Self-Representations of the Pregnant and Postpartum Body
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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.