity culture, but also see how multi-medial formats communicate these rhetorics in particular.
Considering the theoretical assumptions outlined above pertaining to materialist feminism and new public modalities, I approach each case study and individual text in this dissertation with a commitment to the historical contextualization of discourses and an observance of the relationship between digital mediums and rhetorical invention. Both materialist feminism and theories of new public modalities provide me with a rich vocabulary to get at the specificity of maternity culture online. Each case study has been approached with a rigorous openness, and an acute attention to detail. I examine each case study exhaustively and describe the rhetorical work that is being done and how discourses are functioning. I not only provide examples of discourses and highlight what each text is saying but what each text is doing rhetorically, explaining in detail how discourses function within the artifact. For example, I identify what rhetorical strategies are being used, and explore how sound, text, image, intertextuality, extradiscursive apparatuses, and identity work together to form complex rhetorics of maternity culture.
In addition, I seek to identify what the stakes of these discourses and strategies are and articulate if they are aligned with particular interests, communities, or groups. I also 36 examine whether there are contradictions or oddities present in the rhetorics. For example, I assess whether the discourses work against the interests of those individuals speaking, typing, and posting videos. One of the oddities present in maternity culture discourses is that it has deep roots in the Women’s Health Movement, which originally was skeptical of the medical complex and discourses of expertise. Yet, the discourses about maternal health and the female body in maternity culture often heavily rely on science and expertise. Recognizing this oddity, and then examining the discourses that justify its prevalence reveals the complexities of feminist empowerment narratives in maternity culture.
Once I have completed the analysis of the discourses within each case study, I contextualize rhetorics of maternity culture in history and analyze their relationship to economic, political and social arrangements. Examining rhetorics through this lens reveals the assumptions that support subordination in capitalist society, while shedding light on how citizens, and women in particular, envision and enact their own modes of citizenship through cultural discourses. I will conclude this dissertation by exploring the implications of this project while giving a brief account of where future research in this area could be useful.
In an age when new technologies change the creation and circulation of health information, the study of how the communication of such salient content cultivates gender norms is particularly relevant. The rise of social media gives marginalized communities new opportunities to create a public voice, organize resistance efforts, and engage over important political, social, and health related issues. This dissertation project 37 offers a strong contribution to the field of communication studies by exploring public discourses surrounding contemporary online discourses of maternity, pregnancy, and reproduction. It engages questions that are vital to the well being of 21st century democratic culture—for they are questions that uniquely enable and constrain the ability of women to participate in the public sphere.
1 US Department of Human Health and Services, “National Breastfeeding Campaign, Ad Council Materials,” The National Women’s Health Information Center, http://www.womenshealth.gov/breastfeeding/government-programs/national- breastfeeding-campaign/adcouncil/ (last accessed November 1, 2012). 2 US Department of Human Health and Services, “‘Ladies Night’ Spot Transcript,” The National Women’s Health Information Center, http://www.womenshealth.gov/breastfeeding/government-programs/national- breastfeeding-campaign/adcouncil/transcript_ladiesnight.cfm (last accessed November 1, 2012). 3 Stephanie Knaak, “The Problem With Breastfeeding Discourse,” in The Canadian Journal of Public Health 97 (Sept/Oct 2006): 412-414. 4 Joan B. Wolf, Is Breast Best?: Taking on the Breastfeeding Experts and the New High Stakes of Motherhood, Kindle Edition (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 3. 5 See: Knaak, “The Problem With Breastfeeding Discourse,” 412-414; Hanna Rosin, “The Case Against Breastfeeding,” The Atlantic, April 2009; and, Wolf, Is Breast Best? 6 Knaak, “The Problem With Breastfeeding Discourse,” 412. 7 Susan Brownmiller, Femininity (New York, Ballantine Books, 1985). 8 Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003): 71-98, 16. 9 Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 16. 10 Celeste Condit, Decoding Abortion Rhetoric: Communicating Social Change (Urbana- Champagne, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990). 11 Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 144. 12 Linda M. Blum, At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), 2. 13 Blum, At the Breast, 2. 14 John M. Sloop and Kent A. Ono, “Out-law Discourse: The Critical Politics of Material Judgment,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 30 (1997), 50. 15 Alexandra Samuel, “The Truth of Motherhood Online,” in Motherhood Online, Michelle Moravec, ed. (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 1. 16 Samuel, “The Truth of Motherhood Online,” 1. 38
17 Lynne M. Webb and Brittney S. Lee, “Mommy Blogs: The Centrality of Community in the Performance of Online Maternity,” in Motherhood Online, Michelle Moravec, ed. (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 244. 18 Sara Hayden, “Revitalizing the Debate between
AL: University of Alabama Press, 2011); Davi Johnson Thornton, Brain Culture: Neuroscience and Popular Media (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2011). 33 C. R. Miller, “Risk, Controversy, and Rhetoric: Response to Goodnight,” Argumentation and Advocacy 42 (2005): 34-37. 34 Miller, “Risk, Controversy, and Rhetoric: Response to Goodnight.” 35 Thornton, Brain Culture, 2. 36 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2, no.1 (2005), 2. 37 Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 140. 38 Robert Wess, Kenneth Burke, rhetoric, subjectivity, postmodernism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3. 39 See: Ronald W. Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric” Critical Studies In Mass Communication 15 (1998): 21-41; Megan Foley, “Voicing Terri Schiavo: Prosopopeic Citizenship in the Democratic Aporia between Sovereignty and Biopower,” Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 7, no.4 (December 2010): 381-400; Nathan Stormer, “Mediating Biopower and the Case of Prenatal Space,” Critical Studies In Media Communication 27, no.1 (March 2010): 8-23. 40 Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 27. 41 Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 27. 42 Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 27. 43 Mary M. Lay, Cynthia Myntti, Laura J. Gurak, and Clare Gravon, eds., Body Talk: Rhetoric, Technology, Reproduction (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). 44 Ronald W. Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” Critical Studies In Mass Communication 15 (1998): 21-41. 45 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 46 Chandra Kant Kumar, “Analytical Marxism and Foucault’s Theory of ‘Disciplinary Power,’” Imprints 10, no.2 (2005); Alan Hunt, “Getting Marx and Foucault into Bed Together!” Journal of Law and Society 31 (2004): 592-609; MEH Olssen, “Foucault and Marxism: Rewriting the theory of historical materialism,” Policy Futures in Education 2, no.2 (2004): 454-482. 47 Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 29. 48 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972- 1977, Colin Gordon, ed. (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 78-83; and, Chandra Kant Kumar, “Analytical Marxism and Foucault’s Theory of ‘Disciplinary Power,’” Imprints 10, no.2 (2008), 5. 49 Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 105. 50 Dana L. Cloud, Control and Consolation in American Cultural and Politics: Rhetorics of Therapy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998), 16-17.
40
51 Dana L. Cloud, “Hegemony or Concordance? The Rhetoric of Tokenism in ‘Oprah’ Winfrey’s Rags-to-Riches Biography,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 13 (1996), 116. 52 Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin, “Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric,” Communication Monographs 62 (1995), 2. 53 Joshua Gunn and Dana Cloud, “Agentic Orientation as Magical Voluntarism,” Communication Theory 20 (2010): 50-78; Sonja K. Foss, W.J. Waters, B.J. Armada, “Toward a theory of Agentic Orientation: Rhetoric and agency in Run Lola Run,” Communication Theory 18 (2007): 205-230. 54 Gunn and Cloud, “Agentic Orientation as Magical Voluntarism,” 68. 55 See: Nurit Guttman and William Harris Ressler, “On Being Responsible: Ethical Issues in Appealing to Personal Responsibility in Health Campaigns,” Journal of Health Communication 6 (2001): 117-136; M.L. Silk, J. Francombe, and F. Bachelor, “The Biggest Loser: The Discursive Constitution of Fatness,” Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture 1, no.3 (2009); Rebecca de Souza, “Local Perspectives on Empowerment and Responsibility in the New Public Health,” Health Communication 26 (2011): 25-36; Deborah Morrison Thomson, “Big Food and the Body Politics of Personal Responsibility,” Southern Communication Journal 74, no.1 (2009): 2-17; Doshik Yun, et al, “Mothers’ Intentions to Teach Adolescent Daughters about Breast Cancer Risk Reduction Activities: Influence of Self-Efficacy, Response Efficacy, and Personal Responsibility,” Communication Research Reports 26, no.2 (2009): 134-145; Rachel Wells, “Health Literacy: Reading Between the lines,” Journal of Communication Healthcare 1, no.3 (2009); Barbara E. Willard, “Feminist Interventions in Biomedical Discourses: An Analysis of the Rhetoric of Integrative Medicine,” Women’s Studies in Communication 28, no.1 (2005): 115-148. 56 Shari L. Dworkin and Faye Linda Wachs, Body Panic: Gender, Health, and the Selling of Fitness (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 110. 57 Shari L. Dworkin and Faye Linda Wachs, “‘Getting your Body Back’: Postindustrial Fit Motherhood in Shape Fit Prengancy Magazine,” Gender & Society 18 (2004), 611. 58 Karl Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in General, 1844,” Marxist.org, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/hegel.htm (accessed October 1, 2010). 59 Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in General, 1844.” 60 For an excellent description of materialist feminist methods and origins see: Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham, eds, Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women’s Lives (New York: Routledge, 1997). 61 Jeremy Packer and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley, eds, Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility, and Networks (New York: Routledge, 2012). 62 See: Cloud, Steve Macek, and James Arnt Aune, “‘The Limbo of Ethical Simulacra’: A Reply to Ron Greene,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 39 (2006): 72-84. Also see Cloud, “The Materiality of Discourse as Oxymoron: A Challenge to Critical Rhetoric,” Western
41
Journal of Communication 58 (1994): 141-63; “The Matrix and Critical Theory’s Desertion of the Real,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3 (2006): 329-54. 63 Dana L. Cloud, “The Materiality of Discourse as Oxymoron: A Challenge to Critical Rhetoric,” Western Journal of Communication 58 (1994): 141-63. 64 For descriptions of historical materialism, see Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991); Teresa Ebert, Ludic Feminism and After: Postmodernism, Desire, and Labor in Late Capitalism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); Friedrich Engels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” in Marxism: Essential Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 63; Karl Marx, “The Materialist Concept of History,” in Marxism: Essential Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988): 3-19. 65 Cloud, “The Materiality of Discourse as Oxymoron,” 145. 66 Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham, “Introduction,” in Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women’s Lives, Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham, eds (New York: Routledge, 1997), 9. 67 Karl Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in General, 1844,” Marxist.org, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/hegel.htm (accessed May 15, 2011). 68 Martha E. Gimenez, “What's Material about Materialist Feminism? A Marxist Feminist Critique,” in Radical Philosophy: A Journal of Socialist and Feminist Philosophy 101 (2000), 19. 69 Gimenez, “What's Material about Materialist Feminism?,” 19. 70 Eagleton, Ideology, 28; 45. 71 Eagleton, Ideology, 194-195. 72 Eagleton, Ideology, 195. 73 Eagleton, Ideology, 195. 74 Eagleton, Ideology, 45. 75 Eagleton, Ideology, 43-44. 76 Eagleton, Ideology, xiii. 77 Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 106. 78 Barbara Ehrenreich, “What is Socialist Feminism?” in Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women’s Lives, Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham, eds (New York: Routledge, 1997), 69. 79 Friedrich Engels, “Letters on Historical Materialism,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 700. 80 Ehrenreich, “What is Socialist Feminism?” 68. 81 See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 127-86. 82 Friedrich Engels, “Letters on Historical Materialism,” 760. Emphasis in original.
42
83 Daniel C. Brouwer and Robert Asen, “Introduction: Public Modalities, or the Metaphors We Theorize By,” in Public Modalities: Rhetoric, Culture, Media, and the Shape of Public Life (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2010),1. 84 Brouwer and Asen, “Introduction,” 1. 85 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1954 ), 125. 86 Jurgen̈ Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Laurence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991). 87 For an overview of scholarship that interrogates the Internet as a space for public deliberation see: Lincoln Dahlberg, “Computer-Mediated Communication and the Public Sphere: A Critical Analysis,” Journal of Computer-mediated Communication 7 (2001), 1. 88 See: Donald Browne, Ethnic Minorities, Electronica Media, and the Public Sphere: A Comparative Study (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2005); or, Kevin Deluca & Jennifer Peeples, “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (2002): 125-151; or Yeslam Al-Saggaf, The Online Public Sphere in the Arab World: The War in Iraq on the Al Arabiya Website,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12 (2006): 311- 334. 89 Aaron Barlow, Blogging America: The New Public Sphere (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2008). 90 Hanz-Jorg Trenz, “Digital media and the Return of the Representative Public Sphere,” The Public 16 (2009), 33. 91 Some additional sources are: James Bohman, “Expanding dialogue: the Internet, the public sphere and prospects for transnational democracy,” in After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere, Nick Crossley and John Michael Roberts, eds (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004): 131-155; Jodi Dean, Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002); Nicholas Garnham, “The Media and the Public Sphere,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, Craig Calhoun, ed., (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992): 359-376; Alice E. Hall, “Perceptions of the Authenticity of Reality Programs and Their Relationships to Audience Involvement, Enjoyment, and Perceived Learning,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 53 (2009): 515-531; Benjamin Lee, “Textuality, Mediation, and Public Discourse,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, Craig Calhoun, ed., (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992): 402-418; Hallvard Moe “Dissemination and dialogue in the public sphere: a case for public service media online,” Media Culture Society 30 (2008), 319. 92 Jodi Dean, Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 2. 93 Brouwer and Asen, “Introduction: Public Modalities, or the Metaphors We Theorize By,” 1-3. 94 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005): 124, 63, 57.
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95 Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (New York: New Press, 2013). 96 Dean, Publicity’s Secret, 3. 97 Dean, Publicity’s Secret, 4. 98 Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (London: Polity Press, 2010), 29. 99 Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations (New York: Penguin, 2009), 5. 100 Michelle Rodino, “Mobilizing mother,” Feminist Media Studies 3, no.3 (2003): 375- 377. 101 Andrew Chadwick, Internet Politics: States, Citizens, and New Communication Technologies (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2006), 177. 102 U.S. Department of Commerce, National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) “Falling through the net: A survey of the "have nots" in rural and urban America,” 1995, http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/fallingthru.html (last accessed December 2, 2012). 103 R.J.W. Cline and K.M. Haynes, “Consumer Health Information seeking on the Internet: the state of the art,” Health education Research 16, no.6 (2001), 677. 104 Dana L. Cloud, “The Null Persona: Race and The Rhetoric of Silence in the Uprising of '34,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 2 (1999), 200. 105 Warnick and Heineman, Rhetoric Online, 102. 106 “The Bump Brand,” TheBump.com, accessed January 1, 2013, http://www.xogroupinc.com/the-knot-inc-brands/the-bump.aspx 107 “The Bump 2012 Media Kit,” TheBump.com, accessed December 1, 2012. 108 “Statistics,” YouTube.com, http://www.YouTube.com/yt/press/statistics.html (last accessed 23 June 2013) 109 Hilary MacGregor, “The Birth of a Trend: Posting Childbirth Videos Online,” The Los Angeles Times, September 6, 2012, http://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-birth-movies- 20120809,0,3477872.story (last accessed December 25, 2012). 110 Marin8d, “A Commentary on the Birth of Love” YouTube.com, 6 November 2011, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=XXVRrmQxOZ4 (last accessed 21 January 2013). 111 Lisa Selin Davis, “Pushing Back: Has the Natural Childbirth Movement gone too far?” Babble.com, August 3, 2009, http://www.babble.com/pregnancy/giving-birth/pushing- natural-childbirth-movement/ (last accessed July 20, 2013).
44 Chapter Two: Neoliberalism and the Maternal Body
Alienated in her body and her social dignity, the mother has the pacifying
illusion of feeling as being in itself, a ready-made value. But this is only
an illusion.1
Simone de Beauvoir, THE SECOND SEX, 1949
There is no shortage of cultural discourses that claim to exalt, celebrate and even
“protect” the maternal body, but as Simone de Beauvoir notes above, the perceived social value and power of the maternal body is only an illusion. Far from possessing a special kind of fundamental power or agency under capitalism, the maternal body is commodified and alienated from itself: What the maternal body should do, eat, wear, and say is highly debated publicly and a woman’s very corporeality is used as a resource for discipline. Cynthia R. Comacchio argues that the revision of ideals of motherhood is often “the central strategy of a politics of regeneration, emerging from pervasive discourses of anxiety grounded in the rapid, intensive, disruptive socioeconomic changes perceived to be corroding the very framework of the industrial-capitalist order.”2 The alienation of the maternal body first as private property, and then as a cultural commodity is a prime example that the female body in general, and the reproductive/maternal body in particular has been historically a site of cultural and political struggle.
This chapter outlines the foundations for understanding the maternal body in the age of neoliberalism. I chart a theoretical and historical narrative of how the maternal
45 body has been a site of discursive contestation— where arrangements and interests under capital are negotiated and rationalized— and how curvatures and discourses of that contestation have shifted alongside changing political and economic realities. I begin by tracing how the family unit became an organizing mechanism for private property under industrial capitalism and early kinship systems. Next, I articulate how the institution of motherhood became a primary site for systemic feminist critique during the 1950s-1970s.
Finally, I examine maternal figures since the neoliberal turn, specifically explaining how the shift in economic and political policies privatized social and familial responsibility while discourses of personal responsibility, hyper-individualism, and choice served to rationalize the radical privatization of social responsibility and the hyper-singularization of the body, even in feminist discourses and movements.
Family and Reproduction in Industrial Capitalism
It is no surprise that materialist literature provides us with a breadth of theoretical and analytical tools for examining gender, the family, and reproduction as social and symbolic inventions under capital. As previously noted, at a fundamental level, the reproductive function is the basic mode of production in capitalist societies: the production of subjects who will grow up to be workers and consumers.3 Lenin aptly called women’s oppression within the nuclear family as “domestic slavery,” which, as
Wolf notes is central for a Marxist critique of the family, because “the source of women's oppression lies in the role of the family as a reproducer of labor power for capitalism— and in women's unequal role inside the family.”4 Most importantly for the current project,
46 the reproductive function has also been a primary site of the reproduction of social and political inequality. In this section, I attempt to outline the theoretical assumptions for studying gender, the family and reproduction by historicizing the origins of the family and private property under industrial capitalism.
Friedrich Engels, drawing heavily on the notes of Marx, argues in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State that the development of familial obligations and gender roles emerged alongside the invention of private property and the concentration of that wealth into the hands of men.5 With the invention of private property came the development of the nuclear family as the primary economic unit in society. According to Engels, “The first class antagonism appearing in history coincides with the development of the antagonism of man and wife in monogamy, and the first class oppression with that of the female by the male sex.”6 Ultimately, Engels calls the development of the nuclear family and “the historic defeat of the female sex.”7
Engels charts how systems of consanguinity (or systems of blood relations and how we define them) have changed throughout history as our relationship to labor, property, and publicness have shifted. Systems of kinship are, according to Engels, expressions of the economic and social arrangements of particular moments in history.8
Lise Vogel similarly argues that the family “is not a timeless universal of human society.
As with any social structure, the form kin-based relationships take always depends on social development, and is potentially a terrain of struggle.”9 The family (composed of two monogamous individuals) became the primary economic unit of society under industrialized capitalism, despite the fact that this is not necessarily “natural.” 47 Throughout time, the family has been a site of struggle over antagonisms. “In class societies,” Vogel explains, “Women’s childbearing capacity creates contradictions from the point of view of the dominant class’s need to appropriate surplus labor. The oppression of women in the exploited class develops in the process of the class struggle over the resolution of these contradictions.”10
For example: “Monogamy,” Engels writes, “arose from the concentration of larger wealth in the hands of a single individual — a man — and from the need to bequeath this wealth to the children of that man and of no other.”11 Additionally, Engels explains that, housework “became a private service; the wife became the head female servant, excluded from participation in social production.”12 When this shift occurred, maternal subjects in the kinship system lost their maternal-right to property, became an object of exchange between men (fathers and their sons), and found their labor in the home privatized and devalued as a social enterprise. According to Engels, then, the proliferation of capitalism greatly affects familial, gender and sexual relations, often producing and justifying exploitative and oppressive inequities. When women began to enter into the workforce more in the 20th century, this also represented the progression of capitalism. Vogel writes,
Equalization of female labor-force participation is a particular manifestation of the structural tendency in capitalist society toward free availability of all labor power. Like the tendency toward the reduction of domestic labor, this tendency embodies the forward drive of capitalist accumulation.13
Systems of kinship arise from the division of labor and property under capital, and are directly related to the economic, political, and social arrangements that exist in public
48 life. The realization of a social revolution that transforms the means of production into social property instead of private property would lead, according to Engels, to a dramatic transformation of these familial relationships. He writes,
With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the monogamous family ceases to be the economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike, whether they are born of wedlock or not.14
While Engels and Vogel historicized the exploitative and often oppressive familial and gender relations that emerged as byproducts of capitalism and industrialization, it is my aim to chart how the ideological shift that began in the 1980s and continued through the
1990s (which we now refer to as neoliberalism), resulted in changes in the regulation of capitalism that fundamentally redrew the lines that demarcated what was considered public and private, and instituted policies aimed at austerity and the privatization of social responsibility that altered norms and expectations of motherhood. However, before I can attend to those specific shifts, it is important to discuss how the feminist movement of the mid-20th century used the institution of motherhood and maternal experience as a primary source for waging systemic critique and organizing collective action.
Motherhood and Feminism in the Mid-20th Century
Since the nuclear family has become the primary organizing unit under capitalism, motherhood also became a primary source for organizing the early feminist movement. Early feminists argued for the education of women and demanded that they receive the right to vote on the basis of their status as the primary caregivers of society.15
49 Just as Engels had articulated, Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex that the root of women’s oppression is in her role as primary child-rearer. For Beauvoir, women are conditioned from infancy that they are “made to bear children,” that motherhood will be their greatest and most splendorous achievement, while the “disadvantages of the maternal experience, such as periods, illness, and even “the boredom of household tasks” are justified by this “marvelous privilege” she has been granted.16 Beauvoir writes, “It is through motherhood that woman fully achieves her physiological destiny; that her
‘natural’ vocation, since her whole organism is directed toward the perpetuation of the species. But we have already shown that human society is never left to nature.”17
Shortly after Beauvoir’s provocation, the onset of what is often called “Second-
Wave” feminism brought with it a set of critiques against the constitution of the nuclear family and the private sphere as oppressive mechanisms that have been conditioned by patriarchal institutions and interests. Often referred to as the “cult of domesticity,” the distinct separation of the public and private spheres of life (and the accompanying gendered divisions and the burden-of-care that is placed on women and mothers) began to further emerge and solidify around the middle of the nineteenth century as the commercial economy developed and the Second World War end. “In this process,” Joan
Wolf writes, “men were increasingly identified with a public sphere that rewarded competitiveness and self-interest, and women were expected to maintain home life as a respite for the moral coarseness of the market.”18 Second-Wave feminists argued that under the cult of domesticity, the female subject is disregarded, seen only in terms of the maternal experience, silenced in public, and relegated to the private sphere. From this 50 perspective, we should not only insist that women should play a role in public life but also highlight the oppressive conditions of the maternal experience in the traditional nuclear family. The Second-Wave, although a complex sect of feminist political theory,
“began in the United States as an essentially liberal protest against the failure of that society to deliver women the promises of independence, self-expression, and fulfillment that seemed central to the ‘American Dream’”19
Betty Friedan, an early voice of second-wave liberal feminism, famously noted in her work The Feminine Mystique that since the Second World War in the U.S., early
“feminist dreams of education and independence had been displaced by an all-purpose
‘feminine mystique,’” which cultivated the belief among women “that their only fulfillment lay in domesticity.”20 Friedan, who eventually founded the National
Organization of Women, argued that women needed fulfillment and purpose outside of the domestic sphere, and that if they were given that equal opportunity they would thrive.21 Second-Wave liberal feminist projects often sought to increase women’s access to the workplace, and create opportunities for women to participate in the public sphere outside of maternal experience.
Yet, when women began entering the workforce in larger numbers during the
1970s, the burden of familial care was not lifted.22 Further, while the liberal feminist project succeeded at articulating the construction of motherhood and its discontents, it’s emphasis on maternal experience and work-access tuned out a discussion about class politics, what women’s lives would be like without children at all or what alternative experiences of motherhood were like during the mid-to-late 20th century.23 Several radical 51 feminist writers in the early 1970s, such as Shulamith Firestone, began demonizing motherhood and calling for its end all together; contending that “pregnancy is barbaric,” that the female body is imprisoned under maternity, and that there should be an “end to childhood.”24 In 1976, Adrienne Rich argued in Of Woman Born that we must detach the practice and experience of mothering from the patriarchal institution of motherhood (that for Rich included creating equitable access to material resources that would reduce the unequal burdens placed on women, particularly women of color and working-class women).25 Unfortunately, as I will chart in the next section, both the policies and discursive rationalizations that characterize the neoliberal turn in the period after the
1970s in the United States produced a series of ideological, juridical, and discursive shifts that not only did not answer the calls by Firestone, Rich—or even Friedan—to attend to the role of motherhood in oppressing women, but actually tightened the sutures connecting the female body to maternal experience and the institution of motherhood.
Neoliberal Ethics and The Post-1970s Maternal Body
Neoliberalism is a market driven approach to both economic and social policy — on a national and global level — that privileges the efficiency of private enterprise. The neoliberal turn in global politics and markets has been justified by neoclassical theories of economics made popular by political economists such as Milton Friedman. In order to cut state expenditures and nurture the global market, the state moved towards austerity, privatization and deregulation by slashing social programs and privatizing social projects.26 David Harvey notes that the doctrine of neoliberalism also upholds market
52 exchange as the ethic of civilization, an ethic that extends outside of sovereign state power and law.27 Not only are social and economic policies at the whim of the global markets under neoliberalism, but also human subjects are seen as autonomous, equitable, economic entities that are celebrated for their success as individual actors in the market and cultural life. This paradigm of thought assumes that there is no need to provide social programs or aid to individuals, because under capitalism individuals are fundamentally equitable, and it is their duty as citizens to maximize their enterprising potential in the market. Harvey argues that in order for neoliberalism to become the dominant ethic of civilization, a political conceptual apparatus had to become naturalized into our understanding of the political and social world. The political ideals of human dignity and individual freedom make up that conceptual apparatus, and are the central values of contemporary Western civilization. Freedom and dignity are placed in direct ideological opposition to fascism, socialism, and dictatorships. Any state intervention that inhibits the right of the individual to make “choices” (but as I will articulate, only certain kinds of choices) is framed as antithetical to freedom, liberty, and prosperity.
Neoliberalism is an ideological paradigm that is also therefore enmeshed with gender and sexual oppression, and I argue that in particular the maternal body has been a chief site of struggle over its ideas. In The Twilight of Equality? Lisa Duggan argues that the emphasis on the utopian goal of material prosperity and equality under capitalism in the neoliberal age resulted in the systematic development of social, economic, political, and cultural inequalities.28 More specifically, when the U.S. began distancing itself from state responsibility for social problems it produced a cultural inequality and undermined 53 the process of democracy. Duggan argues that three major developments arise that implicate neoliberalism in processes of inequality in contemporary public life: First, the dualism (that was originally created during the industrial revolution) is intensified between the “public” and the “private” that continues to keep the state from intervening in matters of the home; Second, otherness is systematically ignored under neoliberal policies, as all individuals are said to be “equal”; and finally, the separation between the economic, political, and cultural realms of society and a belief that they need to stay separate has resulted in the splitting of activism and positive leftist social change efforts.
Neoliberal and free-market logics particularly participate in the reproduction of gendered norms and expectations in relation to motherhood since, as Engels noted, the family (and its accompanying gender systems) is regulated and deregulated as the primary unit under capital.29
But the shifts in policy that emphasized the privatization of social responsibility to the family unit are not the only mechanisms of the neoliberal turn that discipline the maternal body. Neoliberal ethics are imbued in discourses about the family and the maternal body. These discourses valorize personal responsibility, individualism, choice, and entrepreneurialism, while eschewing ethics of shared-responsibility and collective action. Both neoliberal state policies and discursive rationalizations in the public sphere compromise a complex neoliberal ethic that individualizes, depoliticizes, and shifts power and responsibility to individual bodies.
In what follows, I articulate how both welfare reforms in the 1990s and the death of the single family wage resulted in an increasing number of mothers entering the 54 workforce (usually to care or service jobs); why the commodification of care and service work resulted in its devaluation; and finally, how along with the privatization of social responsibility these events influenced a set of rhetorical demands that did not liberate women from the oppressive institution of motherhood by incorporating them into the workforce, but actually reinforced their subjugation through the devaluation of care work
(in and outside of the home), and the intensification of already inequitable ideals of motherhood.
Beginning in the 1970s there was a substantial increase in number of women working outside of the home. Several favors contributed to this phenomenon. Economist
Teresa Amott explains,
Hiring women was a central part of the corporate strategy to restore profitability because women were not only cheaper than men, but were also less likely to be organized into unions and more willing to accept temporary work and no benefits...This led to what has been called the ‘feminization’ of the labor force, as women moved into jobs that had previously been held only by men and as jobs that were already predominantly female became even more so.30
With women entering the workforce in massive numbers (especially into low-wage service jobs), “unions weakened and corporations were able to resist the pressure for wage increases.”31 This series of events resulted in the eventual death of the “family wage”— a higher single salary that could account for “dependents” like a wife and children. Hester Eisenstein notes,
The inclusion of married women in the workforce, including the mothers of young children, was of assistance to capital in keeping wages stagnant, and in abandoning the concept of a wage that would cover the expenses of a wife and children, a goal for which patriarchal unions had struggled during the nineteenth century. Feminists in the 1970s were vociferous in their demand for women’s economic independence, and indeed many feminist scholars and activist attacked 55 the family wage of the nineteenth century as a trap for women. […] Even though the family wage concept may have been patriarchal, it was a wage norm that acknowledge the need to support “dependents.” In the low-wage economy that replaces it, no such concept remained.32
For single mothers who bore the burden of care and financial stability, the solitary family wage was always an impossibility. Therefore, single mothers turned to the state to fill in the wage gap accommodated for in the family wage through social welfare programs.33
However, as Collins and Mayer note in their book, Both Hands Tied, reform (such as the
Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996) shifted welfare programs (that responded to the burdens placed on single mothers) into workfare programs (that systematically devalued the valuable care work of mothers while simultaneously forcing them into low-wage jobs). With the transition from welfare to workfare, women who once relied on the state to provide a wage so they could take care of children were forced into low-wage service labor that required them to work long hours and prevented them from providing adequate care for their families. Therefore, welfare reform coupled with the demise of the single family wage further devalued housework and childrearing—no longer was there reasonable financial accommodation for caring for dependents at home.
When housework and family care became undervalued in the family unit, care work also became commodified as a source of low-wage labor in the market. Women, especially single mothers, were seen as ideal trainees for care work jobs, such as childcare, preschool education, hospital workers, maintenance workers, cashiers, and restaurant staff.34 Care and service work is not inherently degrading but through its
56 commodification during this time was constituted as such. Employers and investors (such as Wal-Mart) benefited from the creation of a low-wage work force that was prevented from organizing for better pay, benefits, and working conditions.35 Furthermore, the creation and sustainment of the low-wage labor market through welfare reform was a political and economic move that was largely initiated by business lobbyists who had an interest in the workfare program because it brought new workers into the market, set a bottom for wages, and reduced the amount of taxes paid by corporations.36
Accompanying the systematic commodification and devaluation of care work was a move to privatize social responsibilities and costs to the family unit. Duggan explains,
“The family [has become] a gendered institution for privatizing social costs.”37 The proliferation of the doctrine of supply-side economics celebrated during the Reagan era espoused vilified government spending on social safety nets.38 Therefore, programs that benefited particularly poor and minority mothers in the United States (that were mostly fought for and won through the New Deal and by activists during the 1960s and 1970s) came under heavy fire.39 Accordingly, social safety net measures such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), food stamps, and rent subsidies were drastically cut or abolished during the 1980s and 1990s.
The privatization of the costs for caring for dependents occurred alongside an ideological shift that rationalized the radical individualism of bodies while also intensifying expectations of motherhood. This becomes increasingly clear when we look at the family values campaigns of the 1980s and the “new familialism” of the 1990s.
Initially, despite resistance against the institution of motherhood (and the entangling of 57 the female subject with exclusively domesticity and mothering) during the Second-Wave feminist movement, beginning in the 1980s a prominent discourse of family values (that was also anti-feminist, anti-homosexual, and politically reactionary) was propagated by the religious right or Christian Evangelicals—including Dan Quayle, Pat Buchanan, and
Jerry Falwell—and sought to reify the cult of domesticity under the guise of “profamily” politics. “Their profamily campaign,” Judith Stacey explains, “which provided zeal and zeitgeist for both of Reagan's victories, enjoyed its heyday in the 1980s and suffered its nadir during the 1992 electoral season—from Quayle's infamous Murphy Brown speech through the illadvised familyvalues orgy of the Republican Convention, and to defeat at the polls.”40 Not only did the profamily campaign emphasize traditional nuclear family roles and reify domesticity and maternal experience, but it also was accompanied by an aggressive antiabortion campaign that sought to overthrow the 1973 feminist victory of
Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion.
Susan Faludi argues, “The political imagery of the ‘80s antiabortion movement bore all the hallmarks of the New Right ideology […]. In its war-torn psychological landscape, the enemy was feminism, the weapon was aggressively moralistic rhetoric, and the strategy for reclaiming the offensive was largely semantic.”41 In all of its iterations, rhetorics of family values, as Cloud argues, espoused during this period functioned to rationalize public support for the privatization of social responsibility
(particularly for women of color).42 We live in a “present culture of mystification— a culture which continually pulls us away from systemic understanding and inclines us toward constructions that emphasize individual freedom, choice, power, ability.”43 58 While discourses of family values justified and rationalized the privatization of social responsibility, other discourses called upon neoliberal ethics of “choice” and
“freedom” to rationalize a new cult of domesticity—one now seemingly chosen by women. By 1990, an alternative discourse of family values emerged known as “new familialism.” Often called the neo-family values campaign, new familialism was advocated for by academics, not politicians; and was argued for not on the basis of religious morality, but on pseudo social science that suggested two parent (heterosexual) households were undeniably better than other familial arrangements.
The rhetoric of new familialism “eschews antifeminism for a postfeminist family ethic” that argues that women should be equal in the work place and social life; but that they have a primary obligation to their children.44 David Blankenhorn, the co- director of the Institute for American Values, a central figure in the neo-family values campaign, argued,
Strengthening family life in the 1990s cannot and should not mean the repeal of the past 30 years of new opportunities for women in the workplace and in public life. Just as today's cultural ethos of individualism affects men just as much as women, so must a revived ethos of family life affect the behavior and priorities of both sexes.45
New familialism articulates a post-feminist, neoliberal family ethic, “in which […] women willingly, admirably, and self-consciously choose to place familial needs above the demands of a life defined by traditional male models of career and success.”46 But, as
Bordo argues, we should be wary of discourses that invoke the neoliberal ethics of freedom and choice, since they are often used to silence systemic feminist critiques about the unequal treatment of women and minorities.47 Further, discourses of choice and 59 freedom also contribute to rhetorics of personal responsibility. In fact, often just the
“acknowledgement that women participate in reproducing sexist culture gets converted to the ideas that we ‘are our own worst enemies,’ ‘do it to ourselves,’ ‘ask for it.’”48
Discourses of family values and new familialism were part of a larger cultural and political “backlash” against feminism, that according to Susan Faludi began in the early
1980s and was characterized by “a powerful counterassault on women’s rights, […]an attempt to retract the handful of small and hard-won victories that the feminist movement did manage to win for women.”49
The discourses that characterized both the family values campaign and new familialism not only rationalized privatized social responsibility, but also justified the intensification of familial responsibilities and increased expectations of “good” motherhood and domesticity. For example, dominant rhetorics of new familialism blamed the decrease in the amount of two parent (heterosexual) households
for everything from child poverty, declining educational standards, substance abuse, homicide rates, AIDS, infertility, and teen pregnancy to narcissism and the Los Angeles riots. They attribute family breakdown, in turn, to a generalized decline in family values, which, in its turn, they often associate with feminism, the sexual revolution, gay liberation, excessively generous welfare policies and escalating demands for social rights.50
Discourses such as these functioned not only to reify the traditional family and the institution of motherhood, but also privatized social responsibility and intensified familial responsibilities, while valorizing individual solutions to structural problems like those listed above. Susan Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels argue that discourses that celebrate radical individualism and personal responsibility are also present in a kind of
60 “new momism” that emerged in the 1990s that holds mothers liable and accountable for
“producing ever more perfect children” by being ever-present, mentally and physically.51
This hyper-idealized and individualized ideology of motherhood stipulates that
mothers’ primary occupation is to predict and prevent all less-than-optimal social, emotional, cognitive, and physical outcomes; that mothers are responsible for anticipating and eradicating every imaginable risk to their children, regardless of the degree or severity of the risk or what the trade-offs might be; and that any potential diminution in harm to children trumps all other considerations in risk analysis as long as mothers can achieve the reduction.52
These rising expectations of what mothers should control are particularly important when we consider health decisions associated with maternity such as breastfeeding and childbirth. Powerful scientific and cultural discourses obligate pregnant or nursing women to forego their corporeal, mental, and emotional autonomy to their (un)born offspring. Wolf argues that, “While it might be true that risks to children seem omnipresent and that they strike a particular emotional chord, this notion of risk-centered parenting neglects the division of labor that assigns moral and practical responsibility for the protection of children to mothers.”53
Since the neoliberal turn the family—labored by the maternal body—is now not only seen as being responsible for caring for and rearing children, but for all disease, poverty, and violence in society. It is in this way that both Foucault and Marx were right to warn that the eventuation of capital would be solving every problem at the level of the body. For Foucault, the body is the organizing principle of power.54 In 1844, Marx wrote that capital would result in the body becoming estranged, alien to itself.55 The body is not
61 a purely biological or natural form—it is also a cultural product. This does not mean that the body is a blank slate. According to Bordo,
Postmodern tendencies thoroughly to textualize the body [gives] a kind of free, creative rein to meaning at the expense of attention to the body’s material locatedness in history, practice, culture. If the body is treated as pure text, subversive, destabilizing elements can be emphasized and freedom and self- determination celebrated; but one is left wondering is there a body in this text?56
I have argued that the feminization of labor, the privatization of social responsibilities and costs, and intense disciplining discourses of personal responsibility and hyperindividualism resulted in a doubling down on the obligations and expectations placed on the maternal body: Mothers should enjoy the gains for equality and independence fought for and won by between the 60s and 80s—but not at the expense of their obligations at home (obligations that have intensified as the family unit in general, but motherhood in particular, became not only a gendered institution for privatizing costs and social responsibility, but the primary site of struggle over all social ails—from crime to disease and even economic depression). This “double down” of obligations and expectations is what Stephanie Coontz calls the Supermom Mystique—the contemporary of Friedan’s Feminine Mystique—an invisible cultural institution that is silently contributing to the alienation of the maternal body from herself.57
Depolicitization of Feminism
The contemporary construction of the female body is quite different from even the one first explored by early feminists. Previously, the “imagination of the female body was [understood] as a socially shaped and historically ‘colonized’ territory, not a site of
62 individual self-determination.”58It is no coincidence that feminist discourses have transformed alongside the materialization of neoliberal ideology and policies. Sarah
Projanksy argues that we see a redefinition of feminism beginning in the 1980s
(especially in popular and cultural contexts) that implied that we were somehow ‘past’ or
‘post’ feminism. Feminist writers such as Betty Friedan and Sylvia Ann Hewlett, along with anti-feminists such as Phyllis Schafly and Christina Hoff-Sommers critiqued radical feminist attempts to change the social system that enables the oppression of women.
The so-called “post-feminist context” accompanied the larger ideological shift towards a neoliberal ethic that has been described. Judith Stacey argues that feminist discourses in the post-feminist context are often characterized by “the simultaneous incorporation, revision, and depoliticization of many of the central goals of second-wave feminism.”59 Feminist discourses of empowerment increasingly mirror those of the more dominant culture— focusing on personal responsibility, self-determination, individual freedom, and choice.60 Bordo, this results in contemporary feminism missing a necessary systemic critique that organizes women into collective action. Bordo writes that we live in a “present culture of mystification—a culture which continually pulls us away from systemic understanding and inclines us toward constructions that emphasize individual freedom, choice, power, ability.”61 Central to the process of gendered oppression under neoliberalism is a seemingly contradictory set of assumptions that on the one hand, celebrate autonomy, diversity, and equality; while on the other hand define these in the narrowest terms. For Hester Eisenstein, feminism, in its most popular and public current formation, has now been equated with participating in the market as a liberated individual 63 and liberal feminist ideology is continually exploited in global capitalism to advance policies that actually undermine women.62 Gill et al. also argue that contemporary feminist conceptions of agency are often reconfigured under neoliberalism as “making do” with the realities of life under capitalism and making “free choices” as an economic actor.63 In each of these cases, feminist logics champion the ideals of individualism and equality under the law, but often depoliticize and revise the radical vision of second-wave feminist political theory that focused on systemic critique and organizing collective resistance.64 Nancy Fraser argues that it is in this way that certain popular feminist discourses have represent “feminism-tamed”— rather than fighting against the injustices of capital in democracy.65 Fraser writes,
Once centered on labor and violence, gender struggles have focused increasingly on identity and representation in recent years. The effect has been to subordinate social struggles to cultural struggles, the politics of redistribution to the politics of recognition. That was not, once again, the original intention. It was assumed, rather, by cultural feminists and deconstructionists alike that feminist cultural politics would synergize with struggles for social equality.66
Yet, despite good intentions, feminists have participated in legitimizing a structural transformation of capitalist society since the neoliberal turn, focusing primarily on cultural criticism and championing efforts to establish gender equality through deregulation and the removal of structural barriers to individual economic agency for women, while mystifying the inequalities such actions have enflamed.67
The move in feminist political thought and movements to emphasize self- determination, personalization and empowerment also occurred alongside the emergence of post-humanist and post-structuralist theories of agency, that see resistant power in
64 even the most dominant discourses.68 But as Bordo notes, what form that resistance takes is not always resistant for all.69 A materialist feminist critique is particularly important in a post-feminist context where, according to Bonnie J. Dow, traditional feminist critiques of sexual politics and “a profound awareness of the power differences between the sexes at all levels and in all arenas have been discarded as irrelevant or threatening.”70 By utilizing materialist feminism as a resource for my analysis in this dissertation, I am able to reveal how even feminist discourses reinforce dominant ideologies about gender and equality in maternity culture. This is vital, as Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham argue, because “if feminism is to be a social movement that aspires to meet the needs of all women, it must also confront its own class investments in refusing to connect its analysis to a global social system whose very premise is that some women benefit at the expense of others.”71
Part of the current project, then, is recognizing the complicated role that feminist movements have played in the reincorporation and reinforcement of a contemporary institution of motherhood. The motherhood movement, born out of the feminist movement and championed by organizations such as La Leche League, critique the U.S. government for not allowing for longer maternity leave, legal apparatuses that deny women the right to breastfeed in public, employers who don’t provide adequate support for working breastfeeding mothers, and the medical industry for medicalizing birth—yet they also promote discourses of individualism, personal responsibility, and choice that depoliticize feminist struggles and rationalize a contemporary cult of domesticity, a
SuperMom Mystique. In the following chapter, I further contextualize the depoliticization 65 of feminist discourses surrounding the maternal body by historicizing discourses of personal responsibility and entrepreneurialism in the both emergence of the women’s health movement and the contemporary manifestations of maternity culture. I am not seeking to demonize women who breastfeed or give birth naturally—nor their supporters— just seeking to examine how a discourse born of the best intentions can find itself foreclosing on possibilities and disciplining bodies.
1 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 2009), Kindle Edition, location 10928. 2 Cynthia R. Comacchio, “Motherhood in Crisis: Women, Medicine, and State in Canada, 1900-1940,” in Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women’s Lives, Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham, eds (New York: Routledge, 1997), 306. 3 Lise Vogel, Woman Questions: essays for a materialist feminism (New York: Routledge, 1995), 62. 4 Sharon Smith, “Marxist Feminism and Women’s Liberation,” Socialist Worker, January 31, 2013, http://socialistworker.org/2013/01/31/marxism-feminism-and-womens- liberation (last accessed February 1, 2013). 5 Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, translated by Ernest Untermann (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1902). 6 Engels, The Origin of the Family, location 932 of 2811. 7 Engels, The Origin of the Family, location 804 of 2811. 8 Engels, The Origin of the Family, 38. 9 Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 144. 10 Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women, 148. 11 Engels, The Origin of the Family, 65. 12 Engels, The Origin of the Family, 65. 13 Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women, 160. 14 Engels, The Origin of the Family, 65. 15 Valerie Bryson, Feminist Political Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 87. 16 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, location 10793. 17 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, location 10642. 18 Wolf, Is Breast Best?, Location #1595-613. 19 Bryson, Feminist Political Theory, 139. 20 Bryson, Feminist Political Theory, 141. 21 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton Company, 2001). 22 Arlie Russell Hoschschild, The Second Shift (New York: Penguin Books, 1989). 66
23 Ann Snitow, “Feminism and Motherhood: An American Reading,” Feminist Review 40 (1992): 32-51. 24 Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1970). 25 Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W.W. Norton Company, 1976). 26 Samantha King, Pink Ribbons, Inc: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xxvi-xxvii. 27 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 28 Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2003). 29 Engels, The Origin of the Family, Location 2741. 30 Teresa Amott, Caught in the Crisis: Women and the U.S. Economy Today (New York: Monthly Review Press,1993), 50. 31 Hestor Eisenstein, Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women's Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World (New York: Paradigm Books, 2010), 107. 32 Eisenstein, Feminism Seduced, 117. 33 Jane L. Collins and Victoria Mayer, Both Hands Tied: Welfare Reform and the Race to the Bottom in Low-wage Labor Markets, Kindle Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 87. 34 Collins and Mayer, Both Hands Tied, 116-117. 35 Collins and Mayer, Both Hands Tied, Introduction. 36 Eisenstein, Feminism Seduced, 128. 37 Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?, 64. 38 Eisenstein, Feminism Seduced, 113. 39 Eisenstein, Feminism Seduced, 112. 40 Judith Stacey, In The Name of the Family: Family Values in the Postmodern Age (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 54. 41 Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006) Kindle edition, location 8608 42 Dana L. Cloud, “The Rhetoric of
49 Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006) Kindle edition, location 438. 50 Stacey, In The Name of the Family, 53. 51 Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels, The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How it Has Undermined Women (Boston: Free Press, 2004). 52 Wolf, Is Breast Best?, Location #1595-613. 53 Wolf, Is Breast Best?, Location #1577-614. 54 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972- 1977, Colin Gordon, ed. (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 104-105. 55 Karl Marx, “Estranged Labour,” Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm (last accessed January 1, 2013). 56 Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 38, 57 Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, Kindle edition (New York: Basic Books, 2011), location 3052 of 4263. 58 Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 21. 59 Stacey, In The Name of the Family, 53. 60 Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 30. 61 Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 30. 62 Eisenstein, Feminism Seduced. 63 Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, eds., New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 64 Bonny J. Dow, Prime-time Feminism: television, media culture, and the women’s movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 88. 65 Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis, Kindle Edition (New York: Verso, 2013). 66 Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism, Kindle Locations 3658-3661. 67 Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism. 68 Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 27. 69 Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 28. 70 Dow, Prime-Time Feminism, 88. 71 Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham, “Introduction,” in Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women’s Lives, Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham, eds (New York: Routledge, 1997), 1.
68 Chapter Three: From the Pill to the Nipple: Rhetorics of the Women’s Health Movement and the Privatization of Women’s Health
It is impossible to provide a sketch of the women’s liberation movement in the
20th century without discussing its relationship to women’s health issues. The maternal body was a central node in organizing women in the early to mid-20th century. Gender roles and division of labor in the home left women’s issues inextricably and ideologically linked to reproduction, childbirth and child rearing. Feminists critiqued the cult of domesticity and how it negatively affected women, and organized efforts in the 1960s and 70s to gain access to birth control, abortion, and make childbirth more humane. The maternal body and the reproductive function were and continue to be primary concerns for feminists in the United States.
In the previous chapter, I contextualized discourses about the maternal body in neoliberalism, arguing that the maternal body has historically been a site of rhetorical contestation where arrangements and interests under capital are negotiated and rationalized. I briefly detailed how feminist empowerment discourses have become captured in logics of neoliberalism in maternity culture. Maternity culture (an aggregate of discourse about maternity in contemporary public life) is not so much a specific organized movement as it is a collection of discourses that have emerged from the remnants of the women's health movement and encourage individualized lifestyle and parenting choices in lieu of a systemic critique of health care systems.
In this chapter, I argue that maternity culture discourses appropriate the resources and arguments of the 20th century radical women's health movement, while privatizing
69 and depolicitizing the movement’s key aims and tenets. This depoliticization is directly related to a rise in neoliberal policies and ethics in the health care system, as public health is increasingly privatized as an individual responsibility. I begin by historicizing the radical women's health movement—charting a brief trajectory from the early 20th century to the contemporary moment while highlighting the movement’s primary rhetorics and discourses. Finally, I note the relationship between women's health movement discourses and contemporary disciplining discourses in maternity culture.
RHETORICS OF THE RADICAL WOMEN’S HEALTH MOVEMENT
Broadly speaking, the women's health movement attempted to wrest women's control over their own bodies from the medical establishment, and place it in the hands of women themselves. That is to say, it emerged as a powerful counter narrative to science and medical expertise controlling women’s bodies and health. Three major discourses characterized the women’s health movement in the 20th century: First, discourses of the women’s health movement contained a pointed critique of rhetorics of science, medicine and expertise; second, the movement critiqued the health care system for being a racist, classist, and sexist profit-driven industry; and finally, discourses of the women’s health movement emphasized liberal ideals of self-determination, autonomy, and empowerment.
Below, I sketch the narrative history of the women’s health movement while highlighting how the movement invoked these primary discourses as a starting point for understanding the evolution and incorporation of feminist liberation movement discourses in maternity culture.
70 A Crisis in Women’s Health
The 20th century women’s health movement sprouted in the early 1900s, when
Margaret Sanger wrote, fought, and organized for women to have the right to access to birth control.1 Sanger, a nurse by trade, saw firsthand the devastating effects of unwanted pregnancies on women in the low-income neighborhoods in New York City. Sanger was one of the first to identify reproductive health as a key site of struggle for women’s rights.
During the late 1800s and early 1900s, advancements in science, technology, and medicine led the public to begin turning to doctors and scientists to solve many of society’s problems.2 But the dominance and reliance on medical expertise came with a price, especially for women, who were treated as essentially diseased. Ehrenreich and
English explain,
Theories which guided the doctor’s practice from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century held that woman’s normal state was to be sick. This was not advanced as an empirical observation, but as a physiological fact. Medicine had “discovered” that female functions were inherently pathological.3
Menstruation, hysteria, and exhaustion provided the evidence and explanation for women’s inherent pathology, without regard for how engendered roles and institutions were shaping women’s experience. By the 1950s, the science of women's health had become even further abstracted from women’s everyday experience and practice. Not only was the medical profession male-dominated, but medical and scientific research often examined only male participants— leading to data and findings that excluded women yet were used as a basis for treating women.4
71 The crisis in women’s health was swelling at the same time that radical movements in the U.S.—including the women’s liberation movement— were gaining momentum and national attention. By 1968, radical movements in the United States were organizing around issues of civil, women’s, antiwar, student, and welfare rights. Sandra
Morgen explains:
[These] movements had mobilized hundreds of thousands of women and men whose political visions, while varying, contributed to an evolving critique of racism, sexism, capitalism, and imperialism. Radical rhetoric, huge demonstrations, an alphabet soup of new organizations and intensive grassroots organizing resulted in hard-won victories such as the Equal Pay Act (1963), the Civil Rights Act (1964), Executive Order 11246 (initiating affirmative action in 1965), and widespread acts of resistance to the draft, segregation, the humiliation of women in welfare offices, and more.5
Because the women’s health crisis was unfolding in such a robust era of struggle, women’s health activists were empowered to understand their struggles in relation to a broader critique of capitalism, white supremacy, and empire that characterized other liberation movements of the time.
It was also in 1968 that consciousness-raising, or “C-R” became a primary
“symbol and tactic of a growing women’s liberation movement.”6 C-R was a practice wherein women would assemble to share stories and information. C-R discussions sought to “raise” the consciousness of individual women and politicize their personal experiences.7 C-R groups became particularly important in the early formation of the women’s health movement— because there were no formalized spaces where women could discuss and learn about their bodies. C-R groups became the space where women would make connections and discover shared problems concerning women’s health.
72 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell argues that C-R is a unique rhetorical practice that at once constructs knowledge, theory, and praxis.8
In early 1969, the activities of one C-R group would come to represent for many the beginning of the contemporary women’s health movement in the United States.
During a workshop about women and their bodies— held in a classroom at Emmanuel
College in Boston during a women’s liberation conference—eight middle-class white women came together and “talked about childbirth, sexuality, relationships, birth control, and abortion (it was illegal).” 9 They also discussed their doctors, who the women unanimously described as “condescending, paternalistic, judgmental, and non- informative.”10 They agreed that they not only wanted to find medical professionals who approached women in thoughtful and constructive ways, but that they also knew too little about their own bodies. Each woman in the group agreed to take on a specific topic of women’s health, from venereal disease to nutrition, and write and share their research papers with each other and others in informational courses on women’s bodies. By 1973, they had incorporated as the Boston Women’s Health Collective (BWHC), and compiled these papers into a text called Our Bodies, Ourselves.11 The book, which sold over one million copies by 1973, is still in print and a remains a primary text on women health. In their opening chapter, the BWHC writes,
As we developed the course we realized more and more that we were really capable of collecting, understanding, and evaluating medical information ... We were equally struck by how important it was for us to be able to open up with one another and share our feelings about our bodies. The process of talking was as crucial as the facts themselves.12
73 The BWHC, their educational courses, and the text Our Bodies, Ourselves were instrumental in circulating information about women’s health and rhetorically constituting women as empowered subjects.
Our Bodies, Ourselves and the BWHC sparked the formation of other C-R groups that addressed the crisis in women’s health. Nichols explains that “by 1973, there were more than 1,200 women’s self-help health groups across the country” that expressed dissatisfaction with health care and sought to take “power from the paternalistic and condescending medical community,” and assume “control of their own health.”13 Barbara
Ehrenreich noted in an article for Ms. Magazine in 1984 that in these C-R groups women told stories about
being diagnosed as "difficult" for asking questions or "neurotic" for possessing a symptom for which the doctors did not yet have a disease. Stories of terrible insult: like that of the teenage black woman who had been subjected to a dozen serial pelvic exams for teaching purposes because she was a "charity case." Stories of unbearable loss: like that of a Missouri woman who told me she had been sterilized, at her doctor's discretion, just after delivering her first baby- stillborn. And some stories told in the third person, because the protagonists had not survived to tell them: stories of wombs perforated by unsafe-actually, experimental-IUDs; stories of sleazy back-alley abortionists who left women hemorrhaging or fatally infected.14
The personal stories and experiences of women revealed that the male-dominated medical and scientific establishments were harming the health and well-being of many women. The politicization of women’s experience meant that, as Nancy Tuana has argued, the women’s health movement was “not just a liberation movement, but an epistemological movement that sought to not only spread knowledge, but develop it using the stories and experiences of women.”15
74 Even in contemporary times, rhetorics of expertise are primary ways that we make sense of our lives and delegate the consumption of information.16 Yet as Johanna
Hartelius argues, expertise itself is a rhetorical practice wherein experts—such as medical practitioners, activists, scientists, and professionals—make claims about what the truth is or is not. The women’s health movement not only fostered a heavy critique of rhetorics of expertise and science, but also emphasized the superiority of personal and corporeal experience as primary sources of knowledge. In contrast, the medical profession was seen as a dogmatic and controlling institution that denied patients—especially women, the poor, and people of color—the right to information and choices for care and treatment.
While medical care for women was being deemed insufficient, the women’s health movement also emphasized that the medicalization of women had historically been a mechanism of control. Medicalization is the predominantly rhetorical process by which conditions are deemed a “medical problem” and “solved” through medical intervention.
Early in the 20th century, women’s dissatisfaction and depression was diagnosed as hysteria, and prescribed “rest.”17 Menstruating women were forced to be invalids, and pregnant women were “indisposed.”18 Worse, there were systematic practices that solved
“racial inferiority” through non-consented sterilizations and natural reproductive processes were treated as “problems to be solved” through surgical interventions.19
The dominance of science and expertise also meant that women, particularly mothers, became more and more subjected to expert advice about their bodies and lives.
Joan Wolf notes that in addition to the over-medicalization of reproductive functions,
75 motherhood itself became a scientific practice regulated and guarded by scientists. She writes,
The proliferation and moral elevation of science meant that mothers became subject to a reign of expertise in areas that long had been considered somewhat mundane. As homemaking became a domestic science, for example, women sought education in home economics and the science of housework. It was in this era of “scientific motherhood” that scientists began to make careers of advising mothers about what women had been doing largely on their own for centuries.20
The rise and dominance of the scientific and medical institutions led the women’s health movement to focus heavily on decolonizing science and expertise. Morgen writes,
“Movement activists were intent on demystifying health information, demedicalizing key aspects of women's reproductive processes, and deprofessionalizing routine health services.”21 The women’s health movement came to understand medicalization as a way of alienating women from their own corporeal/maternal experiences— and it was only by deprofessionalizing health services that women would assume control of their bodies.
Alongside this critique of expertise was an assessment that the medical establishment was fueled by our capitalist, profit-driven health care system. BWHC wrote in its introduction to the first edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves that the health crisis problem was rooted in the
prohibitive cost of medical care, the racist and inferior treatment of poor people and black people, the profit and prestige-making institutions of the ‘health industry’ (hospitals, medical schools, drug companies, etc.), the total neglect of the public or preventive protection, or the fee-for-service, pay-as-you-die economic base upon which most medical practice is based.22
This analysis of the health care system “rested on a critique of capitalism and of white, upper middle-class male physician control of health care.”23 The health care system is an institution that profits through the systemic control of the populations’ health. The
76 medical profession relies, as with other institutions of expertise, on its ability to justify its own existence: medical practitioners produce the research and evidence that demands patients turn to them—and only them—for medical care and health information.24 Some so-called “first-wave” feminists argued that if more women doctors were included in the medical profession these problems would not exist, but the radical leaders of the women’s health movement were skeptical of the institution of expertise in the medical profession itself—not necessarily the fact that there were fewer women medical professionals. “Always,” Morgen notes, “the movement's ideological” and rhetorical
“focus was the empowerment of women as patients, consumers, active agents in their own health care.”25 The emphasis on personal experience and the goal of the individual
“controlling one’s own body,” were perspectives steeped in the ethics of liberalism, yet, the simultaneous critique of class systems and racial institutions served to politicize women’s experiences beyond the personal.
While the BWHC and C-R groups are perhaps the most well known symbols of the women’s health movement, they did not make up its entirety. Sandra Morgen explains that there were “multiple births of the women's health movement. This movement was never monolithic, flourished in many different sites at once, and was the midwife for many different organizations and organizational forms over the next three decades.”26 Throughout the country, women were talking, organizing, and creating knowledge. Widespread rhetorics of women’s health addressed issues such as self- determination, childbirth, abortion, and infant feeding, while maintaining critiques of medicalization, the regimes of expertise, and the politicization of women’s personal
77 experience. In the next section, I will examine discourses of the women’s health movement “beyond Boston.”
Beyond Boston
In Los Angeles, Carol Downer and Lorraine Rothman “had taught themselves to do cervical self-examinations.”27 Downer organized a group of women to start the first
Feminist women’s health center. Additionally, women throughout the country began organizing to demedicalize childbirth and advocate for breastfeeding. In the late 1960s, both Lamaze International and the International Childbirth Educational Association were formed to not only educate expecting parents, but advocating for more child birthing choices.28 Activists like Doris Haire critiqued the medicalization of childbirth, arguing that obstetric and gynecological doctors’ medical interventions into childbirth— such as induced labor, separation between families during birth, and surgery— led to negative effects. She argued, “The higher incidence of fetal, neonatal, and maternal deaths in the
U.S. than in other developed countries is due to the unphysiological practices adopted during childbirth and the lack of emotional support offered to mothers in labor.”29
Activist rhetorics addressing childbirth concerns were successful— because by the 1980s, hospitals began allowing fathers into the delivery room, and turned away from some of the archaic practices of maternal health care.
In 1956, seven suburban Catholic housewives formed La Leche League (LLL) in
Chicago, IL as a way for women to discuss and promote breastfeeding. LLL’s
“philosophy was (and remains today) the principle that mothers are naturally best suited
78 to care for babies and to help other women with breastfeeding.”30 Although many radical women’s health activists rejected and critiqued LLL’s contention that childrearing was a woman’s natural job—they also echoed LLL’s message that breast milk was ideal nourishment for babies and the preferred method of infant feeding.31 Activists began contextualizing the decline of breastfeeding and the rise of formula feeding in the historical and political realities of 20th century medicine, and from 1970 to 1980, a series of successful rhetoric campaigns and social movements exposed the role formula feeding played in the spread of malnourishment and disease in developing countries.32 By 1997, the American Academy of Pediatrics’ (AAP), who had always supported breastfeeding but encouraged doctors to monitor formula feeding with patients, began asserting
“undeniably” “the breast is best.” Similarly, in 1999 the Office of Women’s Health in the
Department of Health and Human Services released the HHS Blueprint for Action on
Breastfeeding. The move by U.S. officials to define and promote breastfeeding through this document is now widely recognized as the moment when breastfeeding was rhetorically constituted a key public health issue in the U.S.33
Although more radicalized than LLL, a non-profit and underground group called
“Jane” was also developing in Chicago. Jane was a network of women’s liberation activists (who called themselves “Janes”) that would connect women to practitioners who would provide safe illegal abortions. In the 1960s, “abortion was illegal in all states except to save the life of the woman.”34 This resulted in the performance of more than one million illegal abortions per year that resulted in complications or death for between
500 and 1,000 women.35 Eventually, many Jane’s apprenticed and learned to provide the
79 abortions themselves for free or for a very low cost until abortion was legalized in 1973.
In the four years that Jane operated, there was not one fatality.36
Each of these aspects of the women’s health movement in the late sixties and early seventies rhetorically emphasized the distrust of doctors and medical expertise, women’s stories and narratives as key roads to liberation and empowerment, and the glorification of autonomy as a path to women’s empowerment. Ehrenreich writes that as the movement progressed, “It began to seem possible that, with enough organizing, studying, and-especially-sharing, we might just achieve ‘the right to control our own bodies.’”37 However, the power, scope, and dominance of the medical establishment would soon prove pervasive as feminist demands were absorbed into the language and ideology of medicalization. The dream of full control over one’s own body was deferred.
Alongside the increasing control of the medical establishment, there was an organized and powerful backlash against the women’s health movement that also served to define how the feminist women’s health agenda would assimilate into neoliberal logics.
A Backlash and Radical Retreat
The late 1970s and early 1980s, Susan Faludi argues, saw the burgeoning of a backlash against the radical feminist movement in the U.S. The fiscally conservative New
Right movement in American politics—linked to the anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-welfare, and Religious Right—forged this backlash.38 This movement began taking shape in the late 1960s after the presidential election campaign of Barry Goldwater; it was further radicalized after Roe v. Wade in 1973 and solidified its formation in the early 1980s with
80 the presidential election of Ronald Reagan. According to Faludi, “Reagan was the first president to oppose the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment] since Congress passed it—and the first ever to back a “Human Life Amendment” banning abortion and even some types of birth control.”39
Religious leaders and neo-conservatives began critiquing the radical actions and agendas of feminist activists. According to Faludi, the New Right saw feminists as the communists of the 1970s and 1980s.40 Right-wing activists identified feminists as a major threat to the conservative ideal of the American family, and the New Right movement focused a large amount of their energy undoing policies fought for and won by feminists in the 1970s. The New Right waged a war against abortion, sexual rights, and reproductive freedom—issues mostly affecting women, especially the poor or working class.41 In this section, I detail how the New Right’s backlash against feminism not only undermined the work of the women’s movement in general and the women’s health movement in particular, but that this backlash paved the way for women’s health issues such as breastfeeding and natural childbirth to be incorporated into conservative, anti- feminist, and neoliberal logics.
In 1981, several of the neo-conservative politicians in Congress introduced the
American Family Protection Bill, which according to Faludi was designed to specifically undo every major legislative battle won by the women’s movement. She writes,
The act’s proposals: eliminate federal laws supporting equal education; forbid “intermingling of the sexes in any sport or other school-related activities;” require marriage and motherhood to be taught as the proper career for girls; deny federal funding to any school using text books portraying women in nontraditional roles; repeal all federal laws protecting battered wives from their husbands; and ban
81 federally funded legal aid for any woman seeking abortion counseling or a divorce. The bill was largely written in the negative; in its long list of federal programs to rescind, the act offered only one real initiative of its own—new tax incentives to induce married women to have babies and stay home. Under this provision of the bill, a husband could set up a tax-deductible retirement fund if his wife earned no money at all that year. Evidently, even a Tupperware-hawking homemaker was suspect.42
While the American Family Protection Bill did not pass, many of the sentiments of the bill were addressed in other legislation introduced throughout the next few decades.
Most predominantly, there was an organized assault against access to birth control and abortion post-Roe v. Wade. Many of the feminist women’s health clinics that opened in the 1970s closed their once hopeful doors. 43 In 1976, Congress passed the first iteration of the Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of federal funds to pay for abortions (with exceptions in case of rape or incest, or a threat to the woman’s life) in federally administered programs, including Medicaid.44 Over the years, “the Hyde
Amendment’s restrictions have been included in an ever-wider range of programs—for instance, abortions are no longer covered for any federal employee or members of the military. This is exceptional treatment of a legal and common medical procedure.”45
Additionally, laws requiring spousal and parental consent for abortions and the global gag rule restricting U.S. aid internationally for abortions were also implemented.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, the neo-conservative movement was also a major instigator of the pro-family values campaign that undermined radical feminists’ critiques waged against the institution of motherhood. The pro-family values campaign upheld the institution of motherhood through a series of social and legislative maneuvers that re-emphasized the importance of the mother as the caretaker and sole-domestic
82 laborer in the family. Even popular feminists like Betty Friedan criticized the feminist movement for ignoring the role of the mother in the family.46 No surprise then, that in a
1999 article in The Economist claimed: “Feminism is Motherhood.” 47
Rosalind P. Petchesky argues that in addition to the legal maneuvers that eroded reproductive freedoms, the New Right and anti-abortion movement began strategically invoking powerful fetal imagery during the 1980s.48 Anti-abortionists strategically made
“fetal personhood […] by making the fetus a public presence” through sonogram pictures and post-abortion images.49 These images, coupled with other pro-natal discourses, dislocated the female body from the center of the debate on abortion. Fetal imagery, combined with the powerful discourses of pro-family values and pro-natalism campaigns, refocused the debate about abortion and motherhood from being about women’s health to fetal health. During this time, public discussion about maternal health issues such as breastfeeding and childbirth also shifted to focus on the health of the child or the fetus, not the mother.
Despite this backlash, feminist activists, writers, and theorists began calling on the movement to re-envision its radical tactics. Betty Friedan, who had pioneered the second- wave of feminism, argued in her 1981 book The Second Stage that the women’s movement—which according to Friedan won its major battles—now needed to refocus and change tactics to continue moving forward. 50 In the same breadth that she critiqued the conservative backlash against feminist legislation, Friedan decried radical tactics as being too masculine, and encouraged women to focus on volunteerism rather than the radical activism she had once initiated.
83 Friedan was not alone in her call for a quieter, tamer movement. Despite the significant setbacks experienced during the backlash, on the surface it seemed that many of the problems facing women’s health had been resolved by the 1980s and that feminist politics should adjust some of its more radical tactics to these changing realities. In 1984, even the BWHC began revising their radical rhetoric in the new edition Our Bodies,
Ourselves to focus more on health and scientific information produced by professionals and scientists and less on radically re-envisioning the feminist public sphere to reject rhetorics of expertise.51 Further, in 1986 the National Institute of Health required that women be included in research studies. By 1996, breastfeeding became recognized as a national public health issue. And by the early 2000s, it was largely accepted in the medical community that “women’s health” was a significant issue.52 While the success of the women’s health movement at a national level was astounding, it also solidified the retreat of the radical and polemical tactics that had brought the movement national attention.
The combination of the neo-conservative backlash against feminism and the subsequent anti-radical retreat cemented the recovery of the women’s health movement in the service of pro-natalism. For example, women across the politically divisive lines of the abortion debate had always found solidarity on issues such as breastfeeding and alternative birth. When the radical feminist movement began diffusing, organizations such as La Leche League (which is a conservative Christian breastfeeding advocacy group) were left to set the terms of the public discussion surrounding breastfeeding.
Without a radical articulation of breastfeeding as progressive, anti-capitalist feminist
84 issue, public discourse shifted to support breastfeeding as a woman’s natural duty and responsibility.53 LLL’s perspective on breastfeeding reinforces sex biology, traditional gender roles and divisions of labor—yet, it is the dominant voice promoting and supporting breastfeeding advocacy throughout the world.54
As the women’s health agenda progressed into the 21st century, feminist concerns and demands also began a slow assimilation into the medical establishment and institutions of scientific expertise. With this integration, the systemic critiques of the capitalist health care system, the patriarchal and oppressive institutions of expertise, and the medicalization of women’s bodies were replaced in favor of partnerships with medical professionals and government institutions to promote the “healthy” practices that had been central issues for the women’s health movement in the 1960s and 70s—most notably, breastfeeding, natural childbirth, and “family planning” (the more politically palpable and acceptable term used to describe abortion and contraceptive access).
Beginning in the 1990s, doctors and hospitals began promoting “integrative medicine” as a response to feminist demands—a kind of doctor-patient interaction that emphasized personal empowerment and corporeal experience in medical care.55 While integrative medicine satisfied many of the women’s health movement’s demands— critiques of expertise, science, and the profit-driven health care system were lost. It was also at this time when the AAP and the scientific community began exclusively supporting breastfeeding over formula, giving rise to the “breast is best” mantra.
Feminists responded not by maintaining their critique of institutions of expertise, but by celebrating and invoking the rhetorical power of expertise to further the political agenda
85 of the pro-breastfeeding movement. Finally, while Roe v. Wade is heralded as a landmark victory of the women’s health movement, it granted women the right to abortion based on their right to privacy when making a decision about their health with their doctors—not their inherent right to be self-determinant about their bodies or have abortion on demand.
“Rather,” as Morgen explains, “it acknowledges a woman's right to privacy in the medical choices she makes in consultation with her doctor, who retains power.”56
While each of the aforementioned successes seemingly addressed the demands of the women’s health movement, they also emphasized and legitimized the very thing that radical women’s health advocates in the 1970s critiqued: the systems of inequality that produce a profit-driven and inequitable health care system that privileges dominant groups and glosses over the systemic barriers encountered by marginalized bodies. This was especially true for reproductive health and maternity care. Despite the critiques voiced by women throughout the women’s health movement, Wolf explains, “By the last decades of the century, the professionalization of both pediatrics and obstetrics and gynecology had” still managed to emphasize that “pregnancy, birth, and childhood” are
“medical events to be managed by doctors.”57 In this post-Roe v. Wade context, even demedicalized practices heralded by women’s health advocates, like breastfeeding and natural childbirth, are mediated through the medical establishment. Having trouble breastfeeding? Call a lactation consultant. Want to give birth naturally but in a safe, modern way? Book a luxury birthing suite for thousands of dollars per night at your local hospital.58
86 It is not my intention to argue that all feminist empowerment discourses are alike.
In fact, my point is that empowerment discourses are not all the same, and do not always work in the service of the women they claim to liberate. There are many groups and individuals that maintain the radical critiques of systems of inequality in women’s health care and that emphasize women creating and situating knowledge about their health in experience. However, the collective, organized use of that experiential knowledge as a counter-critique to dominant institutions of health, expertise, capital, and science has been decentralized as the women’s health agenda has become legitimized and incorporated into the regime of public health in the United States. This co-optation occurred, in response to the neo-conservative backlash against feminism and the concomitant promotion of fetal rights and pro-natalism. In the wake of such a shift, I contend that discourses of maternal health are privatized onto the maternal body, disciplining her to surveil herself. In the next section, I explain how the privatization and surveillance of women’s reproductive health can be historically situated in the neoliberal context.
THE PRIVATIZATION AND SURVEILLANCE OF WOMEN’S HEALTH
This dissertation rests on the premise that previously radical empowerment discourses about the maternal body — specifically those addressing breastfeeding and natural childbirth— have been incorporated and entrenched into neoliberal logics. In the previous chapter, I laid the foundation for understanding how feminist discourses have incorporated neoliberal ethics of choice and empowerment, while above I have
87 articulated how women’s health movement discourses emerged as a powerful counter narrative to institutions of expertise only to become incorporated into the medical establishment and the neo-conservative movement. In this section, I argue that women’s health (and by proxy maternal health) since the 1990s has been discursively framed almost exclusively in terms of individual responsibility—something to be solved at the level of the body.59
In wake of landmark successes like Roe V. Wade, increased national recognition of the women’s health agenda, and the incorporation of feminist logics into medical practices— women’s health discourses now focus on behavioral adjustment, health promotion and awareness. Discourses shifted from critiquing institutions, to critiquing individuals: Activists proclaim that breastfeeding rates would increase if women were only educated enough to choose to do it more, while childbirth activists echo what Doris
Haire said in 1972—that “American mothers must be educated to accept a certain amount of inconvenience and discomfort in order to have a delivery more conducive to the good health of themselves and their babies.”60 Suddenly, women are targeted as the source of health problems, and their choices and decisions about their bodies marked as issues of public importance.
But “locating responsibility with women for the birth of healthy infants and for good health throughout life,” Lock writes, “is the product of a moral discourse, one that, although it may appear innocent, is politically motivated.”61 The emphasis on individual responsibility in women’s health has emerged in the post-second wave context where discourses of women’s health and maternity have increasingly been framed in the
88 neoliberal logics of choice, individual responsibility, and entrepreneurialism. Lock argues that the dominant ideology in the U.S. that being “healthy” means being in
“control of one’s health, and maintaining health are an internalized part of individual subjectivity.”62 In the post-second wave context, the maternal body, as an individual unit, is celebrated for hard work, entrepreneurialism, and having unrestrained “freedom” and liberty” to make choices about her body. Sara Hayden and Lynn O'Brien Hallstein contend that women’s choices to be mothers, to get abortions, or to participate in particular maternal behaviors are all now framed as exercising individual liberty— seemingly no longer bound by structural or material barriers in society.63 As Cloud notes,
“According to the dictates of a capitalist consumer society, individuals are ‘obliged to be free’ without reference to the social conditions of nonfreedom that constrain choice making and individual opportunity.”64 Framing motherhood and maternal health as
“choices” mutes arguments made in favor of equal access to free childcare, longer maternity leave, and social aid since women can “choose” whether or not to have children or participate in behaviors deemed “healthy” for women.65
Activists throughout the women’s health movement fought for the right of women to control their own bodies and make informed health decisions. However, without a simultaneous critique of the capitalist and inequitable health systems and class systems that produced the inequality in health care discourses of personal responsibility place the burden and the blame on the backs of individual women. Wolf writes that in contemporary times:
89 Women are confronted with an abundance of far-reaching and often highly contested knowledge about how to create optimal wombs and then to monitor their fetuses, babies, and children in order to reduce the risks of anything deemed undesirable. This unrelenting stream of information can be both empowering and maddening. Through a process of normalization, mothers internalize a sense that they can and should control their bodies and that responsible mothers produce healthy outcomes.66
Unfortunately, the privatization of reproductive health has “put the concept of health in danger of being depoliticized.”67 While the collective integration of multiple women’s personal experience led to development of shared experiential knowledge during the women’s health movement that politicized women’s experience and sparked a radical social movement— current discourses of women’s health overly individualize, personalize, and as a result, depoliticize women’s experiences as merely “individual health choices.”68 Cloud notes that public discourses that transform social problems into personal ails are particularly problematic because they function therapeutically, dislocating “political energy, anger and activity in the realm of personal life, where oppositions to systems of oppression and exploitation can do little damage and exert minimal long-term influence on relations of power as they exist.”69 Further, rhetorics of individual responsibility in health discourses serve to rationalize laissez faire approaches to public health policy. Since the neoliberal turn, many “public health” issues — including obesity, HIV/AIDS, and heart disease — are privatized as the solutions proposed by government agencies focus less on creating truly public solutions (and highlighting the accompanying systemic inequities that compound health problems, such as poverty) and instead on supporting private non-profit NGOs and encouraging individual behavioral changes.70 Lock argues that “healthy policy that consists mainly of
90 exhorting individuals to change their behavior not only is shortsighted but, more ominously, indirectly protects those institutions that threaten individual health through discrimination, exploitation, pollution, or iatrogenesis.”71
“Public health” under neoliberalism is a complex network of public and private pressures, rules, laws, and expectations that discipline the body to choose certain
"healthy" behaviors or feel guilt and shame for not doing so. Public health policies accompanied by cultural rhetorics form a disciplining grid of discourses that serve to not only manufacture consent to legislation, but uphold societal norms of “healthy living.”72
This is especially true of health discourses about the maternal body. Wolf notes,
Neoliberal governments are concerned with the health not of individuals but of the general population, and they establish parameters of healthy living that each responsible citizen is to observe for the sake of the community. These boundaries represent a selective mobilization of science, or the identification by public officials of behaviors that they believe to be most conducive to the nation’s health. In a risk culture, in which people are always almost sick, good citizens devote themselves to prevention; responsibility for the health of babies is privatized, or assigned to mothers; and social and economic impediments to healthy babies are deemed to be the task of mothers to surmount. 73
The maternal body now has a civic responsibility to not only research risks, consult with physicians, and maintain their health (and the health of their fetus or child) in the service of the “public good”— but must choose only those behaviors deemed healthy by public health officials, advocates, and scientists. Wolf continues,
State institutions advise that breast is best for babies and that therefore good citizen-mothers will breastfeed. Cultural reasons for not breastfeeding are treated as obstacles, and economic circumstances become barriers that each mother must be persuaded to overcome. Scientific uncertainty disappears, choice becomes overdetermined, and breastfeeding emerges as central to civic motherhood.74
91 The discursive privatization of women’s and fetal health as “civic motherhood” functions to surveil and discipline women’s health choices; it celebrates her individual liberty and empowerment to make choices, while restricting her available options.
CONCLUSION: THE RISE OF MATERNITY CULTURE
In this chapter, I have articulated that the incorporation and depoliticization of feminist rhetorics over the last three decades occurred alongside the advancement of neoliberal logics and ethics in the wider public sphere. Accordingly, contemporary motherhood discourses privatize women’s health, fetal health, and familial responsibilities onto the maternal body. It is my aim to show how contemporary maternity culture discourses reflect logics of neoliberalism and engage in the rhetorical process of disciplining the maternal body.
Maternity culture is a contemporary phenomenon: an aggregate of discourse about the maternal body in public culture. While maternity culture discourses are different than the discourses of medicalization women’s health advocates critiqued in the first half of the 20th century their effect is the same—the maternal body is subject to the demands of others. In fact, the maternal body and the actions of mothers are now modes of citizenship for the public good—as public health becomes her responsibility, and hers alone. This disciplining grid of cultural and political discourses is representative of the evasive power Foucault described: The maternal body is incorporated into a system that teaches her to surveil herself.
92 In the final two chapters of this dissertation, I examine discourses of contemporary maternity culture to illuminate how we come to “discipline mommy.” I look at specific manifestations of breastfeeding and natural childbirth cultures in new media contexts. Throughout these case studies, I interrogate the ways that feminist empowerment discourses in maternity culture rationalize shifts in the intensification of maternal corporeal expectations, and reflect neoliberal ethics in the wider public sphere.
By understanding these discourses as rhetorical expressions of neoliberal ethics, we can better understand in whose interests they serve.
The point here is not to critique women who breastfeed or give birth to their children naturally, nor is it to diminish the importance of advocating for the rights of women to breastfeed in public, have access to clean rooms to breastfeed, or to have their doctors and medical insurance companies respect their wishes to give birth on their own terms. Instead, I wish to unearth the system of values and practices, within which maternal bodies are disciplined and constrained by some of the very discourses that claim to have their best interests at heart. It is important, as Bordo notes, to “highlight a discourse that is gradually changing our conception and experience of our bodies, a discourse that encourages us to ‘imagine the possibilities’ and close our eyes to limits and consequences.”75 Discourses of maternity culture are at once resistant to dominant institutions and reinforcing of powerful neoliberal ideology. They are complicated and slippery. They serve women, while also serving corporate interests. They reject the medical establishment’s desire to control women’s bodies, just as they invoke science and expertise to support their cause. They tell us to look one way, to do one thing, while
93 shaming us into doing the other. They contradict. They surveil. In the case studies that follow, I hope to highlight not only the curvatures of contemporary maternity culture but also what the limits and consequences of these shifting discourses might be.
1 “Biographical Sketch,” Margaret Sanger Papers Project, accessed June 21, 2013. http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/secure/aboutms/index.html 2 Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of Experts’ Advice to Women, Revised Edition (New York: Anchor Books, 2005), 76. 3 Ehrenreich and English, For Her Own Good, 121. 4 Sandra Morgen, Into Our Own Hands: The Women's Health Movement in the United States, 1969-1990 (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), Kindle Edition. 5 Morgen, Into Our Own Hands, Kindle Locations 129-131. 6 Morgen, Into Our Own Hands, Kindle Location 131. 7 For good rhetorical studies on consciousness-raising see: Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Consciousness-raising: Linking theory, criticism, and practice,” RSQ: Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32, no.1 (2002): 45-64; and, Stacey K Sowards and Valerie R. Renegar, “The rhetorical function of consciousness-raising in third wave feminism,” Communication Studies 55, no.4 (2004): 535-552. 8 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Consciousness-raising: Linking theory, criticism, and practice,” RSQ: Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32, no.1 (2002): 45-64. 9 Morgen, Into Our Own Hands, Kindle Locations 139-141. 10 Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book by and for Women (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 1. 11 Morgen, Into Our Own Hands, Kindle Location 145. 12 Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves, 1. 13 Nichols, “History of the Women’s Health Movement in the 20th Century,” 61. 14 Barbara Ehrenreich, “Body Politic: The Growth of the Women's Health Movement,” Ms. Magazine, May 1984, retrieved from http://www.msmagazine.com/spring2002/ehrenreich.asp (accessed June 21, 2013). 15 Nancy Tuana, “The Speculum of Ignorance: The Women’s Health Movement and Epistemologies of Ignorance,” Hypatia 21, no. 3 (2006): 1-19. 16 Johanna Hartelius, The Rhetoric of Expertise (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010). 17 Ehrenreich and English, For Her Own Good, 113. 18 Ehrenreich and English, For Her Own Good, 122. 19 Kathyrn Pauly Morgan, “Contested Bodies, Contested Knowledges: Women, Health and the Politics of Medicalization,” in The Politics of Women’s Health: Exploring Agency and Autonomy, ed. Susan Sherwin (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998), 83. 20 Joan B. Wolf, Is Breast Best?: Taking on the Breastfeeding Experts and the New High Stakes of Motherhood (New York: New York University Press, 2011), Kindle Edition, 4. 21 Morgen, Into Our Own Hands, Kindle Locations 1770-1771.
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22 Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book by and for Women (Boston: New England Press, 1971), 136. 23 Morgen, Into Our Own Hands, Kindle Locations 1817-1818. 24 Hartelius, The Rhetoric of Expertise. 25 Morgen, Into Our Own Hands, Kindle Location 1825. 26 Morgen, Into Our Own Hands, Kindle Locations 240-242. 27 Ehrenreich and English, For Her Own Good, 1 28 Nichols, “History of the Women’s Health Movement in the 20th Century,” 56. 29 Doris Haire, “The Culture Warping of Childbirth,” Icea News 11, no.1 (1972), 5. 30 Wolf, Is Breast Best?, 10. 31 Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973), 225. 32 Wolf, Is Breast Best?, 11. 33 Wolf, Is Breast Best?, 21. 34 Nichols, “History of the Women’s Health Movement in the 20th Century,” 56. 35 Nichols, “History of the Women’s Health Movement in the 20th Century,” 56. 36 Morgen, Into Our Own Hands, Kindle Location 169. 37 Ehrenreich, “Body Politic.” 38 Paul Gottfried and Thomas Fleming, The Conservative Movement (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988), 77–95. 39 Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, Kindle Edition (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2009), 248. 40 Faludi, Backlash, 247. 41 Faludi, Backlash, 247. 42 Faludi, Backlash, 247-248. 43 Nichols, “History of the Women’s Health Movement in the 20th Century,” 57. 44 Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, “The Politics of Reproductive Rights,” in Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book by and for Women (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011), 773. 45 Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, “The Politics of Reproductive Rights,” 774. 46 Betty Friedan, The Second Stage (New York: Summ, 1981). 47 “Feminism is Motherhood,” The Economist, 11 March 1999, http://www.economist.com/node/319165 (last accessed 5 July 2013). 48 Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, “Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction,” Feminist Studies 13, no.2 (1987): 263-292. 49 Petchesky, “Fetal Images,” 264. 50 Nan Robertson, “Betty Friedan Ushers in a ‘Second Stage,’” The New York Times, October 19, 1981, http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/specials/friedan-stage.html 51 Susan Wells, Our Bodies, Ourselves and the Work of Writing (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). 52 Nichols, “History of the Women’s Health Movement in the 20th Century,” 60. 53 “Philosophy,” La Leche League International, http://www.llli.org/philosophy.html?m=1,0,1 (accessed July 5, 2013).
95
54 “LLL History,” La Leche League International, http://www.llli.org/lllihistory.html (accessed July 5, 2013). 55 Barbara E. Willard, “Feminist Interventions in Biomedical Discourse: An Analysis of the Rhetoric of Integrative Medicine,” Women’s Studies in Communication 28, no.1 (2005), 115-148. 56 Morgen, Into Our Own Hands, Kindle Locations 1867-1868. 57 Wolf, Is Breast Best?, 9. 58 Hannah Werthan, “Most Luxurious Birthing Suites in U.S.,” Parents Magazine, http://www.parents.com/pregnancy/giving-birth/labor-and-delivery/labor-and-delivery- most-luxurious-birthing-suites/#page=3 (accessed July 4, 2013). 59 Margaret Lock, “Situating Women in the Politics of Health,” in The Politics of Women’s Health: Exploring Agency and Autonomy, ed. Susan Sherwin (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998), 48. 60 Haire, “The Culture Warping of Childbirth,” 5. 61 Lock, “Situating Women in the Politics of Health,” 50. 62 Lock, “Situating Women in the Politics of Health,” 50. 63 Sara Hayden and Lynn O'Brien Hallstein, eds., Contemplating Maternity in an Era of Choice: Explorations into Discourses of Reproduction (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2010). 64 Dana L. Cloud, Control and Consolation in America Culture and Politics: Rhetorics of Therapy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998), 21. 65 Clare Chambers, Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 10. 66 Wolf, Is Breast Best?, 75. 67 Lock, “Situating Women in the Politics of Health,” 50. 68 Tasha N. Dubriwny, “Consciousness-Raising as Collective Rhetoric: The Articulation of Experience in the Redstockings’ Abortion Speak-Out of 1969,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91, no.4 (2005): 395-422. 69 Cloud, Control and Consolation in America Culture and Politics, 104. 70 These NGOs are also often owned by corporations. 71 Lock, “Situating Women in the Politics of Health,” 49. 72 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972- 1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 105. 73 Wolf, Is Breast Best?, 68-70. 74 Wolf, Is Breast Best?, 68-70. 75 Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 39.
96 Chapter Four: “Whip ‘em out!”: Macho Maternalism in TheBump.com’s Boob- olution Campaign
In August of 2010, TheBump.com, the world’s fastest growing first-time parenting website, launched a campaigned called the “Boob-olution.” The point? To promote the
Department of Health and Human Service’s National Breastfeeding Awareness Month through a series of online interactive tools, celebrity interviews, and video campaigns on
YouTube. The campaign encourages women to “whip ‘em out” (their breasts) because breastfeeding is “what your tits are for.”1 Citing scientific evidence and “real mom” experience, the campaign unequivocally contends that mothers must breastfeed.
The Boob-olution campaign is just a small portion of TheBump.com’s “mommy content.” Over the last 5 years, TheBump.com has spent millions of dollars building the infrastructure and audience of the website. In January 2009, TheBump.com’s parent company purchased www.breastfeeding.com, the most visited site for breastfeeding information.2 Bump co-founder Carley Roney also published a book in October 2010 called The Baby Bump, which is “a comprehensive guide that offers expert and real mom advice on surviving those all-important nine months.”3 Finally, in 2012, TheBump.com launched “The Bump Best of Baby” awards—which tell moms the best products to purchase for their babies.4
TheBump.com is owned and operated by the lifestyle media and service company
XO Group. Originally known by the name of its founding website and brand,
TheKnot.com, the XO group designs websites they hope will be the “go-to” sites for content about family life events (marriage, nesting, having babies) for what they call G- 97 E-M-S (Girls Engaged in Massive Spending).5 The XO Group claims to create dedicated
G-E-M-S who they can integrate into their advertisers product placements, across their three websites (TheKnot.com, TheNest.com, and TheBump.com).6 By engaging G-E-M-S
(who are brides, newlyweds, and first time moms) with “trustworthy” content that is created by users at local levels and with the help of carefully selected experts, they can make more money for themselves and their advertisers. According to MarketWatch, “The bump editorial team […] provides new moms stage-by-stage advice, stylish ideas, local resources, interactive tools and a savvy online community who are obsessed with knowing about everything baby.”7 While the content on TheBump.com is presented as objective, localized, and experiential—it is actually driven by the interests of advertisers and paid sponsors who want moms to think that this is a self-perpetuated community. By persuading new mothers to trust and engage in the community of influential moms and
"experts," the site’s creators produce brand loyalists who will buy the products and believe the information pitched on the site.
Joan Wolf argues that feminist scholars and activists must heed more attention to breastfeeding as a social process.8 She writes, “Breastfeeding literally embodies popular unease about risk, health, and motherhood; it serves as a repository for numerous cultural anxieties, many of which have little to do with infant feeding per se.”9 Modern discourses about breastfeeding are imbued with cultural, social, economic, and political articulations of citizenship, identity, and family.10 As the debate over whether “breast is best” rages on, the only thing that is clear is that “mothers’ infant feeding experiences are becoming
98 increasingly fraught with emotional burdens, including anxiety, frustration, guilt, feelings of failure, and worry about living up to the standard of ‘good motherhood.’”11
Breastfeeding culture is a space where complex interests are served and negotiated. Wolf notes that breastfeeding culture
is embraced by grass-roots women’s health advocates as well as by institutional medicine, or the scientists, doctors, and medical associations that health activists have long mistrusted. It serves liberal, radical, and cultural feminist ends at the same time that it appeals to non- and even antifeminists.12
It is the complex signification of breastfeeding that enables it to operate in service of diverse, and often conflicting, interests. Breastfeeding culture appropriates the progressive cosmopolitan ethos of the women’s health movement, while making the maternal body and her choices public, moral concern. For-profit companies, non-profit organizations, and doctors celebrate breastfeeding as “best.” Breastfeeding culture, exemplified by the discourses in TheBump.com’s Boob-olution campaign, argues for itself on the basis of empowerment and liberty, while disciplining the choices maternal bodies are allowed to make. The decision of what to do with the maternal body is no longer her own, but driven by interested discourses.
In this chapter, I argue that the Boob-olution campaign uses masculine coded language, what I call macho maternalism, to encourage mothers to “Join the Boob- olution” and forego formula feeding in favor of breastfeeding. Macho maternalism is a set of strange gender normative discursive codes that glorify pain, the burden of domestic labor, and personal responsibility as empowerment, while simultaneously sexualizing the female body, reinforcing sex-biology and celebrating hyper-femininity. Macho
99 maternalism’s contradictions and complexities elude detection and rationalize the acceptance of an ideological ethos of neoliberalism that celebrates entrepreneurialism and justifies ethics of marketization. I begin by historicizing macho maternalism as a cultural discourse immersed in neoliberal logics and hegemonic masculinity. Through a rhetorical analysis of texts, videos, and comments on TheBump.com’s interactive site, I then chart how the discourses in the Boob-olution campaign reflect macho maternalism, while simultaneously rationalizing the intensification of maternal corporeal expectations and the masculinized neoliberal ethics in the wider public sphere. I conclude by complicating
TheBump.com as a corporatized space and discussing the implications of invoking macho maternalism discourses to sell a stylized and idealized kind of motherhood to women.
MACHO MATERNALISM
Macho maternalism is a discourse that is coded in hyper-masculine language, yet celebrates hyper-femininity; it encourages women to be "macho" about their pain and suffering, while overtly sexualizing maternal bodies and being biologically determinant about gender and sex roles; and, finally, it justifies complete self-sacrifice as a woman’s natural job, public duty, and personal responsibility. In this section, I lay a foundation for understanding macho maternalism as a complex set of discourses inextricably linked to neoliberal logics and hegemonic masculinity.
I use the term “macho maternalism” to describe the discourses in the Boob- olution campaign for several reasons. As a construct, “macho” discourses mark men’s superiority over women (and other men) through a denigration of “feminine” behaviors
100 and a glorification of traditionally iconic and ideal notions of masculine performance.
R.W. Connell noted that throughout different cultures hierarchies of masculinity are used to express and maintain gendered power relationships.13 Hyper-masculine discourses are the performative enactment of hegemonic masculinity in a particular cultural and historical context.14 In their study of hyper-masculinities in Western cultures, Donald
Mosher and Mark Sirkin contend that Western hyper-masculine or “macho” behavior is marked by callousness towards women, a perspective that violence is “manly,” and a belief that “danger is exciting.”15 In the United States, scholars such as Jackson Katz and
Micheal Kimmel have identified rugged individualism, the sexual objectification of women, homophobia, risk-taking, and violence as representative of hegemonic masculinities.16 Communication scholars have studied the complex formations of hegemonic masculinity throughout diverse contexts, particularly highlighting the role that discourses play in supporting, conditioning, and defying the dominant conceptions of masculinity.17
While there is by no means a direct analogy between the discourses present in the
Boob-olution campaign and the complex forms of hyper-masculinities performed throughout diverse cultures and contexts, the underlying conceptual understanding of machoism – that there is a hierarchy of gendered codes, behaviors, and language that are imbued in power relations in historical contexts—is particularly salient in the present case.18 Macho maternalism marks “good” and “bad” maternal behaviors as well as
“natural” and “unnatural” gender roles. Further, one of the most compelling and odd characteristics of discourses throughout the Boob-olution campaign is that they use 101 language that is coded in masculinity to reinforce sex-biology, gender norms, and sexualize the female body, all while claiming to be a discourse of female empowerment.
In their analysis of Sarah Palin’s rhetoric at the 2008 Republican National Convention,
Katie L. Gibson and Amy L Heyse examine the ways that traditionally feminine, maternal discourses can also be coded to sustain hegemonic masculinity.19 Mary Vavrus has also noted the ways that hegemonic masculinity often functions to reinforce gender norms and ideals even as it defies its traditional codes.20 Macho maternalism is different from other forms of masculinity enacted in female contexts, such as Judith Halberstam’s female masculinity, because it functions to reassert traditional gender roles and sex- biology, not defy them.21 It is for these reasons that I strategically invoke the term macho maternalism to describe this collection of often perplexing discourses.
The complexity of macho maternalism can be better understood when we contextualize it as a discourses tied to the dominant ethics and logics associated with neoliberalism in the United States. Meika Loe notes that institutionalized sexism is connected, in deeply rooted ways to the neoliberal ethics that guide U.S. and global economic and social policies.22 Similarly, the enactment of macho maternalism in maternity culture reflects the intersectional relationship between neoliberal logics and hegemonic masculinity in discourses.
It may seem odd that a discourse about something as archetypically feminine as breastfeeding is an enactment of symbolic codes of hegemonic masculinity, so further explanation of this relationship is necessary. Marieke de Goede has previously noted the ways that, “seemingly disinterested financial language is firmly rooted in gendered 102 cultural practices.”23 In her study of global finance markets, masculinity, and neoliberal logics, Penny Griffin similarly argues that in a neoliberal world—the financial industry is masculinized and is “a community of speech wherein certain groups and/or types of activity create and sustain a culture that offers incentives for, and rewards, certain types of behavior (e.g. aggression, competitiveness, individual, risk taking), while delegitimizing others.”24 Neoliberalism, I argue, is the cultural, political, and economic manifestation of social relations imbued in hegemonic masculinity and the simultaneous advancement of capitalism as an economic system. Framing neoliberal logics as a hegemonic masculinized discourses does not necessarily denote an explicit connection to the male body, but rather a perspective on how the discursive formations of neoliberalism and hegemonic masculinity are interrelated, mutually conditioning, and ingrained in our cultural fabric.25 Griffin explains,
Beliefs about masculinity are a strategic part of modern, economically circumscribed gender discourses. Historic relations of economic and political domination have tended to embed a particular vision of manliness in contemporary economic interactions, through the dominance, in large part, of particular institutions, with the patterns of masculinity embedded in these institutions becoming global standards.26
What it means to be “personally responsible” or “entrepreneurial” (the primary ethics of neoliberalism) has developed in a political and social context where the terms of being a successful economic actor and citizen are inextricably linked to being a “man,” and vice- versa. In Michael Lewis’ 1987 revealing insider’s account of Wall Street, Liar’s Poker, he described an archetype of the most successful traders in Wall Street financial firms: the “Big Swinging Dick” or BSD. A BSD was a Wall Street player who pulled in the
103 most money and praise (often while losing big for their clients or being vicious).27 The
BSD was the manliest of men: competitive, aggressive, risk-taking, vicious, individualistic and “masculine” (even if they were a woman).28 The BSD is a prime example of the interrelatedness of hegemonic masculinity and neoliberal logics. The symbolic codes and qualities that our culture uses to assess “men” and neoliberal citizens are the same: to survive one must be a BSD.
Not only are the symbolic codes of hegemonic masculinity and neoliberalism interrelated, but also they are both systems fueled by the production of antagonisms and inequality. Just as capitalist economies divide subjects and flame antagonisms between groups, hegemonic masculinity is a coded system that requires power to be relegated to a few privileged hands. Robert Jensen explains: “By definition in this conception of masculinity, there's only one real man at any given moment.”29 This means that masculine subjects are “in constant struggle with each other for dominance” in an everlasting and exhausting struggle for power and assurance. 30 Rhetorics that display the features of macho maternalism reflect the inconsistencies and slipperiness of hegemonic masculinity and capitalism, configuring and reproducing “ideas and practices of individual, collective and moral responsibility” on the basis of neoliberal ethics. 31
“Neoliberalization” David Harvey argues, “has done remarkably well in restoring, or in some instances […] creating, the power of an economic elite.”32 While discourses of neoliberalism are framed as utopian project that can reorganize global capitalism in a more efficient and equitably accumulative way, the discourses of neoliberalization actually primarily operate as a system of justification and legitimation to “re-establish the 104 conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites.”33 This is not to say that these are entirely tidy discourses. On the contrary, the very natural of neoliberalization often requires abstraction and dislocation. Harvey explains that:
The evidence suggests […] that when neoliberal principles clash with the need to restore or sustain elite power, then the principles are either abandoned or become so twisted as to be unrecognizable. This in no way denies the power of ideas to act as a force for historical-geographical change. But it does point to a creative tension between the power of neoliberal ideas and the actual practices of neoliberalization that have transformed how global capitalism has been working over the last three decades.34
The neoliberal discourses at work in the Boob-olution campaign are elaborate slights of hand: Inconsistent and often contradictory, yet always functioning to galvanize neoliberal ideas in the service of re-establishing elite power. In the following section, I turn to the texts and videos from the campaign to unearth the complex ways that rhetorics of macho maternalism (which are both neoliberal and hegemonically masculine) are enacted.
Specifically, I focus on how rhetorics of macho maternalism deploy discourses of masculine entrepreneurship and rugged individualism.35
THEBUMP.COM’S BOOB-OLUTION
The Boob-olution campaign consists of several correlative components that can be accessed through TheBump.com’s website. When a user first approaches the site, they are greeted with the message: “Hey, mamas! Did you know August is National
Breastfeeding Month? For such a great cause, we've created a campaign all about spreading the word that breastfeeding doesn't suck!”36 The campaign, videos, interviews, and interactive tools are designed to encourage women to breastfeed. Although first
105 created in 2010, the Boob-olution website has been updated each year with new information and sponsors (the 2013 Boob-olution is brought to you by the Boppy
Company—a pillow company designed for babies). The site asks mothers to pledge to participate in Public Display of Breastfeeding day on August 15th, or to pledge to promise to breastfeed when they have children by posting to their Facebook or Twitter page an automated message that reads: “I just pledged to breastfeed! I joined the Public Display of Breastfeeding Day boob-olution w/@TheBump and @BoppyCompany Take part
8/15.” The text is followed by a link to the Boob-olution’s main site.
At the center of the campaign is also a two minute and eighteen second video containing celebrates alongside several “regular moms” who give testimony about breastfeeding and encourage mothers to “whip ‘em out.”37 The video begins with the women each saying different names for breasts including “Taa taas,” “boulders,”
“hooters,” and “high beams,” to name a few. Then actress and model Ali Landry appears and says, “Did you know that by breastfeeding your knockers could save the U.S. thirteen billion dollars per year in health care costs?” Landry’s proclamation is followed by
Brothers and Sisters actress Sara Jane Morris shouting, “Whip ‘em out,” and Switched at
Birth star Constance Marie insisting, “It’s what your tits are for!” The video continues by accounting women’s experience initially struggling to breastfeed, how much they loved it once they got the hang of it, how natural it is (and ironically, also how unnatural it is that they required expert intervention), and finally spouting off a list of facts and scientific evidence supporting how healthy it is for mothers and babies. The video ends by reiterating that if women breastfeed they can save the U.S. billion dollars in health care 106 costs, that they should “whip ‘em out!,” and that breastfeeding “is what your knockers are for.”
In addition to this video, the Boob-olution website features profiles from not only the celebrities listed above, but also singer Lisa Loeb, Saturday Night Live alumnus Ana
Gasteyer, Desperate Housewives actress Brenda Strong, Park’s and Recreation’s Jama
Williamson, Kelly Rutherford from Gossip Girl, entertainment editor of Essence
Magazine Cori Murray, the creative director of television network TBS, two doctors, a photographer, an attorney, a non-profit arts director, and a mommy blogger.38 While ethnically diverse, this group of celebrities and “real mommies” are far from average. In fact, almost all are wealthy and privileged. In this section, I analyze the video and the profiles of the “real mommies” featured on the site. These are the primary texts that represent the campaigns message about breastfeeding and the Boob-olution, and so reflect most holistically the discourses of the campaign.
I argue that the discourses in the Boob-olution campaign invoke macho maternalism to justify the privatization of the maternal body. The mother becomes responsible for everything from their babies’ health, to the state of the economy and national health care. Specifically, the campaign emphasizes the masculinized neoliberal ethics of entrepreneurialism and rugged individualism. The macho discourses of the
Boob-olution campaign rationalize hyper-masculinized neoliberal ethics, while serving the corporate interests of TheBump.com and obscuring the interests of women
(particularly those who are poor and /or working class). However, as will become clear throughout the analysis, the macho discourses in the Boob-olution campaign also oddly 107 work to naturalize sex-biology and femininity. In this section, I examine narratives of masculinized entrepreneurialism that naturalize and sexualize the maternal body, before turning to how science is used strategically to privatize responsibility onto the individual maternal body.
Show Me Your Dick! … and other Narratives of Entrepreneurialism
The first way that discourses in the Boob-olution campaign conjures macho maternalism and functions to rationalize neoliberal logics is through the invocation of coded language that reflects the appeals of entrepreneurial masculinity. In addition to the connections outlined in the previous section, the archetype of the “entrepreneur” is a cultural construct that is historically and popularly masculine.39 Loe argues that, “The quest for manhood,” or “the effort to achieve, demonstrate, and prove masculinity—is rooted deep in American history, starting at least with the nineteenth century’s self-made man.”40 Entrepreneurialism is a discourse that celebrates the individual actor working alone to organize resources, to act boldly, to ignore circumstance and make “something” from nothing. Cultural manifestations of “entrepreneurship are […] masculine in nature, given their epideictic focus on heroes, captains, conquests, and victories, and the creation and celebration of such masculine figures as Henry Ford, Donald Trump, and Bill
Gates.”41
The narrative of masculinized entrepreneurship permeates the Boob-olution campaign. To begin, the campaign’s key message, “Whip ‘em out!”, most resembles the colloquial phrase, “Whip your dick out,” which is a coded descriptor for men pulling out
108 their phalluses to measure their length and determine their dominance above other men
(and women). The use of the phrase “whip ‘em out” in the Boob-olution video codes breastfeeding and “whipping ‘em out” as an act of empowerment, agency, and dominance. In his study of Balinese cockfight, anthropologist Clifford Geertz notes how masculinity is often enacted through proverbial “pissing contests” – where men measure their manhood, or the “size of their cocks” through comparison and competition with other men.42 Like the archetype of the BSD, the metaphor of “whipping out your dick” exemplifies the competitive, aggressive ethos of entrepreneurialism. Permeating the
“whip em’ out” mantra is a faint taunt: “Come on, punk, just do it! Just breastfeed.”
Under an ethic of entrepreneurialism “masculine agents are called upon to act boldly in the face of panic, irrationality, and ‘exuberance.’”43 In fact, showing your “balls” is a primary symbol of the entrepreneurial spirit in a neoliberal world. Entrepreneurship requires pioneering, risk-taking, and ball busting. The masculinized taunt encouraging viewers to “whip ‘em out” could easily be replaced with the affectively homologous
“show them who is boss,” “prove you're a good mom,” “get your business done” or most deafening: “stop being a pussy.” While only three words, the “whip ‘em out” mantra communicates masculinized entrepreneurialism and dismisses any critique that a woman’s “choice” to bottle-feed might be influenced by her socio-economic status or social position.
But the campaign’s ethos of macho entrepreneurialism stretches beyond the catchy phrase. Throughout the campaign mothers are encouraged to self-optimize by valuing hard work and dismissing challenges or inequities associated with the labor of 109 breastfeeding. Take actress and Saturday Night Live alumnus Ana Gasteyer’s profile on the Boob-olution website. When asked by TheBump.com staff about whether or not breastfeeding is a challenge in the beginning, Gasteyer responds:
I think breastfeeding is hard. But I also think going to college is hard. It's hard to get a mortgage. It's hard to run six miles. I think it's really hard to do a lot of the things we do. But people do it every day. People go on diets… they give up carbs. That is so much harder than breastfeeding! Do you know how hard it is not to eat croissants for six months of your life in order to get into a skinny pair of jeans?44
Here, Gasteyer is comparing breastfeeding to other actions within economic markets and archetypically feminine actions like “dieting.” She insists that while breastfeeding might be hard, disgusting, painful labor, it is not that hard and regardless, that's what “we” do; we work hard. “Hard work” is an ideal of the macho entrepreneurial spirit that discursively functions to rationalize endless self-optimization. Under neoliberal logics individuals are conditioned to think of themselves as “self entrepreneurs whose freely chosen education, work, and leisure decisions operate instinctually according to the economics of risk and reward.’’45 Gasteyer’s framing of breastfeeding as an act of self- optimization that takes “hard work” establishes breastfeeding as paradoxically both an obligation and a choice. “As entrepreneurs of themselves,” Davi Johnson Thornton contends, “Individuals are subjected to an open-ended, limitless injunction to become happier, freer, and more productive. The injunctions to self-optimize are still normative to the extent that they work to constrain and regulate choices,” yet they are presented as empowering discourses that celebrate the individual’s freedom to make each choice.46
Discourses of entrepreneurial self-optimization tell us repeatedly that we are free to make
110 choices as individual actors, while simultaneously marking some choices as more optimal than others. Hard work is good, but only a certain kind of hard work.
Throughout the campaign, the women go into great detail explaining the pain and work associated with breastfeeding, while simultaneously framing that work as necessary, and even “rewarding.” For example, in the PSA video, actress Ali Landry describes in detail her struggle with breastfeeding being incredibly painful: “I would grip the chairs, my eyes felt like they were going to prop out of my head.”47 And then just a few frames later, Landry describes that her “magical bond” with her child made the pain and suffering worth it. Actress Brenda Strong encourages mothers to not give up because its uncomfortable or hard work. She explains, “There are so many ways to make it easy for yourself. If one thing doesn't work, something else will. And just know that the benefit for the health of your child—and for you—in that bonding far outweighs any of the discomfort.”48 Mothers are presented with a binary, work hard and overcome discomfort or produce not only unhealthy outcomes but a less-than satisfying emotional bond with your child. The discussion of the magical “bond” mothers can only have with their children when they breastfeed serves to rationalize the additional labor maternal bodies are subjected to when they breastfeed while also naturalizing femininity and total motherhood as a woman’s imperative. Karneisha O’Connell, an attorney and blogger, highlights perfectly the contradictions present in the discourses in her interview with
TheBump.com staff:
There was a moment I wanted to give up because I realized I was the only one that could provide him with milk. All of the pressure was on me to do that. It was the first week and you're just overcoming not being pregnant and having this new 111 baby that's awake every hour. Also I heard that formula keeps the baby sleeping for a little longer. Once he was up every hour on the hour and after about the fifth hour I thought maybe this breastfeeding thing isn't so great after all. But we stuck with it and it's really been great because my son is 22 pounds at 7 months. He's really happy and well adjusted. I think that has something to do with my decision to with breastfeed.49
Karneisha goes into great detail explaining the burden of care that is displaced onto the maternal body through breastfeeding: She is the only one who can provide the child with nourishment in this feeding arrangement (even if she is pumping and bottle-feeding, her labor is always present in infant feeding). She vindicates the added labor by citing her son’s happiness and adjustment, indicating that it must have been the breastfeeding.
Following these comments, Karneisha was asked what the best part of breastfeeding was, and her answer was surprising. She exercises a kind of amnesia about the extra labor and emotional pain associated with breastfeeding that she had seconds earlier described. She exclaimed:
Oh my gosh, I think the benefits are limitless. The bond with the baby… You have those two little eyes looking at you. You can feel him, and it's just really warm and cozy. It's just the best thing ever. I get choked up just thinking about how nice it was for me to breastfeed the baby from the very beginning. We'll continue until he's about one year old. And even though he has teeth we still march on because I know that he's getting the very best that I can offer him.50
In one breath Karneisha is expressing the sheer despair often associated with breastfeeding, but in the next she rejects that there were any problems “from the very beginning;” insisting that the entire experience of breastfeeding was always “warm and cozy.” The shifting representations of Karneisha and other mother’s experiences acknowledge that breastfeeding is labor intensive, while simultaneously asserting that giving into that “discomfort” is unacceptable. Karneisha is compelled to be macho about 112 her pain and labor—to see it as a badge of honor and an act of empowerment rather than a hindrance. These discourses maintain that the bond mothers will develop with their infants is so powerful, limitless, and incredible that a mother cannot forgo it for any reason.
Karneisha’s response also reasserts a primary claim of contemporary breastfeeding culture: The breast is best because it is natural and naturalness is better than anything artificial. Irene Chow, a non-profit director insists that: “I wanted to give my baby what nature meant for her to eat, and I wanted to bond with my baby. What a wonderful feeling that was. I could never have imagined that kind of closeness with anybody. Also it's more convenient than bottle feeding.”51 The emphasis on the maternal bond and the “naturalness” of breastfeeding is ever-present in the campaign. Not only are mothers told they will experience a natural bond with their babies, but numerous refrains throughout the campaign video that tell mothers “this is what you tits are for” or “this is what your knockers are for.”52 This is not surprising, considering that “breastfeeding is also part of a broader discourse criticizing “artificial” intervention in reproduction and child raising and encouraging mothers to practice “natural” family living.”53
So, at the same time that the campaign asserts a masculine entrepreneurial ideal for women—a seemingly non-normative gender discourse—it also naturalizes the institution of motherhood as a female imperative. The naturalization of the maternal body in the campaign is also justified through messages that overtly sexualize the maternal body and reinforce sex-biology, another feature of macho maternalism. Through use of sexually charged terminology such as tits, boobs, bajungas, and mellons—the video PSA 113 for the campaign reasserts the coding of the breast as a sexualized object just as it defends it as a primary feeding mechanism for babies. Throughout the video the women are filmed shaking, holding and caressing their boobs while other women talk about their breastfeeding experiences. For example, while Ali Landry asserts that breastfeeding
“makes you skinny” TBS creative director Christine Karaba is shown running her hands along the side of her breasts and body to highlight her curves. Further, while one indiscernible voice asserts that breastfeeding will reduce obesity, Parks and Recreation actress Jama Williamson is seen shaking her chest in a shimmy motion while smiling.
The overt sexual objectification of the maternal body is an unsurprising characteristic of macho maternalism that reinforces hegemonic and masculine conceptions of femininity.
The sexualization of the language and representations of the women in the campaign video is further solidified when one explores the comments reacting to the video on YouTube. Erubus245 commented in 2011 that, “all the guys are watching this just to see boobs,”54 and Togeman5 replies in 2012: “Kinda I mean that [sic] how I found the video.”55 In 2012, Dennymattingly696 asks: “will you breastfeed me sexy ladys
[sic]?”56 Nagen Limbu says “whimp [sic] em out ladiieees …lol”57 and
MelinkoDoRiddler exclaims “Constance Marie could breast feed me anytime.”58 While the campaign asserts that the maternal body must embody a certain macho entrepreneurial spirit, it also uses that same logic to undermine the subjectivity of the female body by coding it as an object of desire for men and an object of labor for babies.
Macho maternalism is a slippery discourse that appeals to masculine, neoliberal ethos as it reinforces normative gender roles. Unfortunately, invoking naturalization also justifies 114 the privatization of responsibility and accompanied intensification of maternal labor. In the next section, I examine how the campaign utilizes rhetorics of science to privatize health onto the maternal body while invoking an ethic of personal responsibility that accompanies the masculinized entrepreneurial spirit celebrated in the campaign and accompanying PSA.
The Science of Rugged Individualism
While the Boob-olution campaign rationalizes the intensification of maternal labor through a celebration of ideals of masculinized entrepreneurialism, its discourses also function to privatize maternal, infant, and economic health onto the maternal body.
The privatization of responsibility is reflective of the neoliberal and masculinized discourse of rugged individualism. Rugged individualism is a primary ethic of American culture, is characteristic of the neoliberal logic of self-sufficiency, and functions to support austerity and non-interventionist state.59 Herbert Hover popularized the term
“rugged individualism” as a fundamental American value that not only celebrated the role of the individual as a free and self-reliant actor, but also fostered the competition between individuals as necessary for the growth of society.60 This logic of rugged individualism is inherently a masculinized discourse that emphasizes a “frontier” attitude about the role of individual citizens who “buck up,” and are self-reliant/sufficient.61
In contemporary times, the neoliberal-subject is compelled to be a “rugged individual” by constantly self-optimizing and accepting personal responsibility for their emotional and material circumstance.62 In this section, I examine how discourses within
115 the Boob-olution campaign use science to justify the privatization of personal responsibility for health and by proxy celebrate rugged individualism.
As noted in Chapter 3, public health discourses have increasingly come to focus on the role of the individual in promoting healthy outcomes in public life. Wolf argues that in the U.S. our public health campaigns focus heavily on personal responsibility.63
This is especially true of breastfeeding campaigns, which “focus on individuals, the celebration of health as an individual accomplishment, and the attribution of children’s health to individual mothers.”64 In the Boob-olution campaign, social problems – such as maternal health, childhood health (from infancy through adolescence and adulthood), and economics – are coded as problems that need to be solved by the individual act of breastfeeding. Neoliberal logics work in complex and contradictory ways to justify and rationalize privatization and the retreat of government or state sponsored solutions. In this section, I articulate how the discourses of the Boob-olution campaign invoke the rhetorical appeals of science and expertise to privatize social responsibility for economic and health outcomes onto the breast and the act of breastfeeding.
As previously noted, actress Ali Landry is the first to speak in the PSA video, proclaiming: “Did you know that by breastfeeding your knockers could save the US 13 billion dollars per year in health care costs?”65 Breasts are singled out as a public resource that if utilized properly could save the public billions of dollars in “unnecessary” health costs. Following Landry’s profession, the women of the Boob-olution campaign go on to share their experiences of breastfeeding. Near the end of the video, the women take turns
116 presenting a slew of scientific claims about the healthy outcomes for mothers and infants associated with breastfeeding:
Cori Murray: And it's the best thing for your baby. Ali Landry: I had an amazingly healthy baby. Jama Williamson: My baby never got sick. The whole time I was breastfeeding. Dr. Julie Wolfson: I loved being close to her, and knowing that I could do something for her that nobody else could. Ali Landry: The bond that you are going to create with your child is magical and lasting Constance Marie: You’ll feel way less crazy Ali Landry: It makes you skinny. It burns 500 calories a day. Voice over: NO PERIODS Sarah Jane Morris: It’s free! Jama Williamson: And it's so good for the baby’s brain. Lisa Loeb: Less flu Voice over: Less allergies. Lessens the threat of childhood obesity. Anna Joyce: It seriously reduces your chance of getting breast cancer Kelly Rutherford: It reduces the risk of childhood cancer Ali Landry: It could save the US billions of dollars a year in health care costs.66
While breastfeeding is technically free, and most women do experience a reduction in periods during breastfeeding, the claims listed above are based on correlative epidemiological studies that cannot be undeniably proven. Yet, the Boob-olution PSA video invokes the plethora of scientific claims that “breast is breast” to discipline the maternal body to believe that breastfeeding will result in healthy baby, self, and most importantly, society. If breastfeeding were practiced exclusively and eradicated every health care issue noted in the campaign, then this would “save the U.S. 13 billion dollars in health care costs.” If the logic of the campaign is to be believed, breastfeeding will solve all public health problems and save the U.S. government billions of dollars. It will make mothers skinny and immune from cancer. It will make them rational. Breastfeeding will make their children smarter, healthier, richer, skinnier, and cancer-free, and bottle- 117 feeding will make them stupider, sicker, fatter, and poorer. By framing breastfeeding as the most influential contributor to a child’s and mother’s health, this seemingly scientific discourse is also a political one that privatizes all responsibility for maternal health and the present and future health of the infant to the site of the maternal body. It is the maternal body’s civic duty and responsibility to be an autonomous subject that raises children and provides care for her family—at any cost.67
The broader interests of neoliberalism are served by the rationalization of its logics in breastfeeding culture since discourses of personal responsibility deflect fault for systemic problems on to simple “human behaviors.”68 In so doing, these discourses rationalize the lack of state or public intervention to solve societal problems. Instead, it is rationalized that these problems should be solved at the level of the (maternal) body.
Wolf writes:
Each woman is told that breastfeeding is superior to formula feeding because it reduces physical, emotional, and cognitive health risks to her baby. Having spent her pregnancy managing risks to her developing fetus, the new mother is told that she should continue monitoring her body—what she eats, thinks, and feels—while breastfeeding, and that surveillance now also extends to her baby, who must be constantly observed for any sign of potential disequilibrium.69
The Boob-olution campaign makes these claims about health and economic outcomes on the basis of a plethora of research in the last 20 years investigating the suspected benefits of breastfeeding. Research has explored the association of varying methods of infant feeding and a plethora of outcomes, from obesity to socio-economic status.70 Yet there is serious lack of consensus in the medical community over the epidemiological relationship between infant feeding and health outcomes.71
118 In her extensive study on research depicting the associations between breastfeeding and high incidences of certain epidemiological outcomes, Wolf notes that the majority of epidemiological studies that “prove” the relationship between breastfeeding and healthy outcomes, or bottle-feeding and non-healthy outcomes, rely solely “on their establishment of a statistical relationship between a variable or a set of variables, such as obesity or the consumption of dark chocolate, and a particular outcome, such as heart disease or high blood pressure.”72 Showing a correlation between infant feeding practices and health outcomes does not explicitly prove causality.
There are two methodological problems that complicate the truthfulness of cause- control breastfeeding studies. First, “Since randomized control trials in breast feeding research would be considered unethical,” one long term study of breastfeeding research in 2012 notes, “The evidence remains limited to poorer quality observational studies where participation and recall bias can severely affect the objectivity of the data collected.”73 Recall-bias refers to the unavoidable biases present in reality of cause- control studies that require people to recall their experience retrospectively rather than gather data specifically related to concrete disease events. For example, in a cause-control study, a researcher might ask a mother who breastfed to recall, after many years whether her 10-year-old was ever sick, and that mother might retroactively report that the experience was more disease free than it actually was. 74 Medical researchers have noted that almost all breastfeeding studies suffer from exaggeration due to recall-bias.75
Particularly, studies linking breastfeeding to reducing the risk of cancer in mothers have shown to have strong recall bias.76 Individuals who have been diagnosed with cancer in 119 later life are far more likely to report accurately about their medical history (they know how long they breastfed for or were breastfed), then individuals who do not have cancer.
Aside from recall bias, breastfeeding epidemiological methodology is also weakened since scientists have been unable to explain how exactly breast milk is better.
Further, cause-control studies cannot distinguish breast milk from other healthy behaviors, like washing hands or feeding a child organic food later in life. Moreover, since middle and upper class mothers are more likely to breastfeed—it is also impossible to dislocate the effects of breastfeeding from socio-economic status and its accompanying privileges.77 For example, while the correlation between higher cognitive performance and breastfeeding is perhaps the most statistically significant, studies examining this relationship do not (and cannot) account for other causal factors, like parental involvement in school activities, genetic make-up and access to quality education.78
Yet, the translation of scientific expertise by professionals and campaigns like the
Boob-olution to the general public cites an absolute unwavering assertion that breastfeeding is best. When the American Academy of Pediatrics’ (AAP) revised its policy on breastfeeding in 1997, they knowingly crafted a “stronger statement” in favor of breastfeeding because they wanted breastfeeding to become more prevalent.79 From this moment on, the AAP policy became the standard for all public health information about breastfeeding. By 2012, public health discussions cited overwhelming scientific
“consensus” that breastfeeding was the ideal mode of infant feeding.80 The AAP even released a statement on March 1, 2012 that stated, “Infant nutrition should be considered a public health issue and not only a lifestyle choice.”81 Despite a lack of consensus in the 120 scientific community, public health discourses continue to promote a centralized claim that “breast is best.”
The social and political blindness about the lack of consensus surrounding breastfeeding research, coupled with moralistic public health messages (like those espoused in the Boob-olution Campaign, by the AAP, and the Department of Health and
Human Services public service announcements), undermine right for mothers to choose their own infant feeding practices. The neoliberal subject is an entrepreneurial automaton, a rugged individual who is invited to constantly self-optimize and self-surveil. In maternity culture more broadly, and breastfeeding culture examined here specifically, the neoliberal mommy often bears the burden of social reproduction (producing more healthy entrepreneurial subjects), and is responsible for all public health. The Boob-olution campaign promotes the macho, entrepreneurial maternal subject, meanwhile marking breastfeeding as a moral and civic imperative of the neoliberal maternal body. Wolf explains:
State institutions advise that breast is best for babies and that therefore good citizen-mothers will breastfeed. Cultural reasons for not breastfeeding are treated as obstacles, and economic circumstances become barriers that each mother must be persuaded to overcome. Scientific uncertainty disappears, choice becomes overdetermined, and breastfeeding emerges as central to civic motherhood.82
By framing breastfeeding as a “public health” issue and constituting the illusion of scientific consensus/agreement in the public imaginary, discourses like those espoused by the AAP, the Boob-olution campaign, and the journalists who daily report the ballooned impact of observational epidemiological studies, function to privatize responsibility onto the maternal body, while simultaneously supplanting the maternal subject as a key agent 121 in health and parenting decisions. Breastfeeding becomes not a lifestyle “choice,” but rather a moral and civic obligation. While breastfeeding discourses privatize responsibility for maternal and infant health outcomes on to the maternal body, they also publicize that the individual decisions of mothers are of public concern: The Boob- olution tells moms they must “whip ‘em out;” the APA asserts breastfeeding is not a
“lifestyle choice;” users shame moms on online forums. Indeed, Venezuala even considered a ban on bottles in 2013.83 The public surveillance of women’s infant feeding practices is sanctioned and promoted by medical experts who, despite a lack of consensus and well-known epidemiological flaws, feel compelled to assert, unequivocally, that women must breastfeed. For centuries, Ehrenreich and English note, professionals have often prescribed what is best for women (and their children) using lackluster scientific evidence, and the struggle over whether the “breast is best” is no different.84 The discourses assert, unequivocally, that the maternal body is naturally made for breastfeeding and that science proves that this is her natural duty and responsibility as an autonomous subject.
Oddly, yet not surprisingly, in the same breath that the Boob-olution campaign asserts the “naturalness” of breastfeeding and the role of women as total natural and biological caretakers—it also reasserts the inability of the mother to breastfeed without the help of professionals or experts to guide her. After a series of women such as Jama
Williamson and Ali Landry are shown exalting that breastfeeding as natural and magical, singer Lisa Loeb states,
122 They tell you breastfeeding is going to be this really natural experience and you're just going to figure it out. They said to me, "As soon as possible -- breastfeed!" Well, that's impossible. You just had a baby... that came out of a small... hole. Then you're supposed to take this baby and sort of feed like you're in the wild or something. It's really hard. I read a lot of books and I talked to a lot of friends. But when they gave me the baby to breastfeed, she didn't know what she was doing either. Luckily there are breastfeeding consultants. I think that's really important - - to take advantage of breastfeeding consultants. But different people have different techniques. […] With breastfeeding, you should at least try it. But you should get advice. Although people say it's a natural process... it's not natural. You have no idea what you're doing. If what the consultant says doesn't resonate with you, find somebody else to help you. Find somebody you feel comfortable with. Also: Make sure you massage your breasts. You don't want to get lumps. It will get infected and that will hurt!85
As the campaign avows the naturalness of breastfeeding, it also pronounces that mothers cannot possibly accomplish the task on their own: Each must learn how to do so from professionals and experts. Several of the women, including Kelly Rutherford, Dr. Julie
Wolfson, Irene Chow, and Lisa Loeb, were all referred to TheBump.com staff by their advertiser The Pump Station in Los Angeles.86 At the end of the women’s interviews,
TheBump.com staff writes that they found the women through The Pump Station and encourages site visitors to click through to The Pump Station’s website (where you can buy every pump, pad, or pillow you could imagine or schedule to attend one of their expensive breastfeeding or mommy classes). A personal breastfeeding consultation (1 hour) costs $395 dollars and a group session costs $55 dollars per class.87 Considering this, it makes sense that TheBump.com has a vested interest in keeping women breastfeeding not because breast is necessarily best but because it supports
TheBump.com’s advertisers aims. Breastfeeding, although technically “free,” is not immune from marketization. Products helping women pump, stay stylish, and breastfeed
123 in a “modern way” are ever-present; lactation consultants charge women to teach them to breastfeed; and even Whole Foods Market peddles organic food to new mothers based on the desire to be “natural” when breastfeeding to “provide best for baby and mom.”88
Macho maternalism compels the neoliberal maternal subject to be a rugged individual actor operating and optimizing in the market.
In addition to concealing the relationship between TheBump.com and advertisers
(and simultaneously encouraging mothers to turn to consumer products to solve public health problems at the level of the maternal body), the campaign also obscures racial and class privilege through the privatization of responsibility. Each mother in the Boob- olution campaign comes from privilege, although they are uniformly presented as “real women’s experiences.”89 Take for example, when actress Kelly Rutherford was asked if it was difficult for her to breastfeed at work. She explained:
Well I didn't work that much during the first year of my son's life. I worked in Canada for a few weeks and then I did the pilot for Gossip Girl. But I didn't work that much—I worked only four days on the pilot. So he would come to work with me and would nurse there. You know I probably should have pumped a little more at that point. It would've been less stressful for me and, you know, probably a little easier for him. But I was just trying to do everything and I sort of nursed on demand instead of having a real schedule. Later, with my daughter, it was very different. I was able to pump and she was more on schedule and I had more help so it was easier. I think if I'd had more help in the beginning with my son it would have been easier then too. In the end I wound up breastfeeding my son for two and a half years and my daughter for about nine months.90
Rutherford tells a story of how stressful it was for her to breastfeed her first child, despite the fact that she only worked four days. For her second child, she had more help and was on a pumping schedule, which helped her make it easier. Like Rutherford, other mother’s cite that their “nannies” and “flexible work schedules” made breastfeeding easier.91 124 However, these material conditions are not the reality for most working mothers in the
U.S., as socio-economic status (including income, education, and occupation) is the biggest indicator of whether mothers will breastfeed.92 Women are less likely to start or maintain breastfeeding if they have to return to work quickly, lack sufficient support, are poor and are less educated.93 This means that single and/or poor working mothers in service sector jobs are the least likely to breastfeed, because they lack the support and time off in hourly jobs.94 A 2003 study found that the Temporary Assistance to Needy
Families program (TANF) instituted in 1996 by President Clinton led to nearly half of the single working mothers abandoning breastfeeding.95 But the Boob-olution discourses not only privatizing responsibility onto the maternal body by demanding that mothers must breastfeed, but the discourses also obscure the real material conditions that working mothers face and deflect responsibility/attention from the ill effects of economic stratification in the developed world.
Higher than feeding practices, several scientific studies show that a bigger indicator of child health and cognitive development is their parent’s socio-economic status, not whether or not they breastfeed.96 In other words, studies of the benefits of breastfeeding do not control sufficiently for class variables. Discourses in the Boob- olution campaign fail to address the privilege of the voices in their campaign and synchronously obscure the material conditions that inform most women’s infant feeding practices in the U.S. Instead, they simply assert that it is “free” and that if the “real women” in the campaign can do it (with the help of expensive consultants) so can all women. Unfortunately, this puts the extra burdens on the portion of the population that 125 are the most vulnerable, overworked, and underpaid/valued. Wolf notes that the associated “shame is the consequence of not breastfeeding after having internalized the imperative of total motherhood.”97 If the maternal subject cannot breastfeed, she is a bad mother, citizen, and she herself is subject to guilt about her own health. The privatization of maternal, infant, and future citizen health onto the breast and breastfeeding shifts the responsibility for public health rhetorically onto the maternal body and emphasizes the personal responsibility of the individual mother in managing public health. The discourses within the Boob-olution campaign are a primary example of how macho maternalism operates in maternity culture: discourses celebrate and justify the rugged individuality of the maternal subject while endlessly rationalizing her inescapable personal responsibility.
CONCLUSION
On January 14, 2013, Target Corporation released a new advertisement to promote their White Label baby products called “Cowgirl.”98 The thirty-second video features a thin model, dressed as an Annie Oakley inspired character, in an all white room, donning long red pigtails, bright red lipstick, a notable wedding band and an all white cowgirl outfit. While the video plays in slow motion, she claps her hands together with baby powder, grabs and hoists her belt buckle, walks several steps with her thumbs tucked into her belt, and then lowers herself to her knees. As a techno-style wild-west theme song blares, she sharply throws baby wipes into the air and “gun-slings” a diaper before whipping it on a baby. She rests back on her knees and gives a sigh of relief, as
126 three babies crawl around on the floor. A voice slowly pronounces: “Master it, and become legend,” while Target’s white label baby products, including lotion, diapers, and wipes are shown on the screen. The commercial ends with the voice whispering “The
Everyday Collection, By Target.” The simultaneous sexualization and masculinization of the maternal body in the Target commercial is reminiscent of macho maternalism in breastfeeding culture, and reflects they odd yet compelling combination of discursive codes.
I have argued in this chapter that breastfeeding (similar to diapering in the
Cowgirl commercial) is coded paradoxically as both feminine and masculine, as an act that will empower women but not disrupt their femininity. While macho maternalism discourses defy gendered stereotypes and archetypes through the performance of masculine codes, they set standards and ideals for good motherhood that are hyper- feminine: A mother must be thin but healthy, sexual but maternal, completely natural but also self-made. Gender is also naturalized by rhetorics of science that privatize responsibility for health onto the act of breastfeeding, emphasizing the myth of the self- made mom. The invocation of the rhetorical appeals of science and expertise results in women “being constrained in new ways by expanding medical definitions of their reproductive responsibility.”99 In macho maternalism, both entrepreneurialism and personal responsibility, key discourses of the neoliberal turn, function to rationalize neoliberalism as the ethic of modern civilization.
127
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29 Jensen, Getting Off, 27-28. 30 Jensen, Getting Off, 27-28. 31 Penny Griffin, “Gendering Global Finance: Crisis, Masculinity and Responsibility” in Men and Masculinities 16, no.9 (2013), 9. 32 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Kindle Edition, 19. 33 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 19. 34 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 19. 35 Chip Berlet, “Hard right Styles, Frames, and Narratives,” Z Magazine, November 2004, http://www.zcommunications.org/hard-right-styles-frames-and-amp-narratives-by-chip- berlet. 36 “Join THE Boob-olution!” TheBump.com, accessed July 1, 2013, http://pregnant.thebump.com/breastfeeding-awareness-month- sweepstakes.aspx?MsdVisit=1. 37 “Breastfeeding: Join the Boob-olution!,” YouTube video, 2:18, Posted by “TheBumpTV,” August 16, 2010, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=7SM7Hvjqny4 (accessed 22 July 2013). 38 “Real Breastfeeding Stories,” TheBump.com, August 1, 2010, http://pregnant.thebump.com/new-mom-new-dad/breastfeeding/articles/breastfeeding- stories.aspx (accessed July 19, 2013). 39 S. L. Fielden & M. J Davidson eds., International handbook of women and small business entrepreneurship (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2005).. 40 Loe, The Rise of Viagra, 63. 41 Rebecca Gill and Shiv Ganesh, “Empowerment, Constraint, and the Entrepreneurial Self: A Study of Women Entrepreneurs,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 35, no.3 (2007): 268-293. 42 Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” Daedalus 134, no.4 (Fall 2005): 56-86. 43 Penny Griffin, “Gendering Global Finance: Crisis, Masculinity and Responsibility” Men and Masculinities 16, no.9 (2013), 13. 44 “Ana Gasteyer’s Breastfeeding Story,” TheBump.com, accessed July 22, 2013, http://pregnant.thebump.com/new-mom-new-dad/breastfeeding/articles/ana-gasteyer- breastfeeding-story.aspx. 45 Catherine Chaput, ‘‘Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism: Neoliberalism and the Overdetermination of Affective Energy,’’ Philosophy and Rhetoric 43, no.1 (2010), 5. 46 Davi Johnson Thornton, “Neuroscience, Affect, and the Entrepreneurialization of Motherhood,” in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 8, no.4 (2011), 405. 47 “Breastfeeding: Join the Boob-olution!,” YouTube video, 2:18, Posted by “TheBumpTV,” August 16, 2010, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=7SM7Hvjqny4 (accessed 22 July 2013).
131
48“Brenda Strong’s Breastfeeding Story,” TheBump.com, accessed July 22, 2013, http://pregnant.thebump.com/new-mom-new-dad/breastfeeding/articles/brenda-strong- breastfeeding-story.aspx. 49 “Karneisha O’Connell’s Breastfeeding Story,” TheBump.com, accessed July 22, 2013, http://pregnant.thebump.com/new-mom-new-dad/breastfeeding/articles/karneisha- oconnell-breastfeeding-story.aspx. 50 “Karneisha O’Connell’s Breastfeeding Story,” TheBump.com, accessed July 22, 2013, http://pregnant.thebump.com/new-mom-new-dad/breastfeeding/articles/karneisha- oconnell-breastfeeding-story.aspx 51 “Irene Chow’s Breastfeeding Story,” TheBump.com, accessed July 22, 2013, http://pregnant.thebump.com/new-mom-new-dad/breastfeeding/articles/irene-chow- breastfeeding-story.aspx 52 “Breastfeeding: Join the Boob-olution!,” YouTube video, 2:18, Posted by “TheBumpTV,” August 16, 2010, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=7SM7Hvjqny4 (accessed 22 July 2013). 53 Wolf, Is Breast Best?, 68. 54 Erubus245, 2011, comment on “Breastfeeding: Join the Boob-olution!,” YouTube video, 2:18, Posted by “TheBumpTV,” August 16, 2010, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=7SM7Hvjqny4 (accessed 22 July 2013). 55 Togemon5, October, 2012, comment on “Breastfeeding: Join the Boob-olution!,” YouTube video, 2:18, Posted by “TheBumpTV,” August 16, 2010, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=7SM7Hvjqny4 (accessed 22 July 2013). 56 Dennymattingly696, September 2012, comment on “Breastfeeding: Join the Boob- olution!,” YouTube video, 2:18, Posted by “TheBumpTV,” August 16, 2010, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=7SM7Hvjqny4 (accessed 22 July 2013). 57 Nagen Limbu, August 2012, comment on “Breastfeeding: Join the Boob-olution!,” YouTube video, 2:18, Posted by “TheBumpTV,” August 16, 2010, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=7SM7Hvjqny4 (accessed 22 July 2013). 58 MelinkoDaRiddler, September 2012, comment on “Breastfeeding: Join the Boob- olution!,” YouTube video, 2:18, Posted by “TheBumpTV,” August 16, 2010, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=7SM7Hvjqny4 (accessed 22 July 2013). 59 Jeffrey D. Arthurs, “Proverbs In Inspirational Literature: Sanctioning the American Dream,” Journal Of Communication & Religion 17, no.2 (September 1994): 1-15; Robert C. Rowland and John M. Jones, “Recasting the American Dream and American Politics: Barack Obama's Keynote Address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention,” Quarterly Journal Of Speech 93, no.4 (November 2007): 425-448. 60 See: Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki, “Memory and myth at the Buffalo Bill Museum,” Western Journal Of Communication 69, no.2 (April 2005): 85-108; Leroy G. Dorsey, “The frontier myth in presidential rhetoric: Theodore Roosevelt's campaign for conservation,” Western Journal Of Communication 59, no.1 (1995): 1-19; John C. Hammerback, “Barry Goldwater’s Rhetoric of Rugged Individualism,” Quarterly Journal Of Speech 58, no.2 (April 1972): 175; Lynn M. Harter, “Masculinity(s), the agrarian 132 frontier myth, and cooperative ways of organizing: contradictions and tensions in the experience and enactment of democracy,” Journal Of Applied Communication Research 32, no.2 (May 2004): 89-118; Lori Henson and Radhika E. Parameswaran, “Getting Real With “Tell It Like It Is” Talk Therapy: Hegemonic Masculinity and the Dr. Phil Show,” Communication, Culture & Critique 1, no.3 (September 2008): 287-310; Claire Sisco King, “The Man Inside: Trauma, Gender, and the Nation in The Brave One,” Critical Studies In Media Communication 27, no.2 (June 2010): 111-130; Janice Hocker Rushing, “Mythic Evolution of 'The New Frontier' in Mass Mediated Rhetoric,” Critical Studies In Mass Communication 3, no.3 (September 1986): 265; Mark West and Chris Carey. “(Re)Enacting Frontier Justice: The Bush Administration's Tactical Narration of the Old West Fantasy after September 11,” Quarterly Journal Of Speech 92, no.4 (November 2006): 379-412. 61 John C. Hammerback, “Barry Goldwater’s Rhetoric of Rugged Individualism,” Quarterly Journal Of Speech 58, no.2 (April 1972): 175. 62 Janice Hocker Rushing, “Mythic Evolution of 'The New Frontier' in Mass Mediated Rhetoric,” Critical Studies In Mass Communication 3, no.3 (September 1986): 265. 63 Wolf, Is Breast Best?, 68. 64 Wolf, Is Breast Best?, 68. 65 “Breastfeeding: Join the Boob-olution!,” YouTube.com, 2:18, Posted by “TheBumpTV,” August 16, 2010, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=7SM7Hvjqny4 (accessed 22 July 2013). 66 “Breastfeeding: Join the Boob-olution!,” YouTube.com, 2:18, Posted by “TheBumpTV,” August 16, 2010, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=7SM7Hvjqny4 (accessed 22 July 2013). 67 Wolf, Is Breast Best?, 66. 68 Penny Griffin, “Gendering Global Finance: Crisis, Masculinity and Responsibility” Men and Masculinities 16, no.9 (2013), 26. 69 Wolf, Is Breast Best?, 68.. 70 Wolf, Is Breast Best?, 21-22. 71 Wolf, Is Breast Best? 72 Wolf, Is Breast Best?, 22-23. 73MC Matheson, et al., “Understanding the evidence for and against the role of breastfeeding in allergy prevention,” Clinical and Experimental Allergy 42, no. 6 (2012) 827-851. 74 “Is Abortion Linked to Cancer?,” American Cancer Society, February 19, 2013, http://www.cancer.org/cancer/breastcancer/moreinformation/is-abortion-linked-to-breast- cancer (accessed July 22, 2013). 75 Eirik Evenhouse and Siobhan Reilly, “Improved Estimates of the Benefits of Breastfeeding Using Sibling Comparisons to Reduce Selection Bias,” Health Services Research Journal 40, no.6 (2005): 1781-1802. 76 Gail Goldberg, Andrew Prentice, & Ann Prentice, eds., “Breast-Feeding: Early Influences on Later Health,” Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology 639 133
(2009), 180. 77 Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt, “Breast-feeding Won’t Make Your Children Smarter,” Bloomberg, July 2, 2012, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-02/breast-feeding- is-not-how-mothers-make-kids-smart.html. 78 A Jain, J Concato, & JM Leventhal, “How Good is the Evidence Linking Breastfeeding and Intelligence?” Pediatrics 109, no.6 (2002): 1044-1053; and, Geoff Der, David Batty, & Ian Deary, “Effect of breast feeding on intelligence in children: prospective study, sibling pairs analysis, and meta-analysis,” British Medical Journal 333, no.7575 (2006): 945. 79 “Breastfeeding and the Use of Human Milk,” American Academy of Pediatrics, 1997, http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/100/6/1035.short (accessed July 23, 2013). 80 Wolf, Is Breast Best? 81 “Breastfeeding and the Use of Human Milk,” American Academy of Pediatrics, February 27, 2012, http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2012/02/22/peds.2011-3552 (accessed July 23, 2013). 82 Wolf, Is Breast Best?, 68-70. 83 Catherine Shoichet, “Breast-feeding is best, so ban bottles, Venezuelan lawmaker proposes,” CNN.com, June 18, 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/17/health/venezuela- baby-bottle-ban (accessed July 15, 2013). 84 Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of Experts’ Advice to Women, Revised Edition (New York: Anchor Books, 2005). 85 “Lisa Loeb’s Breastfeeding Story,” TheBump.com, accessed July 22, 2013, http://pregnant.thebump.com/new-mom-new-dad/breastfeeding/articles/lisa-loeb- breastfeeding-story.aspx?MsdVisit=1. 86 “The Pump Station: Breastfeeding Resource Center,” The Pump Station, accessed July 19, 2013, http://www.pumpstation.com/. 87 The Pump Station’s prices are not publicly listed on their website. On July 1, 2013, I called their offices and inquired about the cost of these two services. 88 “Nutrition for Pregnant and Nursing Moms,” Whole Foods Market, accessed July 19, 2013, http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/healthy-eating/parents-and-kids/nutrition- pregnant-and-nursing-moms. 89 “Real Breastfeeding Stories,” TheBump.com, August 1, 2010, http://pregnant.thebump.com/new-mom-new-dad/breastfeeding/articles/breastfeeding- stories.aspx (accessed July 19, 2013). 90 “Kelly Rutherford’s Breastfeeding Story,” TheBump.com, accessed July 22, 2013, http://pregnant.thebump.com/new-mom-new-dad/breastfeeding/articles/kelly-rutherford- breastfeeding-story.aspx. 91 “Real Breastfeeding Stories,” TheBump.com, August 1, 2010, http://pregnant.thebump.com/new-mom-new-dad/breastfeeding/articles/breastfeeding- stories.aspx (accessed July 19, 2013).
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92 Katherine E. Heck, et. al, “Socioeconomic Status and Breastfeeding Initiation Among California Mothers,” Public Health Reports 121, no.1 (2006): 51-59. 93 McGill Institute for Health and Social Policy, “The Work, Family, and Equity Index (WFEI): Measuring governmental performance around the world,” 2007, http://www.mcgill.ca/files/ihsp/WFEIFinal2007.pdf (accessed July 18, 2013). 94 Steven J. Haider, Alison Jacknowitz, and Robert F. Schoeni, “Welfare Work Requirements and Child Well-Being: Evidence from the Effects on Breastfeeding.” Demography 40, no.3 (2003): 479–97. 95 Steven J. Haider, Alison Jacknowitz, and Robert F. Schoeni, “Welfare Work Requirements and Child Well-Being: Evidence from the Effects on Breastfeeding.” Demography 40, no.3 (2003): 479–97. 96 See: Elliot M. Tucker-Drob, et al., “Emergence of a GeneX Socioeconomic Status Interaction on Infant Mental Ability Between 10 Months and 2 Years,” Psychological Science 22, no.1 (2011): 125-133; and, Geoff Der, David Batty, & Ian Deary, “Effect of breast feeding on intelligence in children: prospective study, sibling pairs analysis, and meta-analysis,” British Medical Journal 333, no.7575 (2006): 945. 97 Wolf, Is Breast Best?, 105. 98 “Target ‘Cowgirl,’” YouTube.com, 0:31, Posted by “aWHITELABELproduct,” January 14, 2013, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=Hke6unRVF4M (accessed July 18, 2013). 99 Wolf, Is Breast Best?, 75.
135 Chapter Five: The Self-Made Mom: Home Birth Videos on YouTube and Rhetorics of Hard Work, Redemption and Masochism
In September 2012, The Los Angeles Times reported that posting childbirth videos online was a new and fascinating trend.1 You can even hire a videographer to film your home birth in cinematic style (average prices range from $2,000 to $4,000).2 As of July
15, 2013, there are over 1.79 million natural planned home birth videos on YouTube, a video-sharing website where anyone can upload user-generated content.3 Thirty-eight of these videos have over one million or more views, with the average number of views between these top videos being 6 million views each (the highest viewed video has over
74 million views).4 “Women say they want video to promote a certain kind of birth, to reclaim their power, and to remember a baby's first moments,” but also “to build community, to teach, and to recreate the ancient birth hut virtually,” explains journalist
Hilary MacGregor.5 The desire to “promote a certain kind of birth” stems from a centuries old American debate between the bio-medical model of birth promoted by gynecologists and obstetricians, and the Natural Childbirth Movement promoted by feminists, fundamentalist-Christians, midwives, and doulas.6
On June 30th, 2013, The New York Times published an article claiming it costs more to give birth in America than anywhere else in the world.7 The article outlines how the average cost of an American birth in a hospital has tripled since 1996 now costing nearly $38,000, two or three times as costly as other industrialized countries. Yet other industrial countries with lower costs to do not provide women with less quality maternity care. In fact, the United States has one of the highest maternal and infant mortality rates
136 among industrialized countries.8 Giving birth at home with a midwife costs on average
$4,000, and is far less expensive than giving birth in a hospital.
In the 19th century, midwives in the U.S. performed most births in homes.9 In fact, in 1900 only 5% of women gave birth in hospital.10 However, as medical obstetrics became professionalized, the number of women giving birth at home drastically decreased.11 Between 1910 and 1920, doctors “usurp[ed] the traditional role of the midwife and laid the foundation for a pathology-oriented medical model of childbirth in this country.”12 Doctors introduced “twilight sleep,” in the 1960s, where they put women on a cocktail of drugs that kept them from remembering the details of giving birth.
Although the practice of administering “twilight sleep” has been discontinued, medical interventions such as epidurals (a numbing of the lower half of the body), episiotomies (a surgical cutting of the perineum from the vaginal opening to the anus), drug-induced labor, and caesarean sections (the surgical removal of infants from the maternal body) have all become “normalized” birthing practices. By the early 2000s, nearly 95% of births occurred in hospitals in the U.S. By 2007, 31% of all births in the U.S. in hospitals were by cesarean section, a historic high. According to Time Magazine in 2010, “The rise in cesarean-section deliveries in recent years has been characterized by some as a key indication of the overmedicalization of childbirth.”13
In response to the medicalization of birth during the 20th century, activists began promoting natural home birth or birth with a midwife as a possible corrective during the
1960s and 1970s. The Natural Childbirth Movement or the Home Birth Movement reject the medicalization of childbirth and critique the medical industrial complex for 137 pathologizing the maternal body and the “natural” process of giving birth. While the
Natural Birth/Home Birth Movements are often assumed to be strictly feminist, progressive, or “hippie” movements, advocates are not just radical feminists, but also
Evangelic Christians and new-age thinkers. This coalition is so diverse that “birth advocates have found themselves among strange bedfellows: individuals who disagree— often vehemently—about abortion, even as all parties emphasize the centrality of
“choice” to the home birth movement.”14
Planned natural childbirth refers to birth done without the introduction of drugs to induce labor, an epidural or other drugs to quell pain, or other non-required medical interventions. Natural planned births can occur in hospitals as well as homes and birthing centers.15 Planned natural home birth, on the other hand, has all of the characteristics of natural birth but is done in the home with a midwife, doula, or sometimes completely unassisted (without anyone helping). The danger of planned at-home births in relation to hospital births is scarcely studied in medical and scientific journals, and when it has been explored the results are often contradictory.16 A 2010 study, referred to as the “Wax
Paper,” performed a metaanalysis of mortality data in the United States and claimed that there is a two to three times higher infant/maternal mortality rate associated with home birth.17 Contrarily, a 2013 study of the Netherlands (where Certified Nurse Midwives perform most home births) found that home births pose fewer risks than hospital births.18
Obstetricians stigmatize home births for being unsafe for mothers and infants, and home birth advocates critique the “obstetrical community” for maintaining and rationalizing
”dominance over the birthing process,” sometimes, they claim, at the expense of the 138 health and well being of women and infants.19 Both the Natural Childbirth Movement and the Home Birth Movement have attempted to publicize alternative birth plans and critiques of the bio-medical model of birth, and the video communities on YouTube are one way that activists and advocates attempt to promote this critique.20
Despite the real and legitimate critique of the medicalization and marketization of child birth in American obstetrics, in this chapter I argue that the most popular natural home birth videos on YouTube (with one million views or more) deploy the mythos of the fundamental American neoliberal narrative of the “self-made man” (or in this case, the “self-made mom”). While these videos are designed to promote natural at-home birth as a positive alternative to the dominant medical model, the videos do so by coding the story of at-home birth in the form of the ultimate entrepreneurial narrative: A mythic neoliberal journey depicting the individual actor working hard and sacrificing to overcome pain in order to actualize and transform the self and circumstance. In the “self- made mom” narrative form, pain is marked as pleasurable, making the redemptive mythos inherently masochistic. It is important to emphasize, as I have in other chapters, that I am not seeking to critique women who choose to give birth naturally or undermine the Home Birth Movement’s real and compelling critique of the medical model of birth in the United States. Even empowering and anti-establishment discourses can find themselves dancing with the devil; cloaked in the ubiquity of neoliberal logics.
There are several items I must address in order to perform a diligent analysis of home birth videos on YouTube that illuminates how they function as neoliberal narratives. First and foremost, I contextualize the rhetorics of the “self-made mom” in the 139 history of Protestant Calvinism, and American cultural and contemporary neoliberal logics. Next, I situate the narrative form of the “self-made mom” in discourses of masochistic motherhood, as outlined by Ehrenreich and English. Following this, I provide a systematic analysis of home birth on YouTube. I analyze and dissect these videos by highlighting the neoliberal, entrepreneurial narrative of the “self-made mom.”
Specifically, I focus on the two main tropes within in the narrative form of the “self-made individual”: (1) self-sufficiency and rugged self-reliance; and, (2) glorified pain and suffering as a resource for redemption. Following my analysis of the home birth videos on YouTube, I reflect on the implications of studying rhetorics of self-made masochism in maternity culture discourses.
RHETORICS OF THE SELF-MADE MASOCHIST
The American narrative of the “self-made man” is a powerful mythos that places the Puritan value of “hard work” at the center of the American cultural identity, and its focus on transformation and upward mobility. Psychologist Dan P. McAdams argues that the story of self-redemption is the most fundamental and powerful story in American life.
He contends:
From the time of the Puritan settlements to the present day, Americans have reveled in stories of self-transformation. The self-proclaimed land of opportunity, America has been imagined as a place where […] ‘rags-to-riches’ stories about ‘the American dream’ have assumed a privileged position in the canon of those most cherished cultural myths for Americans along with transformative stories about being ‘born again,’ ‘escaping from slavery to freedom,’ and fully actualizing that good and innocent inner self so enthusiastically affirmed by no less than Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oprah Winfrey, affirmed to be each person’s individual manifest destiny.21 140 American culture celebrates the notion of upward mobility, or transforming pain into a positive outcome in the redemptive narrative. Max Weber classically argued that we must understand the “spirit” of capitalism as an expression of Calvinism and Protestant ethics.
The myth of the self-made man is also a cultural extension of the ethics of Calvinism.
The teachings of Jean Calvin were fundamental to the development and expansion of the
European Protestant Reformation during the 16th century.22 Calvinist doctrine asserted that we are predestined by God to be saved or not—and that there was nothing that individuals could do to change their destiny. The doctrine of predestination, according to
Weber, conjured an “unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual,” since there was no opportunity for good deeds or repentance.23 Even though salvation was predestined, Calvinism also asserted “intense worldly activity” or making a positive contribution (such as accumulation of wealth and possessions) to God’s Kingdom on earth would signal an individual’s redemption and salvation.24 Therefore, it was the greatest duty of an individual to answer their “divine calling” by working hard and self- sacrificing in order to ascend into their predestined salvation. Calvinist doctrine, as
Weber notes, imbued the ethics of self-sacrifice and hard work into the practice of free- market capitalism, while celebrating the success of individual actors in the market as piety.25 Thus, the “self-made man” narrative form was born.
Displaced from its origins in Calvinist doctrine, the tale of “self-made man” is a ubiquitous discursive form across the history of American public culture and has been embodied in numerous narratives. Theodore Roosevelt and Hebert Hoover’s rugged
141 individualism in rhetorics of the frontier emphasized the self-sufficiency and resilience of the individual actor to overcome incredible horrors.26 Even more so, immigrant narratives, like those popularized in Horatio Alger’s famous novels, emphasized rags-to- riches mythic transcendence.27 The Horatio Alger mythology—perhaps the most well known of the self-made narrative forms—marks self-resilience, thrift, and a “pleasurable attitude” as necessary for ascendance to success and wealth.28 Individual citizens are marked as self-optimizing automatons, who can overcome hardship by simply “pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps.” The Horatio Alger mythology set the foundation for a “historic narrative cast from this moldy myth of bootstrapping yourself from rags to riches while riding the rails with the Little Engine that Could.”29 With roots in Calvinism, enlightenment liberalism, and social and economic Darwinism, the narrative of the “self- made man” across these separate stories is quite similar: A self-sufficient subject faces a hardship for which they must sacrifice and overcome, resulting in transformation of the self and material reality.
Communication scholars have long critiqued rhetorics of the myth of upward mobility and the “American dream” as problematic.30 Cloud, argues that the “rags-to- riches” narrative of Oprah Winfrey is a hegemonic ideological discourse. Cloud explains,
“The story of individual triumph over humble beginnings is a staple of a culture steeped in Horatio Alger mythology, in the service of an inegalitarian economic order buttressed by an ideology of individual achievement and responsibility.”31 For Cloud, the social order is maintained through ideological texts “that define social order for the majority of the people.”32 Narratives, such as Oprah’s rags-to-riches tale, deploy a rhetorically 142 powerful tokenism that redefines “oppression as personal suffering and success as individual accomplishment.”33 By framing oppression as personal pain or suffering and success as individual accomplishment, rags-to-riches narratives display pain and suffering as a necessary component of the redemptive American story, while simultaneously ideologically rationalizing the maintenance of the social order.
While the redemptive, self-made narrative is rooted in Calvinism and enlightenment liberalism, it has also been recuperated in the late 20th century to represent the core of the neoliberal citizen-subject. Entrepreneurialism, privatization, and personal responsibility are complex and intertwined neoliberal logics that invoke discourses of self-optimization, bootstrappin’, hard work, and “self-madeness.” American neoliberal subjects are compelled through narratives of the “self-made individual” to see the pain and suffering that accompanies “hard work” as a badge of honor; a necessary obstacle on the road to the American dream and success.
In this chapter, I contend that self-made narratives of redemption are fundamentally masochistic. As others have alluded to above, James Catano also argues the American myth of the self-made individual is both destructive and transformative:
One cannot be self-made without self-destruction, as an individual needs to face pain or suffering in order to tell a story of transformation and transcendence.34 The rhetorical form of masochism (sourcing pleasure in pain) has been explored in communication studies and the humanities quite extensively. Building off of the work of Gilles Deleuze, many scholars have noted that masochism as a sexual practice is not a pathology but an agentive rather than passive torture contract that can bring a subject into being.35 In this 143 chapter, I am not engaging in a discussing of the role of masochism as a distinct sexual practice in an individual subject’s life, but am instead interested in formulating the masochistic trope of pleasurable pain as a way of understanding ideological rationalization. Contracting into neoliberal logics requires the tolerance of a certain amount of pain, since the privatization of the neoliberal subject requires that they bear the brunt of responsibility for their material circumstance. American citizens are compelled through neoliberal narratives of hard work and redemption to see their pain as pleasurable, necessary, and mythically heroic; they are conditioned to develop a taste for suffering.
In communication studies, scholars have previously deployed the Lacanian concept of jouissance to explore the rhetorical functions of pleasurable pain. In his examination of the film The Passion of the Christ, Gunn argues that jouissance can be understood as “an indescribable compulsion toward painful pleasure or pleasurable pain.”36 Christian Lundberg has also explored how jouissance functions to constitute
Evangelical publics in the same film.37 Joshua Gunn and Mirko M. Hall discuss the role of jouissance as a discursive form that can explain why certain objects, such as the iPod, are both pleasurable and threatening.38 While I am not examining the psychodynamics of joussiance in the current analysis, rhetorics of the “self-made mom” similarly compel neoliberal subjects to find pleasure in their pain through the redemptive narrative. The self-made narrative constitutes subjects’ incorporation into neoliberal logics and the masochistic trope is another way that rhetorical scholars can examine how this functions discursively. 144 Masochistic Motherhood
The narrative of natural childbirth told in the videos on YouTube is homologous to the American narrative of becoming self-made: Through hard work, marked by masochism, mothers shall overcome and be transformed by the experience. There is a long, and troubled history in American culture of the institution of motherhood being marked as masochistic. By the mid-20th century motherhood was defined rhetorically by a dutiful self-denial and renunciation, according to Ehrenreich and English.39 A good mother gave up her passions and sacrificed her happiness (and often well-being) to take care of her children and her family. Expert discourses during the mid-century utilized psychological and medical evidence to support this position, and advocated that maternal bodies should see self-sacrifice as a healthy behavior and a source of empowerment as a woman. To be a good and healthy mother, citizen, and person, then, was to be a masochistic mother and wife. Of course, the depression and anxiety faced by mothers and housewives would prove to be a powerful resource for the radical feminist movement.40
The voices of disenchanted mothers would prove that the experts “prescription” of masochism was insufficient to quell the anxieties and disaffection facing housewives during the mid-century.
Scholars have claimed that motherhood is no longer characterized by sacrifice, but by increasing autonomy.41 However, despite strides made in the 1960s and 1970s that got women into the workplace as individual economic actors and autonomous citizens, neoliberal logics have worked in more elusive ways to maintain masochistic motherhood.
Women might work and have seemingly more reproductive freedom, yet each day laws 145 are passing to restrict that freedom, and women still bear an enormous amount of the care burden in domestic settings.42 Further, as discussed in the previous chapter, an increasing amount of pressure is placed on the maternal body to breastfeed, stay fit, provide financial stability, create a bond with their baby, and sacrifice her self for her children.
Even as neoliberal narratives celebrate the freedom of the individual maternal subject to make choices on her own and self-optimize, “the guiding principle of contemporary motherhood is [still] that women who are mothers must act first as mothers and that their self-identity is dependent on optimizing their children’s lives.”43 Masochistic motherhood is required in a neoliberal context, where mothers have a distinct role, as Vogel has argued, in reproducing the future of civilization through the rearing of the work force.44
In maternity culture, pain is often glorified as dutiful and necessary. For example, in the previous chapter I discussed the ways that breastfeeding culture compels women to internalize and privatize health into the personal act of breastfeeding. Women cite their pain and sacrifice as satisfying and “worth it” considering the bond they create with their babies. The self-made mom narrative present in the home birth videos on YouTube reinforces a similar masochistic motherhood: The maternal subject is constituted through self-denial and the welcoming of pain or suffering. Despite the warranted critique of the medicalization of birth through the marketization of medicine, the home birth narratives presented in the videos invoke the neoliberal logics of self-sufficiency, rugged individualism and entrepreneurialism, while encouraging women to become self- empowered and self-actualized through their painful birthing experience.
146 The narrative form of the “self-made mom,” as previously noted, consists of two key discursive stages: The individual subject must (1) be self-sufficient and ruggedly individual; and (2) face pain and suffering in order to self-optimize and transform/redeem the self. In the next section, I systematically analyze discourses in the most-viewed home birth videos on YouTube, highlighting how the “self-made mom” narrative enacts the stages of the “self-made” redemptive neoliberal narrative.
THE SELF-MADE MOM ON YOUTUBE
Unlike breastfeeding, which was discussed in the previous chapter, the Natural
Childbirth Movement and the Home Birth Movement are less popularized, with less than
2% of the population participating in home births in 2009.45 Home birth is still stigmatized in some circles, and many insurance companies do not cover midwives and doulas, which assist home births. The YouTube videos showing home births are designed to publicize and promote the naturalness of the birthing process and to provide an alternative narrative to the bio-medical model.46 As user Vitality Advocate explains in the opening credit of their video, “We made this video to empower women thinking about conscious, natural birthing.”47
Despite the perceived stigma of home births, the number of at-home births increased between 2004-2009 for the first time since 1990, according to the Center for
Disease Control and Prevention.48 Michelle Goldberg explains that while previously
home birth in the United States was mostly limited to insular religious communities like the Amish and to dedicated members of the counterculture like Gaskin, whose husband founded The Farm as a commune in the 1970s. In recent years, though, it’s moved toward the mainstream, spurred by the rise of 147 attachment parenting, a reaction against a dysfunctional medical system, and pro- midwife documentaries like The Business of Being Born, which featured producer Ricki Lake giving birth in her bathtub. Though still quite small, the number of home births is increasing.49
While the stigma associated with home birth is still present, it is changing. In fact, on
June 12, 2012 The New York Times journalist Danielle Pergament wrote a piece for the style section commenting on the growing “chicness” and “hipness” of the Home Birth
Movement: “midwifery is no longer seen as a weird, fringe practice favored by crunchy types, but as an enlightened, more natural choice for the famous and fashionable.”50 The article follows celebrities like models Karolina Kurkova and Gisele Bündchen, both of whom gave birth at home. In 2012, an entire episode of the popular reality series Keeping
Up with the Kardashians focused on eldest sister Kourtney Kardashian researching home birth for the delivery of her second child, and even followed her as she observed a home birth.51 The Home Birth Movement is not just a political movement against the medicalization of birth, but also a counter-culture lifestyle related to a desire to live more
“naturally.”
YouTube videos are just one aspect of the increasing popular natural childbirth culture. YouTube is a popular new media site that allows individual users to post and share videos, as well as comment on others’ videos. The content on YouTube ranges from professional productions of music and entertainment videos, to amateur content produced by ordinary people, including video-blogging, “how-to” videos, sketch comedy, and an array of other original video content.52 Since being developed in 2005, YouTube has become a central force in new media culture, particularly in the U.S. As previously
148 noted, nearly 1 billion unique visitors come to YouTube each month to watch everything from their favorite musicians’ official music video to adorable cat videos.53 YouTube is a unique cultural form that makes ordinary people famous and has been responsible for launching the careers of pop singer Justin Bieber and actor Darren Criss.
Considering the short time it has existed, communication and media scholars have studied YouTube extensively. Most importantly for the present analysis, scholars have explored how YouTube has become a primary source for community building and the dispersal of health information.54 There is a community of users who post, circulate, and comment on natural home birth videos on YouTube. Advocates even link to videos through the popular home birth advocacy websites, such as www.birthlife.org.55 YouTube videos are used as a way to share health information about home births and offer encouragement to other potential “homebirthers.”
“The visibility of ordinary people, the increasing audibility of their voices and the possibility of social mobility promised by their appearance on television,” argue Biressi and Nunn, might explain why audiences find “reality television” and video-sharing sites like YouTube so appealing.56 Programing that features “real people” doing “real things” appeals to people’s desires to be famous, to move upward, and to be seen.57 Further, audiences expect that reality programing is “truthful” and “real.” 58 YouTube, then, can be understood as an extension of our culture’s fascination with documentary realism, or
“reality television.”59
Scholars of reality television have noted the many ways that the “realness” of documentary video should be challenged; but we also need to understand how audiences 149 knowingly engage in “reality” programming even when it fails to be factually representative.60 Cloud, in her investigation of The Bachelor series, notes that audiences are entranced by an irony bribe—a complex ideological framing that invites audiences to buy-into the “realness” of a narrative, just as that narrative reveals itself to be fabricated.61
Documentary realism has an ideological function as well. John Fiske argues in his work on television culture, “Television makes, or attempts to make, meanings that serve the dominant interests in society,” and these meanings are circulated “amongst the wide variety of social groups that constitute its audiences.”62 In particular, Fiske elaborates that codes, or “rule-governed systems of signs, whose rules and conventions are share amongst members of a culture” are evoked in television programming in a way that
“generate[s] and circulate[s] meanings in and for that culture.”63 For Fiske, then, “what passes for reality in any culture is the product of that culture’s codes, so ‘reality’ is always already encoded, its never ‘raw.’”64 Dialogue, costumes, settings, make-up, casting, editing, music, lighting, and the presentation of action all function to participate in the portrayal and reification of the cultural codes of dominant ideology.65
Although YouTube’s user-generated content is not beholden to corporate wealth or control, it still cannot be understood as an “authentic” representation of reality. Each and every time a user generates a video that they share on the site, they are using a variety of coded methods to convey what audiences come to recognize as reality. From how the camera is held, to what music and subtitles are used, users are making decisions
150 about how to represent reality to audiences. As Fiske suggests, “Realism does not reproduce reality, it makes sense of it.”66
Because YouTube videos are often user-generated cultural productions that are attempting to “make sense” of reality, they are an intriguing and important site of analysis for rhetorical scholars. YouTube videos offer a unique opportunity to study the cultural products of a particular community, such as at-home birth advocates. To narrow the field of the at-home birth videos that I analyze in this case study (from the nearly 1.79 million posted at the present time), I focus on the twenty-one U.S. home birth videos that have received one million views or more as of June 15, 2013. I found these videos by searching, “homebirth” “home birth” and “natural birth.” I initially discovered thirty- eight videos with one million or more views. I excluded any videos that were filmed in a hospital or birthing center, and videos that were primarily photograph montages (as they do not provide the same visual story telling methods as motion video). Since my examination of maternity culture is specific to the United States, I also removed videos that were not presented as being made in the U.S. Finally, five of the twenty-two most- viewed videos are by two users, so there are only 16 distinct users in this sampling of videos. The average number of views per video, as of July 28, 2013 is 6.7 million. This number has likely increased since this chapter was finalized, given that the total number of views for each video often increases by nearly 20,000 views in a matter of hours.
I approach each of these videos with the following questions: What meta-textual discourses (such as commentary or thought-bubbles) are used to supplement the videos and communicate to viewers? What role does sound, music and image play in 151 communicating the narrative of the “self-made mom”? More specifically, how is pain
(expressed through screaming, moaning, swearing, as well as body writhing) invoked as a means of telling the self-made mom narrative? How are discourses of self-sufficiency and rugged individualism told through the narratives and commentary in the videos? And finally, how do the narratives depict the transformation or redemption of the maternal subjects in the videos?
Whether it is explicitly stated in the videos, or expressed in the comment section, the videos provide examples of home births, share knowledge, and promote home births as an alternative to the bio-medical model of birth. The videos often feature music (both instrumental and lyrical), on-screen text in the form of thought bubbles, subtitles, or voiceover commentary. They also provide a brief description of the video in the
“Description” section under the video, and more often then not they assert that they are posting the video because they support the natural birth movement. Some videos show the entire process, from contractions to delivery and afterbirth, while others pay far more attention to a certain aspect of the birth process than others (such as the actual pushing of the baby out of the vaginal canal, or the monotonousness of the hours leading up to this moment).67 To further illuminate how these videos enact the narrative form of the “self- made” individual, I now turn to an analysis of how the videos represent self-sufficiency and pain as necessary for transcendence.
152 Self-Sufficiency and Rugged Individualism
The first component of the self-made redemptive narrative is that the individual neoliberal subject is marked and celebrated as ruggedly individual and self-sufficient. At- home birth is fundamentally about removing the process of birth from the system of medicine and relying instead on the “natural innate ability” of the woman to give birth on her own. Accordingly, the discourses within the videos reflect this component of the self- made narrative. Midwives and partners often refer to the women as “rock stars” and the videos reflect the desire to tell the birthing story as one of self-sufficiency, hyper- individualism, self-empowerment, and self-determination.
For example, in the description of Jenny Sigler’s video of her water home birth of her daughter Olive (which at the present time has just over 5.5 million views), she explains: “Birth should be an empowering experience - this is just one small snippet of what her birth was like for me. I felt powerful, present, connected to all women before me, truly doing what God made my body to do.” 68 Throughout the video, the song “My
Own Two Hands” by Jack Johnson and Ben Harper plays in the background.69 The song can be characterized as both bright and somber, with acoustic guitar plucking and crisp vocals. The first verse of the song begins with the lyrics “I can change the world/With my own two hands/Make a better place/With my own two hands/Make a kinder place/Oh- with my/ Oh- with my own two hands/With my own/Oh- with my own two hands/With my own/With my own two hands.”70 The song encourages using “your own two hands,” a trope associated with working hard and getting “into the trenches” to create something
153 from nothing. Using Johnson’s song as a backdrop for her birth video frames Jenny’s birth as a story of self-sufficiency, self-empowerment, and individualism.
User Vitality Advocate also promotes home birth as an empowering experience through her own commentary and the use of quotations presented in white text on a black screen regarding inner-strength, empowerment, and conscious home birth. At the very beginning of her video (which currently has just over 1.05 million views), one such quotation reads: “’We must learn to trust, to connect, and surrender to our own greatness.’ -Elena Tonetti”71 “Vitality Advocate” (whose real name is Katya), is highlighting both the depiction of home birth as an empowering experience, and the need for women to be self-determinant and control their own destiny regarding their birthing experiences. Elena Tonetti, the author Katya cites in this quotation, is a “conscious birth advocate” whose self-help books and workshops emphasize how important it is for parents to overcome their own personal issues with birth before bringing a baby into the world.72 Even further though, Katya also connects the need for women to “encounter this struggle” with their laziness in fighting other life challenges. As Katya explains in her introduction to the video on her website,
It seems from the time we were born into this culture, that everything is done for us, so we don’t have to think or struggle. But there are consequences. Avoiding life challenges over and over makes us not trust our own bodies and inner judgment. It builds bad habits of shifting responsibility onto others.73
Katya is specifically highlighting how our “avoidance” of struggle and pain has resulted in our inability to know our own strength or judgment, while shifting responsibility onto others for our circumstance. Her insistence that we contextualize birth in the broader
154 decline of personal responsibility and accountability is a prime example of the neoliberal ethic of self-sufficiency. The use of pro-home birth quotations on a black screen as a frame for Katya’s story of birth directly connects the experience of struggle in natural birth to the ethics of self-sufficiency and self-reliance, while compelling individuals to take personal responsibility for their circumstance. The assertion that recognizing one’s own power will lead to transformation is a key characteristic of the video narratives. User
“SNBCANDWW” similarly writes in the “Description” of her video (which has just over
2.25 million views):
I am fortunate to have gained the wisdom that every women [sic] has the innate knowledge, power and sensitivity to birth her baby naturally. I want to make this opportunity available to all women, so they too, could recognize and experience their inner wisdom and knowledge of their own bodies and trust the rightness of the natural birth process.74
SNBCANDWW emphasizes the naturalness and innateness of the ability of the maternal body to act singularly and individually to empower itself.
In user Caleb Pierce’s video of his wife Sarah’s at-home birth (which currently has 4.37 million views) the “routineness” of birth is used as a mechanism for communicating the self-sufficiency and power of the maternal body.75 For nearly 10 minutes, the video focuses entirely on showing Sarah doing routine and mundane tasks around her house, such as texting, playing with their child, writing emails, and talking on the phone. Nearly all of the rest of the video Sarah is sitting on the couch in her underwear, while her husband makes jokes and faces into the camera. Her husband says,
“I think I am going to shower,” she replies “okay,” and the film cuts to her sleeping on the couch. The emphasis on the routineness of her birth represents the discourses of self- 155 sufficiency in a surprising way: Birth is not required to be such a big deal, and one can approach it with complete self-restraint and control. Similarly, Tadessa Benjamin uses the display of the “monotony” of birth to communicate the empowerment or innate strength of her self-determination in the process.76 In her video (which currently has 3.8 million views) you watch as her kids play around her and she completes household tasks.
Tadessa is shown giving birth completely unassisted, meaning, she only receives comfort from her husband and their other children and is not supported by a professional midwife or doula. Unlike Sarah in the previously mentioned video, Tadessa does express pain in her video, but by emphasizing the “monotony” of her routine during the birth process, she highlights that maintaining self-sufficiency and control of this “natural process” is ideal.
Unassisted births like Tadessa’s display even more explicit discourses of self- reliance and individualism, since they fundamentally deny the presumption that the maternal body needs any help in the birth process. The women shown giving birth often shout at those in the room not to touch them or their babies, because they want to maintain their control over the situation. User “Moonprysm” refuses to let anyone touch the baby but her.77 During one scene, the head of the baby is sticking out of the mother’s vaginal opening, and the midwife tries to wipe the face of the baby with a cloth to remove blood and fluids from the baby’s eyes. The mother screams and asks: “No one is touching the baby right? No one is touching the baby?” The insistence that the mother be entirely self-sufficient in this moment reinforces rugged, competitive individualism.
Similarly, in user John Canales’s video, the maternal subject keeps reasserting that she needs to be the first to touch the baby, or pull the baby out.78 The desire to have 156 an unassisted birth, or to be the only person to touch the baby is explicitly part of the self- reliance discourses within the childbirth narratives that emphasize the power of the individual to overcome the birthing process entirely on their own. Near the end of
Vitality Advocate’s labor, while she is pushing in the bathtub, the following quotation scrolls across a black screen: “‘The whole point of natural birth is the knowledge that a woman is the birth power source. She may need help, but in essence, she always had, currently has, and will always have the power,’ -Heather McCue.”79 The trope of self- sufficiency, as exemplified in this text, is fundamental to the “self-made” narrative form and is displayed throughout the videos of homebirth on YouTube.
Pain, Self-Optimization, and Redemption
In addition to emphasizing the neoliberal ethic of self-sufficiency, the videos also archive and present pain as a marker of hard work and good citizenship, and as necessary for redemption. Screams, moans, and bodily movements, as well as commentary and editing practices, support the larger narrative told in the videos of becoming self-made. In this section of my analysis, I examine how the videos glorify pain and frame the experience of pain as a process of self-optimization that results in self-transformation.
In many of the videos there is an explicit emphasis on depicting the expression of pain during childbirth. Users discuss pain in their commentary and emphasize pain in their editing and filming. User Moonprysm accentuates her pain by filming the entire video of her birth with the camera pointed directly at her vaginal opening. 80 Her face is not shown in the entire video, but the sounds of her deep breathing, panting, and
157 squealing from pain can be heard. Her body shakes and jiggles with each moment of pain or movement from the baby, and she rocks back and forth in pain every few moments.
Because of the framing of the video, the viewer is forced to directly encounter each and every moment of the birth, including seeing the baby kicking and wiggling inside of the mother, which she exclaims is incredibly painful.
Likewise, user sociallyskilled is shown giving her first home birth to her second child (completely unassisted besides her husband). 81 When she is faced with her final contraction before giving birth, she jumps up, grunts deep and low, and buries her face into the flexibility ball she was balancing herself on and bellows “uh uh uh uh uh.” The pain becomes so great that she tells her husband, “I don’t want to push anymore,” while letting out a deep sigh and “uhhhhhh.” She screams, and her husband tells her the baby is halfway out. She wails: “She is only halfway?!”82 User birthclip’s video is explicitly called “Painful Water Birth,” and the description of the video explains that the video is of a “beautiful but painful home birth.”83 The mother, who is giving birth in water in the video, howls blood-curdling screams, so intense that they distort the sound on the video.
She shrieks, “Get him out of me!” as her hands grip tightly on the sides of the bathtub, her legs spread apart. Her male partner and midwife sit in front of her trying to encourage her and tell her she can do it. She begins crying, shaking, and begging: “Please help me! I can’t do it, I can’t. I’m shaking. Get him out!”84 Even as the video highlights the intense and violent pain experienced by the woman giving birth, the pain in the video is still framed as “beautiful” in the description. These are just several examples of the ways that the videos feature pain as a central component of the birth narrative. 158 The emphasis on pain in the videos stems from broader discourses within the
Natural Childbirth Movement that assert that a woman consciously experiencing the pain of childbirth will become self-actualized and transformed through postpartum euphoria.
Ina May Gaskin, considered to be the mother of the Natural Childbirth Movement, wrote in her book Spiritual Midwifery that giving birth naturally not only disrupts the bio- medical model that creates problems for maternal bodies, but that being entirely conscious during birth and undergoing the full breadth of “good pain” produces a psychedelic or euphoric (sometimes described as orgasmic) experience that is transformative.85 As Samantha Shapiro writes in The New York Times, “the book shows vaginal, unmedicated birth to be an unparalleled opportunity for transcendence and communion. It has been translated into six languages and sold well over half a million copies.”86 Considering that the YouTube videos emerge from the broader context of the
Natural Childbirth Movement, it is not as surprising that they would primarily focus on depicting a transformative, masochistic self-made narrative.
The stories of self-optimization in the videos also distinctly focus on the women feeling, confronting, and working hard to overcome pain. Several of the videos explicitly attempt to provide encouragement to other women who are considering home birth. User
Vitality Advocate, who as previously noted uses quotations on a black screen to frame the video of her birth, attempts to encourage viewers by quoting Khalil Gibran: “Your pain is the breaking shell that encloses your understanding.”87 According to this neoliberal logic, hard work, marked by pain, leads to self-optimization and self- actualization. In a similar fashion, user Marin8d (who currently has 74.5 million views— 159 the highest number of views of all of the home birth videos) takes her time during her video to explicitly encourage other women to face their pain. A voice-over at beginning of her video exclaims: “A monumental moment in a woman’s life, and what I am here to tell you is YOU CAN DO IT.” The words “YOU CAN DO IT” glide across the screen in white text, as if pulled from a Nike commercial, as a woman (later identified as Marin8d) lies on a bed in pain from labor. She continues, “It’s,” presumably the pain, “worth this moment.”88
In addition to offering encouragement to others, several of the videos also focus on depicting “the struggle” with pain, or the mythic journey of wanting to give up but persevering. “I was so excited after my water broke,” Vitality Advocate explains, “but I underestimated how challenging labor would be.”89 While the video displays her writhing back and forth in the tub, she proclaims, “The pain became so excruciating, I started doubting if I could do it...I wanted to quit and get an epidural. I couldn’t stop fighting the pain... Then a shift happened and I finally surrendered.” The film cuts to her peacefully lying in bed, her husband stroking her arm as she stares off with a blank look on her face. She explains on her website in the introduction to the birth video: “Yes my pain was earth shattering at times, but I knew it was there for a reason. It’s supposed to be painful. Sometimes it’s good to be shattered.”90 By focusing on the journey of self- optimization—that as an individual one must face, confront, and overcome struggle,
Vitality Advocate is highlighting the inherently masochistic nature of the self-made narrative.
160 The narrative of the self-made mom in the videos not only emphasizes the necessity of pain in the process of self-optimization, but it also glorifies the ability of some women to control their pain more than others, or to “surrender” to the pain. Caleb
Pierce’s video of his wife’s birth makes a point to highlight how incredible she is at controlling her pain and staying “quiet.” In fact, at one point her midwife looks at her and says, “You are quieter than Amish women.” The cameraman exclaims, “Ya, that’s pretty impressive,” and the midwife replies, as if in shock, “Ya, she’s very, very quiet.” 91 The video exhaustively frames Pierce’s wife as particularly hard working because of how she can control her response to the intense pain. Similarly, in templetunes75 video, which features user Temple singing a religious psalm, the video begins with a disclaimer:
“Temple sings just before the home birth of her 10lb son Koa...She was singing to help with her contractions... she has two strong contractions while singing… The video was shot by her seven year old daughter.”92 As she sits on her bed with her legs crossed,
Temple peacefully sings while her partner plays the guitar. Temple is framed as having
“surrendered” to her pain in a moment of religious clarity.
In like manner, user marcclawson57 posted a video of his wife’s home birth, where he has made commentary throughout the process that emphasized her ability to smile through pain.93 In the first few minutes of the video, Marc says to his wife, “You are looking like a rock star,” and her midwife responds, “She is working like a rock star.”
When a contraction comes on, generic instrumental hip-hop music laced with a strong bass beat, and the words “CONTRACTION!!!” pop-up on the screen. The music moves along with the contraction, until it ends (you see her body release) and text appears that 161 explains that the contraction has ended. The deep, oddly up-tempo beat of the music and the textual emphasis on the word “CONTRACTION!!!” on screen accentuates the contraction and accompanying pain as central to Marc’s narrative of his wife’s home birth. He continues to narrate and frame the video as an expression of her triumph over her own pain.
Shortly after her contraction comes to an end, text appears on black screen and reads, “She moved into transition, the hardest part of labor.” The video shifts to the image of his wife face down on the floor with her eyes closed. Marc speaks to the viewers through the camera and says, “I want you to know how awesome my wife is, she is in transition now and she is smiling, love you baba.” Text appears on the screen that says,
“In between contractions she wouldn’t stop smiling.” A still image appears on the screen that shows her smiling and looking into the camera. The husband goes on to explain that in between contractions she is just “idly” chatting, as a series of still pictures with her lying face down in pain.94 Throughout the video, Marc explicitly frames his wife’s response to the pain of labor as heroic, brave, and essentially “badass.”
The emphasis on the courage and power of the women to overcome the pain is ever-present in the narratives. In the labor segment of Vitality Advocate’s video is bookended with the quotation: “Birth may bring you face-to-face with your insecurities, doubts, inadequacies and fears... it may also bring you face-to-face with your joy, determination, willingness and courage.” Self-optimization, through the glorified confrontation of pain and suffering, leads to the possibility for emotional and material transformation. 162 Transcendence through the surrender to suffering is fundamental in a self-made, rags-to-riches narrative that emphasizes that an individual actor must confront and overcome hardship, through one’s own volition, to receive grand success. Several of the women state that, “Giving birth naturally was my biggest accomplishment,” or proclaim while holding their baby while sobbing, crying, and wailing shortly after birth, “I did it, oh my god I did it,” or that, “It was so worth it.”95 Others, even if they do not explicitly state that they see their home birth as their greatest accomplishment, communicate through the editing and forms presented in the videos that there is an ecstasy or euphoria in the final moments of birth. During the final push of Marin8d’s home birth, piano music plays, while Marin tips back her head, screaming with her mouth open. She leans into her husband’s body as the midwife pulls out the baby covered in blood and hands it to Marin.
Marin’s head is still tipped back in agony. The video rewinds, and begins replaying the scene in slow motion to show her face, eyes squinted closed, letting out a scream of relief. Marin releases into her husband, closing her eyes as the nurse cleans off the baby.96
The ritualistic display of transcendence through agony presents the moment of birth as redemptive, and is not uncommon in the videos: At the end of Ceci Jane’s video, the mother moans and writhes back and forth after the baby comes out, switching between laughing, crying, and wailing.97 Vitality Advocate similarly starts screaming, moaning and crying after her final push in labor, exclaiming “ohhhhhh….she is here, she is here, she is here…our baby’s here!”98 The display of the post-partum moment as transcendent and redemptive justifies the experience of pain and suffering.
163 I am not attempting to argue that these women do not experience a moment of intense feeling and sensation in the moments just after birth. Women do experience an intense release from the endorphins that result from the intense exercise and pain of labor.99 I am also not wishing to critique the possibility of women to be authentically transformed by natural birth. Instead, I want to emphasize that the presentation of the redemptive/transformative narrative alongside the neoliberal masochistic trope of hard work frames childbirth as an entrepreneurial narrative that privatizes pain and responsibility.
Not only is the self-transformation of the maternal subject emphasized, but several videos claim that without the possibility of encountering conscious pain through natural birth the maternal subject also risks not bonding properly or fully with her baby.
In hpnvideo’s description of her vaginal birth after a caesarean section, she takes the time to explain why her previous emergency hospital birth was so problematic:
Having learned about the benefits of natural childbirth, I joyfully began preparing for a peaceful water birth in my home, when I went into labor, my dreams came crashing in as my baby presented hands and feet first. I was rushed to the hospital for an emergency caesarean during which I felt frightened and violated. The recovery was difficult. The post-partum depression that followed was suffocating and although I was happy to have my healthy baby in my arms I struggled to bond with him as I had with my other children. The trauma had been so great, I wasn’t sure if I ever wanted children again.100
Hpnvideo asserts that it is because of her caesarean section that she was unable to bond properly with her baby. Of course, post-partum depression is a real and traumatizing occurrence that affects many women, and should not be underestimated.101 However, hpnvideo seems to claim that the only reason for her post-partum depression was because 164 she gave birth through caesarean section rather than giving birth vaginally. The pain of having surgery is marked as “bad,” violating and frightening; whereas the pain she would have experienced in natural delivery is portrayed as “good” and redemptive.
The view that giving birth naturally results in a “good pain” that leads to a “better bond” with a baby is not uncommon among natural childbirth advocates, and is invoked as a primary reason why natural birth is better than bio-medical birth. A 2008 study that expressed that women who deliver vaginally (although not necessarily without drug intervention) rather than through caesarean might be more responsive to their baby’s cry several weeks after birth, is often used by home birth advocates to claim that natural childbirth produces an unparalleled bond with the baby.102 Women are essentially told through these rhetorics that they can feel “good pain” in birth, or face the pain of not bonding with their child.
As the discourses within the videos champion self-transformation and infant bonding through pain and sacrifice, they also, unknowingly, discipline maternal bodies and their choices. In order to be transformed, one must overcome “good” natural pain.
Unfortunately, whether it is bio-medical discourses strong-arming women to give birth in a hospital while inciting fear and anxiety over safety and well-being, or natural birth advocates compelling women to give birth at-home while inciting fear and shame for not being “transformed” or bonding properly with their babies, both discourses are seeking to discipline women to make a certain kind of choice. Shapiro writes, “The very idea of natural childbirth contained within it the possibility of an “unnatural” birth, a way to fail.”103 165 CONCLUSION
I have argued that the narrative of self-actualization in home birth videos on
YouTube is enacted primarily through masochistic discourses: Pain, self-sufficiency, and redemption are key discursive characteristics of the neoliberal redemptive narrative of the
“self-made” individual. The self-made mom narrative in home birth videos on YouTube reifies a masochistic motherhood that celebrates the entrepreneurial spirit, and privatizes responsibility onto the maternal body using discourses of pain, suffering, and sacrifice as ideological legitimation. In a system that is unequal, where someone has to lose, you have to rationalize why so many people are suffering. The ethics of hard work and self- optimization are used to justify the pain subjects feel under capitalism, by marking it as a necessary by product of the neoliberal American dream. Further, as Susan Bordo has contended, rhetorics about women’s bodies often desubjectivize them, or revoke their status as autonomous persons.104 Masochistic motherhood discourses invoke discourses of the rugged individual and celebrate the personhood of the mother just as they encourage self-denial and renunciation.
The home birth movement is not fundamentally neoliberal or system-sustaining, however, the depictions of home birth on YouTube, as analyzed in this chapter, reflect logics of neoliberalism and discipline maternal bodies to accept complicity in a system that does not always have their best interests at heart. One cannot critique the medicalization of birth the United States, while simultaneously invoking a neoliberal narrative of self-actualization and entrepreneurship that obscures the role that the capitalist system in the U.S. has played in medicalizing birth and maternity care. While 166 discourses outside of the YouTube community—including those from doulas, advocacy organizations, and activists—often invoke anti-capitalist politics that critique the role that marketization has played in shaping women’s birthing experiences, this critique is not only not present in the videos, but the narrative form of self-madeness that is celebrated in the stories reinforces the very logics that create the conditions for medicalization in the first place.105
1 Hilary MacGregor, “The Birth of a Trend: Posting Childbirth Videos Online,” The Los Angeles Times, September 6, 2012, http://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-birth-movies- 20120809,0,3477872.story (accessed July 14, 2013). 2 “Pricing,” MyBirthMovie.com, accessed July 25, 2013, http://mybirthmovie.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/03/MBM-Pricing-2-18-13-for-Site.pdf. 3 Michael Strangelove, Watching YouTube: Extraordinary Videos by Ordinary People (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 1-3. 4 I calculated the average number of views on July 18, 2013. 5 Hilary MacGregor, “The Birth of a Trend: Posting Childbirth Videos Online,” The Los Angeles Times, September 6, 2012, http://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-birth-movies- 20120809,0,3477872.story (accessed July 14, 2013). 6 Samantha M. Shapiro, “Ina May Gaskin and the Battle for at-Home Births,” The New York Times, May 23, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/magazine/ina-may- gaskin-and-the-battle-for-at-home-births.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (accessed July 15, 2013). 7 Elisabeth Rosenthal, “American Way of Birth, Costliest in the World,” The New York Times, June 30, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/health/american-way-of- birth-costliest-in-the-world.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (accessed July 20, 2013). 8 Elisabeth Rosenthal, “American Way of Birth, Costliest in the World,” The New York Times, June 30, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/health/american-way-of- birth-costliest-in-the-world.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (accessed July 20, 2013). 9 For a comprehensive history of childbearing choices in U.S. history see: Judith Rooks, “The History of Women’s Childbearing Choices in the United States,” Ourbodiesourselves.org, accessed July 20, 2013, http://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/book/companion.asp?id=21&compID=75. 10 RW Wertz and DC Wertz, Lying-in: A history of childbirth in America (New York: Schocken Books, 1977); and, Adrian E. Feldhusen, “The History of Midwifery and Childbirth in America: A Time Line,” Midwifery Today, 2000 http://www.midwiferytoday.com/articles/timeline.asp (accessed July 20, 2013). 167
11 “Home Births in the United States, 1990-2009,” Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Number 84, January 2012, http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db84.htm (accessed July 27, 2013). 12 Judith Rooks, “The History of Women’s Childbearing Choices in the United States,” paragraph 4. 13 Tiffany O’Callaghan, “Too Many C-Sections: Docs Rethink Induced Labor,” Time Magazine, August 2, 2010, http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2007754,00.html#ixzz2aHBNTOnx (accessed July 15, 2013). 14 Katherine Don, “Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, and Pro-Home Birth,” Religion Dispatches, July 3, 2012, http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/sexandgender/5684/pro_choice__pro_life__an d_pro_home_birth/. 15 There are births that are planned hospital births that occur in homes in emergency or unplanned situations. These are not considered to be part of the home birth movement. 16 Michelle Goldberg, “Homebirth: Increasingly Popular, But Dangerous,” The Daily Beast, June 25, 2012, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/25/home-birth- increasingly-popular-but-dangerous.html. 17 Joseph R. Wax, et al., “Maternal and Newborn Outcomes in Planned Home Birth Vs Planned Hospital Births: A Metaanalysis,” American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology 203, no.3 (2010), 243. 18 Ank de Jonge, et. al., “Severe Adverse Maternal Outcomes Among Low Risk Women with Planned Home Versus Hospital Births in the Netherlands: Nationwide Cohort Study,” British Medical Journal 346, no.f3263 (2013). 19 J.J. Matthews and K. Zadak, “The Alternative Birth Movement in the United States: History and Current Status,” Women Health 17:1 (1991), 39; Jennifer Block, “How to Scare Women,” Slate Magazine, July 3, 2012, http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/07/daily_beast_and_home_birth_fe ar_trumps_data_in_a_new_story_on_having_babies_at_home_.html. 20 Jennifer Ellis West, Birth Matters: Discourses of Childbirth in Contemporary American Culture (Phd. Dissertation, Louisiana State University, 2011) http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-04202011-093522/unrestricted/West_diss.pdf (accessed July 14, 2013). 21 Dan P. McAdams, “The Redemptive Self: Generativity and the Stories Americans Live By,” Research in Human Development 3, no.2 (2006), 81-82. 22 Marie-Laure Djelic, “The Ethics of Competition’ or the Moral Foundation of Contemporary Capitalism,” in Moral Foundations of Management Knowledge, eds. Marie-Laure Djelic and Radu Vranceanu (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2007), 91. 23 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism And Other Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 60. 24 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, 67. 168
25 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, 123. 26 Leroy G. Dorsey and Rachel M. Harlow, “’We want Americans, Pure and Simple: Theodore Roosevelt and the Myth of Americanism,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6, no.1 (2003): 55-78; Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki, “Memory and myth at the Buffalo Bill Museum,” Western Journal Of Communication 69, no.2 (April 2005): 85- 108; Leroy G. Dorsey, “The frontier myth in presidential rhetoric: Theodore Roosevelt's campaign for conservation,” Western Journal Of Communication 59, no.1 (1995): 1-19; John C. Hammerback, “Barry Goldwater’s Rhetoric of Rugged Individualism,” Quarterly Journal Of Speech 58, no.2 (April 1972): 175; Janice Hocker Rushing, “Mythic Evolution of 'The New Frontier' in Mass Mediated Rhetoric,” Critical Studies In Mass Communication 3, no.3 (September 1986): 265. 27 Richard Weiss, The American Myth of Success: From Horatio Alger to Norman Vincent Peale (New York: Basic Books, Inc. Publishers, 1969). 28 Richard Weiss, The American Myth of Success: From Horatio Alger to Norman Vincent Peale (New York: Basic Books, Inc. Publishers, 1969). 29 Chip Berlet, “Hard right Styles, Frames, and Narratives,” Z Magazine, November 2004, http://www.zcommunications.org/hard-right-styles-frames-and-amp-narratives-by-chip- berlet, paragraph 4. 30 See: Leroy G. Dorsey and Rachel M. Harlow, “’We want Americans Pure and Simple: Theodore Roosevelt and the Myth of Americanism,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6, no.1 (2003): 55-78; Robert C. Rowland and John M. Jones, “Recasting the American Dream and American Politics: Barack Obama's Keynote Address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention,” Quarterly Journal Of Speech 93, no.4 (November 2007): 425-448; Ron Von Burg and Paul E. Johnson, “Yearning for a Past that Never Was: Baseball, Steroids, and the Anxiety of the American Dream,” Critical Studies In Media Communication 26, no.4 (October 2009): 351-371; Kenneth S. Zagacki, “The Rhetoric of American Decline: Paul Kennedy, Conservatives, and the Solvency Debate,” Western Journal Of Communication 56, no.4 (Fall1992 1992): 372-393. 31 Dana L. Cloud, “Hegemony or Concordance? The Rhetoric of Tokenism in ‘Oprah’ Winfrey’s Rags-to-Riches Biography,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 13 (1996), 115. 32 Cloud, “Hegemony or Concordance?” 117. 33 Cloud, “Hegemony or Concordance?” 119. 34 James V. Catano, Ragged Dicks: Masculinity, Steel, and the Rhetoric of the Self-Made Man (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), 54. 35 Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty & Venus in Furs (New York, Zone Books, 1991). For examples of work using this in communication studies see: Marco Abel, “Fargo: The Violent Production of the Masochist Contract as Cinematic Concept,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 16 (1999): 308-328; Don Lockwood, “All Stripped Down: The Spectacle of ‘Torture Porn,’” Popular Communication 7, no.1 (2009): 40-48. 36 Joshua Gunn, “Maranatha,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 98, no.4 (2012): 365-366. 169
37 Christian Lundberg, “Enjoying God’s Death: The Passion of the Christ and the Practices of an Evangelical Public,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no.4 (2009): 387- 411. 38 Joshua Gunn and Mirko M. Hall, “Stick it in Your Ear: The Psychodynamics of iPod Enjoyment,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 5, no.2 (2008): 135-157. 39 Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of Experts’ Advice to Women, Revised Edition (New York: Anchor Books, 2005), 296-297. 40 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton Company, 2001). 41 “Janet A. Kohen,”Housewives, Breadwinners, Mothers, and Family Heads: the Changing Family Roles of Women", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 08, Kent B. Monroe, ed. (Ann Abor, MI: Association for Consumer Research, 1981), 576-579, http://www.acrwebsite.org/search/view-conference-proceedings.aspx?Id=5862. 42 Debora Sparr, “Why Women Should Stop Trying to Do it All,” Newsweek and The Daily Beast, April 2, 2013, http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2013/04/01/why- women-should-stop-trying-to-do-it-all.html, paragraph 11. 43 Joan B. Wolf, Is Breast Best?: Taking on the Breastfeeding Experts and the New High Stakes of Motherhood (New York: New York University Press, 2011), Kindle Edition, 68. 44 Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 144. 45 Home Births in the United States, 1990-2009,” Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Number 84, January 2012, http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db84.htm (accessed July 27, 2013). 46 Hilary MacGregor, “The Birth of a Trend: Posting Childbirth Videos Online,” The Los Angeles Times, September 6, 2012, http://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-birth-movies- 20120809,0,3477872.story (accessed July 14, 2013). 47 “Natural birth encouragement - pain and joy,” YouTube video, 6:32, Posted by “Vitality Advocate,” March 15, 2013, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=7lChCms37lY&list=TLJhxkolSSExc (accessed July 25 2013). 48 Home Births in the United States, 1990-2009,” Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Number 84, January 2012, http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db84.htm (accessed July 27, 2013). 49 Michelle Goldberg, “Homebirth: Increasingly Popular, But Dangerous,” The Daily Beast, June 25, 2012, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/25/home-birth- increasingly-popular-but-dangerous.html 50 Danielle Pergament, “The Midwife Becomes a Status Symbol for the Hip,” The New York Times, June 15, 2012 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/fashion/the-midwife- becomes-a-status-symbol-for-the-hip.html (accessed July 20, 2013). 51 “Kardashians: Water Birth at Home,” Eonline.com, accessed July 15, 2013, http://www.eonline.com/shows/kardashians/videos/189429/kardashians-water-birth-at- home. 170
52 Strangelove, Watching YouTube, 1-3. 53 Statistics,” YouTube.com, http://www.YouTube.com/yt/press/statistics.html (accessed 23 June 2013) 54 See: Joseph B. Walther, David DeAndrea, Jinsuk Kim, and James C. Anthony. “The Influence of Online Comments on Perceptions of Antimarijuana Public Service Announcements on YouTube.” Human Communication Research 36, no.4 (October 2010): 469-492; Donna Chu, “Collective behavior in YouTube: a case study of 'Bus Uncle' online videos,” Asian Journal Of Communication 19, no.3 (September 2009): 337- 353; Aymar Jean Christian, “Camp 2.0: A Queer Performance of the Personal,” Communication, Culture & Critique 3, no.3 (September 2010): 352-376; Aaron Hess, “Resistance Up in Smoke: Analyzing the Limitations of Deliberation on YouTube,” Critical Studies In Media Communication 26, no.5 (December 2009): 411-434; Kyongseok Kim, Hye-Jin Paek, and Jordan Lynn, “A Content Analysis of Smoking Fetish Videos on YouTube: Regulatory Implications for Tobacco Control,” Health Communication 25, no.2 (March 2010): 97-106; Patricia G. Lange, “Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube,” Journal Of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no.1 (November 2007): 361-380; Ben Light, Marie Griffiths, and Siân Lincoln, “‘Connect and create’: Young people, YouTube and Graffiti communities,” Continuum: Journal Of Media & Cultural Studies 26, no.3 (June 2012): 343-355; Simon Lindgren, “‘It took me about half an hour, but I did it!’ Media circuits and affinity spaces around how-to videos on YouTube,” European Journal Of Communication 27, no.2 (June 2012): 152-170; Yan Tian, “Organ Donation on Web 2.0: Content and Audience Analysis of Organ Donation Videos on YouTube,” Health Communication 25, no.3 (April 2010): 238-246; Jina H. Yoo and Junghyun Kim, “Obesity in the New Media: A Content Analysis of Obesity Videos on YouTube,” Health Communication 27, no.1 (January 2012): 86-97. 55 “Watch NATURAL BIRTH VIDEOS,” Birthlife.org, accessed July 28, 2013, http://www.birthlife.org/Universal/video.html. 56 Anita Biressi and Heather Nunn, Reality TV: Realism and Television (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), 2. 57 Biressi and Nunn, Reality TV, 27. 58 Biressi and Nunn, Reality TV, 3. 59 Strangelove, Watching YouTube, 1-3. 60 Geoff King,‘‘‘Just like a movie’? 9/11 and Hollywood spectacle,” The spectacle of the real: From Hollywood to ‘‘reality’’ TV and beyond, ed. G. King (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2005): 47-58. 61 Dana L. Cloud, “The Irony Bribe and Reality Television: Investment and Detachment in The Bachelor,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 27, no.5 (2010): 413-437. 62 John Fiske, Television Culture (New York: Metheun & Co., 1987), 1. 63 Fiske, Television Culture, 4. 64 Fiske, Television Culture, 5. 65 Fiske, Television Culture, 8-11. 171
66 Fiske, Television Culture, 24. 67 The following video by “Caleb Pierce” focuses primarily on the pre-pushing parts of the labor process: “Home birth delivery baby,” YouTube video, 14:53, Posted by “Caleb Pierce,” October 30, 2011, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=C-oBckzNCt4 (accessed July 28 2013). Contrarily, the following video posted by “Moonprysm” focuses entirely on the process of pushing the baby out of the vaginal canal: “Jaimesbirth,” YouTube video, 11:00, Posted by “Moonprysm,” January 28, 2009, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=uXuwy8dXTGA (accessed July 28 2013). 68 “Olive’s homebirth/waterbirth,” YouTube video, 2:46, Posted by “Jenny Sigler” April 24, 2007, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=niJ6F2p9Ql8 (accessed July 28 2013). 69 “Olive’s homebirth/waterbirth,” YouTube video, 2:46, Posted by “Jenny Sigler” April 24, 2007, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=niJ6F2p9Ql8 (accessed July 28 2013). 70 “Jack Johnson - With My Own Two Hands Lyrics,” Metrolyrics.com, accessed July 25, 2013, http://www.metrolyrics.com/with-my-own-two-hands-lyrics-jack-johnson.html. 71 “Natural birth encouragement - pain and joy,” YouTube video, 6:32, Posted by “Vitality Advocate,” March 15, 2013, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=7lChCms37lY&list=TLJhxkolSSExc (accessed July 28 2013). 72 “Peace on Earth Begins with Birth,” Birth Into Being, accessed July 15, 2013, http://birthintobeing.com. 73 “A Water Birth for Our Daughter,” VitalityAdvocate.com, 2013, http://www.vitalityadvocate.com/2013/water-birth/ (accessed July 20, 2013). 74 “Waterbirth Miracle #1,” YouTube video, 4:45, Posted by “SNBCANDWW,” May 9, 2009, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=mO6GGzJWTh0 (accessed July 28 2013). 75 “Home birth delivery baby,” YouTube video, 14:53, Posted by “Caleb Pierce,” October 30, 2011, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=C-oBckzNCt4 (accessed July 28 2013). 76 “The Unassisted Home Birth of Felix Alexander,” YouTube video, 8:49, Posted by “Tadessa Benjamin,” August 11, 2012, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=Dnv6WhJkGZI (accessed July 28 2013). 77 “Jaimesbirth,” YouTube video, 11:00, Posted by “Moonprysm,” January 28, 2009, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=uXuwy8dXTGA (accessed July 28 2013). 78 “River’s Birthday - Hombirth/Waterbirth/Natural” YouTube Video, 3:14, Posted by “John Canales,” October 23, 2009, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=AXdD4XKaQt8 (accessed July 28 2013). 79 “Natural birth encouragement - pain and joy,” YouTube video, 6:32, Posted by “Vitality Advocate,” March 15, 2013, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=7lChCms37lY&list=TLJhxkolSSExc (accessed July 28 2013). 80 “Jaimesbirth,” YouTube video, 11:00, Posted by “Moonprysm,” January 28, 2009, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=uXuwy8dXTGA (accessed July 28 2013). 81 “Unassisted Birth,” YouTube Video, 8:54, Posted by “sociallyskilled,” September 22, 2007, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=N0HTiOvOPZw (accessed July 28 2013). 172
82 “Unassisted Birth,” YouTube Video, 8:54, Posted by “sociallyskilled,” September 22, 2007, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=N0HTiOvOPZw (accessed July 28 2013). 83 “Painful Water Birth (Part 1 of 3),” YouTube Video, 3:08, Posted by “birthclip,” November 9, 2008, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=-CfT3-gl04Y (accessed July 28 2013). 84 “Natural birth encouragement - pain and joy,” YouTube video, 6:32, Posted by “Vitality Advocate,” March 15, 2013, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=7lChCms37lY&list=TLJhxkolSSExc (accessed July 28 2013). 85 Ina May Gaskin, Spiritual Midwifery (Summertown, TN: Book Publishing Company, 1975). 86 Samantha M. Shapiro, “Ina May Gaskin and the Battle for at-Home Births,” The New York Times, May 23, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/magazine/ina-may- gaskin-and-the-battle-for-at-home-births.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0, paragraph 10. 87 “Natural birth encouragement - pain and joy,” YouTube video, 6:32, Posted by “Vitality Advocate,” March 15, 2013, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=7lChCms37lY&list=TLJhxkolSSExc (accessed July 28 2013). 88 “The Birth of Love (Original)” YouTube Video, 1:02, Posted by “Marin8d,” January 20, 2012, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=i7FhdskJjMY (accessed July 28 2013). 89 “Natural birth encouragement - pain and joy,” YouTube video, 6:32, Posted by “Vitality Advocate,” March 15, 2013, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=7lChCms37lY&list=TLJhxkolSSExc (accessed July 28 2013). 90 “A Water Birth for Our Daughter,” VitalityAdvocate.com, 2013, http://www.vitalityadvocate.com/2013/water-birth/ (accessed July 20, 2013). 91 “Home birth delivery baby,” YouTube video, 14:53, Posted by “Caleb Pierce,” October 30, 2011, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=C-oBckzNCt4 (accessed July 28 2013). 92 “Woman Sings While In Labor,” YouTube video, 3:33, Posted by “templetunes75,” August 24, 2007, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=z3WA9iHz5ww (accessed July 28 2013). 93 “Homebirth,” YouTube Video, 6:58, Posted by “marcclawson57” March 2, 2009, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=mYax6ew_5FQ (accessed July 25, 2013). 94 “Homebirth,” YouTube Video, 6:58, Posted by “marcclawson57” March 2, 2009, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=mYax6ew_5FQ (accessed July 25, 2013). 95 “Natural birth encouragement - pain and joy,” YouTube video, 6:32, Posted by “Vitality Advocate,” March 15, 2013, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=7lChCms37lY&list=TLJhxkolSSExc (accessed July 28 2013). 96 “The Birth of Love (Original)” YouTube Video, 1:02, Posted by “Marin8d,” January 20, 2012, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=i7FhdskJjMY (accessed July 28 2013).
173
97 “Grayson’s Natural Home Birth” YouTube Video, 6:01, Posted by “Ceci Jane,” July 1, 2011, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=AmD6MaZTeDw (accessed July 28 2013). 98 “Part 5 of Homebirth - July 3, 2011” YouTube video, 16:21, Posted by “Lucy Eades,” July 16, 2011, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=K8p7z01zug0 (accessed July 28 2013). 99 Adam Sprouse-Blum, Greg Smith, Daniel Sugai, and Don Parsa, “Understanding Endorphins and Their Importance in Pain Management,” Hawai’i Medical Journal 69, no. 3 (2010): 70-71. 100 “My Twin Homebirth VBAC (HBAC)” YouTube video, 8:43, Posted by “hpnvideo,” November 26, 2007, http://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=3XmwED82poc (accessed July 28 2013). 101 Mayo Clinic Staff, “Postpartum Depression,” MayoClinic.com, accessed July 28, 2013, http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/postpartum-depression/DS00546. 102 J. Swain, et. al., “Maternal Brain response to own baby-cry is affected by cesarean section delivery,” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 49, no.10 (October 2008): 1042-1052. 103 Samantha M. Shapiro, “Ina May Gaskin and the Battle for at-Home Births,” The New York Times, May 23, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/magazine/ina-may- gaskin-and-the-battle-for-at-home-births.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0, paragraph 11. 104 Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 94. 105 For an excellent anti-capitalist critique see: Jennifer Margulis, The Business of Baby: What Doctors Don’t Tell You, What Corporations Try to Sell You, and How to Put Your Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Baby Before Their Bottom Line (New York: Scribner, 2013).
174 Chapter Six: Conclusion: Disciplining the Maternal Body
In 2010, the reality television show Pregnant in Heels premiered on the Bravo
Television Network. The show follows maternity guru Rosie Pope as she deals with high- end clients’ outrageous requests through her concierge service. Clients ask for everything, from pregnant sex coaching or making placenta smoothies.1 The show simultaneously promotes Rosie’s maternity brand (which consists of clothing,
‘MomPrep’ classes, and concierge services) all while selling elite, couture motherhood to the viewers. Pregnant in Heels is one example of the many discourses in contemporary public life that represent maternity as a cultural expression and rhetorical reproduction of the ethics of capitalist civilization. While Pregnant in Heels is far more explicit and forthright in it’s recuperation of neoliberal ethics, I have shown how both the Boob- olution campaign and home birth videos on YouTube similarly mimic the values and logics of neoliberalism.
The maternal body is a chief site of struggle over political and economic antagonisms in the contemporary moment. I have argued throughout this dissertation that maternity culture is a rhetoric of reproduction: It is a complex system of discourses that not only disciplines maternal bodies as reproducing persons, but that reproduces unequal economic and political arrangements in the wider public sphere. Specifically, the maternity culture discourses I analyzed function to naturalize, justify, and reincorporate neoliberal logics such as entrprenuerialism, hard work, and perverse individualism, while often espousing radical or counter-hegemonic aims.
175 In an effort to elucidate how maternity culture enacts logics of neoliberalism, I have utilized materialist feminism as a methodological resource for historicizing several case studies that represent the diverse yet homologous discourses within maternity culture. In the second chapter of this dissertation, I contextualized the discursive struggle over the maternal body in broader political and economic changes during the 1980s and
1990s, and discussed how radical feminist movements that took root in the 1960s have come to incorporate the logics of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is a global set of economic and ideological commitments that specializes in privatization. As capitalism has advanced and its logics have become more intricately entangled, discourses that serve elite interests have found quieter, more unassuming ways of disguising themselves in the cultural fabric of the personal and everyday.2
In Chapter three, I examined rhetorics of the women’s health movement to reveal more concretely how counter-hegemonic feminist logics of empowerment have come to incorporate ethics of personal responsibility and individualism. In Chapter four, I turned to my first case study of maternity culture. TheBump.com’s Boob-olution campaign to promote breastfeeding and encourage women to “Whip ‘em out!” reveals the complex ways that hegemonic masculinity and femininity are intertwined within the logics of neoliberalism. Discourses of macho maternalism function to mystify gender codes at the same time that they solidify them. Further, macho maternalism constitutes the privatization of health onto the maternal body, and justifies non-state interventions. In
Chapter five, I probe how videos of at-home birth posted on the popular video-sharing site YouTube reflect the neoliberal narrative form of the “self-made mom.” The 176 discourses at work in the videos naturalize the pain and suffering of the maternal body as a requirement for good citizenship by marking pain as pleasurable and therefore, redemptive. In each chapter and case study, I have attempted to radically contextualize discourses of maternity culture to reveal how and in what ways they function as rhetorics of reproduction and reproducing rhetorics.
I would like to spend some time reflecting on how the analysis made throughout this project can contribute to the study of rhetorics of reproduction, rhetorics of science and health, and feminist discourses under neoliberalism. Once I have discussed these contributions, I provide some final thoughts on future possibilities for scholarship in maternity culture and discuss the political implications of this study.
THEORETICAL CONTRIBUTIONS
Rhetorics of Reproduction as Reproducing Rhetorics
One of my primary aims in this dissertation was to unveil how and in what ways discourses of maternity culture function to discipline the maternal body. Because maternity culture discourses incorporate and justify the ethics of neoliberalism, they must be considered as both rhetorics of reproduction and reproducing rhetorics: Maternity culture discourses are no longer just rhetorics about the reproductive function, but also participative in the reproduction of systems and logics of inequality under contemporary capitalism.
The powerful discourses in maternity culture serve to rationalize neoliberal ethics and have a profound impact on the bodies they discipline. Hestor Eisenstein argues that 177 since the 1960s, women have been encouraged to enter the work force and enjoy their newfound admittance into the individualistic, self-interested, and competitive public sphere.3 However, in and outside of maternity culture maternal subjects are conditioned by increasingly overwhelming obligations, expectations, and standards of what “good” motherhood is. These expectations and ideals of motherhood colonize a maternal subject’s time, labor, mind and body. When we consider the series of economic and political shifts that occurred as a result of neoliberal policies, the interests at work in the paradoxical demand that a woman must be a slave to both her job and her family become more apparent.
In the years since the publication of The Feminine Mystique, the suffocating cult of domesticity shifted by 1989 to become what Arlie Hoschschild called “the second shift”: A new set of obligations that required women to work and bear the brunt of responsibility for their families after work.4 However, that second shift is now an all- consuming “total motherhood” as Wolf notes.5 In addition to most often working outside of the home, mothers must now commit themselves wholly and completely to the task of reducing the risks exposed to their children—whether through breastfeeding, natural childbirth, or organic eating.6 Paradoxically, despite neoliberal logics championing
“choice,” maternal subjects do not “choose” anything—they are obligated under the logic of the new institution of motherhood to prioritize their family. If they “choose” otherwise, they are marked as selfish, individualistic, “bad” mothers. Further study must continue examining the elaborate ways that motherhood discourses, particularly those that claim to be empowering, discipline maternal bodies. Moreover, understanding 178 rhetorics of reproduction as reproducing rhetorics is useful for rhetorical scholars examining how discourses about the reproductive function serve to socially reproduce systems of inequality.
Cultural Rhetorics of Health, Medicine and Science
Maternity culture is a set of discourses primarily about motherhood, but also about health, medicine and science. Because the reproductive function is a biological apparatus, it is no surprise that discourses concerning maternity and reproduction use and engage issues of the body. Since the inception of the Women’s Health Movement during the 1960s, special attention has been paid to critiquing institutions of expertise and science whose resources are used to rhetorically condition and control women’s bodies.
Each case study in this project reveals the perilous relationship between science, expertise, and women’s health.
However, it is essential that we do not abandon the notion that science can produce factual knowledge, Ehrenreich and English contend.7 Instead, we should continue radically contextualizing who is interpreting science in public. Public officials, journalists, professionals and experts have historically interpreted science in a manner that disciplines women, so feminist analysis should continue to question how and in what ways science is being used as a rhetorical resource and whose interest this utilization serves.
179 Feminist Discourse Analysis Under Neoliberalism
Each case study in this dissertation reaffirms what Susan Bordo has previously argued: Feminist discourses increasingly mirror those of the more dominant neoliberal culture—focusing on empowerment, self-determination, individual freedom, and choice.8
As Bordo notes, while these discourses focus on the autonomy and “freedom” of individual women, they mystify the relationship between cultural, radical and dominant interests.9 The focus on discourses of autonomy and empowerment reroutes our attention from systemic critiques that organize women into collective action. Instead, we turn to discourses that champion self-empowerment and self-determinacy, which also function to, in certain instances, control and discipline individual bodies.
An examination of maternity culture reveals that the ethics of neoliberalism become naturalized into the far corners of our being to such an extent that sometimes even the most radical and counter-hegemonic discourses incorporate its rhetorical logics.
In the case of both TheBump.com and the home birth videos on YouTube, rhetorics that were once a source of radical critique and a resource for the radical women’s liberation movement are also entrapped in a set of discourses that discipline maternal bodies in capitalist logics.
The analysis presented in this dissertations suggests that just because a particular cultural text (such as a video, website, or trend) presents a perspective that looks and sounds feminist, does not automatically mean that that perspective works in the interest of women or men. In the last few decades, post-structuralist feminist scholars have emphasized the importance of the decontextualization of texts.10 Nevertheless, the 180 analysis herein reveals that feminist discourse analysis must reinvigorate and further incorporate a materialist feminist approach to radically contextualize texts in the political and economic histories from which they arise. While maternity culture is not markedly
“anti-feminist”—the logics that the discourses I have analyzed throughout this project support rationalize the hegemonic conditions that produce gender, race, and class-based inequality in the U.S. If it were not for the systematic, radical contextualization of texts within maternity culture, the hegemonic functions of these seemingly radical perspectives would not have been revealed. Therefore, feminist scholars should prioritize radical contextualization as a proverbial “gut check” to the ubiquity of capitalist logics.
FUTURE RESEARCH IN MATERNITY CULTURE
In addition to the theoretical contributions outlined above, I would like to attend to several important areas of study within maternity culture that were outside of the scope of the current study, yet must be examined in the future. Initially, while I investigated two facets of maternity culture in this dissertation, other aspects of maternity culture such as fit pregnancy, attachment parenting, and self-help books should continue to be explored as discourses participating in the discipline of the maternal body under the logics of neoliberalism.
Furthermore, within recent years popular discourses have focused an overwhelming amount on something I call “the spectacle of bad motherhood,” which is also a disciplining discourse working in relation to maternity culture. Reality television programs such as TLC’s Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, and Lifetime’s Dance Moms and
181 the newly premiered Pretty Wicked Moms—focus on making a spectacle of women who display culturally “unsavory” mothering behaviors, such as selfishness, poor dieting and aggression.11 While discourses in this project told women that they should participate in
“good behaviors” like breastfeeding and natural childbirth, popular discourses that make a spectacle of bad motherhood also discipline the maternal body by marking certain behaviors as the antithesis of the institution of motherhood. One prominent example of the spectacle of bad motherhood recently is the popular coverage of reality television star
Kim Kardashian’s pregnancy. Tabloid magazines such as Star, Ok! and People printed weekly cover stories obsessing over Kim’s body a site of struggle: Her every habit, pound, and prenatal decision was used as a resource for marking the distinction between
“good” and “bad” motherhood and disciplining maternal bodies in the process. In maternity culture, discourses of shame, guilt and disgust are used to condition bodies to accept particular individual, collective, and moral responsibilities of what makes “good motherhood.”
In addition to examining other aspects of maternity culture such as attachment parenting and the spectacle of bad motherhood, future investigations of maternity culture could explore the incredible ways identity is imbued within rhetorics of reproduction.
The style of “going natural” is a growing movement in the U.S. among elites. From the booming organic food culture to the “green movement,” several cultural trends have shifted within recent years to emphasize the “natural.” Both natural childbirth discourses and breastfeeding discourses invoke the trope of “naturalness” to compel women to participate in these acts. Women carve identity from their participation in acts of natural 182 motherhood, and both natural childbirth and breastfeeding have been marketized as a result. Women are hiring cinematic style videographers to document their births, and products and services to support women breastfeeding are flourishing. Further investigation into the production of stylized cultural identity of motherhood is warranted.
Finally, while discussions of race and sexuality were imbued throughout this project, there is always a sense that there is more to be done. Maternity culture must be understood as a heteronormative, racialized discourse. Although women of color are featured in The Bump campaign, they are not predominantly featured in other aspects of the motherhood movement online. The absence of discussions of both race and sexuality leave a certain silence to be explored in maternity culture. Several websites dedicated to providing a space for women of color to discuss maternity, including My Brown Baby and Mocha Manual have emerged online as powerful counter-discourses to an increasingly invisible, yet pervasive, whiteness in maternity culture.12 Furthermore, the digital blog and resource, It’s Conceivable, is committed to providing a counter- heteronormative voice for GLBTQ parents.13 Future investigations of maternity culture must explore these discourses as powerful counter-publics.
FORGING THE 21ST CENTURY MOTHERHOOD MOVEMENT
On June 25, 2013, Texas State Senator Wendy Davis (D-Fort Worth) spoke for 11 straight hours without taking a bathroom break or sitting down.14 She was speaking in the hopes of thwarting the likely passage of Senate Bill 5—a bill designed to place new restrictions on access to abortion services throughout the State of Texas.15 After Senate
183 Republicans successfully waged their third rules violation claim against Davis, she was forced to stop speaking. Just two hours shy of the midnight deadline that would have successfully stopped the bill from being voted on, it seemed that the bill would pass.
Senate Democrats attempted to challenge the decision to stop the filibuster, including State Senator Leticia Van De Putte, who while seeking and failing to be recognized by the President of the Senate, pointedly asked: “At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over her male colleagues?”16 The gallery of activists watching the filibuster erupted in cheers, and refused to quiet down, essentially shutting down the Texas Legislature, who were unable to successful vote on the bill that night because they could not hear over the noise. Texas’ Governor Rick Perry would go on to call the activists an “unruly mob”—attempting to delegitimize their feat.
They were unruly in some sense—no longer willing to play by the rules of a Senate that would not acknowledge the legitimacy of their voices when working within the confines of the legislative system.
Although a version of the bill passed weeks later, the epochal moment surrounding the “people’s filibuster” in Texas reverberates in my project. Rhetorics of reproduction and reproducing rhetorics are part of a broader set of discourses about the reproductive function (from birth control to breastfeeding) that reproduce the conditions for gendered oppression and inequality in the United States. Discourses that seek to outlaw and/or restrict access to abortion or define the “personhood” of a fetus are undeniably rhetorics of reproduction that participate in disciplining the maternal body. By restricting women’s access to abortion services, women who find themselves pregnant 184 are compelled to become mommy; disciplined in perhaps the most corporeal way. The movement around SB-5 in Texas highlights the potentiality of bodies organizing together to create systemic change.
Both Nancy Fraser and Judith Stadtman Tucker have called upon feminist writers and activists to reconceptualize a 21st century motherhood movement that eschews foundations in liberal feminism and maternalism.17 Instead of focusing on the biological imperative of reproduction for female bodies or the liberal feminist project of incorporating mothers’ more into the workforce, critiques should shift to emphasize the systemic political and cultural discourses that orbit in and around the reproductive process and function to discipline the female body in myriad ways to become.18
1 “Pregnant in Heels,” Bravo.com, accessed July 28, 2013, http://www.bravotv.com/pregnant-in-heels. 2 Meg Luxton, “Doing Neoliberalism: Perverse Individualism in Personal Life,” Neoliberalism and Everyday Life, eds. Susan Braedley and Meg Luxton (Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 163-165. 3 Hestor Eisenstein, Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women's Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World (New York: Paradigm Books, 2010), 117. 4 Arlie Russell Hoschschild, The Second Shift (New York: Penguin Books, 1989). 5 Joan B. Wolf, Is Breast Best?: Taking on the Breastfeeding Experts and the New High Stakes of Motherhood, Kindle Edition (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 17-18. 6 Wolf, Is Breast Best?,17-18. 7 Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of Experts’ Advice to Women, Revised Edition (New York: Anchor Books, 2005), 121-130. 8 Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 30. 9 Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 30. 10 Judith Baxter, Positioning gender in Discourse: A Feminist Methodology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Nicola Gavey, “Feminist Poststructuralism and Discourse Analysis: Contributions to feminist Psychology,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 13, no.4 (1989): 459-475. 185
11 Linda Stasi, “Pretty Wicked Moms’ Crowned Mother of Sad Reality Shows,” The New York Post, July 1, 2013, http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/tv/call_it_the_mother_of_sad_reality_ivkYYhn6 a4EvbYpxL0MvYM. 12 “Motherhood in Color,” MochaManual.com, accessed July 20, 2013, http://mochamanual.com; and, “My Brown Baby,” MyBrownBaby.com, accessed July 20, 2013, http://mybrownbaby.com. 13 “Gay and Lesbian Parenting in NYC and Beyond,” It’s Conceivable, accessed July 20, 2013, http://itsconceivablenow.com. 14 Brian Stelter, “From Texas Statehouse to YouTube, a Filibuster Is a Hit,” The New York Times, June 30, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/business/media/from- texas-statehouse-to-YouTube-a-filibuster-is-a-hit.html?_r=0. 15 Stelter, “From Texas Statehouse to YouTube.” 16 Mollie Reilly, “Leticia Van De Putte, Texas Legislator, Slams Male Colleagues During Abortion Filibuster,” Huffingtonpost.com, June 26, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/26/leticia-van-de-putte_n_3500497.html 17 Judith Stadtman Tucker, “Care as a Cause: Framing the Twenty-First Century Mother’s Movement,” in Socializing Care, eds. Maurice Hamington and Dorothy C. Miller (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 197. 18 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 2009), Kindle Edition, location 10928.
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209 Vita
Ashley N. Mack was born in Phoenix, AZ and was raised there and in Minneapolis, MN. After graduating high school, she attended Arizona State University where she received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science with an emphasis in International Relations, and a Bachelor of Arts in Women and Gender Studies. She went on to graduate from The University of Texas with a Master of Arts degree in Communication Studies. She enrolled in the PhD program in Communication Studies in 2009. She has taught courses in Women and Gender Studies, as well as Rhetoric and Communication. Her scholarship has been published in the Journal of Homosexuality, the edited book The Politics of Style and the Style of Politics, and the upcoming volume
Challenging Social Norms & Gender Marginalization in a Transitional Era. In August of 2013, she will join the faculty in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Louisiana
State University in Baton Rouge, LA.
Permanent email: [email protected] This dissertation was typed by the author.
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