Shaping Motherhood: Representations of Pregnancy in Popular Media

Abstract

Until two decades ago, pregnant bodies were absent from mainstream media types or presented primarily in a maternal context. Today, the pregnant body is ubiquitous across a broad spectrum of media forms, including Internet websites, print media and screen narratives. This thesis explores the meanings and ramifications of this recently visible ideal, examining how contemporary media treat pregnant embodiment. This project focuses on the themes, tropes and discourses which characterise representations of pregnancy across four traditional media formats (magazines, novels, television and film fiction features); its goal is to elucidate the “story” about the pregnant body that contemporary media presents to the New Zealand woman as a consumer of both local and global culture.

To answer this question, I look at the treatment of pregnancy in a set of examples drawn from a range of media genres (or formats) that are available to a New Zealand woman in the first decade of the twenty-first century. These include: thirteen mainstream women’s magazines published in New Zealand (1970-2008) and the Australian lifestyle magazine, Cosmopolitan Pregnancy (2005-2008); three “mummy lit” novels by Sophie Kinsella, Emily Giffin and Adele Parks; the television films Gone Up North for a While (1972) and Piece of My Heart (2009) which both follow the experiences of a young unmarried mother in post-war New Zealand; and the New Zealand television series Outrageous Fortune (2005-2010) and the American film Juno (2007), which each follow the unwanted pregnancy of a teenage girl in the twenty-first century.

Current feminist media scholarship suggests the significance of maternity and domesticity to representations of women, but largely (with a few notable exceptions) fails to consider the pregnant body as representative of these ideals. This thesis responds to this oversight by examining how the treatment of pregnancy in contemporary media establishes a set of ideas about the nature of women’s lives. It argues that stories of pregnant embodiment are part of a wider narrative about a woman’s life more generally, what iconic second wave feminist Betty Friedan termed a “life plan.” I conclude that representations of pregnant embodiment mobilise a number of conflicting discourses that variously support and contradict each other. Women’s magazines offer a homogeneous vision of a feminine life plan, while mummy lit novels and screen narratives both acknowledge and contest this ideal; at the same time, each media type posits pregnancy as a significant milestone in the current life plan. Yet, all share a common agenda: encouraging the feminine subject to engage in a narcissistic relationship with her own body/self as a “mark” of her femininity. The disciplined pregnant body expresses the contradictions at the heart of femininity in a world in which a woman is expected to achieve success in the public realm as an individual, while finding personal fulfilment through motherhood (without which she is incomplete), which paradoxically only seems to intensify her narcissistic involvement with herself.