The Voluntarily Childless Heroine

TVNXXX10.1177/1527476417749743Television & New MediaKaklamanidou 749743research-article2018 Article Television & New Media 1 –19 The Voluntarily Childless © The Author(s) 2018 Reprints and permissions: Heroine: A Postfeminist sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476417749743DOI: 10.1177/1527476417749743 Television Oddity journals.sagepub.com/home/tvn Betty-Despoina Kaklamanidou1 Abstract In a neoliberal and postfeminist context, this article undertakes an analysis of the atypical instances of voluntarily childless heroines on contemporary U.S. network television from 2010 to 2015. Drawing mainly from Diane Negra’s and Angela McRobbie’s work on postfeminist popular culture, and specifically McRobbie’s concept of “double entanglement,” I argue that network television, with rare exceptions, not only avoids representations of female childlessness but also promotes pronatalism, which it associates with neoliberal principles of the market (as illustrated in everything from the booming surrogacy industry to the quest to enroll children at the best private schools, etc.). Keywords childlessness, American network television, postfeminism, sitcom, pronatalism “If I really wanted to have a baby, wouldn’t I have tried to have one by now? I wanted to be a writer, I made myself a writer. I want a ridiculously extravagant pair of shoes, I find a way to buy them.” So says Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) to her friend Charlotte (Kristin Davis) about whether she wants to have babies or not, while they discuss how Carrie’s older boyfriend, Aleksandr (Mikhail Baryshnikov), has had a child in the past and afterward a vasectomy. Carrie’s line is delivered in Sex and the City’s (HBO, 1998–2004) epi- sode 15 from season 6, aptly titled “Catch-38.” Carrie is 38 years old and has never actually thought of procreation. Across the ninety-four episodes of the series, Carrie 1Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece Corresponding Author: Betty-Despoina Kaklamanidou, 21, G. Papandreou Street, Thessaloniki 54645, Greece. Email: [email protected] 2 Television & New Media 00(0) faces a pregnancy scare once (“The Baby Shower,” S1), and discloses that she had an abortion in her early twenties (“Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda,” S4). Sex and the City is the rare television show where the issue of voluntary childlessness is directly discussed. Neither Carrie nor Samantha (Kim Cattrall) ever expresses the desire to have children; in fact, the latter clearly articulates the opposite view, and they both remain without kids even in the two film installments of the franchise in 2008 and 2010. In a postfeminist era that views “feminism as rigid, serious, anti-sex and romance, difficult and extremist,” while offering “the pleasure and comfort of (re)claiming an identity uncomplicated by gender politics, postmodernism, or institutional critique” (Negra 2009, 11), voluntary childlessness has arisen as “the final female taboo” (Rainey 2013). The increasing recent rejection of motherhood—as will be soon discussed—is both a personal and complex decision and a political one (Day 2013). Pronatalism emerges as a powerful discourse not only at the level of official politics but also as a dominant “theme” in media and celebrity culture. Laura Carroll (2012a, 16) observes how U.S. governmental policy “operates as a social control to reward reproduction through” state, federal, and corporate policies. Carroll (2012a, 15) also notes how, Celebrities, coupled with our status-driven culture, have taken the baby-craze to new heights, . Like the best Prada bag, their number of homes, and their glamorous lifestyles, their perfect children help them show the world that they are at the top of the success heap. In an aspirational culture, people are increasingly “motivated to emulate this picture of perfection” (Carroll 2012a) even when they do not possess the necessary capital to do so. As Carroll concludes, this tendency “has taken the pronatalist norm to new heights . because now more than ever before, parents can use their children as a tool for status achievement and recognition” (Carroll 2012a). Although the 2010s have witnessed a significant increase in both sociological research regarding childless women, and media attention that highlights the cultural and societal implications of the issue, television fiction remains rather voiceless on the subject. There have also been to date relatively few academic studies that address representations of childless female characters on television shows and/or films. Julia Moore and Patricia Geist-Martin (2013, 246) have already observed that, “one area that is severely lacking is analysis of the fictional representation of women who choose childlessness in books, television, and film.” Although Moore and Geist-Martin add that relevant “representations are limited,” they underline the importance of scholarly examination to “understand how voluntary childlessness is framed in popular, contemporary media” (Moore and Geist-Martin 2013). Anthea Taylor associates childlessness with singleness, noting that contemporary popular texts demonize single women “in a narrative that . works . to mourn their manlessness, but more importantly, the childlessness that this state implies” (Taylor 2012, 43). Taylor’s association of singleness and childlessness is significant; first, it reveals the close relationship, albeit not obligatory, of the two statuses, and second, it Kaklamanidou 3 allows scholars to revisit older representations of single and probably childless heroines. Third, it also explains how the female heroine from the late 1980s and 1990s— Taylor uses the protagonists of Fatal Attraction (1987), Basic Instinct (1992), and Disclosure (1994) as her main examples—have come to represent figures “of abject horror, harbouring barely sublimated rage, murderous urges and profound jealousy towards those living the patriarchal nuclear familial dream” (Taylor 2012, 53). Another vital aspect of female childlessness is noted in Susan Berridge’s (2015, 113) analysis of celebrity culture and ageing and particularly on Jennifer Aniston, whom she considers “one of the most important discursive sites for anxieties around gender, age and chronological propriety.” Berridge examines Aniston’s interviews as well as coverage of the star in both U.S. and U.K. magazines, and notices that Aniston is frequently targeted as a celebrity who has not had a baby, which according to the author is one of several “particular gendered life goals [one has to achieve] by a certain age” (Berridge 2015, 117). Such was the extent of this scrutiny that Aniston herself addressed the media in a Huffington Post blog post in July 2016, where she unambigu- ously stated that “We don’t need to be married or mothers to be complete. We get to determine our own ‘happily ever after’ for ourselves” (Aniston 2016). It is in the same neoliberal and postfeminist context as Taylor’s and Berridge’s work that I undertake here an analysis of the atypical instances of voluntarily childless heroines on contemporary U.S. network television. Drawing mainly from Diane Negra’s and Angela McRobbie’s work on postfeminist popular culture, and specifically McRobbie’s (2009, 12) concept of “double entanglement,” that is the “co-exis- tence of neo-conservative values in relation to gender, sexuality and family life . with processes of liberalisation in regard to choice and diversity,” I argue that network television, with rare exceptions, not only avoids representations of female childlessness but also promotes pronatalism, which it associates with neoliberal principles of the market (as illustrated in everything from the booming surrogacy industry to the quest to enroll children at the best private schools, etc.). I focus on network television because I want to assess those representations that reach the widest possible audience. Despite the decline in network ratings, due mainly to cable and streaming television services, the traditional American networks still manage to attract a considerably higher viewership than their rivals. For instance, season 9 of the sitcom The Big Bang Theory (2015–2016) averaged 20 million viewers (Maglio 2016) whereas acclaimed dramas such as Mad Men (AMC, 2007–2015) and Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008–2013) averaged respectively 2.27 and 5.4 million (Kissel 2013, 2015 respectively). Almost by definition, network television is more conservative than cable and/or online television, and it still remains a key representational arena of societal discourse, because of the number of viewers it draws. Thus, it is into this vast representational arena that the cultural researcher must delve because television remains, after all, a powerful “window to broader social issues, whether by estab- lishing norms of identity categories like gender or race or by framing political agendas and perspectives,” and can as such influence and even change viewers’ beliefs (Thompson and Mittell 2013, 4). Finally, despite network television’s production of rather traditional and middle-of-the-road narratives, it is there where two significant 4 Television & New Media 00(0) cases of childless heroines appear. After all, it is this mainly conservative landscape that gave viewers same-sex marriages since the mid-1980s1 and two paradigmatic models of childfree women in the mid-2000s and 2010s, namely Cristina Yang in Grey’s Anatomy (ABC, 2005–present) and Robin Scherbatsky in How I Met Your Mother (CBS, 2005–2014).2 Research Contexts and Internet Communities Although

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