Blogging the Maternal: Self-Representations of the Pregnant and Postpartum Body
Lesley Husbands, Concordia University, Today, the popular media is prior to returning to graduate school, worked exploding with images of the pregnant body. for several years in the multimedia industry as Celebrity pregnancies are speculated on and a graphic designer and copywriter. She tracked on websites like "Celebrity Baby currently resides in Montreal with her two W atch" (www.celebrity-babies.com/), in daughters. entertainment magazines and tabloids like Us Weekly, People and OK! Magazine and Abstract phrases such as "baby bump" and "yummy This paper analyzes how dominant media mummy" have entered the lexicon. Pregnant images of the pregnant and postpartum body celebrities are also being featured in glossy contribute to women's self-perceptions and it fashion spreads. Pop star Christina Aguilera evaluates how the content of the blog reflects, appears on the January 2008 cover of Marie reinforces (inadvertently) and challenges Claire, a pregnant bikini-clad Melania Trump Western cultural understandings of pregnancy was featured in the April 2006 Vogue and and mothering. photos of nude and pregnant Britney Spears Résumé were featured on the cover and inside the Cet article analyse les images dominates des August 2006 Harper's Bazaar. Media scholars media du corps de la femme enceinte etdu have noted the onslaught of pregnant corps postpartum contribuent aux perceptions celebrity pictures following Demi Moore's que les femmes ont d'elles-même et évalue Vanity Fair cover in 1991 (Mathews and comment le contenu du blog reflète, renforce Wexler 2000; Tyler 2001) and at least one par mégarde et met au dé fi les has welcomed the trend and speculated that connaissances de la culture occidentale de la it might encourage the visibility of women's grossesse et du maaternage. experiences of pregnancy, shifting the focus away from its usual subject: the fetus/baby (Tyler 2001). Other scholars have shown these representations to be more problematic and have been critical of the narrowness of representation (Cunningham 2002; Douglas and Michaels 2004; O'Donohue 2006), protesting that these images put pressure on women at a time when they deserve a respite (O'Malley 2006). What is most often seen is a certain type of pregnant body: one that is slim, young, white and "perfect." This conveys the message that other kinds of bodies are wrong or "not normal." What pregnant bodies are acceptable and when, where and how should they be revealed? As Imogen Tyler recounts, Demi Moore's nude, pregnant body on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine produced "highly contradictory public responses." W hile some lauded it as beautiful, others found it
68 Atlantis 32.2, 2008 PR www.msvu.ca/atlantis deeply offensive. The ensuing controversy influenced by José Van Dyck's definition in permitted it to become "the best-selling single which she emphasizes the connection issue in the magazine's history" (2001, 75). In between "signs" and "practices" involved in the same vein is a letter I came across in the language (Van Dyck 1995, 19). Van Dyck July 2006 issue of Vogue. The letter writer, underscores the importance of power Marylu Kramer from Hinsdale, Illinois, reacts dynamics inherent in discourse: "each voice to a photograph of a pregnant Melania Trump occupies a position in a field of power" (1995, that appeared in a previous issue. Kramer 20). I attempt to connect the representations starts out by saying, "Yes, pregnancy is to institutional and cultural practices and beautiful," but then pronounces the image of political economies. Discourse applies not the Slovenian model "uncalled for" and only to words but also to images. As Coco "distasteful" (Kramer 2006, 54). Can the Fusco states, "…images are much too pregnant body be at once beautiful and pervasive and powerful in American culture to repulsive? be taken for granted" (Fusco 2003, 43). Here, The feelings that are stirred by Fusco is speaking of photography in representations of the pregnant/postpartum particular, which she argues is connected to body evoke the conflicting and competing the project of knowing oneself as a culture. I discourses surrounding it. In this essay, I seek to understand and explicate how these argue that in the popular media, the pregnant discourses connect and create cultural and postpartum body is discursively meanings, how they help sustain cultural objectified, ignored or represented only in a knowledges and how they may contribute to very particular and narrow way in order to changing them. avoid transgressing social mores. All too I studied the visual and textual often, the pregnant/postpartum body we see content of "The Shape of a Mother" blog over in the media is a privileged body - one that is a period of six months, beginning in July increasingly associated with wealth, 2006. I reviewed all new entries and whiteness, slimness and youth. As I studied comments on a daily basis, taking note of these representations, I became increasingly characteristics such as age, ethnicity and aware of the prevalence of certain binaries: location. Much of this information had to be privilege and difference; beauty and inferred from the content of entries or related monstrosity; and good and bad mothers. links. My aim was to see how the women who An important effort to counter the participated were experiencing their pregnant narrowness of dominant representations of and postpartum bodies and how these the pregnant and postpartum body, I believe, experiences were in/consistent with is a blog called, "The Shape of a Mother" representations of pregnant embodiment in (theshapeofamother.com). The blog contains the popular media. It was important for me to women's self-portraits and accounts of their consider women's own narratives and how lived experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and women reacted to each other's stories: here, mothering. This essay uses discourse women are the producers and consumers of analysis to examine how dominant media media, not simply the passive objects images of the pregnant and postpartum body represented in it. I wanted to investigate contribute to women's self-perceptions and whether women were able to provide support evaluates how the content of the blog reflects, to each other or whether "The Shape of a reinforces (inadvertently) and challenges Mother" would become another arena for Western cultural understandings of pregnancy competition among women. and mothering. In addition, I discuss the As other scholars have noted (Herring practice of blogging among mothers and et al. 2006; Keren 2006, 6-7), it can be mothers-to-be and its capacity to contribute challenging to apply common research toward creating communities of women. methods to the study of blogs and blogging My understanding of discourse is practices. New blogs appear and existing
www.msvu.ca/atlantis PR Atlantis 32.2, 2008 69 ones change or are abandoned at an ever- the possessors of large, aging, and increasing rate. It is difficult to know anything dimpled thighs displayed at the public about producers of and contributors to blogs. beach, of overly rouged cheeks, of a The contributors to "The Shape of a Mother" voice shrill in laughter, or of a sliding come from different locations, but unless bra strap...were at once caught out bibliographic characteristics are disclosed in by fate and blameworthy.[...]anyone, the entry, it is impossible to know where each any woman, could make a spectacle woman is from. Determining women's socio- out of herself if she was not careful. economic backgrounds is similarly difficult. It (1995, 53) is worth noting, however, that a significant number of women self-identify as teen-aged Being too large, too old, too overtly mothers and single mothers, and a small sexual, or too loud are all qualities of the number identify as obese or plus-size mothers female grotesque. In Bakhtin's work on the - types of mothers that lie outside the carnivalesque, he describes grotesque privileged ideal promoted by the mainstream realism as ambivalent, contradictory and media. antithetical to "Classic" aesthetics. Bakhtin In the first months, entries consisted offers the example of the Kerch terracotta mostly of images and relatively little text. The figurines of senile pregnant hags as a "typical majority of images were of pregnant and and very strongly expressed grotesque" postpartum bellies. Entries usually appeared (1968, 25). These figurines suggest both new on a daily basis, with each one typically life and death and decay. The pregnant body drawing anywhere from one to ten comments. is an unstable and unfinished body that is Contributors would often return to comment growing and stretching, exceeding its and entries became richer in text as the "normal" form. It is an in-between body; a months went by. July saw a total number of body that is more than one but less than two, 172 entries, August had 31 entries, with uncertain boundaries between woman September had 25, October had 13, (mother) and fetus (child), life and death. The November had 6, and December had 22 grotesque body is "a revolting, yet fascinating, entries (the site move in November and counterpart to the twentieth-century Western technical difficulties explain the decrease in body ideal with its clear and finished image. In entries during the months of October and a culture struggling towards bodily November). perfectability and control, the grotesque body reminds us of the internality we would rather Mixed Feelings: Monsters and Marvels forget and threatens to return us to a place we What is the origin of the fear and believed we had escaped" (Stacey 1997, 88). revulsion surrounding the maternal body? In The act of giving birth, in which the body The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and expels what had previously been hidden Modernity Mary Russo tells us, "[t]he inside it (fetus/baby, blood, feces), is similarly grotesque body is the open, protruding, fascinating and repulsive to the viewer. extended, secreting body, the body of The trope of the monster is also becoming, process, and change" (1995, associated with excess. Braidotti argues that 62-63). The etymology of the word a definition of "monster" has existed since the "grotesque" evokes a cave or grotto: a dark, late eighteenth century "when Geoffroy de earthly, hidden place. As suggested by Saint Hilaire organized monsters in terms of Russo's subtitle, "excess" is an essential excess, lack or displacement of his/her component of the female grotesque: organs" (emphasis in original 1996, 138) and she claims the link between the monstrous For a woman, making a spectacle of and the pregnant body exists because of fear herself had more to do with a kind of of women's generative power: "Theories of inadvertency and loss of boundaries: conception of monsters are at times extreme
70 Atlantis 32.2, 2008 PR www.msvu.ca/atlantis versions of the deep-seated anxiety that repelled by and attracted to her pregnant surrounds the issue of women's maternal body, Trump was widely criticized in the power of procreation in a patriarchal society" blogosphere.1 (1996, 139). In the seventeenth and The combination of attraction and eighteenth centuries, the birth of a repulsion is often evoked in the horror film, "monstrous" baby was often interpreted as a another popular cultural site of the monstrous divine warning (Braidotti 1996, 136). It was maternal. Barbara Creed's analysis of women believed that an act of illicit looking could and the horror genre, The Monstrous provoke the maternal imagination to kill or Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis deform the fetus and that excessive or draws heavily on Julia Kristeva's theory of aberrant maternal desire could transform the abjection. Creed underscores how the horror baby into a visible image of its mother's desire film constructs the maternal figure as abject, (Braidotti 1996, 139-40; Creed 1993, 46). echoing Kristeva's assertion that abjection is At this time, there was quarrelling by its very nature ambiguous: "it both repels between two groups: those who believed that and attracts" (Creed 1993, 11 &14). Like female desire or wishes ("envies") could Braidotti in her discussion of the monster, imprint upon the fetus (Paré, Descartes and Kristeva emphasizes how "fear of [the Malebranche), and others who argued for the mother's] generative power" lies at the root of "neutrality" of the fetus from its mother this phenomenon (Creed 1993, 43). Creed (Blondel, Buffon, Maupertuis and the draws our attention to a number of popular Encyclopédie) (Braidotti 1996,146-47). The horror films whose plots revolve around a "fundamental contradiction" at the core of this monstrous womb and whose horror often quarrel belies a deep ambivalence toward the culminates in a birth scene: Demon Seed pregnant body: (1977); The Brood (1979); Xtro (1983); The Incubus (1981); The Fly (1986) and The ...the mother's body seems to be Manitou (1978). The pregnant body has long caught in a deep contradiction that been seen as being inherently monstrous and splits it within itself. The female, thus a site of conflicting desires. pregnant body is posited both as a protective filter and as a conductor or A Brief History of Blogging and the highly sensitive conveyor of Momosphere impressions, shocks and emotions. It Blogs (web logs) first emerged in the is both a "neutral" and a somewhat late 1990s as a new form of digital "electrical" body. There is an communication. Following the introduction of insidious assimilation of the pregnant hosted blog tools, specialized software woman to an unstable, potentially created to open up the medium to less sick subject, vulnerable to techno-savvy users, the number of blogs uncontrollable emotions. mushroomed. Currently, blogging is a (Braidotti 1996, 149) well-known medium of modern communication that functions alongside and Evidence that the trope of the together with mainstream media. A blog can monstrous pregnant body persists continues be an online diary that chronicles the to be found in popular media culture. In blogger's personal life or it can occupy more December 2005, it was widely reported in the of a traditional journalistic function, imparting popular press that Donald Trump had used information on a given topic. Because of their the word "monster" to describe the body of his format, blogs can be revised or updated at pregnant wife during an interview with radio regular intervals and readers can comment talk show host Howard Stern. Despite his and be directed to other pertinent and related qualification that his wife was "[monstrous] in Web resources. Blogs are also important all the right places," suggesting he was both because they create unique online spaces
www.msvu.ca/atlantis PR Atlantis 32.2, 2008 71 and communities where people can choose to up to fourteen thousand visitors per day only lurk (read and/or look only) or to actively weeks after its creation (Harris 2006). engage others in conversation. Though blogs Crowder states she was motivated to create are public spaces because technically anyone the blog by her feeling that real women's can view them and participate, some blogging postpartum bodies were invisible in Western has been highly personal and private. society. W omen whose bodies show visible Academic studies of blogging have signs of being stretched from pregnancy and focused less on blogging culture and that have not "bounced back" are often filled communities and the affective qualities of with shame or embarrassment; they feel that blogging as a practice, and more on its their bodies are "not normal." Negative connection to news dissemination and the feelings about real bodies that can look very public sphere.2 As Paul Théberge explains, different from the smooth, firm, "perfect" "[t]his emphasis on the informational and pregnant and postpartum bodies seen in political uses of blogging has tended to mask popular media are evoked in the words of the much more prevalent uses of blogging as "Rachael": "I thought I was a total freak!" a form of popular culture" (2005, 497). Not (theshapeofamother.com/2006/09/rachael). only is this latter function of blogging more Crowder's goals were to help unburden prevalent, I would argue, it is also especially women of their shame and permit people to significant when the blogs in question address see what real women's bodies look like during issues specifically connected to gender and after pregnancy. identities. There exists a disproportionate The content of the site consists of emphasis on adult male bloggers in both women's stories about their bodies in the mainstream and academic discourse (Herring context of pregnancy and childbirth and et al. 2004) and this bias minimizes the photographs. Women send their photos importance and influence of the contributions directly to Crowder, who publishes them along of expecting and new mothers to Internet with her own comments, anecdotes and links communities. The number of existing blogs to related sites. Each woman's story and/or maintained by mothers is high, and the picture(s) appear(s) as an entry in the blog in "momosphere" continues to expand.3 Popular reverse chronological order under the blogs maintained by mothers include the woman's name. People are able to leave following: "Dooce" (dooce.com), "A Little "comments" after entries. Crowder posts Pregnant" (alittlepregnant.com), "Fussy" entries most days, as her time permits. After (fussy.org), "Mom 101" the appearance of several negative (mom-101.blogspot.com) and "The Mother of comments in July, 2006, she began All Blogs" (anndouglas.blogspot.com), a moderating the comments; deleting those she Canadian blog. Their content touches on the feels are "nasty" or "cruel" joys and challenges associated with (theshapeofamother.com/2006/07/support). mothering, such as juggling work and kids as The women who submit photographs are not well as women's experiences with infertility only choosing to show their bodies but also ("A Little Pregnant") and postpartum deciding how their bodies appear and how to depression ("Dooce"). describe their own experiences. As Crowder herself has observed, when women can share The Shape of a Mother their stories this way, it permits them to "The Shape of a Mother" is a popular rethink conventional notions of beauty and to Internet blog started on July 5, 2006 by potentially see their own bodies as beautiful Bonnie Crowder, a stay-at-home mother of (theshapeofamother.com/2006/07/myself). two who lives in southern California.4 The blog Most images that appear on the site show has been widely linked to by other Internet bodies only. Some women have included their blogs, was profiled in the August 4, 2006 children in the pictures, as in the image of Guardian newspaper and was said to attract Crowder and her son that graces the front
72 Atlantis 32.2, 2008 PR www.msvu.ca/atlantis page of the blog. (Gwyneth Paltrow, Sarah Jessica Parker) and The pictures are usually accompanied who has not (Debra Messing, Kate Hudson)." by the subject's story that further Pregnant women, or at least a certain contextualizes them by describing demographic of pregnant women - affluent, pregnanc(ies), childbirth(s) and listing urban, white - are comparing themselves to statistics such as pregnancy weight gain, the the popular media images that surround them baby's weight at birth and the duration of the and are terrified of looking grotesque. pregnancy. They also inevitably describe the Abraham sums up, "...women tell me current appearance of the subject's abdomen, they do not want to be while pregnant: 'a fat as seen in the photo(s), and sometimes other slob,' 'a huge blob,' 'sloppy,' 'horrible like Kate body parts such as legs, breasts, and Hudson,' 'fucking gross.' " Abraham similarly behinds. Language that is more scientific is confirms the competitive edge to women's sometimes used to impart relevant communications that are exemplified in the information about complications during "weight polls" at New York website pregnancy or difficulty in conception or "UrbanBaby" (newyork.urbanbaby.com) where childbirth, etc., but the language used to pregnant posters compare the weight they describe the current state of the subject's have gained during pregnancy, not-so-subtly body and her feelings is informal. trying to underbid each other's entries Not everyone submits photos. Some (Abraham 2004). And like celebrities, these women write just to express how happy they women tend to practise "gestation inflation" are to find that such an Internet site exists and (suggesting they are further along in their along with it, the promise of pregnancy than they actually are), dieting and self-representation and self-acceptance. A following extreme workouts during pregnancy poster who calls herself "tranquilmama" and immediately after the birth. Clearly, writes, "Somehow it's immensely freeing to women who have the luxury of devoting their share these photos. It's somehow making it time and money to workouts immediately okay for me to look how I do" following childbirth are women of a certain (theshapeofamother.com/2006/07/tranquilm class who enjoy certain privileges. They are ama). Similarly, "Pony" comments, "Somehow also women who choose to spend their time I knew Demi Moore wasn't quite it, but still and energy this way. Why? This is more than thought I was wrong wrong wrong" the usual Western cultural obsession with (theshapeofamother.com/2006/07/who-am-i). thin, attractive bodies. The new "perfect" "Pony" is of course referring to the 1991 pregnant/postpartum body has become the Vanity Fair cover and she is suggesting that new body standard for women and the work the image of Moore set a standard few required to achieve and to maintain it is women can attain. increasingly understood as part of motherwork. Competition: Getting Your Body Back Women who do not have the desire The pregnant and postpartum bodies to conform or cannot conform to this standard of celebrities that now appear routinely in can be harshly judged. Women who gain or fashion magazines and tabloids are retain "too much" pregnancy weight are dissected, evaluated and categorized in the deemed grotesque and/or to be suffering from text and later, by those who consume them. such character flaws as lack of discipline, will As New York Magazine writer Laurie Abraham power and self-respect (Cunningham 2002). stated in a 2004 article on this phenomenon: Misty Harris's article on "The Shape of a "Only in the past few years, however, have Mother" that appeared in The Edmonton the 'bump,' the 'basketball,' and the 'belly on Journal demonstrates how this careful two sticks' entered the local lexicon....Us scrutiny and judgment is being directed at Weekly, People and the Star intrepidly report Crowder and the participants of her blog. on who has stayed admirably attenuated Harris quotes a new mother who feels that the
www.msvu.ca/atlantis PR Atlantis 32.2, 2008 73 women who have participated in the blog concept of self-representation and I certainly have "eaten [their] way into it [their understand the need to redress the unrealistic postpartum shapes]" and that they wouldn't and narrow popular representations of have so many "rolls hanging off their hips" if pregnant and postpartum bodies, I wondered they would only "do something about how they if the site itself was fostering negative look[ed]" (Harris 2006). In contrast, this new competition among its participants instead of mother in question is said to be prioritizing offering a testimonial space free of judgment, getting her body back into shape after as Crowder had intended. In addition, on a pregnancy and there is the clear suggestion more visceral level, I found myself disturbed that all women should do the same. Crowder by some of the images - I was put off by the admits that she used to blame herself for the rolls of fat and the stretch marks, the swollen way she looked postpartum, indicating that late pregnancy bellies and the sagging not only is there external pressure on women postpartum ones. to lose the baby weight quickly after giving In thinking more about the content of birth, but also that this pressure has been "The Shape of a Mother" I realized that it internalized. wasn't just what I saw in the images that After watching model Heidi Klum strut bothered me, but also what I didn't see there; down the runway for Victoria's Secret a mere what was outside of the frame. The great eight weeks after giving birth to her second majority of the subjects are headless. This child, Slate Magazine writer Dana Stevens preserves anonymity, an important remarked, "[t]he speed with which women can consideration for many subjects, but does this 'get their bodies back' after delivery has headlessness serve to de-humanize and to become one of the many arenas of de-subjectify the women in the pictures? gladiatorial competition among new mothers Imogen Tyler writes, "[t]he pregnant body was but Klum took the cult of postpartum fitness to and is often decapitated (and thus new heights...." Klum, a model, television de-subjectified) within the frame, with the personality and wife of British pop singer Seal, focus of the image being the torso alone" is also the quintessential wealthy, white, (Tyler 2001, 82). Tyler is speaking of beautiful, heterosexual woman. Not only did conventional depictions of the pregnant body Klum manage to make herself "thong-worthy," found in medical and popular health manuals. she also described the process as being In its subversion of the usual mass media pretty simple: "[Klum] 'naturally' lost a pound images of pregnant perfection is "The Shape a day for the first five weeks after the birth, of a Mother" inadvertently imitating turning to her trainer for a whirlwind exercise conventions of scientific visual discourse, in campaign only during the last three weeks which "doctors learn to see, to isolate, to before filming the show" (Stevens 2005). This compare and thus to match (or not), to combination of "nature" and diligent workouts scrutinise and then to intervene" (Stacey at once implies that women whose 1997, 55)? postpartum bodies retain some of the fat From my own viewing experience, I acquired in pregnancy are both "unnatural" found it difficult to look at the headless and lazy. images and see the whole woman and her What the women who participate at experience of pregnancy. In some ways, it "The Shape of a Mother" share are mixed was much easier to focus on the aesthetically feelings: pride, joy and amazement at what unappealing physical characteristics that were their bodies have done and discomfort, emphasized in the photo than the individual or shame and even revulsion, in some cases, in a collective experience represented therein. the face of the visible material residues of Though the images, in their composition and pregnancy and childbirth. In looking at their subject matter, may evoke scientific images in pictures and reading their stories, I was struck which women are objectified and by my own mixed reaction. Though I loved the pathologized, there are some important
74 Atlantis 32.2, 2008 PR www.msvu.ca/atlantis distinctions to be made between the The Good Mother experience of viewing textbook (medical) On "The Shape of a Mother" the images on paper and looking at pictures that ("good") mothers are often discursively were originally intended for private use on constructed using the language of war. Many your computer screen at home. It could be of the women hold up (the severity and/or argued that one enters into what feels like a number of) their "battle scars" as proof of personal relationship to the screen in this kind "good" mother status. It is as though they of looking, in contrast to the mere equate this physical "evidence" of pregnancy spectatorship of looking at a book or (stretch marks, weight gain) and delivery magazine. Viewers are compelled to look (C-section and episiotomy scars) with good because they are more likely to identify mothering. Similarly, this suggests that those themselves with the images seen on the women with more "battle scars" are better screen. When I read the comments following mothers than those whose bodies remain less the entries on "The Shape of a Mother," for visibly changed by pregnancy. What is the example, I found several uses of the phrase significance of this language and who are "belly twin," meaning someone who has a their bodies at war with? Some of the most belly that looks like one's own. That, along common phrases I found repeated are the with other textual evidence, suggested that following: "badges of honour," "medals," "war the women looking at the site tend to identify wounds," and "battle scars."5 This discourse with the bodies shown there and that they appears to heroize those women who have may even feel a sense of belonging or kinship more "battle scars," as though their "suffering" with the contributors. is connected to some higher power or greater Something that is notable in its good. absence on "The Shape of a Mother" is the Before telling her own cancer story in inclusion of non-white bodies. Crowder clearly her book, Teratologies: A Cultural Study of states on the FAQ and the "About This Site" Cancer, Jackie Stacey unpacks some of the pages that "The Shape of a Mother" is for all hero mythologies found in popular cancer women who have experienced pregnancy, as narratives. She warns, "[the hero mythologies] she wants the site to represent all kinds of encourage us to believe that suffering makes postpartum bodies (theshapeofamother.com). us wiser and serve to heroize those who Despite Crowder's best intentions, the suffer the most....They offer fantasies of majority of photographs on the site depict the power and control through the narrative bodies of white women. This suggests that rationalisations of progress and improvement" blogging as a practice might still be one that is (Stacey 1997, 15). Because of the clinical accessible mainly to white middle class gaze and the use of damaging medical individuals. Though the Internet in general metaphors, the experiences of pregnancy and and blogging in particular are much more childbirth can leave women feeling as though accessible to the masses than they were ten they are outside their own bodies and that or even five years ago (Keren 2004, 7), not they are not in control (Martin 1987). In the everyone has the time create a blog or even context of "The Shape of a Mother," perhaps to participate and not everyone has an we can interpret the use of military vocabulary Internet connection. The narrowness of the as an effort to take back some of the power bodies represented at "The Shape of a and control women relinquish during their Mother" reaffirms the young, white, experiences of pregnancy and childbirth. middle-class woman as the universal and There is at least one other possible ideal standard for motherhood - something we interpretation of the use of military language see all too often in dominant media on "The Shape of a Mother." Donna Haraway representations. has written about the influence of war cultures on biomedicine (Haraway 1992, 320-22) as has anthropologist Emily Martin. In Martin's
www.msvu.ca/atlantis PR Atlantis 32.2, 2008 75 work on how scientific information is the Komen.org message board (a popular conveyed to the public, she has argued that breast cancer Web site) describing her scientific language uses metaphors that rely feelings of anger and complaining about the on cultural stereotypes. Martin found that "sappy pink ribbons." Rather than provoking military language was routinely invoked in support, Ehrenreich's sentiments yielded a descriptions of the body's reaction to illness in "chorus of rebukes" (2001, 50). popular scientific materials and training Does the use of "cutesy" language on materials like medical textbooks. Similarly, "The Shape of the Mother" pose a similar kind and more pertinent to my analysis, Martin of danger? Women have different feelings reveals that generally, in descriptions of the about their bodies, especially during and meeting between sperm and egg, the sperm immediately after pregnancy. While some is represented as "strong," "streamlined" and may feel pride, poke fun at or feel affectionate "active" while the ovum is "seen as large and toward their bulging mid sections and stretch passive" (Martin 1992, 412). These marks, others will feel quite differently. I representations conform to cultural question whether participants at "The Shape stereotypes about men and women or of a Mother," when confronted by the "cutesy" masculinity and femininity: "In our cultural language used by others, will feel free to tradition, passivity is a quintessential female express their true feelings about their attribute, activity a male one" (412). In this postpartum bodies or whether they may context, the use of military language in "The instead get the feeling that "cheerfulness is Shape of a Mother" may be interpreted as more or less mandatory, dissent a kind of evidence that these women have bought into treason" (Ehrenreich 2001, 50). stereotypical gender roles for men and women where men are the active doers and Women's Bodies, Women's Voices women are the passive recipients. An argument could be made that This "military language" starkly women who are or who have been pregnant contrasts to the other kind of language used may be missing their own vocabulary to repeatedly on "The Shape of a Mother." Some accurately describe their feelings and examples of this language are the following: experiences. What is required is a language stretch marks described as "tiger stripes," that would be unlike the medical/scientific "silver squiggles" or "flames of motherhood" language most often used to talk about the and mid-sections as a "kangaroo pouch," pregnant body - a language that would "muffin top," or "jiggly belly pooch." This effectively communicate the perspective of language is characterized by "cutesy" the embodied subject and avoid the pitfalls of euphemisms for some of the visible effects of erasure and "brightsiding." The blog may be pregnancy on the body. To me, it was the perfect medium for thinking through this. reminiscent of the "pink sticky sentiment" Though the blog is a virtual environment, (Ehrenreich 2001, 44) embodied in the pink which suggests simulation, making the ribbons and teddy bears of breast cancer assumption that all Internet media privilege culture, which Barbara Ehrenreich powerfully artifice is a mistake. Kitzmann argues exposed in a 2001 essay in Harper's convincingly for the existence of "genuine Magazine. Ehrenreich complained about the value" in certain types of Web-based "relentless brightsiding" (49), "perkiness" (48) self-documentation and describes Web-based and cheerfulness of "pink ribbon culture" and self-documentation as a "returned emphasis argued that it infantilizes women suffering on embodied existence" that can generate from the disease; encouraging them to "modes of intimacy, emotion, community, and become "good little girls" rather than to insight" (Kitzmann 2004, 117). express their feelings about their experiences In studying the content of "The Shape of breast cancer. Soon after her own of a Mother" it is clear that participants are diagnosis, Ehrenreich posted a message on eager to share their feelings about their bodily
76 Atlantis 32.2, 2008 PR www.msvu.ca/atlantis experiences of pregnancy and motherhood in camps" - classes for women to get their order to work toward their own peace and to bodies back in shape after they have given contribute toward a more inclusive, positive birth - testifies to the societal emphasis on the and realistic understanding of the maternal beautiful (external) postpartum body and body. Hegemonic representations promoting reinforces the idea that women's bodies need pregnant perfection are rejected as harmful to to be disciplined by experts. At the time of women's self-esteem and self-acceptance is writing, a local "boot camp" class was being encouraged. Though "The Shape of the offered at the YMCA in the Mile End district of Mother" is unable to avoid reproducing some Montreal. of the dominant discourses of visual culture, I put forth that it does successfully negotiate References and contest popular cultural understandings Abraham, Laurie. "The Perfect Little Bump," of the pregnant and postpartum body. The New York Magazine. (27 Sept. 2004. Oct, stories told there reflect the mixed feelings the 2004). pregnant and postpartum body inspires both
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