Mediating Moms: Mothers in Popular Culture 9780773586888

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MEDIATING MOMS

MEDIATING MOMS

Mothers in Popular Culture Edited by Elizabeth Podnieks

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2012 isbn 978-0-7735-3979-2 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-3980-8 (paper) Legal deposit second quarter 2012 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the inancial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Mediating moms: mothers in popular culture / edited by Elizabeth Podnieks. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735-3979-2 (bound). – isbn 978-0-7735-3980-8 (pbk.) 1. Motherhood in popular culture. 2. Motherhood – Social aspects. I. Podnieks, Elizabeth hq759.m435 2012

306.874’3

c2011-907842-2

This book was typeset by Interscript in 10.5/13 Sabon.

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Popular Culture’s Maternal Embrace 3 e l iz a b e t h p o d ni e ks Section One Maternal Surveillance 1 Mommy Nearest: tv for Preschoolers and the Search for the Good Enough (Working) Mother 35 stephanie wardrop 2 “Won’t Somebody Think of the Children?”: The Nineties Subversion of the Animated Mother jo johnson

53

3 Real(ity) tv Practices of Surveillance: Evaluating Mothers in Supernanny and Crash Test Mommy 69 fiona joy green 4 “The Bump is Back”: Celebrity Moms, Entertainment Journalism, and the “Media Mother Police” 87 elizabeth podnieks 5 Are You a Politician or a Mother? jennifer bell

108

6 Motherhood, Murder, and the Media: Joanne Hayes and the Kerry Babies Case 125 nicola goc

vi

Contents

Section Two Generational Motherhood 7 “Shit and String Beans,” Boredom and Babies: Bad Mothers in Popular Women’s Fiction Since 1968 147 imelda whelehan 8 Mothering Across Generations: L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables at 100 167 irene gammel 9 “You have to take it and own it”: Yo’ Mama Magazine as a Space of Refusal for Teenage Mothers 185 beth o’connor 10 Mediating Risky Motherhood: A Discursive Analysis of Ofline and Online Responses to the Oldest British Mother-to-be 204 maud perrier Section Three

Pregnant and Postpartum Bodies

11 And Now, the Breast of the Story: Realistic Portrayals of Breastfeeding in Contemporary Television 221 kathryn pallister 12 Watch Them Suffer, Watch Them Die: Depictions of African Mothers and Motherhood in Famine Footage and in Fernando Meirelles’s The Constant Gardener 236 h. louise davis 13 The Reality of tv Labour: Birth Stories 253 dominique russell 14 Mothering in the Middle and Self-care: Just One More Thing to Do 268 debra langan 15 S/Kin of Virtual Mothers: Loss and Mourning on a Korean Birthmothers’ Website hosu kim

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Contents

Section Four Medical Interventions and Reproductive Technologies 16 Fostering the Passive Maternal Experience: Language and Prescription in the What to Expect Series of Maternity Literature 303 sally mennill 17 Motherhood, Prime-time tv, and Grey’s Anatomy latham hunter

320

18 Tom vs. Brooke: Or Postpartum Depression as Bad Mothering in Popular Culture 339 jocelyn fenton stitt 19 Other Mothers: Looking at Maternal Desire in The L Word 358 lenora perry-jamaniego 20 Coming to Terms: Ethics, Motherhood, and the Cultural Science Fiction of the Gene 376 stuart j. murray Contributors Index

401

395

vii

Acknowledgments

Many scholars, contributors, and mothers – often one and the same – have inspired this collection of essays. Thanks go irst to Andrea O’Reilly, whose role as founder and director of the Association for Research on Mothering (arm) and later the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (mirci) has helped to generate an industry of motherhood scholarship. It was upon discovering her work in the mid1990s that I shifted my own academic research in a maternal direction. This collection, a product of that shift, represents the energy of numerous highly accomplished scholars whom I thank for their tenacious commitment to their subjects and to this long-term project. Over the several years of production, they have submitted to me compelling abstracts and chapters; eagerly responded to suggestions for revision made by me, by readers for the press, and by our copyeditor; and provided a sense of personal and professional community that has sustained and stimulated me along the way. I would like to thank those at McGill-Queen’s University Press who have made the publication of Mediating Moms possible. Philip Cercone, executive director, has been a guiding force behind the project, from his initial issuing of a provisional contract to seeing the book realized in its inal form. Joanne Pisano, editorial assistant, has worked behind the scenes with professionalism, generosity, and tireless efforts on our behalf, which are immensely appreciated. The collection exists in large part because of her support. Thanks go also to the readers for the press who reviewed our lengthy manuscript. Their insightful comments were of tremendous value and motivated the direction of the inal version of all chapters. I am most grateful to Joan McGilvray, coordinating editor; Ryan Van Huijstee,

x Acknowledgments

managing editor; and Filomena Falocco, marketing, from McGill-Queen’s University Press for their respective roles in shaping and promoting the book. In addition, thanks go to Susanne McAdam, Brittany Larkin, and Rob Mackie in the production department, and to David Drummond for his dynamic cover design for the book. I also want to thank Lee Frew for his comprehensive index. Joanne Muzak deserves special recognition for her extraordinary talents as our copyeditor. Contributors overwhelmingly noted in correspondence with me her rare attention to detail and the high quality of her perceptive suggestions for last-stage revisions. Her experience as a copyeditor coupled with her obvious knowledge of our broad ield has greatly strengthened the collection. I am indebted to her for her painstaking labour and for her enthusiastic support of this project. Many thanks go to my colleagues in the English Department at Ryerson University for their promotion of an environment in which academic research lourishes. I further thank Ryerson’s Faculty of Arts for awarding me travel grants, which have enabled me to present my work at scholarly conferences; and the Faculty of Arts and the Ofice of Research Services for providing me with the funds to hire research assistants over the past few years. I have been fortunate in working on this book with skilled and dedicated undergraduate students Christopher Richardson and Sacha Staples and graduate students Susan Lai and Amy Ratelle. In addition, I note with gratitude that the preparation of the index was supported with a grant provided by the ofice of the Dean of Arts, Ryerson University. Most profound thanks go to my family, as always, for being who they are: my brother, Andrew Podnieks; sister-in-law, Mary-Jane Podnieks; and aunt, Mairi Macdonald. Special thanks to my husband, Ian Smith, my parenting partner and greatest dad; to my children, Zachary Smith and Emily Smith, joys of my life and measure of my motherhood; and to my mother Elizabeth Podnieks, my ongoing model of maternal excellence.

MEDIATING MOMS

INTRODUCTION

Popular Culture’s Maternal Embrace Elizabeth Podnieks Now that the baby boom generation has come of age in America, mothers are suddenly back in Vogue – and in Time, The New Yorker, and The Wall Street Journal too. Indeed, mothers are suddenly everywhere and their inluence is everywhere felt. Pollsters and policy-makers count them; manufacturers cater to them; and corporations work to accommodate them. Marketers adjust to meet their demands and desires, while medical practitioners keep pace by emphasizing prenatal education and offering non-traditional birthing options. Ever since a pregnant Demi Moore exploded the beauty myth by posing nude for a magazine cover and Madonna cast off her boy-toy image to sing the praises of maternity, popular culture has also begun to embrace dear old mom.1 Julie Tharp and Susan MacCallum-Whitcomb

Mothers are indeed everywhere, as Julie Tharp and Susan MacCallumWhitcomb afirm in This Giving Birth: Pregnancy and Childbirth in American Women’s Writings. In a related spirit, Chatelaine editor Sara Angel explains the rationale for the magazine’s “irst-ever Motherhood Issue” in May 2007: “At no point in history has being a mother, a daughter – or both – been as complicated as it is now. We are working to maintain relationships, careers, homes and aging parents. Playgrounds have become political forums for battles in competitive parenting. Bookstore shelves overlow with manuals on how to do right by your child, and the mommy memoir is its own literary genre. Meanwhile, as the age of irst-time mothers climbs higher than ever before, the topic of getting pregnant is a media obsession.”2 The topic of motherhood in general is “a media obsession,” as Judith Timson explains in the Globe and Mail on 15 April 2008: “We have guided tours of every nook and

4 Introduction

cranny of modern motherhood and every possible blogging subset of moms: political moms, eco moms, lazy moms, shopping moms, sexually frustrated moms, angry moms, moms who confess that their kids bore them, moms who say it’s necessary to stay home, moms who argue we should all be working.” Timson concludes that “we’ve become, as one blog has it, MUBAR: ‘mothered up beyond all recognition.’”3 We are so “mothered up,” in fact, that we have created a whole new lexicon to deine mothers in their various roles and identities within contemporary culture: they are mompreneurs, momoirists, momzillas, momagers, celebumoms, and mominees; they need a momtourage, wear ma-pparel, and are featured in mom-abilia, in momedies, and in mommy blogs in the mamasphere; they are soccer and hockey moms; they take babymoons before becoming momsters who rule the stroller maia and the stroller brigade; they ight in mommy wars; they are alpha, beta, slacker, slummy, and yummy, as well as being martyr mommies and sanctimommies; they are summed up in acronyms like MILF (Mothers I’d Like to Fuck), SMUMS (Smart, Middle-class, Uninvolved Mothers), SCAMS (Smart, Child-centred, Active Moms), SMCS (Single Mothers by Choice), and WAHMS (Work at Home Moms).4 In the movie industry, an explicit maternal preoccupation is manifested in releases such as The Mother (2003), Knocked Up and Juno (2007), Baby Mama and Soccer Mom (2008), Motherhood, Mother and Child, and Mother (2009), and Mars Needs Moms (2011). On television, Canada’s Life Network began offering The Mom Show in October 2005, a series that “dishes up a fresh, frank and funny take on the world of motherhood ive days a week.”5 From 2008 on, reality television has been especially rife with maternal fare such as Birth Stories, Teen Mom, Must Love Kids?, 19 Kids and Counting, and Kate Plus 8. Online, MSN launched the webcast In the Motherhood in May 2007, a reality-comedy produced “For Moms. By Moms. About Moms.”6 Moreover, mothers have taken to blogging auto/biographical narratives to a staggering degree, with personal blogs complementing and often accompanying networking sites such as Moms’ Buzz, Cafemom, and The Mom Salon – the latter of which includes the Mom Bloggers Club, which launched its own monthly e-magazine, MOMS CLIQ : the magazine for mom bloggers, in June 2006.7 There are also politically driven, activist websites such as The Mothers Movement Online, Momsrising, Mothers Ought to Have Equal Rights, the National Association of Mothers’ Centers, and Mothers and More.8

Popular Culture’s Maternal Embrace

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In addition to MOMS CLIQ , we have maternal zines like Hip Mama, introduced as a print publication by Ariel Gore in 1993, which has since gone online as well to deliver “political commentary and ribald tales from the front lines of motherhood.”9 Another example is Mamazine. com whose agenda, as described by co-founders and co-editors Amy Anderson and Sheri Reed, is “to critically examine cultural expectations of mamas and resist the unhealthy pressures put on them, while also taking time to celebrate the real and often poignant joys of raising children.”10 The online Literary Mama publishes “reading for the maternally inclined” and “features mama-centric writing,” and the print and electronic Brain, Child is “the magazine for thinking mothers.”11 Distinct and lucrative maternal genres are emerging in books as well. Texts like Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It (2002) and Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year (1993) are examples of mom lit/mum lit (the maternal subgenre of chick lit) and the momoir. Taken together, these examples indicate just some of the means by which mothers, motherhood, and mothering have entered popular arenas and consciousness since the late twentieth century and especially since the turn of the millennium. Mediating Moms: Mothers in Popular Culture is a scholarly collection of essays that critically examines maternal representations in ilm, TV, the Internet, newspapers, tabloids, pregnancy manuals, parenting magazines, and bestselling iction. The twenty chapters draw on feminist, psychoanalytic, sociological, literary, and cultural studies perspectives to examine an array of current and relevant contemporary topics about working, stay-at-home, good, bad, single, teen, elder, celebrity, and lesbian mothers; and issues such as the mommy wars, self-care, pregnancy, abortion, contraception, infanticide, adoption, sex and sexuality, breastfeeding, postpartum depression (PPD), fertility, genetics, and reproductive technologies. Mediating Moms engages with motherhood as being and yielding feelings that are variously and often concomitantly instinctual, rewarding, magical, fulilling, communal, ambivalent, conlicting, isolating, and oppressive; and queries if and how it is driven by feminist and postfeminist choices or by age-old imperatives of patriarchy. To this end, the collection addresses Western dominant discourses around motherhood that historically position mothers too often as objects rather than subjects, as absences over presences, and as spoken for instead of speaking themselves. Contributors consider how these discourses continue to be played

6

Introduction

out in and reinforced by mass media while registering some of the vital and provocative ways they are being resisted, redeined, and rewritten not only by the media but by mothers themselves, who have become increasingly empowered as the creators, purveyors, and regulators of their own maternal content. The chapters lead us to speculate how, in the end, mediated representations might be interpreted by and impact mothers in their lived realities, especially in relecting and promoting alternative, liberating, and transformative maternal identities and practices. MATERNAL SCHOLARSHIP AND DISCOURSE

In theorizing these chapters that illuminate how popular culture embraces “dear old mom,” I draw on three conceptions of popular culture as summarized by Cameron McFarlane. Firstly, there is “‘Prevalent’: Popular Culture as Mass Culture,” which relects the central focus of all chapters in Mediating Moms. Originating with the Industrial Revolution in the late nineteenth century, mass culture refers to “objects and activities that are industrially produced and widely disseminated via electronic or mechanical means for commercial purposes,” as in TV shows, movies, music videos, and the Internet. In contrast to the folk cultures of the pre-industrialized past, which gave us “authentic,” localized, and unique arts and traditions, mass culture is easily reproduced and repetitive so that, for example, “one has no choice but to hear the same song or see the same ilm wherever one happens to be.”12 In this context, we can appreciate how mass culture is able to disseminate and perpetuate speciic, essentializing representations of mothers to recipients the world over. Such representations are then accepted as universal norms – as in good mothers are self-sacriicing and love their children unconditionally. Mediating Moms identiies and undermines mass-marketed truisms such as these. Secondly, some chapters negotiate the concept of “‘Well-Received’ or ‘Well-Liked’: Popular Culture as Consumption.” McFarlane explains that “‘pop culture’ refers not just to the products of an industrial culture but also to the ways in which people use those products – or whether they use them at all,” and therefore this kind of expression “insists that consumers play an active and crucial role in the creation of their own culture and in the making of its meanings.”13 Mothers have become contentious economic forces as they articulate their commercial preferences and demands, evidenced, for instance, by their response to a November 2008 Motrin advertisement, posted on the product’s website, for the

Popular Culture’s Maternal Embrace

7

relief of pain supposedly caused by “babywearing.” The ad suggested that women carried their babies in slings only as a fashion statement, viewing their infants as must-have accessories. Offended mothers launched a grassroots attack against Motrin on Twitter, blogs, and YouTube, leading the company to remove the ad. And in September 2010, breastfeeding mothers urged the boycotting of Old Navy after the clothing store introduced a baby outit with a logo of a baby bottle surrounded by the slogan “Formula Powered”; the company issued an apology. In this spirit, Mediating Moms points to how audiences determine just how popular or successful the products of popular culture will be and how mothers endorse or reject certain maternal myths or norms to the degrees they devour tabloids featuring glamorous celebrity mothers, or keep prenatal guides like What to Expect When You’re Expecting at the top of parenting bestseller lists, for example. The collection engages, moreover, with the related “ideological role of popular culture” as queried by Dominic Strinati: “Is popular culture there to indoctrinate the people, to get them to accept and adhere to ideas and values which ensure the continued dominance of those in more privileged positions who thus exercise power over them? Or is it about rebellion and opposition to the prevailing social order? Does it express, in however an imperceptible, subtle and rudimentary manner, resistance to those in power, and the subversion of dominant ways of thinking and acting?”14 Chapters in Mediating Moms that showcase, for instance, teen mothering in the magazine Yo’ Mama, lesbian parenting on the television program The L Word, or breastfeeding on shows like Desperate Housewives and Friends contend with the notion that we consume texts and products that may, on the one hand, embody or reinforce personally held interests, beliefs, and practices, and, on the other hand, motivate or convince us to mother and think about mothering in different ways. The collection explores the hegemonic implications of where and how mothers are either passive or active recipients of popular culture, and how and to what ends they, as a subordinate group within a dominant patriarchy, question or resist the indoctrinating, pervasive ideologies of motherhood. Other chapters speak to a third meaning of popular culture: “‘Common’: Popular Culture as Everyday Culture.” In this version, popular culture refers to “the objects and activities that make up the everyday life of a group, large or small, and of the meanings that people, even unconsciously, invest in those objects and activities.” McFarlane emphasizes that in this sense “popular culture often eludes our attention because it seems so ordinary, so unexceptional; it is ‘just what we do.’” Mothering is “just

8

Introduction

what” women have always done and hence perceived by Western societies at large as an “ordinary” or “unexceptional” activity. McFarlane suggests that the study of popular culture leads to our “defamilarizing it, making strange what we normally take for granted,” and the chapters here do just that with maternity:15 they expose long-held assumptions about and stereotypes of mothers for what they are – ideological constructs – and submit them to review, critique, and potential revision. The relationship between popular culture and its critical evaluation by scholars, which drives this collection, is articulated by Simon During: “In what is probably the most wide-reaching transformation of the humanities since literary criticism’s rise to power over half a century ago … popular culture has become an important object of academic attention.”16 Similarly, it is only in the last few decades that we have witnessed the production of an increasing body of maternal scholarship and that motherhood has become a topic considered worthy of and legitimized as an academic discipline.17 While a survey of such developments is beyond my scope here, I want to touch on some of the studies that theorize motherhood within the context of popular culture and that have therefore inspired and informed this collection. Mediating Moms is, in particular, part of an ongoing dialogue with scholarship that examines the mother according to three intersecting themes: the good versus the bad mother; intensive mothering; and new momism. In Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama (1992), E. Ann Kaplan uncovers “three broad ‘Master’ mother discourses or narratives” in popular ilm and literary texts within North America from 1830 to 1990 that have positioned motherhood for speciically white, heterosexual, middle-class women. Emphasizing that not every mother or family in any given period necessarily abided or abides by such discourses, and that notions of dominance are contradictory and contingent, she looks at how shifts in these discourses parallel changes in “mother-institutions” brought about by “three historical eruptions.”18 The Industrial Revolution, which led pre-modern women away from being active producers of the economy to being new middle-class consumers within the home, inaugurated “the early modern mother in the modern nuclear family.” This mother was informed by and constructed out of a mother discourse traceable to Rousseau in the eighteenth century. Through his text Emile (1762), he helped to inscribe in literary, institutional, and religious terms a mother’s complete focus on and devotion to her child, thus conining women to the domestic and maternal spheres and deining the successful mother as one who is selless, submissive,

Popular Culture’s Maternal Embrace

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angelic, and asexual (the Virgin/Madonna igure). The alternative model assumes the mother to be evil or monstrous – an image derived from the mythic Medea, who murdered her children – and associated with selishness, aggression, and or sexual experience (the whore/Magdalene igure) as well as sexual dominance and corruption (the femme fatale). As a consequence, by the nineteenth century an army of self-appointed experts, including “priests, doctors, philosophers, professors, writers, journalists, and others, all largely male,” were telling women how to be good mothers in ways that best served patriarchy.19 The First World War threatened to replace the modern mother with the “high modernist mother,” as it was a period during which many women fought for suffrage, entered institutions of higher education and or the workforce, decided to remain childless, and rejected heteronormative mothering through lesbian relationships, for example.20 Mother discourses were particularly inluenced by Darwin, Marx, and Engels. These thinkers, on the one hand, called for an acknowledgment and critique of the bourgeois family as a social and class construct, while, on the other hand, they reiterated the necessity of the mother in the home for the survival of the species and thus recapitulated women to a destiny predicated on biology. And although Freud contributed to the concept of subjectivity as well as an awareness of an unconscious, inner life for individuals – concepts that permitted viewing mothers as multi-faceted beings – his phallocentricism did little to challenge the prevailing maternal discourses that rendered mothers the handmaidens of patriarchy.21 Further, the stereotyping of the monster mother was theorized and made popular by Freudian psychology in which mothers were imagined to be castrating and devouring, and the maternal/feminine feared. Of this period, Kaplan concludes, “the nuclear family remained intact and the mother was still central, though defensively so.”22 The Second World War to the late twentieth century – and extending into the new millennium – produced the “post-modern mother,” one who emerges out of a period in which the nuclear family has been dramatically and increasingly undermined. Mother discourses now relect the feminist and liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s, which led women to resist and or reconigure scripted gendered roles, especially maternal ones. Women’s experiences and identities as mothers, previously undervalued or devalued in economic, political, and cultural spheres, have become privileged at the same time that biological imperatives that women reproduce or are “naturally” mothers is being questioned. Meanwhile, discourses respond to the scientiic and electronic innovations that have

10

Introduction

altered women’s relationships to their bodies as they turn to reproductive technologies. In this way, however, the focus on the fetus as subject risks returning the mother to the position of object.23 Kaplan set out to “unravel” a rhetorical motherhood driven by a dominant discourse of which women may not even be conscious; “only when they band together to take up arms against some particular hardship, suffering or frustration may women begin to be aware of the codes that conine and limit them.”24 The contributors to this collection likewise unite as they expose and analyze some of the “codes” of representation that continue to “conine and limit” mothers beyond Kaplan’s end point of 1990 and into the twenty-irst century. Kaplan concentrates, as noted, on dominant discourses within the mainstream culture of North America, but as she rightly insists, and as our contributors demonstrate, by understanding how such discourses came to serve as cultural paradigms we can appreciate further how they impact negatively on mothers from marginalized positions, be they racial or ethnic groups, the poor and working classes, and non-traditional families (single mothers, lesbian parents, surrogates).25 Another important text is Representations of Motherhood (1994), edited by Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan. Representations of Motherhood considers the mother as a subject from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives and disciplines. Of particular relevance is its attention to representations within “discursive arenas” such as “law, medicine, ilm, visual art, and technological culture.”26 Following an historical trajectory similar to that of Kaplan, the authors investigate how the mother, silenced by Rousseaunian notions of self-sacriice and invisibility, has increasingly come into subjecthood; how attention to maternal experience allows us to view mothering in its social, psychological, and political dimensions; and how we can regard “the maternal place as generative for women’s psychological development as well as for cultural and political change.”27 Published in the same year, psychologist Shari L. Thurer’s The Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother examines how maternal mythologies, “complete with rituals, beliefs, expectations, norms, and symbols,” from disparate societies have informed conceptions of mother (read altruistic) love throughout history.28 Thurer identiies “an ideology of good mothering” that not only eternally deines women according to their (successful) relations to their children, but also is “ephemeral, of doubtful value, unsympathetic to caretakers, arbitrary, and, literally, manmade.”29 Similarly, in The Cultural

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Contradictions of Motherhood (1996) Sharon Hays coins the term “intensive mothering” to denote the maternal ideology that took hold in the United States just before the Second World War and that has not eased its discursive grip as “a gendered model that advises mothers to expend a tremendous amount of time, energy, and money in raising their children.”30 The titular contradiction refers to the fact that in the United States (as in other Western societies) today, despite the fact that more than half of mothers work in jobs outside of the home, and despite late capitalism’s urging of self-interested and competitive drives, mothers are still pressured by cultural and institutional forces to devote themselves wholly to mothering and in especially self-sacriicial and nurturing terms. Hays associates herself with sociologists who “critically examine aspects of the culture of everyday life that are so sacred, so deeply held, so taken for granted as to remain generally unquestioned and regularly treated as common sense,” which reminds us of McFarlane’s deinition of “Popular Culture as Everyday Culture” as that which necessitates defamiliarization. And like Kaplan, Hays argues that in making “problematic that which is sacred,” we see it “as neither natural nor given but as a socially constructed reality.” Such a move begins “with the recognition that there are alternative ideologies available, no matter how much these may grate against our deepest sense of what is right and natural.”31 Mediating Moms problematizes these accepted or normalized images of mothers in the media and foregrounds, for example, women in their sixties who decide to have children, and parturition itself as violent, bloody, and horriic. In The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women (2004), Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels ind a related discourse to intensive mothering, one they call the “new momism,” which is “a set of ideals, norms, and practices, most frequently and powerfully represented in the media, that seem on the surface to celebrate motherhood, but which in reality promulgate standards of perfection that are beyond your reach.” The new momism coincided with the explosion of motherhood in the media from the mid-1980s on, when “women have been deluged by an ever-thickening mudslide of maternal media advice, programming, and marketing that powerfully shapes how we mothers feel about our relationships with our own kids and, indeed, how we feel about ourselves.” Douglas and Michaels further explain that because “the media trafic in extremes,” it has “built an interlocking, cumulative image of the dedicated, doting ‘mom’ versus the delinquent, bad ‘mother.’”32 This “bad” mother takes centre stage in Molly

12

Introduction

Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky’s important study “Bad” Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America (1998), which charts how mothers are too easily branded as destructive forces to their children and held accountable for their children’s so-called failures. Mediating Moms was in part inspired by Douglas and Michaels, who state that “the media have been and are the major dispenser of the ideals and norms surrounding motherhood.” As they emphasize, the rise of the working mother, and the conversion of this mother into a niche market, “all contributed to new shows, ad campaigns, magazines, and TV news stories geared to mothers, especially afluent, upscale ones. Because of this sheer increase in output and target marketing, mothers were bombarded as never before by media constructions of the good mother.”33 Constructions such as these demanded to be further documented and problematized, as they are here. Moreover, the collection pushes Douglas and Michaels’s indings that, “at the same time that the new momism conquered the media outlets of America, we also saw mothers who talked back.”34 Measuring the tensions between the mythic “good” and the rebellious “bad” mom, Douglas and Michaels signal both their aesthetic and political agenda as they hail their study as “a call to arms”: “With so many smart, hard-working, dedicated, tenacious, fed-up women out there, can’t we all do a better job of talking back to the media that hector us all the time?”35 Mediating Moms is a response to this call. After I submitted the manuscript of Mediating Moms for review with McGill-Queen’s University Press, Mommy Angst: Motherhood in American Popular Culture (2009) appeared. A collection of essays edited by Ann C. Hall and Mardia J. Bishop, Mommy Angst deftly analyzes some of the cultural anxieties surrounding and imposed on mothers today within media such as ilm, television, and the Internet. While our collections overlap in this regard, Mediating Moms further illustrates, within a broader scope extending beyond the United States, some of the ways media is used to confront and challenge norms, break taboos, and empower mothers with agency and control in (re)deining their roles and identities; and, where necessary or possible, it offers suggestions for how women can act on and through the media to bring about change. In so doing, Mediating Moms aligns itself with the image analysis undertaken by Richard Dyer in The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations. Concerned with how “a group is represented, presented over and over again in cultural forms,” he emphasizes that “representations are presentations, always and necessarily entailing the use of codes and conventions of the available cultural forms of presentation.” He states, in the spirit of our

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contributors, that “without understanding the way images function in terms of, say, narrative, genre or spectacle, we don’t really understand why they turn out the way they do.” Mediating Moms is predicated on the need to critique how and why the “social group” of mothers is imaged as it is today. Dyer adds an important qualiication: “because one can see reality only through representation, it does not follow that one does not see reality at all.” Indeed, representations exist in tandem with reality, such that “representations here and now have real consequences for real people” in terms of “the way representations delimit and enable what people can be in any given society.”36 As Andrea O’Reilly acknowledges by dividing her edited volume of essays, Mother Matters, into a section on discourse and a section on practice, the symbiosis between text and life is an important theme in motherhood studies. The work makes explicit the goals of maternal scholars: we must acknowledge current and normative maternal discourses, assess the impact they have on women’s realities, and consider how certain maternal practices may be read as “counter narratives” to those discourses.37 O’Reilly responds to the vivid metaphoric mandate urged by Susan Maushart, namely, that feminist scholars must “unmask motherhood,” peer beneath prevailing masks or images that distort or conceal women’s own meanings about motherhood.38 Mediating Moms continues the process of unmasking as it looks at mothers as imaged by and in the media; how mothers mediate or negotiate these images according to their historical, corporeal, and lived personhoods; and how scholars mediate popular and academic discourses of motherhood as a way of registering, strengthening, or alleviating tensions between representation and reality. MEDIATING MOMS : AN OVER VIEW OF THE CHAPTERS

I began to formulate Mediating Moms in dialogue with O’Reilly as we co-edited the collection Textual Mothers / Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary Women’s Literatures.39 Our call for papers generated over 100 abstract submissions, which alerted us to the broad and dynamic work being done in the ield of motherhood studies, and indicated that much more work was waiting to be tapped. My call for papers for this new collection similarly brought in more than 100 proposals from academics, almost all from Canada, the United States, and Britain. Although I invited submissions on any aspect of mothering in popular culture, almost all of those I received were framed according to the “master”

14

Introduction

discourses identiied by Kaplan in which the term mother signals a white, middle-class, heterosexual, married, and biological parent. Presented with this discursive underpinning, in organizing the material at hand, I chose abstracts that most compellingly sought to examine and challenge normative assumptions and narratives about motherhood in light of new and inluential popular texts and contexts. The result is a body of work that contributes to the crucial (re)assessment of motherhood at this point in time when mothers are arguably more visible and vocal than ever before, and when media related to entertainment, advertising, politics, law, medicine, and the economy are dramatically revising and refashioning the way we consider and practice mothering. It is my hope that the collection will encourage further and necessary inquiry into popular culture and motherhood, especially at the nexus of race, class, and nationhood. While all chapters in Mediating Moms overlap in their querying of the good/bad, intensive, and heteronormative mother ideologies, I have divided the collection into categories suggested by the prevalence of the following overarching and intersecting themes: Maternal Surveillance; Generational Motherhood; Pregnant and Postpartum Bodies; and Medical Interventions and Reproductive Technologies. Debra Langan’s chapter, for instance, treats the issue of women who mother both their children and their aging parents, but its greater focus on care of the maternal body led me to place it in the Pregnant and Postpartum Bodies section. As another example of intersecting themes, Maud Perrier’s work on Britain’s oldest mother, who conceived by in vitro fertilization (IVF), would it in the Medical Interventions category, but because of its prevailing interest in the old(er) age of the mother, I have included the chapter in Generational Motherhood. MATERNAL SUR VEILLANCE

Mass media praises and viliies mothers, keeping them under constant surveillance and judging them according to the extent to which they adhere to ideologies of good motherhood. As Douglas and Michaels posit, “with intensive mothering, everyone watches us, we watch ourselves and other mothers, and we watch ourselves watching ourselves.”40 This state of scrutiny is manifested in the ways legal, political, and cultural institutions regulate maternal behavior. It is also obvious in the related mommy wars, identiied by Nina Darnton in a June 1990 Newsweek article as the media-staged battle that pits mother against mother – those who stay at home versus those who go out to work.41

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15

Ladd-Taylor and Umansky afirm that “some mothers are not good mothers. No one can deny that”; such women are guilty of “real violations of parental duty.”42 Called “pure evil” by Leeds police, Karen Matthews is serving an eight-year prison term in her native England for kidnapping her own daughter in order to collect a hefty ransom in February 2008.43 Wendy Paduch was branded “Britain’s worst mother” in October 2010; she left her two children in the care of her mother while she went on what was supposed to be a week-long holiday in Tunisia, but stayed away for three months. In that time Paduch married a local, and although she briely returned to England to see her children, she was back in North Africa with her new husband by January 2011.44 Ladd-Taylor and Umansky also stress that “the ‘bad’ mother label does not necessarily denote practices that actually harm children,”45 but the media, and mothers working in its service, actively monitor women on a daily basis, provoking debates about maternal behavior and competency. Ayelet Waldman, author of Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (2009), documents how other mothers made her “do the Bad Mother perp walk” for her “crime” of “confessing in the pages of the New York Times style section to loving my husband more than my children.”46 In May 1997, vacationing Danish actor Anette Sorensen left her fourteen-month-old baby in a stroller outside a Manhattan restaurant, in full view of her table, while she went inside to eat. After stunned patrons alerted the police, she was arrested, spent two days in jail, and her child was taken into children’s services for four days, events that caused a transatlantic scandal. According to Sorensen – and backed by the Danish press – it is customary in Copenhagen for mothers to dine in this fashion. Sorensen, dubbed the “Stroller Mommy” by the media, successfully sued the City of New York.47 In another example, after the New York Sun columnist Lenore Skenazy allowed her nine-year-old son to ride the subway alone in Manhattan without so much as a cell phone in April 2008, on radio and TV talk shows, blogs, and news reports, she was simultaneously denigrated for exposing her child to the dangers of the streets and hailed for trying to instill in him maturity and independence.48 Political igures, too, police mothers in the media, just as mothers who are politicians are also policed by the media. American Republican Vice President Dan Quayle took to his pulpit to condemn the eponymous protagonist of the television show Murphy Brown, played by Candice Bergen, when she became a single mother during the 1991–92 season. Twenty years later we have Mike Huckabee, Fox News Channel host and former governor of Arkansas, criticizing pregnant actor Natalie

16

Introduction

Portman: “It’s unfortunate that we glorify and glamorize the idea of outof-wedlock  children,” and professing that the baby’s father (now Portman’s iancé) “didn’t give her the most wonderful gift, which would be a wedding ring!”49 Throughout the 2008 US presidential election campaign, the liberal media and its audiences scrutinized Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin for her decision to run for ofice despite her being the mother of ive, while lauding now First Lady Michelle Obama for afirming that her “primary title” will always be “mom in chief.”50 Palin, for her part, challenged her opponents while making an explicit connection between motherhood, politics, and aggression when she asked, during her VP nomination acceptance speech, “You know, they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? [sic] Lipstick.”51 In Canada, Christy Clark, the premier of British Columbia, ran her 2011 campaign on a “families irst” platform and was embraced as “Premier Mom” by the media; she delivered her irst press conference following her victory from the arena where her son was playing hockey.52 Within such a climate of surveillance, Mediating Moms begins with two chapters that look at animated mothers in programs aimed at children and adults, respectively. Stephanie Wardrop (chapter 1) takes on the mommy wars as waged by Noggin and PBS Sprout, two American networks for preschoolers. With attention to the “opt-out revolution” – the phenomenon of educated women withdrawing from the workforce to care for their children – and object relations theorist D.W. Winnicott’s notion of the “good enough mother,” she posits that cartoons such as Arthur, Dragon Tales, Little Bear, and Curious George are of value to the extent that they may be advocating a surprisingly liberal and luid deinition of mother, one that admits and accounts for non-biological and non-female caretakers. Jo Johnson (chapter 2) connects the over-feminized girl-woman igures of early Disney ilms for children to the mothers in satiric animated TV programs of the 1990s geared to adults. Through a close reading of the maternal protagonists of The Simpsons, Family Guy, and King of the Hill, she registers the degrees to which their domestic, sexual, and career choices subvert the new momist myths of the modern nuclear family sitcom. Johnson suggests that in their refusal to conform either in whole or in part to these myths, igures like Marge Simpson “talk back” to their animated families and communities and, by extension, to their audiences, articulating their mandate to be seen not as patriarchal fantasies but as empowered matriarchs.

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The next two chapters consider other aspects of media surveillance. Fiona Joy Green (chapter 3) explores reality TV shows Supernanny (USA) and Crash Test Mommy (Canada) as being “humiliation TV” in their depictions of women’s failures as mothers and caregivers within typically lower- to middle-class heteronormative families. Through her analysis of the surveillance techniques, which allow both the shows’ producers and participants to witness and judge the maternal practices featured on each episode, Green highlights how “Mommy-centred reality TV exploits and proits from women’s struggles for the phantasmatic idealization of mothers,” and she calls on audiences to adopt viewing strategies to counter the new momist, intensive, and mommy war myths promoted by these programs. In chapter 4, I illuminate how famous mothers have come under increasing scrutiny within the tabloids by the “media mother police,” making connections between the mother who is judged good or bad and the celebrity who is envied or despised. Through a comparison of how Angelina Jolie and Britney Spears are depicted in print and electronic issues of People, In Touch, Star, and the like, I argue that their maternal reputations rise and fall in accordance with how the women adhere to the dictates of new momism and how fans use celebrity narratives not only to critique these ideologies but also to gauge their own maternal ambitions and desires. Jennifer Bell (chapter 5) follows with an overview of how politicians are policed. She leads with the truism uttered by former deputy prime minister of Canada, Sheila Copps, “Everyone knows that babies and politics don’t mix.” Referring to numerous mother politicians in Canada such as Copps, Pat Carney, Rosemary Brown, and Belinda Stronach, Bell examines the discrimination they face by the media in its reporting of electoral politics. She outlines how the women counter, in their own parliamentary work as well as in interviews and published memoirs, some of the ahistorical and sexist assumptions and attacks rendered about and against mothers as political igures. Nicola Goc (chapter 6) then analyzes how the contemporary Irish press positions motherhood, contraception, abortion, infanticide, illegitimacy, and divorce in relation to state and church. The chapter spotlights what became known as the “Kerry Babies Case,” named for the discovery of the bodies of two babies in County Kerry in 1984 and the subsequent arrest and trial for murder of single mother Joanne Hayes. Goc charts how Hayes became the focus of an “antipathetic” motherhood discourse that dominated the nation throughout 1984 and 1985

18

Introduction

and continues into the twenty-irst century through ilms about the story. Goc highlights the book Hayes penned in response to her treatment by the media and how other individuals and groups use online forums to counter mainstream print journalism that persecutes mothers. GENERATIONAL MOTHERHOOD

Mothers are deined by and within different historical periods, as well as according to how their respective ages inluence not only how they will parent but also how society judges them as either it or unit to do so. Recent events bring these issues to the cultural fore. When British novelist Hilary Mantel announced in February 2010 that she thought the maternal instincts of young women “are suppressed in the interests of society’s timetable” as drafted by men, and that girls are “perfectly capable” of having children at age fourteen, she was lambasted by the British Department for Children, Schools and Families for being “‘completely out of line’ with Government policy.”53 In contrast, a ten-year-old girl made international news after giving birth to a baby on 26 October 2010, in Spain, where “doctors remarked that the baby was welcomed into the new family, who said that childbirth at a young age was not abnormal in their native Romania.”54 At the other end of the spectrum, the Canadian series W - FIVE aired the documentary “Parents Again” in February 2008, reporting on socalled “kinship families,” of which there are more than 60,000 in Canada. The program raised awareness of the fact that an increasing number of grandparents are called upon to return to primary caregiving, often resignedly, when the birth parents are unable or unwilling to fulill their duties.55 At the same time, women are eager to become mothers (much) later in life, as showcased in another CBC documentary, “World’s Oldest Moms,” broadcast on 13 March 2010.56 Included in this category are India’s Omkari Panwar, already a grandmother who underwent IVF treatment and delivered twins at seventy, becoming, in 2008, the world’s oldest mother to give birth, and Spain’s Maria Carmen del Bousada de Lara who similarly used reproductive technologies to become a mother to twins at age sixty-six, in 2006.57 Bousada de Lara’s death in July 2009 has fuelled ethical debates about “age-appropriate” maternity. The chapters in this section address mothering in generational and agespeciic contexts. Imelda Whelehan (chapter 7) surveys a range of stories from those produced under the banner of second wave feminism in the 1960s to the “chick lit” and “mum lit” narratives of our postfeminist era.

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19

Her overview of cultural shifts drawn from books like Up the Sandbox! (1970), I Don’t Know How She Does It (2002), and A Storm in a Teacup (2010) portrays a series of protagonists consistently confronting feelings of guilt and inadequacy as they strive for maternal perfection alongside professional fulillment. Whelehan probes the value of these genres as offering “frank expression” for women, though she cautions us that mum lit may not be up to the task of encouraging real economic, political, and gendered revisions of patriarchal motherhood. Irene Gammel (chapter 8) then positions the iconic Canadian novel Anne of Green Gables as the “quintessential mother-daughter tale” passed from mothers of one generation to the daughters of the next. Focusing on the novel’s remarkable status as a popular culture phenomenon and franchise both within and beyond Canada today, she details how the theme of mothering in Anne’s matriarchal world of Avonlea is both drawn from Montgomery’s own early-twentieth-century immersion in popular magazines and relects our twenty-irst-century “sensibilities and ambivalences.” Gammel shows that the novel remains relevant today in its dramatizing of motherhood by choice, its foregrounding of single and adoptive mothers, and its blurring of the generational lines between mother and grandmother. The next chapter offers a provocative glimpse into teen life as experienced within contemporary Toronto. Beth O’Connor (chapter 9) argues that despite an increase in media attention, teen mothers continue to be “pathologized as the ultimate Other in mothering discourse.” She introduces us to Yo’ Mama, an independent magazine launched in Toronto in 2002 by six teenage mothers. O’Connor convincingly explains how Yo’ Mama serves as an “alternative discursive space” constructed by and for a diverse group of teen mothers from a wide variety of backgrounds, providing them with a political, creative, and communal outlet and voice while also educating social service providers about their lives, needs, and capabilities. Maud Perrier (chapter 10) closes this section with a study of Patricia Rashbrook, who in 2006 became Britain’s oldest mother at sixty-three. Perrier examines how Rashbrook’s pregnancy was covered in British papers like the Sun, the Daily Mail, and the Telegraph, as well as in posts to the BBC’s online “Have Your Say.” Perrier positions this web forum as a groundbreaking site in which the public was given the opportunity to talk about, and talk back to, not only the mainstream press reports themselves but also the prevailing yet contradictory ideologies, which, on the one hand, construct the postmenopausal mother as selish and irresponsible

20

Introduction

and, on the other hand, as a it parent who reinforces the heteronormative model for good motherhood via her middle-class and married status, when positioned against lower-class, teen, or single mothers. PREGNANT AND POSTPARTUM BODIES

We turn from age to exploring how women view and respond to their bodies physically, biologically, and aesthetically, and how their bodies have been co-opted and commodiied by the media. Women are increasingly lagged by corporations eager to capitalize on maternity. For instance, the MSN webcast In the Motherhood was “conceived by” Suave, a company that makes beauty products and embarked “on a mission to wake up moms and encourage them to take care of themselves and get their beauty back. The brand’s 360-degree ‘Say Yes to Beautiful’ integrated marketing campaign reminds moms that beauty has a place amongst the dirty dishes and piles of laundry that are an inevitable part of motherhood.”58 On the more extreme side, plastic surgeons have begun to market “mommy makeovers.” As one medical group tells prospective clients, “More than ever, you have exciting surgical options to reverse the unwanted effects of childbearing and age”; these surgical options include breast reduction, body sculpting, and tummy tucks.59 Mothers who opt for the knife can purchase My Beautiful Mommy, the picture book written by Dr Michael Salzhauer as a tool to help women explain their surgical decisions and physical changes to their little ones. On the culinary front, Baskin-Robbins turned to pregnant women to promote its new soft serve ice cream by making 21 May 2008 “Bump Day” and offering free scoops to expectant moms.60 However, serving ice cream to pregnant women is nothing compared with pouring milk produced by mothers. In what is surely one of the most avant-garde statements about a mother’s relationship to her body to date, performance artist Jess Dobkin opened the “Lactation Station Breast Milk Bar” at the Ontario College of Art & Design Professional Gallery in summer 2006, where she offered taste testing of the breast milk donated by six lactating women. Dobkin created the piece to problematize a woman’s supposed “natural” ability to know how to breastfeed, and the fact that women are expected to do so in isolation.61 Just as extraordinary is the London, uk, restaurant Icecreamists, which, in February 2011, began selling a new ice cream called “Baby Gaga” made from breast milk donated by ifteen women who responded to an ad. Supplies sold quickly. However, new batches were coniscated by local oficials while Lady Gaga threatened a lawsuit for trademark infringement.62

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21

Debates about private versus public mothering have erupted online over Facebook, which has banned photographs of breastfeeding and of pregnant stomachs since June 2007 and February 2011, respectively. These sanctions have led to the creation of Facebook petition groups like “Hey Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!” and “No one wants to see your pregnant belly! Ban Maternity Photography!”63 In a related sense, Riki Lindhome and Kate Micucci, the comedic team known as Garfunkel and Oates, irst performed their irreverent and now viral song “Pregnant Women are Smug” on YouTube in April 2009. In lyrics like “Pregnant women are smug/Everyone knows it, nobody says it/Because they’re pregnant/F-ing son of a gun/You think you’re so deep now/You give me the creeps now/Now that you’re pregnant/I can’t count all the ways how/You speak in clichés now,” the musicians playfully satirize the socially and maternally imposed sanctity of the pregnant body.64 The chapters in this section relect corporeal issues such as these. Kathryn Pallister (chapter 11) evaluates sociocultural norms that inluence whether or not women choose to breastfeed. Attuned to current debates about breast milk versus formula, the sexual nature of the breast, and cultural views on bodily exposure, she focuses on how protagonists on TV shows such as Sex and the City, Yes, Dear, Desperate Housewives, ER, and Friends talk back to prevailing dichotomous messages that tell women to breastfeed but not in view of a discomited public, and how the programs encourage their viewers to regard breastfeeding as a choice and a necessarily complex but normalized practice. Examining breastfeeding within the postcolonial contexts of race and nation, H. Louise Davis (chapter 12) traces how the iconic Christian image of Madonna with Child is employed by documentary and feature ilmmakers in their construction of black African mothers. Concentrating on groundbreaking 1984 footage about famine in an Ethiopian refugee camp as well as Fernando Meirelles’s 2005 The Constant Gardener, which is set in the slums of Nairobi, Davis shows how the West uses the parodic, inverted Christian image of the African mother who cannot feed her child to symbolize both the superior maternal abilities of white women and an entire continent’s failure to nurture and sustain itself. She concludes with a look at more recent BBC reports and online forums that engage directly with the voices of African women as speaking subjects as well as at visual artists who experiment with new and radical images of the Madonna with Child icon. Dominique Russell (chapter 13) considers how the Canadian reality TV show Birth Stories projects, reinforces, and at times overrides “the obstetric myths of the medical model of birth and labour.” She inds that

22

Introduction

although the program typically allows the master or technocratic version of birth – the power of medicalized, hospitalized labour – to prevail, normalizing discourses exist in luid tension with narratives by and about women from diverse ethnic, racial, and class backgrounds as well as from non-traditional (i.e., single-sex or single-parent) families. Deining the oral birth stories of the women as a (potential) talking back through “women’s speech,” Russell perceives how mothers use the show “at the level of production and reception, creating issures in its unconscious ideology and reality TV formula.” Shifting to print journalism, Debra Langan (chapter 14) confronts neoliberal, capitalist discourses on self-care that instruct mothers how to look after themselves so that ultimately they may better look after others. Her analysis of two leading parenting magazines, the American Parents and Canadian Today’s Parent, uncovers how they consistently urge their white, middle-class target audience to make/keep their bodies beautiful, youthful, and healthy, maintain an active sex life, and relieve themselves of stress. Because the content fails to address the familial, political, and economic contexts that make heeding these directives not only unrealistic but burdensome, Langan proposes ways that self-care must be problematized so that mothers, as individuals, are not expected to assume wholly the responsibilities of our social institutions. This section ends with a consideration of the maternal body as absent or, more pointedly, virtually present, as Hosu Kim (chapter 15) translates the narratives posted on the Korean website “The Sad Love Stories of Mothers Who Sent Their Babies Away for Adoption.” Grounding her analysis in the history of South Korea’s transnational adoption practices, Kim traces the crucial emergence of birthmothers into the prevailing discourse of adoption – which has to date privileged the adoptive family – through their “virtual mothering,” a practice involving the mediation and negotiation of “the loss of both their children and their ideals of motherhood.” Drawing on theories of mourning and “machinic assemblage” of the body, Kim reads the online postings as a form of “skin autobiography” that disturbs “an overwhelming silence” of transnational birthmothers, allowing them to articulate, for the irst time, the trauma of giving up one’s child against Korea’s mainstream media that stigmatize them and render them ghostlike. MEDICAL INTER VENTIONS AND REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGIES

In this inal section, we expand our look at the body in terms of its relationships to birthing and the medical establishment as well as genetics

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23

and reproductive technologies. The chapters raise provocative issues concerning us in the new millennium, leaving us to ponder current and anticipate future scientiic, medical, and ethical challenges surrounding the representations and practices of motherhood. We are witnessing, for instance, unprecedented concern for women’s physiological and psychological responses to motherhood. It was only in March 2010, after years of being blocked, that the United States legislated the federal health care bill known as the Melanie Blocker Stokes Mother’s Act, formerly the MOTHERS Act: Mom’s Opportunity To Access Help, Education, Research and Support for Postpartum Depression Act.65 As taboos like postpartum depression are being shattered by public igures like actor Brooke Shields, whose memoir is analyzed in this section, so a number of writers have penned books offering medical, legal, and familial rewritings of the heteronormative script, such as The Ultimate Guide to Pregnancy for Lesbians by Rachel Pepper, and Confessions of the Other Mother: Non-Biological Lesbian Moms Tell All edited by Harlyn Aizley. Moreover, ofline (or in-person) and online support groups and networks like the Lesbian Mothers Association of Quebec and Facebook’s Gay Parenting Online Fan Page offer previously unheard of resources and outlets for lesbian mothers.66 The most contentious maternal issues today deal with fertility and reproduction. January 2006 saw the establishment of the federal regulatory agency, Assisted Human Reproduction Canada, at a time when the topic has been attracting tremendous media coverage. Celebrities are increasingly going public about their experiences with assisted pregnancies; for instance, Celine Dion, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Nicole Kidman all had twins between 2009 and 2011 (Dion via IVF, Parker and Kidman through surrogates) and all have spoken publicly about their experiences. Non-famous women, meanwhile, are gaining publicity for their stories. One of the most infamous cases of IVF to date is that of Nadya Suleman, the mother of six who went on to deliver octuplets in January 2009, and who was subsequently mocked in the press as “Octomom.” As a media spectacle, Suleman takes her place alongside Thomas Beatie, the thirtyfour-year-old transgendered, married man who was successfully impregnated with donor sperm, becoming known around the world as “Pregnant Man.” He came to signify, as New York Times’ Guy Trebay put it, “partly a carnival sideshow and partly a glimpse at shifting sexual tectonics” with the birth of his healthy daughter in June 2008. Beatie’s pregnancy marked “both a personal milestone and a strange and wondrous crossroads in the evolution of American pop culture.”67 He has since given birth to two more children, in June 2009 and June 2010. Marking

24

Introduction

another “personal milestone” and evolutionary crossroad is Kristine Casey, the sixty-one-year-old who, acting as a surrogate for her daughter, gave birth to her own grandchild in February 2011, leading Margaret Somerville, founding director for the Centre for Medicine, Ethics, and Law at McGill University, to denounce the situation as unethical.68 The chapters in this section likewise treat contentious issues of maternity within pop culture. Sally Mennill (chapter 16) exposes the disconcerting ways that What to Expect When You’re Expecting, “America’s Bestselling Pregnancy Book,” emphasizes risk and inundates pre- and post-natal mothers with fear, rather than offering them comfort and reassurance. Through an analysis of the birthing sections of the second (1991) and third (2002) editions, which promote medical hegemonic ideals, Mennill calls on potential readers to recognize and resist how the manual inscribes early-twenty-irst-century discourses of maternity governed by a “bio-medical technocracy” or biopower that submits the pregnant body to medical intervention and control while denying agency to the expectant and laboring mother. Latham Hunter (chapter 17) considers the theme of empowerment by way of examining Grey’s Anatomy, which began airing in 2005. She argues that the show is “an undeniable leap forward in the televisual representation of motherhood” because it remains, unlike most TV series before it, fully committed to exploring in medical and personal terms controversial and complicated narratives of pregnancy and maternity. Evaluating the irst three seasons, Hunter traces the show’s treatment of taboo themes such as the vulnerability of the pregnant body, the risk of pregnancy for women, and the pregnant body invaded and laid bare by the medical establishment, all of which serve to reverse or unsettle myths of women as “naturally” linked to motherhood. The show’s most progressive value, she suggests, is that it opens up a crucial space in which reproduction and childrearing are politicized in postfeminist terms. Jocelyn Fenton Stitt (chapter 18) then moderates the very public debate about postpartum depression ignited by Tom Cruise, who criticized Brooke Shields for taking antidepressants for PPD treatment. Mainstream media as well as women bloggers viliied Cruise while celebrating Shields for her memoir Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression (2005). Stitt uses the Cruise/Shields scandal and its mediated responses to probe the ways that popular culture romanticizes the “good” mother and to consider tensions between medical and social explanations for a woman’s ambivalent, negative, and even dangerous responses to mothering.

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The impact of a different kind of medical intervention is the subject for Lenora Perry (chapter 19), who explores reproductive technologies within Showtime’s drama The L Word, which features an ensemble cast of lesbian characters in West Hollywood – arguably the only “popular program that has opened cultural ruptures, and where the lesbians have centre stage.” Viewing episodes from the second season, in which protagonist Tina becomes pregnant, Perry elucidates how “the lesbian who conceives a child without male participation represents a transgressive example of woman and mother.” Perry’s analysis situates this “queer symbol of the maternal” within discourses of the medicalization of pregnancy, pornography, and the “monstrous maternal.” The program opens up, she suggests, possibilities for more positive and truthful portrayals of lesbian mothering that will relect and impact the real lives of those who constitute “the new American family.” Lastly, Stuart J. Murray (chapter 20) contemplates reproductive technology through a philosopher’s lens as he surveys debates between Science and Nature in terms of how discourses of genetics and technology lead to the “paradigm of the ethically good mother – the mother whose relation to her child is mediated by genetic terminology and who submits to genetic technologies, experts, and tests as a pre-parental duty.” Challenging such a paradigm, he critiques Bryan Sykes’s insistence in the internationally bestselling The Seven Daughters of Eve (2001) that motherhood is “genetic.” Murray then turns to the respective work of bioethicists Margaret Somerville and Leon R. Krass, arguing against their repugnance for reproductive technologies and their privileging of heterosexist norms. He counters that we would do well to listen to Adriana Cavarero’s For More Than One Voice (2005), which posits an ethical motherhood dictated not by the gene and genetic technologies but one predicated on the relations between mother and child formed at what Cavarero calls “the scene of infancy.” CONCLUSION

At the end of his study Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, John Storey proposes that “all people” need to see themselves “as active participants in culture: selecting, rejecting, making meanings, attributing value, resisting and, yes, being duped and manipulated.”69 Contributors to Mediating Moms actively participate in assessing cultural maternity, broadening our vision of a representational motherhood that is negative and oppressive, and revealing how mothers in the late-twentieth and

26

Introduction

early-twenty-irst centuries are stigmatized and dichotomized; at war with each other and themselves; under control by state, religious, medical, and cultural institutions and powers; suffer from a loss of identity; and are isolated, ill, at risk, and hounded by the press. However, the chapters also prove what Douglas and Michaels found: “At the same time that the new momism conquered the media outlets of America, we also saw mothers who talked back.”70 Dramatic, comedic, and satiric animated, live-action, and ictional maternal characters challenge and negotiate prevailing notions of normative motherhood as they seek employment outside the home, breastfeed in public, use IVF to conceive, or parent in lesbian families, for instance. In like spirit, their reallife counterparts talk back through their auto/biographical narratives and performances in documentary ilm, reality television, blogs and online forums, interviews, memoirs, and magazines. Not every voice is heard, and not every voice is talking back. Contributors to Mediating Moms acknowledge there is still much work to be done in recognizing when and how images of motherhood render us, in Storey’s words, “duped and manipulated” by intensive mothering and new momist myths. But new possibilities for critique and agency are offered by the plethora of mothers, both real and imagined, showcased in this collection who use their mediated status to select and reject dominant tropes and ideologies, and for “making meanings” out of and “attributing value” to heretofore resistant, alternative, and even radical maternal practices, experiences, and identities. Marge Simpson, Miranda Hobbes, Meredith Grey, Marilla Cuthbert, Angelia Jolie, Christy Clark, Melissa Etheridge, Patricia Rashbrook, Yo’ Mama teens, and Korean birthmothers are just a few of the igures mediating motherhood in popular and provocative ways for their twenty-irst-century publics.

NOTES

1 Tharp and MacCallum-Whitcomb, eds., introduction to This Giving Birth, 1. 2 Angel, “Mum’s the word,” Chatelaine, May 2007, 15. 3 Judith Timson, “MUBAR: mothered up beyond all recognition,” Globe and Mail, 15 April 2008, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/. 4 Terms such as these are now ubiquitous in popular culture: i.e., mompreneur (entrepreneur), momager (manager), momoirist (memoir writer), celebumom (celebrity), mominee (mother of an Oscar nominee), momzilla (controlling, especially when it comes to planning children’s weddings), momster

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5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

27

(member of the mommy maia; competitive and ixated on the children), martyr mommy (overly self-sacriicial), and sanctimommy (sanctimonious). The phrase “yummy mummy,” Pieta Woolley explains, “started as a shorthand for the glamorization of motherhood, a celebrity-led trend featuring ‘too-posh-to-push’ C-sections, sleek and sexy maternity fashion, and a rapid return to itness, hipness, and career.” Pieta Woolley, “Yummy Mummy,” straight.com, 29 March 2007, http://www.straight.com/article-77742/ yummy-mummy. As depicted in Fiona Neill’s bestselling Slummy Mummy, the eponymous mother is a dishevelled, unglamorous, frustrated stay-athome mother. Urban Dictionary offers a more extreme version: “A young mother from a lower socio-economic background. Usually found on a council estate with lots of piercings / children/tattoos. Drug abuse problem optional,” “Slummy Mummy,” last modiied 19 May 2009, http://www. urbandictionary.com/deine.php?term=slummy+mummy. The Mom Show, http://www.slice.ca/shows/showspage.aspx?Title_ID= 100007. In the Motherhood, accessed 12 June 2009, http://inthemotherhood. msn.com. http://www.themomsbuzz.com; http://www.cafemom.com; http://www. themomsalon.com/index. Note that “Digital Mom” provides the statistic that in 2010, approximately four million mothers are blogging. 13 October 2010, http://www.digitalmomblog.com/2010/10/13/how-many-moms- areblogging/#. The Mothers Movement Online, 2009, http://www.mothersmovement.org. Bee Lavender, “about us,” Hip Mama, 20 October 2003, http://www. hipmama.com/node/115. Amy Anderson and Sheri Reed, “Mamafesto,” Mamazine.com, accessed 3 May 2010, http://www.mamazine.com/Pages/about.php. “About Us,” Literary Mama, accessed 3 May 2010, http://www. literarymama.com/about; Brain, Child, http://www.brainchildmag.com. McFarlane, “General and Historical Overview of Cultural Studies,” 5–6. Ibid., 6. Strinati, An Introduction, 3. McFarlane, “General and Historical Overview of Cultural Studies,” 6. During quoted in McFarlane, “General and Historical Overview of Cultural Studies,” 6. For a comprehensive introduction to the ield, see O’Reilly, Maternal Theory. Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation, 19. Ibid., 20–1.

28

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46

Introduction

Ibid., 18. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 18, 26. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 9. Bassin, Honey, and Kaplan, introduction to Representations of Motherhood, 17. Ibid., 9–10. Thurer, The Myths of Motherhood, xv. Ibid., xxv, xxvii. Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, x. Ibid.,13. Douglas and Michaels, Mommy Myth, 5–7. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 12–13. Ibid., 26. Dyer, The Matter of Images, 1–3. O’Reilly, Mother Matters, 15. Maushart quoted in O’Reilly, Mother Matters, 11 and in Podnieks and O’Reilly, Textual Mothers, 3. O’Reilly’s commitments to other projects prevented her from participating in this collection. Douglas and Michaels, Mommy Myth, 6. Darnton qtd. in Douglas and Michaels, Mommy Myth, 204; Darnton qtd. in Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, 132. Ladd-Taylor and Umansky, “Bad” Mothers, 1, 3. Andrew Norfolk, “Karen Matthews Sentenced,” The Times, 24 January 2009, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article5573061.ece. Daily Mail Reporter, “‘Britain’s Worst Mother’ Abandons Children for Penniless Tunisian Waiter... AGAIN!” 9 February 2011, http://www. dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1354785/Britains-worst-mother-WendyPaduch-abandons-children-Tunisian-waiter.html. Ladd-Taylor and Umansky, “Bad” Mothers, 3. Excerpted in Today Books, “Are You a Good Mother Or a ‘Bad Mother’?” 7 May 2009, http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/30618909/ns/today-parenting. The New York Times article to which Waldman refers in the Today piece is “Truly, Madly, Guiltily” (27 March 2005). Waldman’s article, “Truly, Madly, Guiltily,” appeared in the New York Times, 27 March 2005.

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29

47 Mirta Ojito, “Danish Mother Is Reunited With Her Baby,” New York Times, 15 May 1997, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/15/nyregion/ danish-mother-is-reunited-with-her-baby.html. 48 See for instance Mike Celizic, “Mom Lets 9-Year-Old Take Subway Home Alone,” MSNBC.com, 3 April 2008, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/ id/23935873/print/1/displaymode/1098. 49 “Mike Huckabee Slams Natalie Portman’s Out-of-Wedlock Pregnancy,” People.com, 3 March 2011, http://www.usmagazine.com/momsbabies/news/ mike-huckabee-slams-natalie-portman-for-out-of-wedlock-pregnancy-201133. 50 Patrick Healy, “New to Campaigning, but No Longer a Novice,” The New York Times, 27 October 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/28/us/ politics/28michelle.html?_r=1&oref=slogin. 51 Governor Palin, speaking at the Republican National Convention in St Paul, 3 September 2008. 52 Justine Hunter and Ian Bailey, “Clark’s First Task is To Find a Seat In Legislature,” Globe and Mail, 28 February 2011. 53 David Harrison, “Novelist Says Girls Are Ready to Have Babies at 14,” The Telegraph, 27 February 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/ women_shealth/7332066/Novelist-says-girls-are-ready-to-have-babiesat-14.html#. 54 Giles Tremlett, “10-year-old Gives Birth in Spain,” 2 November 2010, http:// www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/02/10-year-old-gives-birth-spain. 55 “Parents Again,” W - FIVE , CTV.ca, 16 February 2008, http://www.ctv.ca/ CTVNews/WFive./20080215/wive_grandparents_080215/. 56 “World’s Oldest Moms,” CBC News, 13 March 2010, http://www.cbc.ca/ documentaries/passionateeyeshowcase/2010/worldsoldestmoms. 57 “World’s Oldest Mother Gives Birth to Twins at 70,” Mail Online, 5 July 2008, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1031722/ Worlds-oldest-mother-gives-birth-twins-70.html; Graham Keeley, “Oldest mother, Maria Carmen del Bousada, Dies at 69, Leaving Baby Orphans,” The Times, 16 July 2009, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ europe/article6714820.ece. 58 “Can Motherhood and Womanhood Co-Exist?” PR Newswire, 3 May 2007, http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY= /www/story/05-03-2007/0004579899&EDATE. 59 “What is a Mommy Makeover?” Marina Plastic Surgeons Associates, Mommy Makeovers, http://amommymakeover.com/what.cfm. 60 “Baskin-Robbins Launches a New Twist – Soft Serve,” PR-inside.com, 19 May 2008, http://www.pr-inside.com/print596745.htm 2008-05-19.

30

Introduction

61 Zosia Bielski,“Breast Milk On Tap As Performance Art: ‘Welcome Curiosity,’” National Post, Canada.com, 13 July 2006, http://www.canada. com/cityguides/toronto/story.html?id=d6ae12ae-7a7b-4d83-bda3bfd459166ed9&k=58946. 62 “Lady Gaga Nurses Grudge Over Ice Cream,” Toronto Star, thestar.com, 7 March 2011, http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/949645--ladygaga-nurses-grudge-over-breast-milk-ice-cream. 63 “Hey Facebook, Breastfeeding is Not Obscene,” Facebook group, accessed 3 December 2010, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2517126532; “No One Wants to See Your Pregnant Belly! Ban Maternity Photography!” Facebook group, accessed 3 December 2010, http://www.facebook.com/ group.php?gid=52555626778&v=wall. 64 Lindhome and Micucci, “Pregnant Women are Smug,” YouTube.com, 9 April 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJRzBpFjJS8. 65 Joan Whitlow, “Postpartum Depression: Health Bill Helps Mothers In Crisis,” The Star-Ledger, 28 March 2010, http://blog.nj.com/njv_joan_ whitlow/2010/03/postpartum_depression_health_b.html. 66 Lesbian Mothers Association of Quebec, http://www.algi.qc.ca/forum/ algipresse/messages/36.html; Gay Parenting Online Fan Page, Facebook. com, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Gay-Parenting-Online-Fan-Page/ 206512389368211?sk=info. 67 Guy Trebay, “He’s Pregnant. You’re Speechless,” New York Times, 22 June 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/fashion/22pregnant.html. 68 Margaret Somerville, “When Granny Gives Birth To Her Grandson, There’s Something Wrong,” Globe and Mail, 19 February 2011, http://www.theglobe andmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/when-granny-gives-birth-to-hergrandson-theres-something-wrong/article1913695. 69 Storey, Cultural Theory, 234. 70 Douglas and Michaels, Mommy Myth, 12–13. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aizley, Harlyn, ed. Confessions of the Other Mother: Non-Biological Lesbian Moms Tell All. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. Angel, Sara. “Mum’s the Word.” Chatelaine, May 2007. “Assisted Human Reproduction of Canada.” Health Canada. http://www.hc-sc. gc.ca/hl-vs/reprod/agenc/index-eng.php. Bassin, Donna, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan. Introduction to Representations of Motherhood. Edited by Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan, 1–25. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.

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Douglas, Susan J., and Meredith W. Michaels. The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women. New York: Free Press, 2004. Dyer, Richard. The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations. London: Routledge, 1993. Hall, Ann C., and Mardia J. Bishop. Mommy Angst: Motherhood in American Popular Culture. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2009. Hays, Sharon. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Hudock, Amy. “About Us.” Literary Mama. http://www.literarymama.com/about. Kaplan, Ann E. Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama. London: Routledge, 1992. Ladd-Taylor, Molly, and Lauri Umansky, eds. “Bad” Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Lamott, Anne. Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year. New York: Ballantine, 1993. Lindhome, Riki and Kate Micucci. “Pregnant Women are Smug.” YouTube. 9 April 2009. McFarlane, Cameron. “A General and Historical Overview of Cultural Studies.” In Cultural Subjects: A Popular Culture Reader, edited by Allan J. Gedalof, Jonathan Boulter, Joel Falak, and Cameron McFarlane, 5–6. Toronto: Thomson Canada, 2005. Neill, Fiona. Slummy Mummy. New York: Penguin, 2007. O’Reilly, Andrea, ed. Maternal Theory: Essential Readings. Toronto: Demeter Press, 2007. – ed. Mother Matters: Motherhood as Discourse and Practice: Essays from the Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering. Toronto: Association for Research on Mothering, 2004. Pearson, Allison. I Don’t Know How She Does it. New York: Knopf, 2002. Pepper, Rachel. The Ultimate Guide to Pregnancy for Lesbians: How to Stay Sane and Care for Yourself from Pre-conception through Birth. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2005. Podnieks, Elizabeth, and Andrea O’Reilly, eds. Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary Women’s Literatures. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010. “Postpartum Depression Legislation in the United States: A Brief History.” Postpartum Support International. http://postpartum.net/resources/ healthcare-pros/legislation-history. Salzhauer, Michael. My Beautiful Mommy. Savannah: Big Tent Books, 2008.

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Introduction

Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction. 5th ed. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2009. Strinati, Dominic. An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 2004. Tharp, Julie, and Susan MacCallum-Whitcomb. Introduction to This Giving Birth: Pregnancy and Childbirth in American Women’s Writings. Edited by Julie Tharp and Susan MacCallum-Whitcomb, 1–8. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2000. Thurer, Shari L. The Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother. New York: Penguin, 1994.

SECTION ONE

Maternal Surveillance

1 MOMMY NEAREST

for Preschoolers and the Search for the Good Enough (Working) Mother TV

Stephanie Wardrop

Psychoanalyst and object relations theorist D.W. Winnicott’s idea of the “good enough mother” has been a casualty of what the media has dubbed the recent “mommy wars.” Stay-at-home moms, according to reports in the popular press, snipe at working moms for their abandonment of their children in their heedless pursuit of personal fulillment, while working moms resent the time the stay-at-home moms have with their kids perhaps as much as they resent their indictments that only total attention to children and home is “good enough.” Following popular news features, popular books like Deborah Shaw Lewis and Charmaine Crouse Yoest’s Mother in the Middle have examined the trend of “opting out,” of mothers leaving the workforce behind to spend quality time with their children and devote themselves to soccer games and PTA meetings. USA Today has recently recast the war between stayat-home moms and working moms as a battle between “alpha moms,” who bake elaborate concoctions for school fundraisers and dress impeccably while piling their kids in and out of the minivan for ballet, tee ball, and class ield trips, versus the “beta moms,” who schlep around in sweatpants, forget to wash their hair, and, more egregiously, forget the due dates for permission slips or fail to negotiate the Byzantine workings of their kids’ after-school schedules. At the heart of all of these debates lies the question we hoped the women’s movement of the 1970s would have solved: How can a woman be a competent mother and worker? Children’s television programs aimed at preschoolers provide one unlikely forum for this debate, and

36 Maternal Surveillance

there are no easy answers there either. At the same time the news media and talk shows were waving the mommy wars battle lags, two new networks devoted solely to programming for preschoolers emerged: Noggin, an offshoot of Nickelodeon and Nick Jr’s kids’ programming; and pbs Sprout, the irst network providing twenty-four-hour programming for the under-seven set. Despite Bush-era accusations by the political right in the United States that both pbs and the Noggin channel’s programming for children is too “liberal,”1 a survey of most of the shows aimed at preschoolers raises questions about the so-called progressive agenda of these programs. In the majority of tv programs aimed at three- to sixyear-olds, anyone can be a good mother – a purple dinosaur, a stay-athome mom, a loving older sister, an elderly male dragon, an affable man in a yellow hat. Everyone but a working woman? These depictions may point to retrograde deinitions of mothering – only a stay-at-home, fulltime mommy will do – but they may also point to an opening up of those deinitions; if toddlers can accept dinosaurs and goofy men as “mothers,” then widespread cultural acceptance of a broader deinition of mothering may not be far behind. On the surface, it would appear that television aimed at preschoolers shows us that anyone can be a good mother – anyone except a working woman. But recalling Winnicott’s deinition of the “good enough mother” allows us to see preschoolers’ television as opening up a broader deinition of motherhood. CONTEXT FOR THE MOMMY WARS

As many articles in this volume enunciate, in The Mommy Myth Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels target American mass media as the source of the mommy wars in their creation and circulation of fear regarding internal threats to the sanctity of the nation and family. Douglas and Michaels identify four main types of mainstream news stories about daycare: (1) melodramas about alleged sexual abuse; (2)  the need for better, or more, care; (3) stories about the “effects” of daycare on children, mostly negative; and (4) the cost of daycare, which is almost uniformly presented as too expensive.2 In short, the typical news story does not present daycare as an attractive option for parents. Further, the sensational televised trial and news stories of sadistic nannies, such as Louise Woodward’s trial for the death of Matthew Eappen, proved to many that in-home care hardly presents an attractive alternative.3 Mothers and fathers installed nanny cams in response to this media hype about the grave dangers children face outside mom’s watchful eye,4 and, rather than endanger their children or be accused of extraordinary

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37

selishness as Eappen’s mother was in choosing to continue her work as a doctor rather than stay home with her child, many mothers began “opting out” – at least, according to a more recent trend in media hype. In her 26 October 2003 article in the New York Times, Lisa Belkin coined the term the “opt-out revolution” to describe the allegedly massive waves of high-achieving professional women deserting the corporate world and returning to their kitchens and nurseries.5 Prompted by this article, writers such as Linda R. Hirschman investigated this phenomenon. Hirschman produced Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, one of the pro-work salvos in the mommy wars. She conducted a study of women who were married in 1996, “all highly educated” and working full-time after graduation; ten years later, in 2006, 90 per cent of the brides had had babies and only 15 per cent were working full-time. Unable or unwilling to negotiate both the boardroom and the playroom, 51 per cent of them had stopped working entirely and one-third were working part-time. Only six of the mothers continued to work full-time.6 Hirshman blames “choice feminism” for this waste of brainpower and the seeming return to the culture of the 1950s. She argues that the 1970s women’s movement mutated into a sort of “choice feminism” that celebrated anything a woman “chose” to do, from dancing around a stripper pole to leaving the political and professional world, at the expense of working for social change or her own inancial security. On the other side of the divide stand writers like then Pennsylvania senator (and 2012 presidential hopeful) Rick Santorum, author of It Takes a Family, who argues that “radical” feminism made women feel that they had to work. Presumably, now they have wised up and embraced their true calling by returning to the home.7 Such arguments ignore the reality that while women have enjoyed increased opportunity and success in education and professional status, the workplace still functions much as it did ifty years ago, rewarding (and demanding) long hours and a somewhat single-minded devotion to one’s career and company. Lines have been drawn, and as the media would have us believe, there is a bitter war in the suburban cul-de-sacs of the United States between the complacent minivan-driving stay-at-home moms and the overachieving soon-to-burnout working mothers who still think they can have it all. HISTORICAL CONTEXT FOR THE DEBATE

Of course, debates about the proper sphere of women and what makes a good mother are hardly new. Anthropology, biology, psychology, and other disciplines have deined the role of mother throughout the ages in

38 Maternal Surveillance

ways that have reiied women’s maternalism as inherent in their makeups and essential to the survival of the human race, especially its youngest members. Evolutionary-functionalist views of motherhood, for example, posit that motherhood is part of (and the cause of) the “natural” division of labour; since men are more “naturally” aggressive, agile, and strong, they hunted while women’s childbearing ability (or burden) necessarily kept them close to home to nurse and nurture children. But as Nancy Chodorow notes in The Reproduction of Mothering, while this division of labour may have been historically necessary, it is not essential; while “men’s not caring for children was convenient and probably necessary for survival in gathering and hunting bands,” it is not in today’s society.8 Pro “opt-out” advocates like Santorum have modern psychology to support the notion that woman have been biologically mandated as primary caretakers of children. Psychoanalysis, like anthropology and biology, stresses the importance of women as mothers and their natural impulses toward motherhood. According to most psychological theories, mothers, in their natural empathy for and identiication with the infant as a part of herself, receive a great deal of satisfaction from mothering. While this is certainly true for most of us with children, this view can be dangerous in asserting that since gratifying the infant is a form of self-gratiication, it should come to mothers easily, willingly and without self-sacriice. Even in the twenty-irst century, much of our conception of women and mothering still adheres to the basic picture of human psychological development elucidated by Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalytic theory has had much to say about the issue of the child’s needs and desires in relation to the mother’s, and, unfortunately, popular culture’s ideal of motherhood and family is still mired in this early-twentieth-century model. Freud spoke of an infant’s primary narcissism as operating on the pleasure principle, so that an infant doesn’t particularly care where that gratiication and pleasure comes from; in fact, he recognizes the source of that gratiication and pleasure as the breast, then the mother attached to it. In his narcissism, the infant lacks a sense of differentiation between the self and others, and oscillates between seeing the mother as separate and not separate from himself. The infant experiences himself as one with the mother, and recognizes his dependency only when his separateness is brought to his attention – as when the mother is absent – and his desire is frustrated. In Freud’s psychoanalytic conception, the reality principle enters the infant’s consciousness when he comes to see the mother as a separate person with separate interests, needs, actions, and

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39

desires – and inds this differentiation enormously frustrating. Thus for Freud, the infant’s healthy response to this frustration is to develop a sense of separateness, rather than identiication with and connection to the mother.9 On the other hand, object relations theory, which focuses on the preOedipal identiication with the mother, provides a more empowering, less mutually self-annihilating view of the relation between mother and infant. While Winnicott writes, “mothering is an extraordinary condition which is almost like an illness, though it is very much a sign of health,”10 the mother alone is not solely responsible for healthy infantile development in his conception. For Winnicott and others, the mother and other caretakers are necessary to help the infant develop from his/ her total dependence into a separate self.11 Because one’s sense of self is, according to object relations theory, derived in relation to others, a healthy relation between infant and mother is measured by the infant’s ability to develop a sense of self independent of the mother’s presence through a basic sense of relatedness. Building on this idea, Winnicott argues that the mother’s involvement with other people besides the infant (especially the father) is essential to the development of the reality principle in the child, allowing him to more easily differentiate his mother from himself because he sees the mother in relation to others (though this involves frustration and envy). The father and others then provide differentiation while the mother – still assumed to be the primary caretaker – provides “continuity and core of self and it is primarily the relation to her which must be worked out and transformed during the child’s earliest years.”12 While object relations theory acknowledges the existence and value of other caretakers, both psychological theories assert that a mother’s loving care is elemental and critical – even if the infant takes it for granted.13 For Chodorow, these infantile feelings and needs, and our cultural perceptions of women’s early mothering, “create speciic conscious and unconscious attitudes or expectations in children [toward mothering]. Girls and boys expect and assume women’s unique capacities – sacriice, caring, and mothering.”14 In other words, through both fantasies and actual experiences, we develop expectations for an all-loving, all-sacriicing mother igure, and these expectations can never be met. For instance, Winnicott speaks of the idea of the “magic mother,” able to read her infant’s every signal, to anticipate his/her every need, but warns that the seemingly lucky child of the magic mother never forms a healthy object relation with her or anyone else. She begins adapting herself to her

40 Maternal Surveillance

infant’s needs, but, as the infant grows, she responds less automatically and completely, allowing the infant to develop its own resources to satisfy its frustration. Thus, the infant, and, deep down, all of us long past infancy, cling to our narcissistic desire for a mother that loves us completely and exclusively, who cherishes us and fulills our needs without frustration. Some have argued that it is this desire to return to oneness with the mother that drives us toward religion and forms our cultural conceptions of romantic love. Perhaps this desire to recreate for another generation, if not ourselves, this maternal fusion and primary love also drives the movement to keep mommies at home, devoted to the needs of their grateful children. But of course mothers are humans too, with their own needs and desires, and our cultural values of independence and achievement are at odds with our notions of ideal motherhood. Only in popular culture, and television in particular, do we get to experience a non-frustrating (and non-differentiated) mother. One reason to examine TV programs aimed at preschoolers is that they speak to the primary narcissism of their viewers in presenting the possibility of the magic mother. They provide a marker against which children can measure their own experiences and function in what Chodorow calls “the reproduction of mothering,” which “begins from the earliest motherinfant relationship in the earliest period of infantile development. This early relation is basic in three ways. Most important, the basic stance for parenting is founded during this period. Second, people come out of it with a memory of a unique intimacy they want to recreate. Finally, people’s experience of their early relation to their mother provides foundation for expectations of women as mothers.”15 Vicariously, television provides young viewers with additional “expectations of women as mothers” – and ones that may be at odds with their own experiences. Winnicott and Chodorow wrote decades ago, but their views still represent the best alternative to the Freudian model, which still retains its grip on our popular conception of mothering. CHILDREN AND TELEVISION

One neglected aspect of the popular media that relects this social tension is children’s television, which struggles both to entertain and teach, both to reassure and challenge children about the wider world and the worlds within their homes. According to the 2010 US census, there are just over nineteen million children under the age of ive in the United States.16

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41

That is a sizable audience for family-centered shows like Calliou, The Berenstain Bears, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Angelina Ballerina (all of pbs and pbs Sprout), and Dora the Explorer, Franklin, and Little Bear (all on Noggin and Nick Jr), which all feature stay-at-home moms. Further, it explains why political conservatives have grown concerned about the effects of the images of families relected on these channels. For example, in February 2005, on her second day on the job, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings made public a letter she sent to pbs CEO Pat Mitchell protesting the depiction of a lesbian couple and their children in an episode of the half-animated, half-video Postcards from Buster (a spinoff of Arthur, which I will discuss later). The episode was pulled in many viewing areas. A year later, the Republican-led House of Representatives voted to cut funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting by $115 million dollars, threatening the elimination of pbs and National Public Radio.17 (The same committee had threatened to cut $223 million from the budget in protest of the Postcards from Buster incident.) They were eventually outvoted both times, as citizens rallied around this cause in a surprising show of solidarity, largely to save what they saw as the positive messages of the programming on pbs and Noggin; in fact, according to several studies, many people believe that television viewing has a profound and potentially positive effect on viewers’ behavior and values.18 In their article, “Family Attitudes Towards Television,” Dan Brown and Tammy Hayes cite several studies conducted in the late 1980s and early 90s that reveal a “receptive attitude by families and children toward television as a teacher and as a model for beliefs about family life and what behavior is appropriate and desirable in the family.”19 In particular, television is perceived to model family life (or an ideal of it) for young viewers. Studies between 1982 and 1986 revealed that “children’s tastes in viewing television provide formative elements of their cultures. Children’s beliefs in the reality of television portrayals were reportedly associated with the likelihood of their belief in mutual family support as real.”20 Even though “modern families seldom watch television as a family unit,”21 very young children watch TV with their parents and older children watch with their siblings.22 Thus, the TV family is being modeled both in congruence with and in the absence of the child’s actual family. And by most accounts – as the creation of two networks exclusively geared toward them would indicate – preschoolers watch a considerable amount of television. In general, preschoolers watch mostly “educational programs, cartoons, and non-animated child

42 Maternal Surveillance

and family programming” for an average of two to three hours a day, according to a 1998 study. Thirty per cent of preschoolers even have a TV in their room.23 So, within the context of the mommy wars and the battle against allegedly progressive messages on TV shows aimed at preschoolers, just how liberal are most programs on Noggin and pbs, particularly in their portrayals of working mothers? On the surface, surprisingly pretty conservative. Working mothers, as I’ll discuss in a moment, appear in few shows aimed at preschoolers or grade schoolers, and those rare moms that do work generally do so within their home. This model persists, even with a highly visible working mom having entered the White House since I irst began writing this article. For example, on Discovery Kids’ Kenny the Shark, Grace Cassidy, the mom of grade schooler Cat and baby Carl, works as a psychotherapist in a home ofice but somehow manages it without any visible child care beyond her daughter and their pet shark. Discovery Kids’ preschooleraimed program Ready! Set! Learn! is hosted by Paz the Penguin, whose mother, Big Penguin, is an architect who never seems to leave the igloo. Maryann Thornberry, the mother on Nickelodeon’s The Wild Thornberries, serves as the producer and videographer of the wildlife documentaries that her husband hosts and narrates, but she works alongside her family as they travel across the globe in their combi van ilming exotic animals in exciting locales. pbs Sprout’s Sagwa, based on Amy Tan’s children’s book Sagwa the Chinese Siamese Cat, features a family of cats employed as scroll writers for the Foolish Magistrate in early-twentieth-century China. The parents, Baba and Mama Meow, dip their tails into inkwells to write the magistrate’s edicts, and the two oldest kittens, Sagwa and her brother Dongwa, are in training and working alongside them to continue the family business. Only pbs’s Arthur series, based on the Arthur adventure books by Mark Brown, presents several mothers who work outside the home: Binky Barnes’s mom is a nurse, the Brain’s mom helps to run the family ice cream shop, and Bitzi Baxter, Buster’s mother and a divorcee, is editor of the town newspaper. But the principle mother, Jane Read, works at most part-time, and only leaves the home for work under rare conditions – and her leaving threatens the sanctity and sanity of the Read home enough for her to return to it. Arthur presents a rare exception to children’s television’s seeming inability to imagine a nuclear family in which a mother engages in professional activity outside the conines of the home, and thus presents a

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more complex and realistic view of contemporary family life, even as it creates a somewhat idyllic family- and friend-centered world in which class and social issues are negotiated and resolved and all foes are eventually vanquished, whether they be bullies, evil fast-food corporations, or our own fears and misperceptions. Most importantly, the working mothers on Arthur are presented as competent and equally loving moms to the stay-at-home mothers on the other shows. In the episode “Buster’s Amish Mismatch,” for example, Buster, the tolerant rabbit who got into so much trouble visiting lesbian moms on his own show, becomes inspired after a ield trip to Amish country. While he suddenly refuses to ride in a car, demands that all the lights be turned off and no electricity used, his mother, Bitzi, tries to strike a wise balance between supporting his need for self-deinition and not allowing her son’s latest obsession to take over both of their lives. She allows him to “be Amish” in his own room, and gets him a crank lantern and extra blankets to keep him warm when he denies himself the apartment’s central heating. She follows him slowly in the car as he insists on walking to school, giving him both protection and autonomy. She is supportive within limits. When he attempts to churn butter in his room, she patiently explains that her job demands do not allow her to grow her own vegetables and grind their own corn and wheat. She’s exasperated enough to ask him, “Can’t you just be Amish a little bit?” but he sticks to his newfound beliefs until another mother igure, lunch lady Mrs McGrady, concerned about Buster’s unusual lack of appetite, tells him that she knows Amish people and that he’s “not being Amish” if he thinks that means “being cold and miserable all day.” With their guidance, he inds compromises. He invites Arthur to a barn raising but stops churning butter in his room, and his mother begins to make pizza, his favorite food, from scratch sometimes. Without compromising either her personal and professional needs or her son’s need to determine his own beliefs, Bitzi allows Buster the space to discover himself within the safety of a loving and supportive home. Of course, when Buster gets his spinoff, Postcards from Buster, he leaves Bitzi behind to travel the country with his dad, a private pilot for the musical group Los Viajeros; in the American tradition going back at least to Tom Sawyer, woman/mother represents the conines of home and man/father represents adventure and the exciting outside world. Unlike Buster, Arthur only has to share his mother with the outside world of work on a temporary basis. Usually she works as a part-time accountant out of the computer armoire in the Read dining room, despite

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the distractions of a third-grader, a preschooler – Arthur’s precocious sister D.W. – and Baby Kate, not to mention child-caused computer meltdowns and lost work papers. (Her husband, David Read, also works out of the home as a caterer in a simple but signiicant twist on traditionally gendered professions.) In the episode “All Worked Up!” Jane works for a few weeks in a corporate ofice and loves it at irst, despite the disarray it throws into their family routine. She enjoys dressing professionally, getting up and leaving the house without having to clean up the breakfast chaos, and even gets a haircut that the children ind makes her threateningly unrecognizable. The kids resent this and fantasize themselves deserted. Arthur, for instance, imagines his mother being whisked away to work – perhaps forever – in a corporate helicopter, laughing as she leaves the conining world of the Reads behind. But Jane inds ways to both work outside the home and help Arthur with his homework and help D.W. feel included, which results in D.W. faxing her ofice every ive minutes with updates on what’s going on at home. All of this seems wonderfully realistic, even progressive, in terms of depicting the reality of many preschool and elementary-aged children’s lives, but when Jane’s temporary position ends, she is relieved. She gives up her new hairstyle as “too much work” and embraces being a semi-stay-at-home mom again and all threats to the family are resolved. But a working mother who negotiates job and family even temporarily marks Arthur as an exception in the landscape of children’s television depictions of motherhood. And it is probably not a coincidence that the show is aimed at slightly older kids, though preschoolers identify with and enjoy watching D.W. and her friends negotiate their worlds. More often shows aimed at young children reproduce the fantasy of the all-loving selless Winnicottian “magic mother” who can meet her child’s needs easily and without sacriice, despite the fact that, as previously discussed, Winnicott sees this as a plan for mothering that will sap a child of his ability to grow as an individual and negotiate the real world successfully. Many shows present a lovely world without conlict, in which one child is raised with the complete attention of her mother, with the father often absent, at least during working hours. It is easy to see how this traditional world would appeal to young children, even as it presents a fantasy that their own worlds cannot match. One such show, Little Bear, is based on the series of “I Can Read” books by Else Holmelund Minarik, illustrated by Maurice Sendak. It presents the world of Little Bear, a cub who lives in a traditional home with his wise and devoted Mother Bear, whose attention he does not

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have to share even with Father Bear very often, as he is usually at sea as a isherman. The show recreates the romantic notion of the family as described by psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin, in which the mother represents both the safety and repression of the home – her sole focus is her child – and the father represents both authority and adventure as the family representative of an exciting outside world. In the episode “Father Bear Comes Home,” for instance, Little Bear and his friends, who also rely on Mother Bear to take care of them, are so excited by the prospect of Father Bear’s return and the adventure that he experienced while away that they come to believe he is bringing home a mermaid for them to see, and the subsequent “A Date with Father Bear” illustrates Little Bear’s impatience with Father Bear’s sleeping in late because he has promised a special day out ishing, just the two of them. But Mother Bear also represents Winnicott’s “good enough mother,” who begins her relationship with her infant by seeing the infant as her primary maternal occupation, who then adapts to her baby’s growing needs by gradually giving him a sense of control (“subjective omnipotence”) through his connection to her. For Winnicott, as her child grows, the good enough mother instinctively leaves a sort of lag time between her child’s demand and her gratiication of it so that he can learn to deal with frustration and gain some autonomy. The “perfect” mother, on the other hand, anticipates and satisies all needs on the spot, and this prohibits the child’s growth.24 “What Will Little Bear Wear?,” an episode based on one of Minarik’s irst stories, demonstrates Mother Bear’s ability to anticipate and satisfy all needs, as Little Bear, playing out in the snow, continually comes in and disrupts his mother with demands for something to wear. Each time Mother Bear seems magically to produce exactly what he needs – a hat, a coat, boots – but still he needs more. Finally she asks him if he wants a fur coat, and when he says “yes,” she takes off the clothes and tells him that he’s wearing his fur coat and if he goes out he will not be cold. When he goes outside, he discovers both that she was right and that he has been self-suficient, in a sense, all along – all he needed was what he already had, his own fur. In “Birthday Soup,” Little Bear wakes up on his birthday and can’t ind Mother Bear. Believing himself to be abandoned, he angrily sets out to make his own birthday meal, but can’t make a cake, so he proceeds to ill the big soup pot on the ire with fruit and vegetables to feed his friends. As they all sit down to his soup, Mother Bear comes in with a beautiful cake, and reassures Little Bear that she “did not forget [his] birthday and

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[she] never will.” Thus Little Bear experiences frustration and a sense of loss but deals with it by relying on his own resources and is, of course, rewarded with the knowledge that his mother loves him and would never forget him or something as important as a birthday. Such growth is possible, in Winnicottian terms, because of Mother Bear’s wise delaying of gratiication and the close connection between mother and child. In an episode called “Leaves,” we learn the strength of this psychic connection. Little Bear dreams that he meets Mother Bear as a child. They play together in the dream and he is able to wake up and tell her where the charm is that she’s been missing from her bracelet since she was a child, for in his dream he sees where she lost it. He is both intimately connected to her, almost one with her, enough to psychically “share” her past, yet also recognizes her as separate and autonomous, as an individual with a history before he came along. Produced in the mid-to-late 1990s, Little Bear is an endearing show, and I know many children and parents who love its simple world of family, forest animals, picnics, and friendships, and it presents a remarkably healthy depiction of motherhood when viewed through the lens of object relations theory. It provides an appealing and reassuring fantasy about mothers and small children. More recent shows also present a “good enough mother,” but not in the form of an actual mom, and certainly not a working one. A new trend in shows aimed at preschoolers seems to be the total erasure of the mother, whereby she is replaced by another family member, especially an older sister, or a teacher, or a really patient guy in a yellow hat. For instance, pbs’s Dragon Tales is noteworthy in presenting the wild adventures in Dragonland that two Hispanic siblings share in the total absence of their parents, who appear only as disembodied voices from downstairs, seemingly oblivious to the fact that their children are periodically magically whisked away from their playroom for hours at a time to a land inhabited by dragons. Max and Emmy play with their school-aged dragon friends whose parents are also essentially absent, but they receive the wisdom and guidance of an elderly teacher dragon named Quetzel. They enjoy the adventure and danger of total autonomy but have someone there to save and support them if things go too far awry. Noggin’s Max and Ruby, based on the series of books by Rosemary Wells, presents two white bunnies who are seemingly raising themselves. Like Emmy, Ruby is an older sister who seems to have the sole responsibility of caring for her younger brother, though Ruby even feeds and clothes him and takes him along so she can babysit other children while

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their mothers work in their gardens. Nick Jr’s Go Diego Go also presents a big sister/little brother dyad who rescues baby animals from the rainforest, often reuniting them with their mothers, while Diego and Alicia’s mother and father are generally absent. The newest and perhaps most intriguing take on the best-mom-is-nota-mom-at-all spin is pbs’s Curious George, in which a toddler-like chimp is raised by the more loving than competent Man with the Yellow Hat. Kids love both George’s antics and the Man’s method of discipline, which relies more on coaxing and encouraging than correction. For example, in “Muddy Monkey,” George refuses to take a bath because he has lost Sproingy, his rubber frog, but he can’t have lunch until he is clean. The Man in the Yellow Hat tries to make the bath fun, by adding bubbles, launching a new ship in the tub, and having George get clean by washing the car, but none of it works. He is puzzled but never frustrated. When he sees muddy toy truck prints on the tablecloth, he is more amused than annoyed, and when he inds a toy boat in the freezer, instead of being angered that his monkey-child is illing appliances with toys (with the batteries running down!) he tells George patiently, “You know, George, if you were a little more careful with your toys, you wouldn’t lose so many of them.” Eventually Sproingy is found and George is bathed and the Man can only “wonder what that was all about.” He learns little to nothing with each parenting test but remains an ever affable and loving parent in the face of any of George’s misadventures. Whether he is ordering 100 dozen donuts and hiding them in the apartment, looding a house in an attempt to clean grape juice off a rug, or misdirecting trains at a switchyard, George can always be certain that his curiosity is met with his guardian’s amusement and support. Perhaps the Man with the Yellow Hat can be so endlessly supportive of and amused by his monkey-toddler because he does not seem to have a job that taxes his patience or energy much; he can devote all of his time and attention to George. On the other hand, his friend Professor Wiseman, a working woman, would make a terrible mother, as she is more devoted to writing books like Is Seven Necessary? and being foolish enough to entrust the “good copy” of her manuscript with a man with an accident-prone monkey. She likes George, even takes him to a dog show, but she just doesn’t understand that what a monkey-child wants is interaction and excitement, not watching show dogs from the bleachers or lessons on clock making. In her glasses and ever-present lab coat, Professor Wiseman seems unlikely to be the good enough mother that the Man with the Yellow Hat appears to be so naturally.

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CONCLUSIONS

In light of the so-called mommy wars and the conservative backlash against certain children’s television programs that allegedly subvert “traditional” family values, what can one conclude about the trend of the absent mother, or the replacement of the mother with a dragon, a dinosaur, an older sister, or a male adventurer? On the one hand, the trend seems to assert that the only good mom is a non-working mom, someone devoted solely to the needs of the child, and thus seems to reinforce the notion that good mothers are opting out of the workplace. On the other hand, perhaps this trend relects the truth that the opt-out myth obscures, that more moms are working, and that more children are being cared for – lovingly and competently – by someone other than their maternal parent. Each time the mommy wars battle seems to lag, it seems, some news article comes along to renew the ight. A 2007 article in USA Today announced, “just when you thought the mommy wars were over,” the indings of a new study that proves “working full time is less appealing than it used to be” (for mothers).25 This study, however, like most of them, prefers to present the full-time/part-time/stay-at-home quandary as a matter of personal choice. As Pamela Stone notes in her recent book Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home, this ignores the fact that the marketplace has not changed much in the past decades despite the increased opportunities for women in the professions. Her book provides a useful counterpoint to those that perpetuate the opt-out myth. She cites statistics, for example, that reveal that between 1984 and 2004, among white, college-educated women, the number of working moms of preschoolers and working moms overall has actually increased. Seventy per cent of moms with preschoolers work and 84 per cent of all moms work outside the home. “Even among the group of women for whom staying home is most expected, married women with preschoolers,” Stone writes, “only about one in four (28 per cent) is home full-time.” She argues that actual statistics on trends in the labour force show little to no change toward opting-out – and certainly indicate there is no “revolution,” as some sources would have us believe.26 When high-proile opt-out moms like Brenda Barnes, former CEO of Pepsi-North America and Karen Hughes, one of the US President’s team of advisors, leave their jobs to spend more time at home with their children, the media seizes on it as a trend. As Stone’s study reveals, most moms do work, and those who do not left work not as a matter of

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choice, but because of the enormous dificulty of combining motherhood with “the condition of work in the gilded cages of elite professions.”27 Whether as evidence of a conservative backlash against the changing family or proof of an emerging redeinition of the family, images of mothers in television programs aimed at preschoolers matter. Study after study has proven that young children “place a lot of trust in television, believing that it exists to entertain, educate, and inally, to tell them the truth.”28 Because children “tend to believe and emulate portrayals seen frequently that seem relevant, useful, realistic, normative, desirable, and rewarding,” it matters whether the moms they see on TV (whether human or bear or aardvark) work outside the home.29 Such images establish their expectations for both their present and future worlds. If the Man with the Yellow Hat or Barney the Purple Dinosaur can be seen as igures for non-maternal caregivers, they can be said to teach young viewers that such mother igures are indeed “good enough,” that the only acceptable “mother” is not necessarily or solely one’s mother. Rather than undermine the role of the mother, these igures represent her in her various roles beyond caregiver and promote the Winnicottian notion that what a child needs is consistent loving support and the chance to ind his or her own independent self, and that this relationship goes beyond that between mother and child. Perhaps this is what conservative critics and opt-out proponents ind so disturbing: the idea that when it comes to mothering, there are more caregivers out there, in addition to mom, who are good enough.

NOTES

1 Paul Farhi, “Public Broadcasting Targeted by House,” Washington Post, washingtonpost.com, 15 May 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/09/AR2005060902283.html. 2 Douglas and Michaels, Mommy Myth. 3 Sarah Rimer, “British Nanny Found Guilty of Murder in Baby’s Death,” New York Times, 31 October 2007, www.nytimes.com/1997/10/ 31/us/british-nanny-found-guilty-of-murder-in-baby-s-death.html?ref= louisewoodward. Eight-month-old Matthew Eappen died on 9 February 1997, possibly as a result of “shaken baby syndrome.” The subsequent “au pair murder trial” of his British nanny, nineteen-year-old Louise Woodward, caused a media sensation in which the press and public viliied not only Woodward but Matthew’s parents, especially his mother, Deborah Eappen, who was accused of putting her career over her child’s welfare.

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4 I write “mothers and fathers,” but as I’ll examine, primary caretaking is still assumed to be the province of the mother. What Nancy Chodorow descried in 1978 still holds true: in our culture “total dependence is on the mother. It is aspects of the relation to her that are internalized defensively; it is her care that must be consistent and reliable; it is her absence that produces anxiety. The infant’s earliest experience and development is in the context of, and proceeds out of, an interpersonal relationship to its mother.” The Reproduction of Mothering, 60. 5 Bennetts’s recent The Feminine Mistake marks the most recent alarm regarding the perils of opting out. 6 Hirshman, Get to Work, 7. 7 In his book, It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good, Santorum argues that children need one parent at home full-time and blames the “purported need to provide things for their children” that “provides a rationalization for pursuing a gratifying career outside the home” (94–5). Further, he implies that that parent who stays at home should be the mother, and it is due to “radical feminism’s misogynistic crusade to make working outside the home the only marker of social value and self-respect” that makes women think they should pursue that gratifying career. Thus radical feminism has “succeeded in undermining the traditional family and convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness” (95). 8 Chodorow, Reproduction of Mothering, 17. 9 Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents. 10 Winnicot qtd. in Chodorow, Reproduction of Mothering, 85. 11 Chodorow explains, “During the early months, the child comes gradually to perceive the mother as separate and ‘not me.’ This occurs both through physiological maturation and through repeated experiences of the mother’s departure. At the same time, it begins to distinguish aspects of maternal care and interaction with its mother, and to be able to wait for and conidently expect satisfaction. This beginning perception of its mother as separate in conjunction with the infant’s inner experience of continuity in the midst of changing instances and events, forms the basis for its experience of a self.” Reproduction of Mothering, 67. 12 Ibid., 71. 13 Winnicott and others report that an infant only notes the failure or absence of mother’s care. Michael and Alice Balint, for example, describe the primary love of the mother as “observable only in its breach”; if the infant goes ungratiied, s/he will scream and cry in his/her desire to be loved and satisied without feeling a sense of obligation to return that love. Chodorow, Reproduction of Mothering, 64.

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14 Ibid., 83. 15 Chodorow, Reproduction of Mothering, 57. 16 Statistics from the 2010 census reveal that there are 19,175,798 children in the United States under the age of ive. “Census 201 Briefs: Age and Sex Composition,” US Census Bureau, accessed 12 October 2011,  http:// www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf. 17 Rick Klein, “GOP Takes Aim at pbs Funding,” Boston Globe, boston.com, 8 June 2006. 18 In fact, a 1998 study revealed that parents favour public television content over commercial and cable programming. Brown and Hayes, “Family Attitudes Towards Television,” 121. 19 Brown and Hayes, “Family Attitudes Towards Television,” 127. 20 Ibid., 122. 21 Ibid., 116. 22 Kotler, Wright, and Huston, “Television Use in Families with Children,” 38, 39. According to Kotler, Wright, and Huston, watching television with parents who “attempt to cultivate critical viewing skills” “help[s] children understand or question content; enhance the educational value of the viewing experience; and moderate some of the adverse effects of violence or frightening programs.” 23 Ibid., 35, 34, 33. 24 Winnicott, “Transitional Objects,” 89–97. 25 Sharon Jayson, “Gap Widens in How Moms View Working, “ USA Today, usatoday.com, 18 July 2007, http://www.usatoday.com/topics/site/ News/6574. The article cites a series of phone interviews conducted in Spring 2007 comparing the attitudes of mothers of children under eighteen today with similar mothers’ attitudes ten years ago. It states that “among working mothers, 60 per cent now say part-time work is the ideal situation, compared with 48 per cent in 1997. Among at-home moms, 48 per cent say staying home is ideal, up from 39 per cent in 1997.” 26 Stone, Opting Out?, 6. 27 Ibid., 19. 28 Austin, “Effects of Family,” 382. 29 Ibid., 378. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Austin, Erica Weintraub. “Effects of Family Communication on Children’s Interpretation of Television.” In Television and the American Family, 2nd ed., edited by Jennings Bryant and Alyson Bryant, 377–96. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Ehrlbaum Associates, 2001.

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Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon, 1988. Bennetts, Leslie. The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much? New York: Voice, 2007. Brown, Dan, and Tammy Hayes. “Family Attitudes Towards Television.” In Television and the American Family. 2nd ed., edited by Jennings Bryant and Alison Bryant, 11–35. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Ehrlbaum Associates, 2001. Bryant, Jennings. “Curriculum-Based Pre-School Programming.” In Television and the American Family. 2nd ed., edited by Jennings Bryant and Alison Bryant, 415–34. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Ehrlbaum Associates, 2001. Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: University of California, 1999. Douglas, Susan J., and Meredith W. Michaels. The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women. New York: Free Press, 2004. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: W.W. Norton, 1962. Hirschman, Linda. Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World. New York: Viking, 2006. Kotler, Jennifer A., John C. Wright, and Aletha C. Huston. “Television Use in Families with Children.” In Television and the American Family, 33–48. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Ehrlbaum Associates, 2001. Santorum, Rick. It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good. Wilimington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2005. Stone, Pamela. Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home. Berkeley: University of California, 2007. Weintraub, Jessica Austin. “Effects of Family Communication on Children’s Interpretation of Television.” In Television and the American Family. 34–46. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Ehrlbaum Associates, 2001. Winnicott, D.W. “Transitional Objects and Traditional Phenomena – A Study of the First Not-Me Possession.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 34 (1953): 89–97.

2 “ WON ’T

SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN ?”

The Nineties Subversion of the Animated Mother Jo Johnson

Examining The Simpsons, Family Guy, and King of the Hill, this chapter will consider whether the many modern representations of the cartoon mother display a perpetuation of 1950s aesthetics and ideals, popularized by early animated sitcoms and Disney heroines. Do they perpetuate the 1950s family values of their Stone-Age predecessors The Flintstones and still demonstrate the slim waists and highly sexualized designs of the Disney studios? Or do the animated moms of the 1990s “talk back” to their repressive social and aesthetic construction and represent themselves as satirical matriarchs over their own life choices? Also worthy of discussion is where these animated mothers it within the modern discourse of motherhood. Do they adhere to the notion of “new momism” – “the insistence that no woman is truly complete or fulilled unless she has kids, that women remain the best primary caretakers of children, and that to be a remotely decent mother, a woman has to devote her entire physical, psychological, emotional and intellectual being 24/7 to her children”?1 Or do they represent a rebellion, subverting and satirizing domestic traditions in a way only animation can achieve? The cartoon sitcom mother has timelessly amalgamated grace and maternity with a hint of sexuality. She is beautiful and slender; her unfeasibly tiny Disney waist and doe-eyed kindness remain unfaltering as she single-handedly runs the household. She is governed by the contradictory notion that a woman’s fulilment comes solely from her children, husband, and home, and her attempts to juggle her family and a career are often unsuccessful. When discussing the cartoon sitcom mother, it is not only important to consider how she is constructed socially, but also aesthetically. Dominating

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the industry throughout the history of animation, the character designers of the Disney Studios remain responsible for the mainstream design traditions of the white, animated female. Early Disney animation production generally consisted of a white, male artistic team designing and drawing the key movements of the characters, while an underpaid, often female workforce would trace, paint, and perform what Elizabeth Bell describes as the “tedious, repetitive, labor-intensive housework of the Disney enterprise.”2 According to Paul Wells, the emphasis of the animated female is on the childlike: “The stress on the suggestion of petite-ness and prettiness … is a common design strategy for the idea of the child-woman in animation, and is signiicant in that it deines juvenility as feminine.”3 A convention stretching from the early 1920s to the present day, the “child-woman” mold of Disney heroines restricts the waistline and extracts the female reproductive system (which could not possibly it into such a petite waist), in favor of a highly sexualised, empty shell. This early indicator of patriarchal dominance and restriction is vital in preparing and shaping the pre-pubescent princess (and her young audience) into the domesticated, yet asexual role that the wholesome Disney Studios would traditionally have her ill. In Walt Disney’s empire, dancing kitchenalia and upbeat songs about housework bestowed an inherent domesticity onto female characters. The Disney mother epitomized the contradictory struggle between outdated and current social ideals. What resulted was a drastic narrative convention of denial and censorship, which dealt with the social conlict by erasing the biological mother altogether. The mother’s increasing domestic liberation was either ignored by substituting maternity for a plump fairy godmother or singing teapot (Cinderella, 1950; Beauty and the Beast, 1991), or over-exaggerated, embodied within the power hungry guise of the evil stepmother (Snow White, 1937; Enchanted, 2007). With its conservative patriarchy and liberal exclusion, Disney very swiftly became a major familial icon, remaining to this day synonymous with wholesome, nuclear family-friendly entertainment. The launch of the cartoon sitcom, such as The Flintstones (1960–66), came at a time when the mother was facing incredible change brought about by the women’s liberation movements. Although the mother was at a stage where her entry into the workplace was becoming less of a taboo, the perpetuation of the 1950s model of domestic life was still (and still is to this day) bizarrely regarded by television as the conventional representation of the family. Wilma Flintstone, the long-suffering

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wife of Fred, displays the perfect social and aesthetic make-up of the typical cartoon housewife. Her social foundation is deeply rooted in the 1950s model of domesticity, and she is aesthetically constructed from the same mold as the Disney heroine. Her inexplicably tiny waist and lame red hair earned her sex symbol status alongside other cartoon characters such as Jessica Rabbit (Who Framed Roger Rabbit, 1998) and Family Guy’s Lois Grifin. She is also the wife to a boorish husband (mirrored by numerous animated and live-action sitcoms) and struggles when trying to venture out of the home and into a career. Immense progression, liberation, and equality of the mother went virtually unnoticed within the live-action and animated televisual realm until decades later. After The Flintstones ended in 1966, it was twenty-three years before prime-time television next saw a regular animated sitcom. In 1989, Matt Groening’s The Simpsons was launched. As Wells describes, the show created “a sustained satire on American mores, using animation as the vehicle through which to reveal contradiction, hypocrisy, banality and the taboo.”4 Through its characterization, storylines, and animation, The Simpsons subverted the American sitcom, satirizing the perpetuation of the 1950s traditional family. The sitcom antics of The Simpsons, King of the Hill (1997), and Family Guy (1999) established a subversive trend in nineties animation, parodying and satirizing current social, political, and religious themes. Examining the media struggle between “intensive” and “rebellious” mothering in their book The Mommy Myth, Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels suggest that “instead of dismissing these media images as short-lived (and sometimes even stupid), let’s review how they have laid down a thick, sedimented layer of guilt, fear, and anxiety as well as an increasingly powerful urge to talk back.”5 Indeed, the medium of animation has always been a successful vehicle for subversion. The notion of talking back described by Douglas and Michaels has been present throughout animated history. Animators living within extreme political climates have often used animation as a tool to covertly subvert and protest the oppressive regime under which they live. Examples of such works include Jiri Trnka’s The Hand (1965) and Vincent Paronnaud’s animated adaptation of the graphic novel Persepolis (2007). Recent animation has also talked back to the notion that it is a medium made exclusively for children. The realization that animation could attract an increasingly adult audience was one of the most subversive and important aspects of animation to come to light after the late 1960s. Ralph Bakshi’s Fritz the Cat (1972), for instance, was the irst animated feature to receive an X rating.

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PEARLS OF WISDOM AND THE DESPERATE HOUSEWIFE

With the subversive running wild through The Simpsons, one would consequentially expect the characters to be similarly rebellious. This rebelliousness can certainly be seen in the somewhat inept character of Homer Simpson. He is not the responsible bread-winning father that nuclear tradition would dictate. In fact, his wife, Marge, takes on much of the familial responsibility. Their 2.4 children also display subversive traits. Bart subverts the role of strong and boisterous son to the extremes of petty crime and vandalism. Lisa and Maggie simultaneously challenge and satirize the tradition of the well-behaved and silent daughters, to the extent that Lisa has become an over-achieving, moral-purveying, feminist activist, and Maggie has personiied the silent daughter stereotype by not making a sound for twenty-one seasons. The character of Marge represents the satirical epitome of self-sacriice and new momism, maintaining a stereotypically passive character by neglecting her own desires to fulill her increasing obligations towards her family and home. As Chris Turner explains, “Marge paciies, she calms, she brings understanding and order and even the possibility of salvation.”6 Marge is the source of spirituality and ethics, speaking out, in many episodes, against issues such as cartoon violence and the presence of a nearby burlesque house. She is slim (although her waistline is considerably more subtle than that of her Stone-Age predecessor, Wilma Flintstone) and graceful, and her consistently conservative wardrobe with her plain green dress and practical shoes bestows her with a sense of motherly fortitude. Visually speaking, Marge is one of the most caricatured of the Simpson family. Her gravity-defying blue hair symbolizes patience, structure, and rigidity – qualities she lawlessly demonstrates herself. As Turner describes her, “Marge is the towering-blue-haired paragon of authentic family values on The Simpsons, she is the symbol of the show’s (barely) enduring morality.”7 Marge’s hair not only symbolizes her characteristic strength, but also represents her in terms of her distinctiveness and iconography. It is also a storage facility built to rival the deepest of handbags. Her hair embodies her total control, resourcefulness, and endurance. The cartoon mother is often adorned with pearls, which “from the earliest times have been considered as emblems of purity, beauty, and nobility.”8 Marge’s red, faux-pearl necklace symbolizes nurturance (mother of pearl), wisdom (pearls of wisdom, also modeled by Lisa Simpson), and Christian morality (the pearly gates). Intriguingly, pearls have been linked

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with mysterious powers of self-reproduction. As Edwin Streeter explains in his 1886 book Pearls and Pearling Life, “Amongst all the ideas which have been entertained, both in ancient and more modern times, with regard to Pearls … none appears more romantic than that of their reputed powers of re-production.”9 This mythology could explain how the impossibly slim-waisted cartoon mother is able to bear children. Myra Macdonald argues that “the image of the holy mother and child … invites our admiration for what she symbolizes, not for who she is. Impregnated without sexual contact, she teaches us that nurturing is a spiritual experience untouched by either the complications of physical passion or our own desires.”10 The stereotypically reserved characterization of animated housewives, such as Marge Simpson, shares common traits with the idea of the holy or angelic mother; these women display complete self-sacriice, spirituality, and a melodramatic reservedness when it comes to their own desires. The anatomically impossible representation of animated predecessor Wilma Flintstone and the overtly slim Disney waists of the animated mother literally embody the holy mother, as their restrictive construction would not allow them to conceive naturally. Conversely, like the Disney princess, the animated mother remains highly sexualized; she may have been impregnated without sexual contact, even immaculately, but she is far from being a virgin. Similar to the qualities embodied by the angelic mother, “the new momism is a highly romanticized and yet demanding view of motherhood in which the standards for success are impossible to meet.”11 Explaining the two types of mothering associated with new momism, Douglas and Michaels set down the rules for “intensive mothering.” They explain, “Intensive mothering insists that mothers acquire professional skills such as those of a therapist, pediatrician … teacher, and that they lavish every ounce of physical vitality they have… and most of all, every single bit of their emotional, mental and psychic energy on their kids.”12 Interestingly, Douglas and Michaels describe Marge as an example of a “rebellious mom” and list Roseanne as a similar example. They argue, “Marge Simpson … didn’t so much attack intensive mothering as she ignored it. She and the kids ate TV dinners while lying in the living room watching violent cartoons.”13 While Marge is deinitely a product of a show that rebels against tradition, her character is arguably more a satirical, over-intensive mother rather than a rebellious one. In the episode “Itchy and Scratchy & Marge” (1990), she protests against the violent Itchy and Scratchy cartoons, and her zealous nagging gets them pulled off the air, albeit for a short time. Douglas and Michaels go on to

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argue that these mothers, including Marge, represent “the notion that you can still love your kids and be a good mother without … making sure they have a funny, loving note in their lunch but each and everyday.”14 Yet, that’s just the kind of thing that Marge would do; indeed, in the season six episode, “The PTA Disbands” (1995), Marge puts a loving note in Lisa’s lunchbox saying, “I am very proud of you, love Mom.” Bart’s simply says, “Be good. For the love of god, please be good!”15 Marge’s satirical intensive mothering is probably the quality for which she is most famous. While preparing for a dinner party in the season eight episode, “A Millhouse Divided” (1996), Marge could easily be imagined on the cover of Good Housekeeping Magazine as she adds another glaze to her already luorescent ham, pulls the freshly steamed toilet seats out of the dishwasher, and orders her children to put doilies under the coasters. With her offspring neatly lined up in their Sunday best, these faultless but ultimately short-lived moments clearly deine Marge as a stereotypical domestic goddess and consequently, as new momism dictates, a model wife and mother. Indeed, her knowledge of her family’s blood types, shoe sizes, preferred sandwich preparations, and secret hiding places (including Homer’s poker shack in the swamp), bestows her with a level of intensive motherliness that even enables her to distinguish her child’s latest problem by analyzing his or her hug. It is thus not surprising that Marge was voted “top role model for mothers” in a 2004 UK poll, beating Cherie Blair (wife of then Prime Minister Tony Blair) and the much-publicized Victoria Beckham: “The poll found that youngsters especially admired her down-to-earth approach and advice, such as telling her three children to ‘listen to your heart, and not the voices in your head.’”16 It is easy to see Marge’s appeal; behind her familiar nagging growl lies a nurturing, loving, selless mother. As Turner explains, “Marge’s frequent worried groan … the closest thing she has to a catchphrase – speaks to a maternal over protectiveness born of fear.”17 Marge undeniably adheres to the notion of new momism in that “mothers exist primarily to nurture and encourage their children in benevolent ways, often sacriicing themselves to do so.”18 Self-sacriicing, “desperate,” or “hysterical” housewives appear frequently in the family melodramas of the ifties. Elizabeth Grosz notes that “the patriarchal symbolic order places social constraints and systems of meaning on women’s behavior, through intimidation, threats, inscriptions, barriers – materially imposed on women which drive many to a possibly selfdestructive hysteria.”19 This patriarchal order of the male-dominated

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animation industry has left little space for the development of the cartoon mother. Even in the subversity of the nineties sitcom, the cartoon mother still remains governed by stereotypical barriers of self-sacriice. These barriers usually arise when she tries to separate her family from her career, or even her family from her own personal identity. As tradition dictates, the cartoon housewife is commonly represented as a living, breathing extension of the domestic sphere. Marge’s “hysterical” outbursts (averaging three or four episodes per season) usually center on her complete restraint and suppression within her domestic environment. When a free holiday reveals Marge’s fear of lying, instead of sharing her fears with her family, she bottles them up, overcompensating for her personal anguish with a frenzy of domestic activity. Baking until the early hours of the morning and ixing the roof throughout the night, Marge remembers her mother’s advice and it becomes her mantra: “Mother always said don’t complain, be good, behave, behave, be nice, smile, be polite, don’t make waves.”20 According to Sara Delamont, “Parents usually raise children to it with the society that the parents know and understand … Some people set out consciously to break with conventions, but most unconsciously try to prepare their children for the ‘real life’ they know.”21 Indeed, Marge inadvertently passes on the experience of her subservient upbringing, which in some cases stiles her childrens’ development (usually Lisa’s). Advice such as “take all your bad feelings and push them down, all the way down, past your knees, until you’re almost walking on them, and then you’ll it in,”22 is perhaps not the best suggestion for a prepubescent child; however, unlike her mother, Marge realizes the danger of her counsel and ultimately advises her daughter to “be sad” if she wants to, offering to do the smiling for both of them. Marge’s tenacious self-sacriice and ongoing struggle to live up to the notion embodied by new momism is probably the cause of many of her repressed hysterical breakdowns. Yet, by offering to take on her daughter’s problems as well as her own, Marge prevents Lisa from falling into the model of conformity that her own mother’s advice brought upon her. Although she embodies the passivity and repression of new momism, one thing is certain: unlike her mother, Marge is sellessly and continually protecting her children from the forced compliancy of her own upbringing. Whether supporting Lisa’s right to be sad or repeatedly standing up for her destructive son Bart, Marge actively encourages her children to be whatever or whoever they want to be.

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VILE WOMEN AND STONE - AGE SEXUALITY

Until its subversion by X-rated productions such as Fritz the Cat, animation was viewed as a genre for children. The subversion of sitcoms such as The Simpsons demonstrates not only a break from tradition, but also a break from the family-friendly genre of its ancestors. Seth MacFarlane continued this custom when he created the animated show Family Guy, which irst aired in 1999. Modeling itself on the traditional family sitcom, Family Guy’s premise is almost identical to that of The Simpsons, but the show’s use of similar character design, plots, and comedic devices has been criticized for showing little intelligent satire and few detectable morals, leaning instead towards plagiarism, cheap jokes, and baseless crude humour, with little point or consequence other than simple shock value. A rather unexpected mix of sexuality and maternity, Family Guy’s lame-haired housewife, Lois Grifin, could be mistaken as belonging to the generic model of traditional motherliness. Reminiscent of Wilma Flintstone in her curvy and iery design, she similarly adheres to the stereotype of the stay-at-home mother, married to an overbearing and overweight husband. Despite the presence of the obligatory 2.4 children, the family dog, and the suburban middle-class setting, it quickly becomes apparent that Lois’s identity is quite subversive. In total contrast to the notion of the angelic mother, Lois Grifin, voted second place in Maxim magazine’s “TV’s Best Nymphos” poll, has a shockingly alternative view of her own needs. As Maxim reports, “Not a day goes by that we don’t wonder how a slob like Peter Grifin locked down a stone-cold fox like Lois, but we don’t resent him for it. Any lady who can keep house, prevent an evil baby from taking over the world, and doesn’t mind lifting up a gut to get to the good stuff is marriage material in our book.”23 Interestingly, Marge appeared in both Maxim magazine in 2004 and Playboy magazine in 2009 in celebration of The Simpsons’s twentieth anniversary. Her extremely uncharacteristic inclusion and racy pictures in these magazines arguably demonstrate the inevitable competition between The Simpsons and prime-time rivals Family Guy. Indeed, The Simpsons has been criticized in its later seasons for following the trend of tasteless humour made famous by its sitcom rivals Family Guy and American Dad. Renowned for her arguably selish sexual appetite, Lois has led many attempts at breaking free from her stereotypical domestic restraints. A short stint as a model resulted in an addiction to weight loss pills, and an outburst of kleptomania landed her in jail. And she displayed the

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prescribed dependence of all animated housewives (even Marge Simpson) by becoming addicted to gambling. Lois’s cries for attention have become increasingly abundant as the show has progressed, including continually leading the anthropomorphic family dog to believe that she will one day have sex with him. While Lois’s radical antics have continued throughout the six seasons of Family Guy, there has been no evidence to suggest competence, nurturing, or selless activity in her representation as a mother. She persistently ignores her daughter Meg’s adolescent anxiety, gives questionable advice to her son Chris, and remains oblivious to baby Stewie’s matricidal intentions. Her actions are primarily selish. She shirks her responsibilities as a mother at a moment’s notice, whenever her own desires come into fruition. Like E. Ann Kaplan’s deinition of the phallic mother, Lois “satisies a need for power that her ideal function prohibits. She may also project onto the child her resentments, disappointments and failures for which the child is also to suffer.”24 As the continually disappointing child, Meg has displayed increasingly sexually motivated attempts (perhaps inspired by her phallic mother) to gain attention within the familial and social sphere. She seduced the family dog Brian and dated the mayor of Quahog while working as his intern. Repeatedly ignored and abused both physically and mentally by her family, Meg is arguably the product of Lois’s increasingly extreme sexual behavior. Lois’s avoidance of her maternal responsibilities is perhaps the most radically subversive of all her character traits. Completely contradicting the self-sacriicial nature of new momism, Lois displays a primarily egotistical rebellion, devoid of accountability. Lois may seem like the perfect example of nuclear subversion, yet with complete control over her own life, she chooses to wield her emancipation in a way that ultimately excludes her children. Where characters such as Marge Simpson and Wilma Flintstone arguably represent the angelic mother, Lois’s adhesion to the phallic mother model arguably has more in common with Disney’s evil stepmother. Constantly represented as a force to be struggled against, Lois is the object of baby Stewie’s matricidal intents, which mirror the need for the repressed Disney heroine to overcome and eventually overpower her stepmother, ultimately the villain of the story. As well as shirking her responsibilities as mother, the stepmother is frequently represented as an incredibly dark sexual predator. She is often sexually curvier than the angelic mother. Lois has wide hips and breasts to match, and although her predecessor Wilma is highly sexualised, she still retains her angelic status; her pearls ground her morally, her slim waist “virginally.”

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Contrastingly, Lois is often seen in revealing outits, including full S&M wear, and frequently uses her sexuality to control a situation, a trait that she has actively passed onto her daughter Meg. As a complete contrast to Marge’s intensive mothering, Lois’s actions persistently reject the idea of new momism, embracing instead a selfcentered and self-destructive rebellion. Although totally contradicting the image of a sexually submissive housewife, Lois is frequently represented in a way that degrades and devalues her as a mother; she is regarded as nothing more than a predatory sexual object, and she likes it that way. QUEEN OF THE HILL : SHIFTING THE DOMESTIC WALLS

In shows such as The Flintstones there is a recurring storyline of the animated mother who joins the workforce, only to be ousted conveniently and swiftly, as traditional half-hour animated narrative dictates. With the man of the house providing the income, the women’s jobs are often no more than frivolous whims, something to occupy the hours in between the housework. This trend has disappointingly continued into present day animated sitcoms where the mother inexplicably inds herself with more free time or a yearning for fulilment previously suppressed. Predictably, Marge has had several short-lived jobs, from pretzel wagon vendor to police oficer, and Lois has been employed as an airhostess and sporadically teaches piano from home when the storyline requires. Alas, this employment rarely continues beyond one episode, so any chance of character progression or long-term societal change is always short lived and ultimately redundant. Douglas and Michaels note that “the ‘mommy wars’ puts mothers into two, mutually exclusive categories – working mother versus stay-athome mother, and never the twain shall meet.”25 Indeed, it is a frequent notion of new momism that work and family don’t mix. A woman is seen as either shirking her responsibilities at home if she works, or a bad example of a liberated woman if she doesn’t. This is a struggle frequently represented within the animated sitcom, yet any sign of progression is ultimately reset by the half-hour time limit where, at the end of every episode, everything has to revert back to “normal.” This situation, however, is not an utterly hopeless one. In 1997 Mike Judge’s King of the Hill introduced the character of Mrs Peggy Hill, her likeness based on former First Lady Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson. Noted for her exceptionally large feet and frequently larger ego, Peggy is

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a self-hailed genius, often using the phrase “in my opinion” when communicating widely recognized facts. The design of Judge’s King of the Hill characters is perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the show. Although displaying highly caricatured design traits (as one would expect from the genre of animation), the characters nevertheless fail to adhere to the stereotypical aesthetic rules of the Disney model sheet. The King of the Hill characterizations and storylines completely subvert the plasticity and mobility of animation to the extent of portraying an overt reality and placing an emphasis on subtlety never before seen in an animated sitcom. In keeping with Judge’s tradition of subtlety, the character of Hank Hill is only slightly overweight, not to satisfy the stereotype of the boorish husband, but because he eats a lot of meat and drinks a lot of beer. The character of Peggy is similarly subverted; the slim beautiful domestic goddess of the animated sitcom is replaced with an average weight, average looking wife and mother, and her taste in clothes is practical and homely (perhaps due to shopping at a store called “Frumpy’s”). Peggy’s more anatomically correct design clearly demonstrates that she was able to both conceive and give birth to her son. She is not aesthetically constructed as nothing more than a sexualized fantasy, but refreshingly, a real representation of a woman. Within the misogynistic model of the animated sitcom, regular employment is generally, unsurprisingly, bestowed upon male breadwinners or single unattractive females, as demonstrated in The Simpsons’s Springield, where female occupation of the workplace is reserved for single women, spinsters, or single mothers (i.e., women who don’t have a man to provide for them). Marge has faced numerous hurdles when applying for positions of employment, yet her sisters, Patty and Selma, have been employed at the local DMV for years. The other single women of Springield dominate the education system, one teaching Lisa’s year, the other Bart’s. Arlen, Texas, home to King of the Hill residents Peggy and Hank Hill, is the exception to the aforementioned societal model, despite seemingly following the same age-old rules that place the man of the house as the breadwinner and the woman as the homemaker. Peggy Hill not only effortlessly combines the role of mother and primary homemaker, but has succeeded in what most animated mothers, within their thirty minutes of collective struggle, have so far failed to do: she has a job! Regularly placed as a substitute teacher at an early morning phone call’s notice, she is constantly on the go, perhaps fuelled primarily by the misguided notion that she is single-handedly giving the children a proper

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education. Peggy’s neighbour (and former beauty queen) Nancy HicksGribble is equally present in the workplace as a weather forecaster, while her husband Dale runs a very unsuccessful extermination business. She is in fact the breadwinner and he barely earns enough money to pay the cable bill. Although these women hold traditionally female occupations, their employment remains a permanent and deining part of their character. In an unfamiliar world where their wives can work and even provide the main source of income, the men of these animated towns, understandably, often feel threatened by this power that would never have existed in the world of their Stone-Age predecessors. Unintentionally, Hank plays a pivotal role in his wife Peggy’s liberation. Unlike the traditionally inept cartoon husband, Hank shares the domestic workload with his wife by cooking, cleaning, and taking care of his precious front lawn. Even though he’d much prefer it if she stayed at home full time, Hank crosses the domestic nuclear boundary, thus enabling his wife to do the same. It is Peggy’s ability to comfortably juggle her home and career that sets her apart from other animated mothers, but “traditional family values” return to the Hill residence in the season two episode, “Peggy’s Turtle Song.” After eating too many bowls of sugary breakfast cereal, the Hills’s son, Bobby, is misdiagnosed with ADD, which in Hank’s opinion was caused by “the boy” not getting enough attention. Peggy suddenly feels the guilt of new momism and, encouraged by Hank, decides to give up her job. After quickly inding herself with too much free time, she decides to take up guitar lessons. Astutely voiced by feminist musician Ani DiFranco, Peggy’s guitar teacher encourages her to ind “a voice to scream with.” Taking this literally, Peggy actually starts to yell. Peggy’s “Turtle Song” is thus the production of her unfamiliar restriction within the domestic sphere. Peggy is encouraged by her teacher to “take a pot shot” at the holiday of Mother’s Day by quashing the orthodox conlation of femininity and maternity and performing at her Mother’s Day music recital instead of having brunch with her family, an annual Hill tradition. Douglas and Michaels’s description of Mother’s Day celebrations resonates here. They write, “Imagine it’s Mothers Day, and you are being taken out to one of those god-awful brunches where you and hundreds of mothers will be force-fed runny scrambled eggs and laccid croissants by way of thanking you for the other 364 days” of the year.26 Peggy’s guitar teacher shares this negative opinion of Mother’s Day, but Peggy does not. Perhaps the most engaging aspect of Peggy’s expression of her restraint is that she is completely unaware of it; to Peggy, her song is simply about a turtle that

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was stuck in her shell, and not, as her teacher suggested, “A song about how a woman feels when the world tells her who she has to be.”27 Hank’s reaction to Peggy’s song is inevitably negative. After deliberately going against his wish to have her annual Mother’s Day brunch, she reluctantly takes his advice and rewrites her song, ending it with the “wonderful love of a turtle named Hank.”28 This leads Hank to suggest that she has too much mother in her for just one child; she needs a whole class full and needs to go back to work to happily fulill her role as mother. While it might be tempting to occasionally read Peggy as a feminist, Peggy herself disabuses us of this notion as she tells Hank, “I am not a feminist, Hank. I am Peggy Hill, a citizen of the Republic of Texas. I work hard, I sweat hard and I love hard and I gotta smell good and look pretty while doing it. So, I comb my hair, I re-apply lipstick thirty times a day, I do your dishes, I wash your clothes and I clean the house. Not because I have to, Hank, but because of a mutual, unspoken agreement that I have never brought up, because I am too much of a lady.”29 Nonetheless, the characterization of Peggy is a signiicant step forward, and women as signiicant and even primary income earners are cropping up more frequently within the animated sitcom. Dominating the domestic sphere for generations, these women are not just attempting employment for comedic effect and a quick but unsuccessful liberation ix; they are breaking free from their apron strings and permanently joining the workforce. Peggy, like Lois, recognizes her right to govern her own life, often acting in a self-serving and competitive way to achieve this. Yet unlike Lois, Peggy never shirks her responsibilities as a mother. Emancipated yet responsible, Peggy is the benchmark for future animated mothers. Within the anarchy of the nineties prime-time animation, the traditionally structured and homogeneous nuclear family has inally evolved beyond its white, middle-class, heteronormative boundaries into something different, uncensored, and tangible.

“ WON ’T

SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN ?”

While the concept of the nuclear family has shifted, the varying representations of the animated mother may, for the most part, suggest little evolution from their Stone-Age, nuclear equivalents. However, where the child-woman model has dominated most representations of animated femininity (in both design and characteristics), their association with juvenility has arguably now shifted to the masculine characters, such as Homer Simpson and Peter Grifin. Traditionally seen as over-phallic or

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over-protective, fretful worriers, the animated mothers’ united maternal motto, “Won’t somebody think of the children?” (used frequently by the mothers of Springield), epitomizes their ongoing representation as moral purveyors and primary caretakers. A motto born of fear and guilt, these subversive mothers are “talking back” so that someone else will think of the children. Modern animated mothers no longer want to be considered the sole, self-sacriicing, caretaker of their children and home. As seen in King of the Hill, it is possible for an animated mother to share this responsibility with the father. Peggy talks back by inadvertently criticizing the holiday of Mother’s Day, choosing to return to work after realizing the stay-athome life was repressing her, and arguably and iguratively wearing the trousers (culottes) in the relationship. King of the Hill also talks back to the representation of fathers as sole earners with no responsibilities around the home. Hank interestingly takes utter pride in the completion of some of the tasks around the home and garden, albeit the manly ones, the ones that involve power tools, and he will only cook on the grill. Subversively shifting the boundaries erected by the nuclear family sitcom, and disregarding the contradictory guilt imposed by new momism, animated mothers are now becoming breadwinners, sexual equals, and partners in what have traditionally been represented as purely patriarchal societies. Marge, however repressed, is nonetheless protecting her children from the repression she has suffered, encouraging them to be whatever they want to be, and mothers such as Peggy are gradually realizing their entitlement to their own emancipation. These women are governed not by their obligations and guilt but by the choices they have made. Whether domestic, career focused, or sexual, these choices have transformed these women from mere patriarchal fantasies to matriarchs of their own lives.

NOTES

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Douglas and Michaels, Mommy Myth, 4. Bell, “Somatexts at the Disney Shop,” 107. Wells, Understanding Animation, 204. Wells, “‘Smarter Than the Average Art Form,’” 30. Douglas and Michaels, Mommy Myth, 14. Turner, Planet Simpson, 251. Ibid., 252.

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8 Edwin Streeter, Pearls and Pearling Life (London: George Bell & Sons, 1886), 64, http://www.farlang.com/gemstones/streeter_pearls_and_ pearling/page_001. 9 Ibid., 69. 10 Macdonald, Representing Women, 133. 11 Douglas and Michaels, Mommy Myth, 4. 12 Ibid., 6. 13 Ibid., 219. 14 Ibid., 13. 15 “The PTA Disbands,” The Simpsons, Season Six. 16 “Marge Simpson Voted Top Mom,” Simpsons Channel, News Archive, 18 March 2004, http://www.simpsonschannel.com/news/monthlyarchive-3-2004.html. 17 Turner, Planet Simpson, 257. 18 Haas, “‘Eighty-Six the Mother,’” 196. 19 Grosz, Jacques Lacan, 174. 20 “Fear of Flying,” The Simpsons, Season Six. 21 Delamont, Changing Women, Unchanged Men?, 28. 22 “Moaning Lisa,” The Simpsons, Season One. 23 “TV’s Best Nymphos,” Maxim Online, 10 March 2007, http://www. maxim.com/amg/girls/girls-of-maxim/76371/tvs-best-nymphos.html. 24 Kaplan, “Motherhood and Representation,” 47. 25 Douglas and Michaels, Mommy Myth, 12. 26 Ibid., 28. 27 “Peggy’s Turtle Song,” King of the Hill, Season Two. 28 Ibid. 29 “Shins of the Father,” King of the Hill, Season One. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bell, Elizabeth. “Somatexts at the Disney Shop: Constructing the Pentimentos of Women’s Animated Bodies.” In From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture, edited by Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells, 107–24. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995. Delamont, Sara. Changing Women, Unchanged Men? Sociological Perspectives on Gender in a Post-industrial Society. Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001. Douglas, Susan J., and Meredith W. Michaels. The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women. New York: Free Press, 2004.

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Grosz, Elizabeth. Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction. London: Routledge, 1990. Haas, Lynda. “‘Eighty-Six the Mother’ – Murder, Matricide and Good Mothers.” In From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture, edited by Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells, 193–211. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995. Kaplan, E. Ann. “Motherhood and Representation: From Postwar Freudian Figurations to Postmodernism.” In Psychoanalysis and Cinema, edited by E. Ann Kaplan, 128–42. London: Routledge, 1990. King of the Hill: The Complete First Season. 1997. Los Angeles, CA: Twentieth Century Fox. DVD Region 2 encoding, 2003. King of the Hill: The Complete Second Season.1998. Los Angeles, CA: Twentieth Century Fox. DVD Region 2 encoding, 2003. Macdonald, Myra. Representing Women: Myths of Femininity in the Popular Media. London: Hodder Arnold, 1995. The Simpsons: The Complete First Season.1990. Los Angeles, CA: Twentieth Century Fox. DVD Region 2 encoding, 2002. The Simpsons: The Complete Sixth Season. 1994. Los Angeles, CA: Twentieth Century Fox. DVD Region 2 encoding, 2005. The Simpsons: The Complete Eighth Season. 1996. Los Angeles, CA: Twentieth Century Fox. DVD, 2006. Streeter, Edwin. Pearls and Pearling Life. 1886. London: George Bell & Sons. Farlang.com. Accessed 13 March 2007. http://www.farlang.com/gemstones/ streeter_pearls_and_pearling/page_001. Turner, Chris. Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Documented an Era and Deined a Generation. London: Edbury Press, 2005. Wells, Paul. Understanding Animation. 4th ed. London: Routledge, 1998. – “‘Smarter Than the Average Art Form’: Animation in the Television Era.” In Prime Time Animation: Television animation and American culture, edited by Carol A. Stabile and Mark Harrison. 16–32. London: Routledge, 2003.

3 REAL ( ITY ) TV PRACTICES OF SUR VEILLANCE

Evaluating Mothers in Supernanny and Crash Test Mommy Fiona Joy Green

Take one busy mom, add someone who says they can do better, give them 48 hours to prove it, and you’ve got Crash Test Mommy, where mom’s biggest critic takes charge of the home and kids for a weekend. How hard can motherhood be? Crash Test Mommy, Slice

As the above introduction to Crash Test Mommy suggests, people are keen to view the nitty-gritty realities of mother’s lives. The popularity of mommy reality TV – unscripted entertainment programming that features real mothers as its central subjects – is also evidenced in the muchacclaimed, international Supernanny series, which has been viewed in over ifty-eight territories and nominated for a People’s Choice Award.1 This chapter explores how two mommy reality TV shows, the Canadianbased Crash Test Mommy and the American series Supernanny, both use surveillance techniques to entice program participants and viewers to judge the mothering abilities of women within a narrow discourse of motherhood. I focus on how these shows use celebratory narrative to pass on stories that perpetuate, replicate, and celebrate the traditions, myths, and ideologies of motherhood that are not fully understood and also appear to be larger than life. By critically engaging with the dominant discourse of motherhood inscribed in the narratives of these shows, I argue that, while these programs use the predictable binary of “good”/“bad” mother to stir up and perpetuate the so-called ongoing mommy wars, which refers to the split between stay-at-home mothers

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and mothers who work outside the home at the turn of the twenty-irst century, they also offer limited examples of how some mothers are talking back to the popularised mythical good mother ideal and the “good”/“bad” mother dichotomy.2 REALITY TV

While some folks scoff at the importance and inluence of reality TV, academics and cultural critics, such as Mark Andrejevic, contend it is “a genre of its own, spanning two new Emmy categories in the United States.”3 Laurie Ouellette and Susan Murray argue that reality TV “is a pervasive and provocative phenomenon that is remaking television culture and our understandings of it.”4 Reality TV is a force to be reckoned with and taken seriously as it occupies “lucrative time slots across the globe and a prominent place in the cultural imaginary.”5 Andrejevic argues that it is the “hot programming trend of the new millennium,” noting that in 2001, 45 per cent of all Americans watched reality TV, with one in eleven describing themselves as “die-hard” fans.6 Family life and mothering have been, and continue to be, a founding element of reality TV. Often credited as the irst reality TV show, the 1973 Public Broadcasting Service series An American Family blended popular television entertainment with “the relexive anthropological approach of turning the camera around to study representative members of contemporary society in their natural habitat.”7 The twelve weekly one-hour episodes of An American Family, which took seven months to ilm, document the daily life and transition of the Loud family through a divorce and the eldest son’s decision to proclaim his homosexuality. It promised to provide viewers with a glimpse into the “genuine” and unscripted lives of a real family and an unmediated, voyeuristic look at the “authentic” personalities, situations, and narratives not found in ictional television.8 Yet, scholarship repeatedly reveals the absurdity of these promises by exposing how reality TV constructs the depiction of people’s lives through editing and shaping video footage.9 According to Andrejevic and Dean Colby, self-representation in reality TV programming is structured by the conventions and mode(s) of production that provide opportunities for participants to reproduce identities that are solely consistent with the logic and rules sanctioned by the show’s producer(s) and director(s).10 For example, while the ABC Supernanny web page claims to welcome “all kinds of families,” including “single parents, straight and gay parents, all ethnicities and income levels,” Nick

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Gilhool, the casting director of the forth season, appears on the program’s online casting page to speciically appeal to “parents dealing with shared custody situations, adoptive parents, parents who are dreading the birds and the bees conversation, (and) anybody who is fed up with their kids.”11 Both adoptive parents and families dealing with shared custody in the United States are most likely to be heterosexual couples, given that samesex couples are denied the right to marry in all but seven states,12 and only eleven of the ifty states and Washington, DC “either implicitly or explicitly state that sexual orientation cannot legally prevent gay and lesbians from adopting.”13 The casting call for Crash Test Mommy also attempts to recruit speciic types of moms, dads, and potential crash test mommies who are “fun, ready to be on TV and ‘game’ to play!” In this case, the “ideal mom or dad” has two or more children, has someone in their life they wish would better understand and/or appreciate them, has an outgoing and/ or outspoken personality, and lives in British Columbia. The ideal crash test mommy is a spouse, family member, or close friend of a mom or dad, has something to prove, thinks her or his way of child rearing is better than that of the parent’s, has an outgoing and/or outspoken personality, and lives in British Columbia.14 Both screen calls provide an explicit template for the type of parents the casting and story directors are interested in having participate on their shows. As a result, the families on the programs tend to be fairly homogenous. They appear to be lower- to middle-class and generally live in single dwelling houses, rather than on reserves, in cooperatives, trailer homes, apartments, or condominiums. The majority of families on both shows appear to be white and able-bodied, apparently heterosexual, and conventionally attractive looking people. Many of the featured mothers are either stay-at-home moms with husbands/partners who work outside of the home or single mothers struggling to balance working outside the home and caring for their children. Media studies professor Bethany Ogdon observes that, although the producers of reality TV “go through the motions of declaring it a narrative medium through which stories of the human condition may be told and life lessons might be learned,” the genre is fundamentally a “video factory which ceaselessly produces a never-ending ‘image-repertoire’” and obsessively repeats the “exact same carefully scripted scene.”15 In an Entertainment Tonight Canada interview, Crash Test Mommy host Nicole Oliver speaks to the consistency of the script, noting that the program always puts a mother’s critic, who thinks she or he can do a

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better job than the mother, in the mother’s shoes for forty-eight hours and that by the end of the show both the temporary and real mom have a new perspective on mothering, including respect for what mothers do every day.16 Although Oliver isn’t involved in the selection process, which is the sole responsibility of the casting director, and although she only meets the family when ilming begins, she is well-informed about the focus of the show and “knows all about the subjects and their issues before (their) arrival.”17 Oliver’s knowledge about the participants helps her to shape the show according to the overarching theme previously decided upon by the director(s). American studies professor Nicolaus Mills furthers Ogdon’s point that reality-based TV relies on catching and depicting people in moments of embarrassment for the enjoyment of the viewer. Mills reasons that the genre has made “a culture of humiliation the key to prime-time audience ratings,” noting that humiliation TV makes “entertainment out of people’s weaknesses,” and that it subjects participants to “prolonged exposure before the camera” for the purposes of looking for and openly discussing – in their presence – their failings of character, behaviour and/or looks.18 Humiliation TV is constructed to showcase “losers to whom the viewing audience can feel superior,” and to encourage schadenfreude, whereby viewers take personal enjoyment in the misfortune or troubles of others, which, in turn, reduces feelings of empathy in the lives viewers.19 THE DISCOURSE OF MOTHERHOOD : NEW MOMISM AND MOMMY WARS

In their book The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How it Has Undermined All Women, Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels assert that current Western motherhood entails “a set of ideals, norms and practices most frequently and powerfully represented in the media, that seem – on the surface – to celebrate motherhood, but which – in reality – spread standards of perfection that are beyond our reach.”20 This new momism dictates and acts upon a highly romanticized myth of the perfect mother who simultaneously needs to be a faultless therapist, paediatrician, mind reader, caretaker, consumer, safety expert, and homemaker. Central to new momism is an ideology of intensive mothering theorized by Sharon Hays in her inluential book, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. Hays argues that “the ideology of intensive mothering is a gendered model that advises mothers to expend tremendous amounts of time, energy and money in raising their children.”21 Mothers are also

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expected to place the child’s needs and desires during each stage of development before anyone else’s, including their own, and, with the help of experts, be fully satisied, fulilled, completed, and composed in motherhood. According to Judith Stadtman Tucker, founder of Mothers Movement Online, this so-called new and improved version of motherhood relies on fear, fantasy, and marketing by the media: “The rules of play for the new momism are spelled out in media messages that invite mothers to compare their lawed human lives to unrealistic and unattainable ideals of motherhood. Those who might be tempted to see through the fallacy of it all are bombarded with news reports emphasizing the unspeakable tragedies that await children of mothers who dare to deviate from the One True Path of Momism.”22 Writing on mothering mythology and lore in the late twentieth century, Pamela Courtenay Hall notes that feminists have identiied the relevance of, as well as deconstructed, the myths surrounding the ideals and discourse of motherhood for decades.23 By drawing on Zdzisław Mach’s discussion of myths, Hall reminds us that a myth is “a symbolic text which presents a story which, in turn, transmits values, norms and patterns essential and fundamental for a given culture,” and that through this process, symbolic texts and norms “come to be seen as ‘natural’ rather than constructed by historical (and social) circumstances.”24 People learn, accept, and assimilate these normalized mothering myths into their worldview without questioning their origins, meaning, or signiicance, and, as a result, the myths, ideals, and discourse of motherhood remain nebulous, unrecognized, and unspoken.25 This enculturation process takes place in popular culture and throughout society in various other social institutions, such as education, religion, social policy, and legislation (particularly related to children and families). Hall argues the myths and discourse of motherhood are popularly transmitted and circulate easily as celebratory stories because of their luid currency within a society and culture that commemorates and rewards these motherhood traditions, images and narratives.26 This motherhood discourse offers a readily available and socially accepted role for mothers and, hence, becomes embodied in the everyday lives and worlds of people, including mothers. As women strive to imitate and take on this mothering image as their own, they partake in the process of identity performance that, according to philosopher Judith Butler, entails engaging in and embodying a repetitive and systemic performative action that becomes essentialized when the behaviour is accepted by the performer and others as invisible and thus “natural.”27

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Popular culture couples new momism with the so-called mommy wars that divide mothers into the two distinct and rival categories of “stay-athome mom” and “working mother,” and construct debates to determine which type of mother is better. Mommy wars provide a simplistic vision of mothering that both ignores the diversity of mothers and their social contexts, and divides mothers into two oppositional groupings to be compared and judged.28 Scholar and mother Miriam Peskowitz notes that the mommy wars prompt mothers – who may already feel generally isolated, defensive, and guilt-stricken because of the tiring and unsupported work of mothering – to judge and undermine other mothers who live their lives differently from the way they do.29 Lindsey Rock concurs with Peskowitz, arguing in her article on young mothers that “culturally constructed ideals devalue some mothers while valorizing others.”30 Rock similarly claims that the practice of undervaluing mothers frequently occurs when mothers feel insecure and unsure in their own mothering practices and, in turn, devalue other mothers in order to value themselves.31 In her discussion of the prevalence of mothering myths, Peskowitz observes how mothers often take on the poisonous simple images of mother as their own.32 This adoption and self-devaluation by mothers is not surprising given, as Butler contends, people are unable to successfully imitate their own “phantasmatic idealization” of their identities.33 Mothers will always fail to imitate the ideal because it is an illusion that does not exist; replicating the ideal can only ever be an approximation and never successful. Together, new momism and mommy wars idealize and support a discourse of motherhood that sets mothers up to fail by encouraging them to compare themselves to and compete with each other and to judge themselves and others as “good” or “bad” mothers.34 Mommy-centred reality TV exploits and proits from women’s struggles for the phantasmatic idealization of mothers, in part by focusing on their conlict with each other and on their fear of being viewed as a “bad” mother. MOTHERS UNDER SUR VEILLANCE

The structure and narrative of mommy reality TV programs centre on combining the everyday experiences and struggles of parenting with the myths constituted by the idealized mythology and discourse of motherhood. Supernanny, originating in England in 2004, was the irst reality show on parenting and, due to its enormous success, has been broadcast and produced in many countries, including Australia, Canada, the United

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States, Belgium, Brazil, China, France, Greece, Holland, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Germany, Malaysia, Romania, Singapore, Spain, and Sweden. According to the show’s promotional press, Supernanny promises to transform the lives of a different family each week by introducing them to British “no-nonsense” professional nanny Jo Frost, who teaches parents how to put a stop to the “unruly bad behaviour” of their children. Viewers are assured that the combination of Frost’s “frank and upfront style” and “recipe of strict discipline and tried-and-tested techniques” will compel parents to “confront the real issues behind” their children’s “bad behaviour,” and teach them “how to turn their kids around.”35 The Canadian reality TV program Crash Test Mommy also irst aired in 2004. According to the show’s promotional website, Slice.ca, “Crash Test Mommy is back (for its ifth season) and continues to take underappreciated, often criticized moms out of the house for a weekend away, replacing them with a know-it-all family member or friend, who thinks they can do a better job with the children and the household. While host Nicole Oliver whisks mom away to enjoy a two-day luxury retreat, the substitute mom is left to cope with the meals, meltdowns and daily challenges that are part of raising children. Meanwhile, Mom watches her family from afar via webcam, providing insights and giving the substitute mom instructions when she sees her rules being carelessly ignored.” Both programs introduce viewers to mothers struggling with parenting. In the case of Supernanny, mothers desperate for help ask British nanny Jo Frost to enter their homes, scrutinize and analyse their mothering practices, and teach them how to become better mothers.36 In Crash Test Mommy, mothers, tired of being criticised by family and friends for the way they parent, invite their critics into their homes to single-handily parent their children for the weekend so they can learn the realities of mothering. In both situations, mothers are cognizant of not meeting their own or other people’s “good mother” standards. Mothers agree to invite these select guests, along with camera crew and, according to Mills, the increasingly socially accepted surveillance and eavesdropping equipment into their homes to help them improve their own mothering practices, or to gain control over their identities as a “good” mother.37 For instance, in the opening scene of Supernanny, viewers see families making their case to Frost for her help by submitting video footage of themselves at home to demonstrate their parenting dificulties and to support their desperate pleads for help.38 In a February 2005 episode, Andrea, a married schoolteacher of three children implores, “So please, come to our house Supernanny and help us out because we need you!”

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Within the irst few minutes of each hour-long show, Frost observes and shares her initial critical impressions of the family dynamics and problem areas. During these times mothers often say they feel “like a terrible Mom” and eagerly agree to have Frost, along with her camera crew, webcams and microphones, record the next two weeks of their everyday lives and teach them the Supernanny approach to parenting, guaranteed to solve the problems with which they are struggling. This method includes teaching the parents how to follow a posted daily schedule/routine and carry out speciic behaviour modiication techniques to address problems particular to the family. After a few days of supervised teaching and correction through the use of recorded interactions, Frost leaves the family to observe, via webcam, how well they are able to follow her magical method. Without fail, a crisis occurs during Frost’s absence because a parent, most likely the mother, has failed to properly learn and apply a technique. Frost promptly returns to the family home to share and evaluate the surveillance footage taken during her absence, to determine where the failure occurred, and to teach the mother how she can properly follow through with the Supernanny technique. Mothers often acknowledge their inability to follow Frost’s teachings and promise to make a more concerted effort to meet her good mother techniques and standards. They are given another chance to redeem themselves in the latter portion of the show, which they do by properly executing the steps of the technique they had previously failed. All episodes conclude with a happy ending in the form of a “family update,” ilmed within two weeks after Frost’s visit. Viewers see a wellfunctioning family where parents have regained control over their children, and mom feels like a “good” mother. For example, previously mentioned Andrea demonstrates this when she tells us, “I believe 100 per cent what Jo has taught my family. This experience has made me much stronger in the area of parenting, and as a woman, as a mom – deinitely. I perceive success in the Weston family!” Surveillance is also central to Crash Test Mommy where webcams and eavesdropping techniques are used by host Nicole Oliver and the absent mother to scrutinize the critic looking after the mother’s children for the weekend. Crash Test Mommy opens with Oliver introducing viewers to the episode’s opposing characters – the mother and her critic, the crash test mommy – and then reviews their contradictory philosophies of parenting. The critics tend to be current fathers, former boyfriends or spouses, childless siblings or in-laws, or mother-in-laws

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who believe their own approaches to parenting are better than those of the mother. They often criticise mothers for being “too strict” and “too rule bound,” for not “taking time for themselves,” or for “not keeping a clean house.” At the top of the show, Oliver asks the mother what the schedule entails for her critic over the next two days and reminds the crash test mommy, “webcams around the house let mom check in anytime she wants.” The critics often claim they will be able to meet or win the challenge. For example, in a show aired in December 2005, Carl, the husband and father of three children asserts, “this is not going to be easy but I will win this challenge.” Within minutes of pulling away from the home in a white stretch limo, Oliver and the mother, along with viewers, check into what is going on at home via video feed, and witness how the big plans to show mom how to be a better parent are failing. The next thirty minutes of the program feature the crash test mommy struggling to meet – or consciously ignore – items on the irst day’s schedule. Meals are often late or completely missed, or poor food choices are made in desperation to feed the children or to bribe them to stop behaving badly. Household chores are often not done, sometimes started but not inished, or are quickly undone by the activities of active children. Organized and supervised playtime is often missed due to trying to get grocery shopping and other errands completed. Crash test mommies quickly learn about the hard work and responsibilities of mothering. The ever-watching mothers are ready to let their critics know via text messaging, webcam, or telephone when infractions have occurred. Erin, for example, text messages her mother-in-law during a September 2005 program to tell her “chocolate is not a healthy treat” and a few minutes later that “the kids must eat from four food groups per meal.” By the end of day one, crash test mommies usually learn that overtired, under-nourished and overly sugared kids act out and make parenting dificult. Carl, for instance, who insists that his wife “Allie needs to pull up her socks!” declares in exhaustion and frustration at the end of day one, “This is a hard job; it’s non-stop. You have to be so organized and I’m not sure how organized I am.” During day two of the weekend, crash test mommies realize that the mothers’ parenting rules and alleged excessive planning, lists, and schedules do work. By the end of the show, viewers witness video lashbacks to comments the mommy critics made about their own ability to parent better and to video recorded footage of how they failed to make those predictions come true. In the inal scene of each episode, we watch the mother and her critic discuss what they

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have learned over the weekend. Inevitably, crash test mommies demonstrate respect and admiration for the mothers. During another 2005 episode, Sonja, a childless younger sister who is convinced raising children is like training dogs and, thus, can create “me time” every day, says to her older sister Stacey and mother of three, “I think you are a super mom. I have to say I’ve humbled myself to say that and I understand why you can’t make ‘me time.’” Jen, also a younger childless sister tells Oliver and viewers in a different episode, “I can’t believe what Kim goes through and how much she gives her kids; as a mother you devote every minute of your life to these kids. Up until this weekend I didn’t realize you don’t have, I don’t think I had two minutes without something going on.” The show closes on a happy note with the crash test mommy and the mother embracing, as the mommy critic acknowledges the hard work the mother does. Interestingly, none of the crash test mommies want or offer to change places with the mothers. MOTHERHOOD MYTHOLOGY : MOTHERS AND “ BAD ” MOTHERS

“ GOOD ”

With the help of surveillance cameras and microphones, TV screens, and DVD players, participants and viewers learn which attitudes and practices constitute a “good” mother, and which comprise a “bad” mother. In the case of Supernanny, the mother is initially viewed as a “bad” mother with her opening video-recorded desperate plea for Frost’s help. Yet, she has the opportunity to transform herself into to a “good” mother through the duration of the one-hour show if she is able to successfully follow and internalize the no-nonsense parenting techniques taught by modern day Mary Poppins.39 Frost uses instant replays of both desirable and undesirable behaviour to correct the bad or unacceptable mothering behaviour of these desperate women. The end result is a “good” mother who has learned the appropriate techniques and behaviours required to get the job done. In the case of Crash Test Mommy we witness the inexperienced critic being pitted against the knowing “good” mother. The crash test mommy must comply with the dictated structure of the weekend, which interestingly often shares components of Frost’s daily routine. With the surveillance and technical support of Oliver, the mother is able to check in on the crash test mommy anytime and correct behaviours that do not meet her standards. This show also uses video playback to remind viewers what good mothering and bad mothering look like. By the close of the

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program, the mother retains the title of “good” mother, while the “bad” mother label is reserved for the critic, who eventually defers to the mother’s standards and concedes that she is indeed the better mother. Clearly the program structure and use of surveillance in Supernanny and Crash Test Mommy set participants up to be on either side of the “good”/“bad” mother dichotomy. The shows perpetuate the mommy wars by placing mothers and child rearing experts who replicate and promote new momist discourses of motherhood on one side and mothers and critics who do not on the other. They also use tactics of humiliation TV by making entertainment out of the shortcomings of the “bad” mothers in each episode. Viewers may tune in to either show to see how badly others are parenting and may also give themselves a boost of conidence as they compare themselves to the desperate parenting situations shown in Supernanny or the failures of the crash test mommy. Both shows constitute speciic ways mothers are to behave and be scrutinized, while concurrently downplaying the reality of mothers struggling to parent in highly unsupportive and obstructive social contexts. As Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryl Kaplan note, there is a paradox when attempting to articulate the meaning of mothering in cultural arenas like reality TV that are unable to comprehend women’s lived experiences.40 Jo Frost corrects distressed mothers while the absent mothers correct crash test mommies for behaviours that do not support their stated rules and expectations. Not surprisingly, their rules and expectations often neatly mirror the tenets of intensive mothering previously outlined by Hays. In both programs we see how children can only be properly cared for by the mother, who constantly puts her children’s needs before her own. We learn that mothers must lavish excessive amounts of time, energy, and money to properly rear their children and that they must turn to experts such as Jo Frost rather than to un-knowledgeable family members or mothering critics for parenting advice. And while we observe the hard work mothers do, we also see how mothers are expected to always be composed, fully satisied, fulilled, and completed by motherhood. Under the guidance of Jo Frost and Nicole Oliver, participants and viewers learn the doctrine of new momism that allegedly celebrates motherhood yet, in reality, advocates impossible standards of mothering perfection. They learn how to detect the characteristics of a “good” and a “bad” mother, and how to establish a mother’s success or failure in her ability to effectively meet the discourse of motherhood. According to Deborah Pope, Naiomi Quinn, and Mary Whyer, viewers are likely to witness how mommy mythology essential to the discourse of motherhood

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“tends to prevail, as the language and the conventions of the story shape not only what is thought but also what can be said, not only what is heard but what can be understood.”41 Audiences may also witness how dificult it is for mothers to honour the discourse of motherhood and, as a result, notice how they intensify their efforts to achieve it, or participate in a destructive cycle of self-blame or mother-blame.42 This type of self-blame is seen when mothers participating in Supernanny doubt their parenting abilities and often feel badly when they can’t instantly be the “good” mother Frost is teaching them to be. For instance, in a March 2005 episode, Evelena, mother of a two-year-old son says, “I felt badly and in pieces” when she is unable to comfort her son in a way she did before Supernanny. In the case of Crash Test Mommy, critics who attempt to parent differently are chastised for not following the rules or meeting the standards outlined by the “real” mother, and they come to realize their approach is secondary to that of the mother’s. Thus, they intensify their efforts to meet the prescribed mothering model so they, too, may become “good” mothers. While both Supernanny and Crash Test Mommy purport to celebrate mothers by putting the lives of mothers at the centre of their programming, they persistently perpetuate new momism and mommy wars and bolster the restrictive discourse of motherhood by offering celebratory stories and roles of mothering that reinforce motherhood myths and traditions. By engaging with popular reality TV shows such as Crash Test Mommy and Supernanny, viewers become adept in identifying the proscribed behaviours associated with the discourse of motherhood and skilled in scrutinizing the ability of mothers to meet its criteria. Consequently, they may become luent in the celebratory stories of mothering and unaware of the deeper issues facing mothers, such as lack of quality and accessible day care, the unrealistic expectations of intensive mothering and new momism, and the divide and conquer tactics of mommy wars. These omissions conirm journalist Summer Wood’s observations that, in the end, mommy reality TV perpetuates the myth that a mother’s troubles are due to individual character or circumstance, and not due to the staggering cultural and social inequities faced by mothers everywhere.43 Maternal theorists Andrea O’Reilly (2006) and Jane Swigart (1991) note cultural scripts, such as the discourse of motherhood within Supernanny and Crash Test Mommy, operate to inform the public of the ideals set forth by the dominant group, to maintain particular standards, and to keep certain groups of mothers – such as those who live

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with mental or physical disabilities, those who live in poverty, those who are single or identify as queer – under surveillance.44 ALTERNATIVE READINGS : TALKING BACK

There are, however, alternative ways to interpret the messages in these shows. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall contends that television is implicated in “the provision and the selective construction of social knowledge, or social imagery, through which we perceive the ‘worlds,’ and ‘lived realities’ of others, and imaginarily reconstruct their lives and ours in some intelligible ‘world-of-the-whole.’”45 He argues that while a strand of meaning typically inscribed and associated with the dominant ideology customarily becomes the preferred or dominant reading, any given culture is also constituted with multiple streams of meaning and, thus, ensures texts carry multiple meanings with different audiences who work with different textual meanings.46 Television audiences, then, are not merely passive recipients of hegemonic meaning who uncritically accept textual messages; they are active creators of meaning able to interpret what they watch based on their own cultural knowledge. An audience might acknowledge that mothers struggle with the responsibilities of parenting and the pressures to conform to or recreate the “good” mother ideal. Some viewers may be critical of how the mythology of motherhood collides with the reality of mothering, while others might question the validity of the discourse of motherhood presented in the shows and/or side with mothers who are parenting within various contexts that are similar to those of viewers. In fact, I suspect that these possible alternative readings by the audience contributed to the decline in the ratings and the cancellation of Supernanny on 19 March 2011 after its seventh season, which dramatically dropped from its 2005 Emmy nomination status to ABC’s lowest-rated show of the week.47 Like the crash test mommies who often concede to the dificulties of mothering once they are in the thick of parenting alone for forty-eight hours, viewers likely realize that while most mothers try to adhere to assorted principles of intensive mothering, they also practice ways of successfully parenting that counter the dominant discourse of motherhood. While the audience is certainly being shown how mothers are supposed to behave, they are also exposed, through the actions of the mothers and crash test mommies, to the realities of mothers struggling to parent in decidedly unaccommodating and obtrusive situations that offer very limited support.

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NOTES

1 ABC, Supernanny, “About the Show,” accessed 3 August 2010, http://abc. go.com/primetime/supernanny/index?pn=about. 2 I chose to review these two shows in 2005, the year following their inaugural season in part because the very popular Supernanny was nominated for a People’s Choice Award and in part because Crash Test Mommy offered a Canadian approach to motherhood that at irst glance appeared to be less proscriptive than Supernanny. Not being that familiar with either series when I began watching these new programs, I randomly recorded half a dozen of each show without paying attention to the title or focus of the episode. I soon realized that beyond the similarities of using a formulaic structure and format of the shows, there lay an agenda of schooling mothers and others about the way to practice motherhood. The episodes critiqued in this chapter are all from those viewings. 3 Andrejevic, Reality TV : The Work of Being Watched, 4. 4 Ouellette and Murray, introduction to Reality TV : Remaking Television Culture, 1. 5 Ibid., 2. 6 Andrejevic, Reality TV , 2, 9. 7 Ibid., 69. 8 Ouelette and Murray, Reality TV , 4. 9 Several authors in Escoffery’s collection How Real is Reality TV ?: Essays on Representation and Truth deal with this question. See, for example, Escoffery, introduction; Crew, “Viewer Interpretations of Reality Television”; Johnston, “How Women Really Are”; King, “Training Camp of the Modular”; and Ogdon, “The Psycho-Economy of Reality Television and the ‘Tabloid Decade.’” 10 Andrejevic and Colby, “Racism and Reality TV,” 197–8. 11 Nick Gilhool, “Casting Call,” accessed 12 September 2009, http://revver. com/video/275288/nick-gilhool-casting-director-for-supernanny-us/. 12 “Same Sex Marriage Status in the United States by States,” Wikipedia.org. 29 September 2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_ status_in_the_United_States_by_state. 13 Taylor Gandossy, “Gay Adoption A New Take on the American Family,” CNN.com, 27 June 2007, http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/06/25/gay. adoption/index.html. 14 Roxanne Hooper, “Crash Test Mommies Needed for Television Show,” Langley Advance (Langley, BC), 10 August 2007, canada.com, http:// crashtestmommy.tv/press/langley_advance.pdf.

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15 Ogdon, “Psycho-Economy of Reality Television,” 34–5. 16 Nicole Oliver, interview about Crash Test Mommy, Entertainment Tonight Canada, accessed 3 September 2011, http://www.nicoleoliver.com/ publicity-video.htm. 17 Hooper, “Crash Test Mommies Needed.” 18 Nicolaus Mills, “Television and the Politics of Humiliation,” Dissent Magazine 39 (Summer 2004), accessed 3 August 2010, http://www. dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=351. 19 Ibid. 20 Douglas and Michaels, Mommy Myth, 204. 21 Hays, Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, x. 22 Judith Stadtman Tucker, “‘Mom’ Must Die: A Provocative New Book Exposes the Tyranny of ‘New Momism,” The Mothers Movement Online, February 2004, http://www.mothersmovement.org/books/reviews/ mommy_myth.htm. 23 Hall, “Mothering Mythology,” 60. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 61. 26 Ibid. 27 Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” 21. 28 Nina Darnton, “Mommy vs. Mommy,” Newsweek, 4 June 1990. 29 Peskowitz, Truth Behind the Mommy Wars, 22. 30 Rock, “The ‘Good Mother’ vs. The ‘Other’ Mother,” 22. 31 Ibid., 20. 32 Peskowitz, Truth Behind the Mommy Wars, 22. 33 Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” 21. 34 While the idealization of motherhood, and the “good”/”bad” mother dichotomy have been present since the eighteenth century, the ideals have changed over time. For further discussion, see Ladd-Taylor and Umansky, eds., “Bad” Mothers. 35 Supernanny, Channel 4, accessed 3 August 2010, http://www.channel4. com/health/microsites/S/supernanny/. 36 For more detail regarding the structure of the program and speciic techniques, see Green, “Supernanny: Disciplining Mothers Through a Narrative of Domesticity.” 37 Mills, “Television and the Politics of Humiliation,” 4. 38 The majority of families participating in and featured on Supernanny consist of two heterosexual married adults and their children. Very few shows feature single parents, who have generally been mothers, although a newly divorced father of four is featured 10 September

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39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

2007 according to the oficial Supernanny website www.supernanny. us.com. Supernanny: How to Get the Best From Your Children, season 1, 2005, directed by Casey Brumels and Chloe Soloman (Burbank, CA: Ventura Home Entertainment, 2006), DVD. Bassin, Honey, and Kaplan, eds., introduction to Representations of Motherhood, 17. Pope, Quinn, and Whyer, “Editorial: The Ideology of Mothering: Disruption and Reproduction of Patriarchy,” 445. Ibid., 442. Wood, “The Nan Show,” 71. O’Reilly, Rocking the Cradle; Swigart, The Myth of the Bad Mother. Hall, “Culture, the Media, and the Ideological Effect,” 140. Hall, “Encoding/Decoding.” Michael Hinman, “Jo Frost Quits Supernanny,” 7 November 2010, http:// insideblip.com/node/512/jo-frost-quits-supernanny.html.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andrejevic, Mark. Reality TV : The work of being watched. New York: Rowman and Littleield, 2004. Andrejevic, Mark, and Dean Colby. “Racism and Reality TV: The case of MTV’s Road Rules.” In How Real is Reality TV?: Essays on Representation and Truth, edited by David Escoffery, 195–211. London: McFarland, 2006. Bassin, Donna, Margaret Honey, and Meryl Kaplan. Introduction to Representations of Motherhood. Edited by Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryl Kaplan, 1–25. Yale: Yale University Press, 1994. Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1977. Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” In Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, edited by Diana Fuss, 13–31. New York: Routledge, 1991. Caplan, Paula. The New Don’t Blame Mother: Mending the Mother Daughter Relationship. New York: Routledge, 2000. Crew, Richard. “Viewer Interpretations of Reality Television: How Real is Survivor for Its Viewers?” In How Real is Reality TV?, edited by David Escoffery, 61–77. London: McFarland and Co, 2006. Crittenden, Ann. The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued. 2nd ed. New York: Owl, 2002. Collins, Patricia Hill. “Shifting the Centre: Race, Class and Feminist Theorizing about Motherhood.” In Mothering: Ideology, Experience and Agency, edited

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by Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey, 45–66. New York: Routledge, 1994. Darnton, Nina. “Mommy vs. Mommy” Newsweek, 4 June 1990, 64–7. Douglas, Susan, and Meredith Michaels. The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How it has Undermined All Women. New York: Free Press, 2004. Escoffery, David, ed. How Real is Reality TV ?: Essays on Representation and Truth. London: McFarland, 2006. Gardyn, Rebecca. “The Tribe Has Spoken.” American Demographics 23, no. 9 (2001): 34–40. Green, Fiona. “Supernanny: Disciplining Mothers Through a Narrative of Domesticity.” Story Telling: A Critical Journal of Popular Narrative 6, no. 2 (2007): 99–107. Hall, Pamela Courtney. “Mothering Mythology in the Late Twentieth Century: Science, Gender Lore and Celebratory Narrative.” Canadian Women’s Studies/Les Cahiers de la femme 18 (1998): 59–63. Hall, Stuart. “Culture, the Media, and the Ideological Effect.” In Mass Communications and Society, edited by James Curran, Michael Gurevitch, and Janet Woollacott, 315–48. London, Arnold, 1977. – “Encoding/Decoding.” In The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During, 90–103. New York: Routledge, 1993. Hays, Sharon. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Johnston, Elizabeth. “How Women Really Are: Disturbing Parallels between Reality Television and Eighteenth-Century Fiction.” In How Real is Reality TV ? 115–32. London: McFarland, 2006. King, Barry. “Training Camps of the Modular: Reality TV as a Form of Life.” In How Real is Reality TV ? 42–57. London: McFarland, 2006. Ladd-Taylor, Molly, and Lauri Umansky. Introduction to“Bad” Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America. Edited by Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky, 1–28. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Maushart, Susan. The Mask of Motherhood: How Becoming a Mother Changes Everything and Why We Pretend It Doesn’t. Toronto: Penguin Press, 2000. Mills, Nicolaus. “Television and the Politics of Humiliation.” Dissent Magazine. 39 (Summer 2004). Accessed 3 August 2010. http://www.dissentmagazine. org/article/?article=351. O’Reilly, Andrea. Rocking the Cradle: Thoughts on Motherhood, Feminism and the Possibility of Empowered Mothering. Toronto: Demeter Press, 2006.

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Ogdon, Bethany. “The Psycho-Economy of Reality Television in the ‘Tabloid Decade.’” In How Real is Reality TV ? 26–41. London: McFarland, 2006. Ouellette, Laurie, and Susan Murray. Introduction to Reality TV : Remaking Television Culture. Edited by Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette, 1–15. New York: New York University Press, 2004. Paperny Films. “Crash Test Mommy Now Casting: Be On the Show.” studioblanc.com. Accessed 12 September 2009. http://www.crashtestmommy. tv/beontheshow.html. Peskowitz, Miriam. The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars: Who Decides What Makes a Good Mother? Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2005. Pope, Deborah, Naiomi Quinn, and Mary Whyer. “Editorial: The Ideology of Mothering: Disruption and Reproduction of Patriarchy.” Signs 15, no. 3 (1990): 441–6. Rock, Lindsey. “The ‘Good Mother’ vs. The ‘Other’ Mother: The Girl-Mom.” Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering 9, no. 1 (2007): 20–8. Slice TV. Crash Test Mommy. Shows. Accessed 3 August 2010. http://www. slice.ca/Shows/ShowsPage.aspx?Title_ID=83491. Supernanny: How to Get the Best From Your Children. Season 1. 2005. Directed by Casey Brumels and Chloe Soloman. Burbank, CA: Ventura Home Entertainment, 2006. DVD. Swigart, Jane. The Myth of the Bad Mother: The Emotional Realities of Mothering. New York: Doubleday Publishing, 1991. Turnbull, Laura. Double Jeopardy: Motherwork and the Law. Toronto: Sumach Press, 2001. Wood, Summer. “The Nan Show: How Nannies Rewrote the Rule on TV Parenting.” Bitch Magazine 30, Fall 2005, 67–72.

4 “ THE

BUMP IS BACK ”

Celebrity Moms, Entertainment Journalism, and the “Media Mother Police” Elizabeth Podnieks

THE GOOD , THE BAD , AND THE GLOSSY

“Mommy, why is Jamie Lynn’s mom bad?” This question was posed to me by my then eight-year-old daughter, who, after wandering into my home ofice, began reading the headlines of all the Hollywood magazines I had strewn about the loor in writing this chapter. Her eyes had been drawn to a cover featuring the familiar face of Jamie Lynn Spears, star of her favorite TV show, Zoey 101. As the pregnant teen sister of Britney, Jamie Lynn joined the roster of celebrity moms and moms-to-be that has become the mainstay of entertainment journalism.1 This particular issue of US Weekly (7 January 2008) offers a photograph of the unsmiling girl being hugged protectively by her big sister, with the caption “Destroyed By Mama” plastered below the image. The subheading “Shame on Lynne Spears” identiies the derelict mama who is accused, in a series of pointform bulletins, of aiding and abetting her sixteen-year-old daughter’s pregnancy (“Let Jamie Lynn’s boyfriend sleep over”) as well as of marketing the story for personal inancial gain (“Lynne sees her girls as a piggy bank”). This incident in my ofice is not the irst time my daughter has been drawn to my glossy hoard, delighted by the fact that her professor-mother has been amassing such a magazine collection. Truth be told, I know just how she feels. I used to love this stuff. I poured over Tiger Beat as a preteen and moved on to People in high school. Much later, in the mid-1990s when I became a mother, I began to notice at the grocery check-out, on the Internet, and at the airport that

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almost every issue of every entertainment magazine features either celebrity wanna-be moms, pregnant stars, or mothers with their babies. Although women have obviously always been mothers, this intense media focus signalled that it was now suddenly trendy or hip to have a baby. My new motherly status coincided not simply with a Hollywood baby boom but more complexly with the increasing, and unprecedented, attention paid to mothers in all spheres of society, including political, economic, and cultural. Before having children, I enjoyed (and accepted as a clichéd guilty pleasure) reading about rich and famous people whose lives and experiences would never intersect with my own. Once I became a mother, and once I became attuned to the maternal preoccupations of my gossipy pastime, I began to feel implicated in the images of and headlines about mothering. This personal response went hand in hand with my professional, academic turn to the ield of motherhood studies, stimulating me to examine critically the representations of celebrity mothers in entertainment journalism. Over the past decade, countless celebrities have become mothers: Angelina Jolie, Britney Spears, Katie Holmes, Gwyneth Paltrow, Halle Berry, Reese Witherspoon, Kate Winslet, Jennifer Garner, Cate Blanchett, Naomi Watts, Michelle Williams, Jessica Alba, Madonna, Jennifer Lopez, Demi Moore, Julia Roberts, and Brooke Shields, to name but a few. Print magazines like People, In Touch, US, Life & Style, OK! Weekly, Hello! Canada, and Star, along with their online versions and Twitter feeds, provide readers with weekly, daily, hourly, and even minute-by-minute updates about celebrity parenting.2 Since the end of the twentieth century, famous moms have been under increasingly invasive surveillance by the “media mother police.” While Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels use this term to describe a force of child care experts that watches over, instructs, and passes judgment on mothers in and through the media,3 I  expand the phrase to include the reporters, the paparazzi, and the “celebrity-industrial complex” they serve4 – who photograph, headline, and dissect the maternal images and mothering practices of celebrities. In this chapter, I investigate the ways that entertainment journalism monitors celebrity mothers and charges them with being good or bad, envied or despised. Drawing on Sharon Hays’s “ideology of intensive mothering,” Douglas and Michaels’s concept of the “new momism,” and Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky’s theorizing of “bad mothers” and “mother blaming,” I explore how motherhood scholarship intersects with that of celebrity culture. In particular, I focus on how these approaches to maternal narratives resonate with Reni Celeste’s assertion

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that “glamour and disaster are the two major commodities of a media culture.”5 Through a reading of how Angelina Jolie (“Momgelina”) and Britney Spears (“Unitney”) – arguably two of the most overexposed media moms today – are represented in entertainment magazines, I show that “glamour and disaster are the two major” constructs of celebrity mothers as well. In so doing, I consider the extent to which celebrities are complicit with the media in fostering and perpetuating intensive mothering and new momist myths, and how readers and fans use such media as a measure and relection of their own maternal values and accomplishments. BIG BROTHER / MOTHER IS WATCHING

As outlined in the introduction to this collection, in The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood Hays contends that contemporary women are driven by an ideology she calls intensive mothering, which is “a gendered model that advises mothers to expend a tremendous amount of time, energy, and money in raising their children.”6 She explains that in such a climate mothers are called on “to be at once nutrition experts, psychological counselors, and cognitive development specialists,” and if they don’t measure up, “other ‘experts’ may charge them with child neglect, emotional abuse, and toxic parenting’ or denounce them for creating a ‘dysfunctional family.’”7 The rampant and culturally condoned criticism of mothers is the subject of “Bad” Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America, in which editors Ladd-Taylor and Umansky argue that from the twentieth century on, mothers in the United States have been measured in stereotypical terms, including “the welfare mother, the teen mother, the career woman who has no time for her kids, the drug addict who poisons her fetus, the pushy stage mother, the overprotective Jewish mother,” and judged unit to parent. While some women are guilty of “real violations of parental duty,” Ladd-Taylor and Umansky underscore the fact that ultimately, “mothers get blamed for everything, pure and simple.”8 Emphasizing that “the deinition of a ‘bad’ mother intertwines with that of a ‘good’ mother,” they argue that “vestiges of the Victorian ideal of motherhood persist: the ‘good’ mother remains selfabnegating, domestic, preternaturally attuned to her children’s needs; the ‘bad’ mother has failed on one or more of these scores.”9 Ladd-Taylor and Umansky quote a 1908 speech by Theodore Roosevelt in which he noted that while the good mom was “sacred,” the bad one who “shirks

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her duty, as wife and mother, earns the right to our contempt.”10 Nowhere is this contempt more blatant or bold than in today’s tabloids: witness the “Shame on Lynne Spears” cover mentioned earlier. Douglas and Michaels address related concerns in The Mommy Myth, analyzing representations of mothering in the media through what they brand the new momism, an ideology disseminated largely by the media whose surface celebration of motherhood belies a deeper mandate to enforce unattainable or unrealistic standards of maternal perfection. The myth is “that motherhood is eternally fulilling and rewarding, that it is always the best and most important thing you do, that there is only a narrowly prescribed way to do it right, and that if you don’t love each and every second of it there’s something really wrong with you.” Acknowledging that the new momism accepts the gains of feminism, which allowed women to claim autonomy from men and to choose whether to have children, for instance, Douglas and Michaels clarify that the new momism simultaneously contradicts feminism by insisting that the only proper choice women can make is to have children and devote themselves to motherhood.11 In the chapter “Attack of the Celebrity Moms,” the authors identify the “celebrity mom proile” as the genre that has been, from the 1980s to the present, “the most inluential media form to sell the new momism,” inscribed in home and entertainment magazines “where its key features were reined, reinforced, and romanticized,” as I will demonstrate in my analysis of the tabloids.12 Thus, on the one hand, with every headline, image, and story showcasing celebrities as perfect mothers who are seemingly fulilling the new momism, entertainment journalism contributes to fashioning the unreal, fantasy-driven supermom. On the other hand, as Daniel Boorstin notes in The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, our penchant for worshipping celebrities is offset by our contradictory impulse to “debunk” them through “critical journalistic biographies or by vulgar ‘conidential magazines,’” which signal that they are, in fact, undeserving of our attention and admiration.13 Likewise, Ellis Cashmore explains in Celebrity/ Culture, “Celebrity culture became a feature of social life, especially in the developed world, during the late 1980s/early 1990s, and extended into the twenty-irst century, assisted by a global media which promoted, lauded, sometimes abominated, and occasionally annihilated” entertainment igures.14 As much as magazines airbrush the realities of mothering via their photoshopped cover mothers and their accompanying luff stories, the magazines simultaneously delight in pulling back the dreamy veil coating these images, supposedly exposing mothers as incompetent at

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best, dangerous at worst. In exploring the link between the mother and the celebrity, then, I want to focus on how the dichotomy of the “good” versus the “bad” mother has its counterpart in a culture that paradoxically praises and debases its celebrities. According to Cashmore, media technology has affected the ability of journalists, the paparazzi, and fans “not just to peer but to examine and scrutinize in forensic detail” the star’s life, and this notion of scrutinizing relates to how the media polices mothers.15 In Foucauldian terms, Cashmore describes how “celebs must surrender themselves to life in a kind of virtual Panopticon – the ideal prison where the cells are arranged around a central watchtower in which concealed authority igures can inspect without being inspected. We, the fans, are in the watchtower and the celebs are open to our inspection.”16 In a related sense, Hays explains, via Jacques Donzelot’s 1979 The Policing of Families, that “social workers, public schools, the courts, and law-enforcement oficers all contribute to training mothers and children at the same time that they serve government interest in ‘policing the family.’”17 Douglas and Michaels identify a branch of this force as operating within the regime of intensive mothering, where “everyone watches us, we watch ourselves and other mothers, and we watch ourselves watching ourselves,” leading to the conclusion that “motherhood has become a psychological police state.” From the 1980s on, the media in particular has contributed to “training mothers” to respond to certain child rearing practices and ideologies, engaging in what Douglas and Michaels refer to as “unprecedented media surveillance.”18 They urge women to “turn the surveillance cameras away from ourselves and instead turn them on the media that shaped us and that manufactured more of our beliefs and practices than we may appreciate, or want to admit.”19 Heeding this directive, I adjust my lens to the entertainment journalism that tracks, labels, and judges Angelina Jolie and Britney Spears.20

“ MOMGELINA ”

VS .

“ UNFITNEY ”

Stars, Boorstin suggests, “intensify their celebrity images simply by becoming widely known for relations among themselves. By a kind of symbiosis, celebrities live off one another.”21 In like manner, mothers are categorized in relation to each other, as we recall Ladd-Taylor and Umansky’s assertion that “the deinition of a ‘bad’ mother intertwines with that of a ‘good’ mother.” Both the media and its target audiences position Jolie and Spears in symbiosis, primarily in terms of maternal

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reputation. In 2007, Liz Kelly, “Celebritology” blogger for washingtonpost.com, announced the winners of her “2nd Annual Lizzie Awards” as voted by her readers: “Most Admired Celebrity”: Angelina Jolie; “Biggest Celebrity Train Wreck”: Britney Spears.22 OK! Magazine’s poll of 1,100 children determined that for 2007, Jolie was the “nicest” celebrity while Spears was the “naughtiest.”23 Such cultural status feeds into the monikers “Momgelina” and “Unitney,” which have been applied liberally in the blogosphere over the past few years to describe the maternal identities of Jolie and Spears. Politically loaded, the epithets pass judgment on the perceived mothering abilities of the women while underscoring the workings of new momism.24 More generally, today’s popular culture has coined such divisive catchphrases as “yummy mummy” and “slummy mummy,” which have entered the lexicon through the deining examples of celebrities.25 Jolie was named the “yummiest mummy” in Hollywood in 2007 and 2009,26 and it is no wonder that her antithesis, “Unitney,” was dubbed “Britain’s ‘ultimate slummy mummy’” for 2006.27 Blogging fans perpetuate and comment on these conceptions by launching sites like Momgelina.com (“the Jolie-Pitt Kids Source”) and poorBritney.com. Prior to becoming a mother, Jolie was portrayed in the press as a bisexual, tattooed rebel who broke taboos by French kissing her brother at the March 2000 Oscar’s, for example, and whose favorite necklace was a vial illed with the blood of her one-time husband Billy Bob Thornton. But then, in August 2001, she was named a Goodwill Ambassador by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and on 10 March 2002, she adopted her irst child, Cambodian orphan Maddox, at which point her transformation from dominatrix to Mother Teresa began. A second adoption, of Ethiopian Zahara (on 6 July 2005), and third adoption, of Vietnamese Pax (on 15 March 2007), as well as the births of her biological daughter Shiloh (on 27 May 2006) and twins Knox Léon and Vivienne Marcheline (on 12 July 2008), solidiied her status as a bona ide supermom.28 It is important to note that Jolie irst became a mother only three months before she separated from Thornton, after which she gained sole custody of Maddox. Naomi Wolf credits Jolie for popularizing the single mother as “the new maternal ideal” for (post)feminist women “whose maternal drive is so selless and intense that they choose to raise children even under the burden of their solitary status.” Further, Wolf suggests the shift in perception of the single mother from bad to good mom was created by a Vanity Fair spread that staged Jolie as “the sexy young woman

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and her son in a luxurious hotel bedroom,” making being a single mother seem “fun and glamorous.”29 Of course, as the world knows, Jolie did not remain single for long. She has been partnered with Brad Pitt since 2005, and her seemingly stable, loving relationship with one of Hollywood’s most desired heartthrobs has made her a woman to envy. She thus simultaneously embodies the sacriicial impulses of the “new” single mom, the glamour of the superstar, and the “good” attributes of the new momist mom. Throughout these years, Jolie’s fulilling maternal life has become a staple of celebrity journalists who are eagerly on the lookout for the next baby – “Angelina Pregnant? The Bump is Back and She’s Taking Prenatal Vitamins!” – and who are only too happy to indulge her persona as a responsible, selless, sacriicing Madonna.30 The 19 March 2007 issue of People seems thrilled to announce on its cover that Jolie and Pitt are “Adopting Again!” Jolie delightfully comments on her adoption of Pax: “I just want more kids … I’m having a great time.”31 Not long after, the 24 September 2007 cover of OK! Weekly announced, “How Shiloh saved Angie,” with the caption, “With her career on hold to enjoy her kids, the hands-on-mom is getting healthy and planning her next pregnancy.” Inside we learn, under the heading “A hands-on mom,” that Jolie, who “has no interest in reverting to her wild-child ways,” “has made it no secret that she inds more fulillment from family than ilm.”32 Hello! Canada featured “Angelina and Her Children” on the 31 March 2008 cover with the copy, “How the Superstar Makes Time for Four – and More.” Called “Hollywood’s Busiest Mom” on the cover, Jolie, the story inside makes clear, inds that mothering comes “naturally” to her: “Not many people would consider a stroll to the corner store with four youngsters under the age of seven a leisure activity while pregnant, but superstar mom Angelina Jolie makes it look like child’s play.”33 She also makes it look elegant; though her children are dressed in casual garb, Jolie glides to the store in a rather improbable gown that literally trails the ground behind her. One photo explains that she “is looking voluptuous in a lowing Rachel Pally dress.”34 Moreover, the 2 June 2008 Life & Style cover blurts out, “Angelina’s $20 Million Twins! Luxury yachts, mansions and an expert medical team. These babies are being spoiled with extravagant gifts – and love,” testifying to a Jolie who abides by the mandate of intensive mothering in that she expends “a tremendous amount of time, energy, and money in raising” her kids.35 Jolie is the celebrity role-mother par excellence. When women with children began entering the workforce en masse in the 1970s, they lacked in

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role models, but the media presence of celebrity mothers, “women who had combined demanding careers with motherhood,” made them, according to Douglas and Michaels, perfect for the part of mentor. The type of mothering promulgated by media moms, from the get-go, was the intensive kind, for they were eager to prove that in going to work they had not, in any way, betrayed “true womanhood.”36 In describing fans’ relationships to their idols, Cashmore contends, “fans adopt what they see as a celebrity’s attributes, including his or her values and behavior.”37 Accordingly, then, female fans – and readers of puff proiles – have been well-positioned to absorb the ideologies of intensive mothering and the new momism as promoted by the likes of Jolie. Over the past few decades, although countless role models have become available to women, the media machine has only expanded its red-carpet coverage of maternity, underscoring that “the mother” is perhaps the greatest role a woman can play. And Jolie plays it to the hilt. She is “having a great time” with motherhood despite the grueling demands of an acting career. By parading in sexy outits and launting her commitment to both Pitt and her brood in interviews and photo ops, she remains, as the intensive mother must, “true to her womanhood.” She also makes obvious that just as the tabloids work in the service of intensive mothering and the new momism, so the stars understand the laws by which they as mothers are regulated. Like Jolie, Spears entered our popular consciousness as a provocative igure. She has been engaged in a fraught relationship with the media from the release of … Baby One More Time, her 1999 debut album and single video featuring an erotically charged schoolgirl, to her surprise marriage in July 2004 to dancer Kevin Federline, whom she had known for only a few months. Pop star Spears became mother to Sean Preston on 14 September 2005.38 However, with no new albums or scheduled concerts, her career went into decline at the same time that her family life began to collapse. She iled for divorce in November 2006, and even before the birth of her second son, Jayden James, on 12 September 2006, Spears had been put on the fast track to “bad” motherhood, being dubbed “the trainwreck” en route.39 She was publicly shamed when photos surfaced on the Internet showing her driving her car with baby Sean on her lap;40 when it was reported that he had fallen from his high chair and fractured his skull;41 and when the newly single mother was photographed on several different occasions lashing her crotch sans underwear to the paparazzi.42 Unsurprisingly, Spears has provided the gossip rags with endless fodder as they waged an unrelenting assault on her maternal identity, practices, and abilities.

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The period between 2007 and 2008 proved a particularly disastrous one for Spears, and therefore a gluttonous feeding frenzy for the press. In February 2007, having prematurely checked out of rehab, which she had entered to control her alcohol and drug addictions, she shaved her head, attacked a paparazzo’s car with her umbrella, and soon after lost custody of her children. On 5 March 2007, US magazine featured a large cover photo of the bald Britney with the headline, “‘Help Me’: Insiders and ex-staffers reveal Brit’s loneliness, self-hatred & drug use as her parents desperately pray.” Overlaid on her chest is a photo of son Sean with the caption, “Who has the babies.” Spears’s “Help Me” is echoed by the representations of her sons; in the 13 August 2007 issue of US, Sean and Jayden are front and centre with “Britney’s Boys HELP!” blaring across the page. A photo of Spears, in a cut-off leather jacket, bare midriff, and leather underpants barely attached to a pair of ishnet stockings, is enclosed in a circle with the redundant description, “Britney on a stripper pole.” The text under the “HELP!” sign reads, “Soda in baby bottles, Mommy’s many men, nighttime cries for Daddy’s love. Kevin battles for Sean & Jayden as Britney grows more dangerous.” That same week (13 August), Life & Style published a nearly identical cover with the two boys side by side and the headline yelling, “Britney’s Babies: HELP US!” A smaller photo of Spears is enclosed in a circle at the bottom with the caption, “Out-of-control Britney puts her sons in danger again during a wild trip to Las Vegas.” Taken together, the three cries for “help” suggest that Spears and her sons are desperately seeking intervention, calling to that igure of authority, the police, to rescue them, while simultaneously invoking the media police to report them. The reference to the “insiders and ex-staffers” who “reveal” all on the 5 March 2007 cover of US is an example of the policing mechanism driving this media machine. Spears and her offspring are being watched. This fact is made obvious in the 27 August 2007 issue of US, whose cover discloses, “Brit’s Nannies Tell All” and “Ex-staffers turn on Spears, spilling her darkest secrets to an enraged Kevin” – and to readers. Bullet points make public her supposedly private behavior, which includes being “Drunk with the babies,” her “bizarre nudity,” and her “demands they share her bed.” An earlier issue of Star, calling itself “Nannygate,” promised, “Hollywood Nannies Tell All!” (2 April 2007), including intimacies related to Spears’s mothering. The feature article imparts that these nannies “help safeguard A-list celebrities’ kids – but not all of their behindclosed-doors secrets.” That is, like the police force, the nannies are there

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to serve and protect. Like the media police, they are there to promote the ideologies of intensive mothering and the new momism, rewarding those who adhere to its rules and punishing (via shame, blame, and exposure) those who don’t. Thus, for instance, we learn that “one former nanny claimed that the popstar did shots of Jack Daniels while breast-feeding!” and “sometimes she’d give Sean Coca-Cola in his bottle – and he’d fall asleep with it. According to the source, she’s looking into having Sean’s teeth whitened!”43 Spears’s “bad” mother is frequently intertwined with Jolie’s “good” mother. The blown-up image of the shaved Spears on the aforementioned 5 March 2007 cover of US (“Help Me”) is juxtaposed to a picture of Jolie and Pitt on the other half of the page, contentedly pushing Zahara and Shiloh in a luxe double stroller. Similarly, the 24 September 2007 issue of OK! Canada (“How Shiloh Saved Angie”) presents a large photo of Jolie, gorgeous as ever as she holds and looks happily at Shiloh. In a sidebar, we see Spears, clad in the sequined two-piece dance suit and ishnet stockings made infamous in her globally derided opening act at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards, a performance her fans and producers had hoped would signal the resurrection of her career but that in fact buried it further. Her ensuing treatment by the media underscores Cashmore’s assertion that it can “abominate” and “annihilate” celebrities. Moreover, my argument that the debased performer is aligned with the “bad” mother is realized in the way the press conlates Spears’s musical disaster with a maternal one, as the OK! Canada caption accuses her thus: “BRIT misses kids’ birthday party for sad ‘comeback.’” Some cases of “bad” mothering involve “real violations of parental duty,” as we have heard from Ladd-Taylor and Umansky. In September 2007, a judge ruled that Spears must be tested regularly for drug and alcohol use and be assigned a parenting counselor. By October, Federline had gained full custody of their sons.44 Despite the seriousness of these developments, the tabloids lost no time in merging the legal and new momist surveillance of Spears. On the 19 November 2007 cover, US showcased her in a near-transparent pink and black catsuit, calling her “SICK!” and explaining, “Brit Slammed by Parenting Coach” because “Mental illness signs worsen”; she “Leaves boys in car while shopping”; and she “Swaps clothes with bartender.” She is monitored from judicial, psychological, and aesthetic angles, while her very real dificulties are trivialized by the media as it reduces her life to sensational sound bites.

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HOT HOLLYWOOD MOMS

In analyzing Spears’s treatment by the media, I ind it helpful to consider Norma Coates’s work on the “bad” mom Courtney Love. Widow of Kurt Cobain, musician, and struggling heroin addict, Love is also the mother of Frances Bean Cobain. As Coates suggests, “The question of her itness to mother lurks just beneath the surface, when it does not emerge openly, in mainstream representations of Love; it is the source of the media’s fascination with her.”45 Coates argues that “the boundaries of ‘acceptable’ motherhood are thereby policed through the demonization” of the singer, and it is precisely this demonization that we see in the treatment of Spears, especially according to class and sexuality.46 For example, Love’s habit of bringing Frances Bean on stage during concerts, where Love screams and swears at her audience, is deemed an exercise in how not to behave in front of one’s child. Coates interprets reaction against Love as evidence that “certain bourgeois behavioral codes are being reinforced here” such as “tired tropes of ‘ladylike behavior.’”47 The tabloid focus on Spears taking drugs, doing “shots of Jack Daniels,” and buying teeth whitener for babies, as well as dancing on a stripper pole in ishnet stockings, underscores the underlying issue of class, as Spears clearly transgresses the “bourgeois behavioral codes” that are a hallmark of intensive mothering and new momism. Spears’s “white trash” persona intersects with the “welfare mother” and the “drug addict who poisons her fetus,” stereotypes of the “bad” moms identiied by Ladd-Taylor and Umansky.48 Coates goes on to state that “Love’s most damaging activity as a mother is her refusal to deny her sexuality. Her physical appearance models that of the stereotypical slatternly woman, or whore,” and the same can be said of Spears.49 The 13 August 2007 issue of US with the bottom inset cover photo of “Britney on a stripper pole” offers a fullpage blow-up of the same image in the feature story, with the query, “What If This Were Your Mom?”50 Coates argues that where the “normative deinition of mothers’ sexuality is that it is absent or in abeyance,” “Love exposes that belief for the oppressive fallacy that it is, and for that she is punished,” as is Spears, marked by the media as a fallen woman, just as she is a fallen, burned out star.51 Petra Büskens notes that “heterosexual monogamy” is culturally inscribed in the deinition of mother, as is our “intuitive, albeit ideological, sense that a good mother doesn’t ‘fuck around.’”52 As a mother who “fucked around,” Spears

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cannot, in these terms, be a “good” mother. Just as “Love’s launting of her sexual nature rails against normative deinitions of mothers’ sexuality,”53 so Spears is complicit in this imaging of herself: witness her vagina lashing and refusal to curb public displays of her promiscuity despite constant paparazzi tailgating. However, returning to Douglas and Michaels, we can consider sexuality from an alternate standpoint. Celebrity moms are positioned as role models in terms not only of how they respond to 1970s feminism and beyond, but also of how they balance maternal practices and attitudes with sexual ones. Indeed, a key reason women turned to celebrities at the end of the twentieth century is that they “suggested something that many of us wanted to believe: that becoming a mom didn’t automatically mean you were now an unattractive, asexual” woman.54 Yummy Jolie is a case in point. According to People.com, she “says being pregnant makes her feel womanly and sexy”; “Plus, the actress says that her partner, Brad Pitt, ‘inds pregnancy very sexy. So that makes me feel very sexy.’”55 Here, as in other interviews, Jolie uses the media to promote a version of maternity that is contained within the heterosexual and monogamous imperatives of the new momist ideology. Where the media punishes Spears for her transgressions, it rewards Jolie by perpetuating her self-constructed fairytale. Thus, for instance, the 11 February 2008 cover for Hello! Canada, in which a pregnant Jolie walks the red carpet with Pitt, drips with honey: “With Brad by her side, Angelina Jolie looks happier than ever as their love story continues to fascinate the world.” Inside, the two appear in a photo with the caption,“Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt couldn’t hide their love. The two were seen kissing, holding hands and sharing laughs.”56 Spears’s sex life is sluttish, for which she is to be despised; Jolie’s is romantic, for which she is to be envied. Despite recent sexual liberations afforded to mothers, then, they remain policed by a media still abiding by its normative rulebook. One other issue raised by Coates that I want to address relates to “peripatetic mothers, who wander away from a stable home base with or without their children.” Love has been subjected to many critiques for such behavior, leading Coates to suggest that “the most extreme conclusion one might draw from them is that Mother should stay at home all of the time, providing a stable and safe haven for her child, an embodiment of conservative ‘family values.’”57 Jolie and Pitt are globetrotting actors; their children, always in tow on ilm locations, have no stable base, no regular school, and few opportunities to become socialized with outside friends. These facts have led some tabloids to question Jolie’s

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mothering. We have heard Jolie afirm that she plans to become, at least for a while, wholly committed to the domestic sphere, but US magazine instigated what has become a Jolie backlash as it queried her reputation on the 9 April 2007 cover with the headline, “Her Twisted Double Life,” highlighting “Her broken promise to be a stay-at-home mom” and “How she uses her kids to manipulate the media.” Inside, Jolie is admonished for, among other things, showing “poor taste” in selling photos of Pax and acting cruelly by changing his Vietnamese birth name, Pham Quang Sang. The story details her plan to sign on for more and more ilms, casting her as a hypocrite for her “I will stay at home” pledge.58 This US issue signals that although the dichotomies of the good/bad mother are age-old and ixed ones, individual celebrities rise and fall in the media’s wheel of fortune. Thus, in an inverse of magazines discussed previously, Star (9 June 2008) ran the headline, “Nanny Tells All, Behind Closed Doors!” But this time, it is Jolie who stands accused, as bullets report, “Skinny dipping at 2 a.m.” and “chocolate & pizza for breakfast.” Jolie is slapped with these charges beside a rehabilitating Spears who, in another instance of intertwining, occupies the top of the cover page. Smiling with her son Jayden, Spears has earned a respite from the paparazzi bloodhounds, as the copy reads, “Brit & Her Son I Love You, Mom” [sic]. Throughout 2008, under medical and legal watch, she managed to control her addictions, recover her mental health, and gain increased visitation with her boys. For this good behaviour, the tabloids rewarded her accordingly. While inside the magazine Jolie is taken to task by a tell-all nanny,59 Spears receives royal treatment: “Britney & Her Boys: A Mother’s Love Conquers All.” A series of photos, in which Spears hugs, kisses, and plays with her sons, is evidence that she has begun to embrace the dictates of intensive mothering and new momism: “Britney Spears has turned over a new leaf – and has been bonding with the boys she’s barely been able to watch grow up.”60 That same week (9 June), OK! published a nearidentical cover with the headline: “Brit’s private mommy moments: Finally happy and dating a good man, she’s becoming the mom she always wanted to be.” She is also becoming the “good” mother whom the media police cautioned her to be. CONCLUSION

Douglas and Michaels, as well as Cashmore, stress that even those of us who dislike entertainment journalism cannot avoid its cultural presence

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and inluence.61 Yahoo! indicates that in 2008 Spears was, for the fourth year running, the number one subject searched on the Internet, and in the 2007 and 2009 editions of the Guinness World Records she was named the Most Searched Person.62 In 2008, Jolie was ranked by Forbes magazine the third most powerful celebrity in the world, becoming number one in 2009; she was one of “The 100 Most Inluential People” identiied by Time magazine in 2006 and 2009; and one of “The 50 People Who Matter” spotlighted by the New Statesman in 2010.63 Clearly, how maternal stars are represented in and how they present themselves to the tabloids has far reaching implications for women everywhere. Tabloids soared to market success since their launch in the 1970s in part because, as Cashmore believes, “people preferred to read about everyday events in the lives of fantastic people rather than fantastic events in the lives of everyday people.” He quotes The Economist’s description of the Star, which “treats celebrities as people to envy (better clothes, better dates, better sex and, inevitably, better body parts) but also, if captured from a slightly different angle, as people who are just as wretched as you.”64 Magazines, working to promote normative conceptions about maternal responsibility, sexuality, and performance, depict celebrity moms who serve as role models to inspire non-famous women to dream about and to strive for (even while knowing they can never attain) maternal perfection. Readers are given some encouragement by the same magazines, which permits them to feel a degree of equality and hence identiication with maternal stars through stories about adoption, or battling an addiction, for instance, and in more banal terms, through features such as US magazine’s “Stars, they’re just like us!” section, which feeds us images of celebrities looking and acting like ordinary folk, caught without makeup while taking a toddler to preschool, for example. Tabloids, however, do more than simply show that stars can be “just like us” or “just as wretched as you”; they show stars who are in fact more “wretched,” as coverage of Spears surely proves. Such stories are cautionary tales, toughlove warnings issued to all mothers from the panoptical tower. Celebrities may talk back to their tabloid trackers when they are given opportunities to voice their “side” of a story within said publications or in interviews on talk shows, or when they post their own material, as Spears does at www.britneyspears.com/blog and on her “It’s Britney!” app. I want to close, however, with a brief look at the growing phenomenon of non-famous women who blog about celebrity moms and “celebuspawn,” positing how they use their online forums to talk about and back to the glossy images and directives of entertainment journalism.65

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After Danielle Friedland launched the Celebrity Baby Blog in 2004, a plethora of blogs about the maternally famous followed suit, such as Mamarazzi, babyrazzi, Celebrity BabyBlog, Celebrity Baby Watch, Celebrity Babies Blog, Celebrity Babies, Celebrity Baby Pictures & Baby Blog, Black Celebrity Kids, Celebrity Baby Scoop, FAME baby, and Celebrity Pregnancy.66 Posted and maintained by those interested in – perhaps obsessed with – celebrity motherhood, the blogs are predicated on and are responses to “news breaking” media coverage as proffered in the tabloids. Discussing the power of the public, Graeme Turner explains that “audiences place individual celebrities somewhere along a continuum that ranges from seeing them as objects of desire or emulation to regarding them as spectacular freaks worthy of our derision.”67 In a related sense, Douglas and Michaels position women who read celebrity proiles accordingly: “On the one end is the totally accepting uncritical fan, on the other end is the cynical hip mama who don’t believe none of it, and in the middle – where most women are – are the negotiators who work and play with what they know to be the blurriness between fact and fantasy.”68 Fans who blog also span such a range; their sites exemplify how social media fosters maternal communities in which normative discourses of motherhood are shared and debated. Moreover, the networks of countless bloggers who voice their opinions on the parenting practices of celebrity moms support Cashmore’s contention that fans typically want, more than anything, simply to participate in a dialogue about their own tastes and interests with other like-minded fans.69 Such a dialogue, as a form of gossip, is appreciated by Carol Brooks who explains in “What Celebrity Worship Says About Us” that gossiping about the famous is a healthy and relevant activity: “By using other people’s triumphs and tragedies as fodder for discussion, we collectively deine who we are and what we value as a culture.”70 Women who read tabloids and contribute to celebrity blogs use the content to gauge their own responses to the ideologies of intensive mothering and the new momism, and thus “deine who [they] are” as mothers and “what [they] value” in their own maternal practices, identities, and experiences. At the same time, they might explicitly and implicitly be critiquing the tabloid industry itself, recognizing that “other people’s triumphs and tragedies” are constructs revealing the ideological underpinnings of the “celebrity-industrial complex.” It is in this spirit that I redirect my daughter’s question posed at the start of this chapter, suggesting she ask not “why is Lynn Spears a bad mom?” but rather what does it mean that the magazine calls her one?

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NOTES

1 I use the terms “entertainment,” “celebrity,” and “tabloid” journalism interchangeably, speciically in relation to the group of North American glossy gossip magazines focusing on celebrity culture, such as People, US, In Touch, Life & Style, OK! Canada, Hello! Canada, and Star. My chapter does not question the “truth” of the material examined here but rather, taking it at face value, queries maternal discourses within the media. 2 See, for example, People.com, http://www.people.com; UsMagazine.com, http://www.usmagazine.com; OK! Magazine, http://www.okmagazine.com; hellomagazine.ca, http://www.hellomagazine.ca; and Star Magazine, http:// www.starmagazine.com. 3 Douglas and Michaels, Mommy Myth, 130. 4 Orth, The Importance of Being Famous, 19–20. Orth coined the phrase “the Celebrity-Industrial Complex,” which she describes as “the media monster that creates the reality we think we see, and the people who thrive or perish there.” 5 Celeste, “Screen Idols,” 5. 6 Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, x. 7 Ibid., 71. 8 Ladd-Taylor and Umansky, eds.,“Bad” Mothers, 2. 9 Ibid., 6. 10 Ibid., 10. 11 Douglas and Michaels, Mommy Myth, 3–4. 12 Ibid., 113. 13 Boorstin, The Image, 75. 14 Cashmore, Celebrity/Culture, 3. 15 Ibid., 8. 16 Ibid., 4. 17 Hays, Cultural Contradictions, 162. 18 Douglas and Michaels, Mommy Myth, 6–7. 19 Ibid., 25. 20 My analysis focuses on the covers of magazines collected in the period from 2006 to 2008, when Jolie and Spears began attracting as much publicity – and scrutiny – for being mothers as performers. In particular, these years, the nadir for Spears, saw the media launch its construction of the “bad” mother Spears, often, as I argue, in opposition to the “good” mother Jolie. During this time I purchased a variety of weekly entertainment magazines like People, US, OK!, Hello! Canada, Life & Style, and Star, and chose for study a selection of fourteen that featured either Jolie or Spears, or both, on the cover.

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21 Boorstin, Image, 65. 22 Liz Kelly, “2nd Annual Lizzie Awards.” Celebritology (blog), Washingtonpost.com, 9 July 2007, http://blog.washingtonpost.com/ celebritology/2007/07/2nd_annual_lizzie_awards_winne.html. 23 “This Year’s Naughtiest? Britney & Paris.” OK! Magazine. The children, aged 2–17, “were asked to name people they thought belong on Santa Claus’” naughty and nice list. Miley (Hannah Montana) Cyrus won the nicest award from children aged 2–12, Jolie from those aged 13–17. 24 See deinitions at Urban Dictionary: “Unitney”: “britney spears [sic] being determined an unit parent,” accessed 5 February 2010, http://www. urbandictionary.com/deine.php?term=unitney. “Momgelina”: “A mother that possesses the abilities to juggle several different seemingly impossible tasks at any given time, all the while looking absolutely amazing doing so,” accessed 5 February 2010, http://www.urbandictionary.com/deine. php?term=Momgelina. 25 For descriptions of “yummy” and “slummy” mummy, see the introduction to the collection. 26 “One hot mama,” Yahoo! Lifestyle, 19 March 2007, http://au.lifestyle. yahoo.com/b/famous/1239/one-hot-mama; “Angelina is the Number One ‘Yummy Mummy,” 20 March 2009, http://www.celebitchy.com/42208/ angelina_jolie_is_the_number_one_yummy_mummy. 27 “Posh is a Top Mum,” Mirror.co.uk, 18 September 2006, http://www. mirror.co.uk/news/topstories/2006/09/18 /posh-is-a-top-mum- 8952017767382. 28 “Jolie, Angelina,” Wikipedia.org, accessed 19 January 2010, http://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelina_Jolie. 29 Naomi Wolf, “Selish Yuppie to Heroic Parent,” Globe and Mail, 7 September 2010, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/ from-selish-yuppie-to-heroic-parent/article1694284/. 30 “Angelina Pregnant?” Star, 13 November 2006, Cover. 31 Jason Lynch and Mary Green, “Coming Soon: Kid No. 4!” People, 19 March 2007, 57. 32 Shana Bass, “How Shiloh saved Angie,” OK! Weekly, 24 September 2007, 48. 33 Jennifer Evans, “While Brad Breaks Ground for Charity Angelina Jolie Takes Their Four Children for a Stroll in New Orleans,” Hello! Canada no.77, 31 March 2008, 52. 34 Ibid., 50. 35 Hays, Cultural Contradictions, x. 36 Douglas and Michaels, Mommy Myth, 118.

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37 Cashmore, Celebrity, 83. 38 The general biographical details are from Wikipedia, “Spears, Britney,” accessed 15 August 2008, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britney_spears. 39 See, for instance, Urban Dictionary, s.v. “trainwreck,” accessed 8 August 2008, http://www.urbandictionary.com/deine.php?term=trainwreck& page=2. 40 See, for instance, “Britney: ‘I Love My Child,’” People.com, 7 February 2006, http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,1157153,00.html. 41 The 11 April 2006 cover of Star magazine exclaims, “New Baby Crisis!” followed by the headline, “Brit’s Baby Fractures Skull!” Bullet points on the cover include, “Baby Falls from High Chair!” and “New Child Welfare Investigation!” Spears was questioned by the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) and by the Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff’s Department but no charges were laid. 42 See, for instance, JayBird, “Britney lashes crotch again,” 19 February 2008, cele/bitchy http://www.celebitchy.com/9454/britney_lashes_crotch_again_dad_ tells_bodyguards_not_to_let_her_go_to_toilet_alone_/; and Michael Knudsen, “Britney Spears’ Crotch Picture Wrap-Up,” 3 December 2006, Popbytes, http:// popbytes.com/archive/2006/12/britney_spears_crotch_pussy_no_panties_ shot_picture_wrap_up.shtml. 43 Simon Parry and Ilyssa Panitz, “Hollywood Nannies Tell All!” Star, 2 April 2007, 42–3. 44 “Spears, Britney,” Wikipedia.org, accessed 5 February 2010, http://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Britney_Spears. 45 Norma Coates, “Moms Don’t Rock,” 320. 46 Ibid., 322. 47 Ibid., 324–5. 48 Ladd-Taylor and Umansky include the “teen mother” in this list; not surprisingly, Spears’s pregnant teen sister Jamie Lynn has been subjected to similar media assault. 49 Coates, “Moms Don’t Rock,” 328. 50 Kevin O’Leary, “What if this Were Your Mom?” US Magazine, 13 August 2007, 58. 51 Coates, “Moms Don’t Rock,” 329. 52 Büskens, “From Perfect Housewife,” 35. 53 Coates, “Moms Don’t Rock,” 329. 54 Douglas and Michaels, Mommy Myth, 118. 55 “Angelina Jolie: Pregnancy Makes Me Feel ‘Sexy,’” People.com, 30 May 2008, http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20203549,00.html?xid= rss-topheadlines.

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56 John R. Kennedy, “Stars Resume Their Red-Carpet Love Affair at the 14th SAG Awards,” Hello! Canada, 11 February 2008, 31. 57 Coates, “Moms Don’t Rock,” 325. 58 Mara Reinstein, “Angelina’s Double Life,” US Magazine, 9 April 2007, 58–66. 59 Casey Brennan, Heidi Parker, Kathleen Perricone and Melissa Cronin, “The Brangie Bunch ‘It’s Chaos!’” Star, 9 June 2008, 48–52. 60 “Britney & Her Boys: A Mother’s Love Conquers All,” Star, 9 June 2008, 42-3. 61 Douglas and Michaels, Mommy Myth, 3; Cashmore, Celebrity, 79. 62 “Spears, Britney,” Wikipedia.org, accessed 12 November 2010, http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britney_Spears. 63 “Jolie, Angelina,” Wikipedia.org, accessed 5 January 2011, http://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelina_Jolie. 64 Cashmore, Celebrity, 26. 65 Children of celebrities are now routinely dubbed “celebuspawn” in gossip/ entertainment journalism. The term is deined in the Urban Dictionary accordingly: “The offspring of celebrities, not initially famous in their own right, who usually use their status or parents to get publicity, further their careers and party too much in public. Often celebuspawn believe they are above the law and can do whatever they want”; and “Any child or offspring of a famous celebrity. The child or children of well-known, or famous people or person. Often seen on websites that cover celebrity news. Derived from the words ‘celebrity’ and ‘spawn,’ meaning something that is bred.” http://www.urbandictionary.com/deine.php?term=celebuspawn. 66 For a detailed reading of blogs such as these, see Elizabeth Podnieks, “‘HEY CELEBS!’” 67 Graeme Turner quoted in Cashmore, Celebrity, 196. 68 Douglas and Michaels, Mommy Myth, 124. 69 Cashmore, 85. 70 Carol Brooks, “What Celebrity Worship Says About Us,” USA Today, 13 September 2004, http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/ 2004-09-13-celebrity-edit_x.htm. BIBLIOGRAPHY

“Angelina Pregnant?” Star, 13 November 2006. Cover. Bass, Shana. “How Shiloh saved Angie.” OK! Weekly, 24 September 2007, 48. Boorstin, Daniel. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Atheneum, 1972.

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Brennan, Casey, Heidi Parker, Kathleen Perricone, and Melissa Cronin, “The Brangie Bunch ‘It’s Chaos!’” Star, 9 June 2008, 48–52. “Britney & Her Boys: A Mother’s Love Conquers All.” Star, 9 June 2008, 42–3. Büskens, Petra. “From Perfect Housewife to Fishnet Stockings and Not Quite Back Again: One Mother’s Story of Leaving Home.” Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering: Mothering, Sex and Sexuality 4, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2002): 33–45. Cashmore, Ellis. Celebrity/Culture. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2006. Celeste, Reni. “Screen Idols: The Tragedy of Falling Stars.” Journal of Popular Film & Television 33, no. 1 (Spring 2005): http://O-proquest.umi.com. innopac.lib.ryerson.ca. Coates, Norma. “Moms Don’t Rock: The Popular Demonization of Courtney Love.” In “Bad” Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America, edited by Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky, 319–33. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Donzelot, Jacques. The Policing of Families. New York: Pantheon, 1979. Douglas, Susan J., and Meredith W. Michaels. The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women. New York: Free Press, 2004. Evans, Jennifer. “While Brad Breaks Ground for Charity Angelina Jolie Takes Their Four Children for a Stroll in New Orleans.” Hello! Canada No.77, 31 March 2008, 52. Hays, Sharon. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Hello! Canada. hellomagazine.ca. http://www.hellomagazine.ca. Kennedy, John R. “Stars Resume Their Red-Carpet Love Affair at the 14th SAG Awards.” Hello! Canada, 11 February 2008, 31. Ladd-Taylor, Molly, and Lauri Umansky. Introduction to “Bad” Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America. Edited by Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky, 1–28. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Lynch, Jason, and Mary Green. “Coming Soon: Kid No. 4!” People, 19 March 2007, 57. OK! Magazine, http://www.okmagazine.com. O’Leary, Kevin. “What if this Were Your Mom?” US Magazine, 13 August 2007, 58. Orth, Maureen. The Importance of Being Famous: Behind the Scenes of the Celebrity-Industrial Complex. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2004.

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Parry, Simon, and Ilyssa Panitz. “Hollywood Nannies Tell All!” Star, 2 April 2007, 42–3. People.com. http://www.people.com. Podnieks, Elizabeth.“‘HEY CELEBS! QUIT THAT BEHAVING! DON’T MAKE US COME DOWN THERE!’ Celebrity Moms, Babies, and Blogs.” In Mothering

and Blogging: The Radical Act of the Mommy Blog, edited by May Friedman and Shana L. Calixte, 182–99. Toronto: Demeter Press, 2009. Reinstein, Mara. “Angelina’s Double Life.” US Magazine, 9 April 2007, 58–66. Star Magazine, http://www.starmagazine.com. “This Year’s Naughtiest? Britney & Paris.” OK! Magazine, 29 November 2007, http://www.okmagazine.com/news/view/2966. US Magazine. http://www.usmagazine.com.

5 ARE YOU A POLITICIAN OR A MOTHER ?

Jennifer Bell

“Everyone knows that babies and politics don’t mix” Sheila Copps, former deputy prime minister of Canada, wrote facetiously in 1986.1 A year later, Copps was, in fact, the irst woman in Canada to give birth while a member of Parliament (MP), and she struggled throughout her political career to demonstrate that women could successfully combine motherhood and electoral politics. Her public accounts of her experiences, and those of other female politicians, reveal that the notion of motherhood occupies a troubled position in Canada’s political culture. This chapter examines the complexities of the representation of politicians as mothers in the public sphere and how mothers in elected ofice must continually negotiate their roles and identities against this normative discourse, both in the media and in their memoirs. This very public negotiation and self-representation of mothering is crucial to our society’s often conlicted portrayal and understanding of the practice of motherhood, as public life and political communication have become inextricable from popular culture. In the twenty-irst century, politicians are performers. They often rely on aesthetics, seeking cultural signiicance and even celebrity status as they grasp to build relationships with a frequently inattentive electorate, morphing themselves into and against public expectations. Politicians are thus commodities, belonging to the ield of both consumer and cultural goods. Mass and social media, political memoir, and the politicians’ manipulation of these mediums play an integral role in constructing popular and political culture in Canada today, iltering our understanding of what is politically and socially relevant. It is clear from the media’s preoccupation with women politicians, and from women’s essential contribution to electoral politics, that to be a mother, or not, is politically and culturally relevant.

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This chapter interrogates the cultural background of the assumed incompatibility between motherhood and holding elected ofice. The legacy of a male-dominated parliamentary system, the realistic demands of motherhood, and even, as Janine Brodie suggests, the idealization of motherhood in popular culture contribute to a supposed incongruity between motherhood and elected ofice. The consequences of this perceived discord is crucial to the representation of motherhood in popular culture, as well as women’s involvement in political life. While family concerns affect both men and women in electoral politics, women face greater scrutiny about their role as working mothers and are often obliged to reconcile and defend their roles as parents and politicians in a manner not required by men.2 PRACTICAL DEMANDS

On an institutional level, the demands of electoral ofice present realistic challenges to blending parenthood, speciically motherhood, and politics.3 Former federal cabinet minister Pat Carney (1980–88) deemed Parliament “not family friendly,” citing long parliamentary sessions, separation from loved ones, and geographic hurdles as contributing to the dificulties of maintaining family life for politicians.4 Long distances between one’s constituency and the national or provincial capital can make weekend travel dificult and exhausting, and cross country obligations, child care concerns, and daily schedules that can luctuate based on the news cycle further contribute to the demands of combining parenthood and politics. The pressure and responsibilities of a minority government, constituency obligations, or the threat of unpredictable election calls can make arranging personal time dificult to achieve. As a single mother from British Columbia, Carney struggled publicly to alleviate some of these pressures; she was successful, for example, in extending politicians’ travel beneits to children even though she felt that she faced “indifference” by some of her colleagues.5 Historically a male-dominated institution, Parliament has slowly evolved to render it more family-friendly since Carney’s tenure; an on-site day care centre has been created, and there is now the predictability of ixed parliamentary schedules.6 While these structural provisions to Parliament can help alleviate some of the struggle for families, and mothers speciically, other challenges still exist. For example, breastfeeding while in ofice, as Copps recounts in Worth Fighting For, can be dificult.7 Parental leaves of absence, furthermore, are politically undesirable as politicians are constantly accountable to

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their electorate and are typically seeking re-election. Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, partisan and electoral politics can be an all consuming occupation, both physically and emotionally. Success often requires an unwavering commitment to one’s party, one’s re-election, and one’s self, at times leaving little room for personal matters. CULTURAL ASSUMPTIONS AND CONSEQUENCES

Despite more recent features of Parliament and legislatures that better accommodate family responsibilities, the strain for politician mothers, especially those with young children, is heightened because of lingering traditional gender roles that often assume women to be the primary caregivers of children. In her extensive study on marriage, motherhood, and political candidacy in Canada, Brodie found that “males generally beneit from unambiguous norms that divide their time between public and private roles. Except in very unusual circumstances, the demands of work come irst. The female, however, often has to resolve her private role demands before she can consider adopting a public role.” Otherwise, Brodie suggests, she is likely to suffer from “private-versus-public role strain.”8 Constant time constraints and scheduling pressures, child care concerns, or inances, to name but a few examples, cause some women politicians to acknowledge experiencing this role strain when attempting to balance their professional and family responsibilities. Ellen Fairclough, Canada’s irst female cabinet minister (1957–63), admits to often inding her “tightrope act dificult” as a politician and a mother.9 Rosemary Brown, former member of the legislative assembly (MLA) of British Columbia and federal leadership candidate for the New Democratic Party (NDP) in 1975, refers to her immune system being “thrown into turmoil” because of having to existing as a “multi-personality.”10 Realistic and practical concerns for politicians and mothers, however, sometimes derive from and are accompanied by cultural challenges to the compatibility of motherhood and politics. Lingering notions of traditional public/private gender roles and stereotypes still cast the female politician as somewhat of an anomaly. Female politicians were frequently asked in the 1970s, “Are you a politician or a woman?”; the question suggests that the two roles were mutually exclusive and incompatible.11 The question of whether a woman can be both a politician and a mother continues to resonate. Popular concepts of the idealization of motherhood and lingering notions of private and public roles still have the ability to encumber women in elected ofice. Often, when a woman

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achieves professional success, she is accused of neglecting her “womanly” duties; and if she doesn’t achieve this success, she is accused of not being able to properly balance her professional and private responsibilities. Women are judged on their professional success and as wives and mothers.12 Women are quick to point out that this is often a double standard: for male politicians to have “adoring, dutiful families” lends them stability and credibility,13 but for women, their role as mothers can cast doubt upon both their career and their parenting skills. Lisa MacLeod, an Ontario member of provincial parliament (MPP), and mother, found herself the subject of public scrutiny when a judge in a high proile court case dismissed her evidence because of the distractions that he perceived in her life. The justice equated her vague recollection of the events in question to the fact that she was “commuting regularly to Toronto for her work, leaving her husband and child in Ottawa.” The uncomfortable implication, although unstated, was that a busy career woman, practicing both motherhood and politics was unreliable and incapable of living up to her demands and responsibilities. MacLeod responded by quipping that she didn’t know that truth had a gender.14 It is the gendered construction of politics here that many women found offensive and archaic, and the media’s attention to this issue helped highlight it in popular culture, helping to erode these cultural perceptions of the incompatibility of motherhood and elected ofice. As Lyn McLeod, former leader of the Ontario Liberal Party states, “It is that much more dificult for women … because we are still asked that stereotypical question – whether or not we are deserting our homes. It comes back to the sense that somehow it’s not quite natural.” This question, she is certain, would not be asked of men in politics.15 These comments emphasize the point that motherhood and professional ambition are at times seen in opposition. As Shari Thurer states, “a lack of ambition – or a professed lack of ambition, a sacriicial willingness to set personal ambition aside – is still the virtuous proof of good mothering. For many women, perhaps most, motherhood versus personal ambition represents the heart of the feminine dilemma.”16 Women legislators, mothers of course included, as represented in their auto/biographies and biographies, are unequivocally ambitious, even if in different ways and for different reasons.17 The fact that women politicians must grapple with this dilemma on the public stage intensiies it and subjects a personal matter to public scrutiny. This public interrogation ranges from curiosity and interest to borderline cruelty. As Iona Campagnolo, former federal cabinet minister, states, “Political life is so very cruel. It seems to me … that the children of

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women politicians are more seriously discriminated against than the children of male politicians … There’s an inordinate curiosity about women politicians.”18 Fairclough recounts the media’s intrusive interest in her personal life and that she had to “make it clear to anyone who asked” that her husband and son were supportive of her political career, regardless of the fact that they were both grown men.19 Brown discusses the open hostility she received, but also her personal guilt and anguish when running for leader of her party. As she writes in her memoir, “The only hostile question directed at me concerned the hypocritical fear that my children would suffer as a result of my political activities, and accusations of impending neglect.” While she publicly dismissed these suggestions, and realized that journalists were probing because they had found her “Achilles heel,” on a personal level, she admits, “I was no equal to the demons that whispered to me that I was placing my selish ambition ahead of my children.” Her disappointment also lay in the fact that it was “unfair”: her husband would not have been asked the same questions.20 As Brown’s experience indicates, the convergence of practical concerns, public scrutiny, and societal norms about idealized notions of motherhood can cause or intensify a psychological role strain. Many mothers who hold elected ofice discuss the emotional pressures of the role and its guilt-inducing consequences. Thurer suggests that it is grudgingly accepted for women to have to work for economic reasons, but when a woman chooses to pursue a career, “a shadow is cast over her motherliness.”21 Media images of happy, fulilled mothers add to mothers’ feelings of “inadequacy, guilt, and anxiety.” Such cultural constructions can cause mothers to cling to an idealized notion of motherhood that can never be reached, but neither can be discarded.22 Christy Clark, premier of British Columbia, who gave birth while a member of the legislative assembly, discusses her anguish at public judgment of her mothering skills. As she writes, “The worst thing I got called was a bad mother … I once did a live radio interview with my crying infant in my arms … I was devastated at the time when CBC aired a call from an angry listener who said the crying was proof I was neglectful.” While she later reconciled these roles on a personal level, she felt intense public humiliation and scrutiny from attempting to combine her chosen responsibilities.23 Copps echoes this sentiment, noting that “dual responsibility tugs at the heartstrings of women when they pursue the dual tracks of parenthood and career … There is a heavy dose of guilt involved with the thousands of hours spent away from home and family to pursue the good of the country.”24 Many politicians write with despondency about missing

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important events in their children’s lives. Judy Wasylycia-Leis, who has run at all levels of political ofice, stated in an interview that when she ran in 1997, she knew it wouldn’t be easy for her family. As she acknowledged, “For weeks on end there would be tears when I said goodbye … I always left feeling guilty.” Although she recognized that her children eventually got used to the “new reality,” her interviewer editorializes that it is because of this guilt that Wasylycia-Leis, as a mother, is a rarity in Canadian politics.25 This guilt is natural; love, altruism, and responsibility often do inform mothers’ thoughts and actions.26 However, as Andrea O’Reilly writes, natural-intensive mothering, where a woman is assumed to be the primary caregiver, even at the repression of her own selfhood, has become the only legitimate form of mothering. She argues that this normative discourse of natural-intensive mothering in society “polices” women’s mothering and results in “pathologizing” women who do not or cannot practice it.27 By nature of their chosen career, women politicians would be unlikely to practise natural-intensive mothering, and hence be subject to the pressure that O’Reilly identiies. This is not to say that all maternal guilt or love is a cultural construction. But, to help alleviate some of the pressure, Thurer postulates that freeing mothers from the fantasy of maternal perfection would allow them to stop worrying about culturally imposed restraints, and questions of adequacy would dissipate when “decent people are encouraged to mother in their own decent way.”28 STRATEGIES FOR SYNTHESIS

Thurer describes politicians who combine motherhood and personal ambition as cultural icons who are “freeing women to embrace formerly devalued ways of mothering.”29 While these politicians possess the public proile to serve as role models for other women and help change cultural constructions of mothering, they must still often battle this idealization of motherhood themselves –– in the public sphere and internally. They have been required to develop individual strategies to best converge their roles and, when necessary, protect themselves and their children from this public scrutiny. Of course, there are no prescriptive methods to achieve this, which relects the complexities of lived motherhood30 and further complicates and increases the cultural constructions of mothering. Choosing to embrace or being thrust into the role of very public mother can be uncomfortable or even, in Campagnolo’s words, cruel.31 Mindful of this sometimes harsh public scrutiny, some politicians very

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actively work to keep their children out of the public eye. Audrey McLaughlin, former leader of the NDP, for example, chooses not to discuss her children in her memoir. She explains that while she has chosen to enter public life and become public property, her children haven’t, and she believes that this decision should not complicate their lives.32 Similarly, Campagnolo states that, “I have been very reluctant to make anything known about my children … I keep them well out of the light … Every way that you can buttress your own personal life, quietly, in the background, is better for your children.”33 Former MP Belinda Stronach agreed to cooperate on a biography of her on the condition, “You can’t talk to my children. Otherwise, I’m in.”34 While this strategy of separating one’s political life from one’s family life is foremost about protecting children, it also serves to detract attention away from a politician’s role as mother and emphasizes her professional role as a politician. But just as some female politicians choose to conceal their family life from prying media, others, and sometimes even the same women, relate their role as mothers directly to their role as politicians. Copps, for example, describes the advantages of being raised in a political family herself and her active decision to raise her child in a similar fashion: for her, the beneits outweighed the cost.35 When she herself gave birth, she held a press conference from the hospital and was on the front page of every national newspaper. She appeared to embrace this role of public mother, returning to the House of Commons shortly after birth and describing in detail in her memoir the fact that her breasts were “engorged with milk” during a speech by a visiting president.36 These public statements help to erode the gendered stereotypes of politicians as they publicly dislodge “deep-rooted assumptions on what is appropriate to women and men.”37 The example of such mothering promotes a range of possibilities and narratives and could encourage other mothers to participate in politics, possibly then raising the proportion of women elected and broadening the spectrum of political representation. Copps recognizes this and takes pride in the example she became for other women. She writes that women would “come up and ask about my daughter because they remember the day she was born, the fact that I breast-fed her at the ofice, the fact that my struggles represented their struggles and my victories represented their victories. … The fact that I would dare to seek the leadership of my party gave them hope to pursue their dreams.”38 For Andrea Horwath, leader of the Ontario NDP, her experiences as a single mother afirm and validate her understanding of the issues for which she advocates. “When I get up in the Legislature and I talk about

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the single mom or a woman struggling at two or three jobs or family responsibilities it is something that hits close to home,” she says.39 Here, she is speaking to the juggling act that women must perform and, as a result, the social perspective that she as a woman can offer to the political system. This representation of motherhood contributes to its multiple constructions in the public sphere and helps to shift normative discourses of mothering and politics in popular culture. Other contributions to this shift include the strategy of women politicians inscribing motherhood as a site of agency in their political practices. Stronach, for example, launched her 2004 leadership campaign for the Conservative Party by promoting “honesty, compassion, fairness, respect and integrity,” qualities she explicitly linked to motherhood. She asked rhetorically, “Who better than a mother to ensure these values are always relected in the actions of government?”40 Brown also would occasionally respond to media questions by referring to her experience as a mother and a wife. She believed that these roles gave an “added dimension” to her perception of the world, and she emphasized this as “one more asset that I would bring to the political sphere.”41 In the United States, Nancy Pelosi, as Democratic House Leader, and Hillary Clinton, when running for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, were both accused of playing the “mommy card” in cultivating their public images, and trying to appeal to the electorate from this angle.42 While none of these women ran on a gender-speciic or motherhood platform, positioning themselves distinctly as mothers is fraught with complications. In one respect, it is a bold and empowered strategy for women to assert and promote themselves speciically as women, and insert this gendered identity into the conventionally masculine world of politics. It places traditionally domestic and private values within the public sphere, at once disrupting and violating it. It validates motherhood as possessing public worth and demonstrates its compatibility with personal ambition and power. It suggests that women politicians can indeed have both and be successful. Furthermore, many women describe motherhood as being central to their identity, not something that can or should be overlooked or downplayed just because they are elected oficials. As Shaunti Feldhahn asks, “What is so wrong about female politicians … being proud that they undertook one of the most intense, important roles in the world and did it well?”43 Regardless of whether it is “wrong” or “right” for a politician to promote her status as mother, the fact remains that as a politician, she must be very deliberate and careful in crafting her public image and political

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niche. Impression management is crucial to political success. Positioning oneself as mother might be part of a larger strategy and an attempt to appeal to a speciic demographic. It relies on the affective function of creating emotional connections and identiication with the electorate, more than half of whom are female. Electorally, mothers are a sought after demographic as they are considered moderate swing voters. Portraying oneself as a mother is potentially humanizing for a politician; it depicts her approachability and emphasizes common experiences with voters. According to a pollster, it softens a female politician, but still shows her to be tough in a non-threatening way.44 This strategy, in other words, makes assumptions about the public; it presumes that voters will respond to a female politician who positions herself as a mother and thus creates a gendered political identity. This strategy of politicians imbuing their politics with maternal imagery is problematic, however. While it might be read as empowering, it can also be read as promoting and reinforcing an idealization of conventional restrictive notions of motherhood and hence the female politician. Since “achievements and pleasures gained outside motherhood are condemned within patriarchy as substitutes for ‘normal’ femininity,”45 this portrayal simultaneously relies on, and serves to uphold, traditional stereotypes in order to make women’s intrusion into the public sphere acceptable again. It is potentially reassuring to voters who may feel uncomfortable with women in power that these women have not transgressed too far beyond domestic roles.46 It can potentially reinforce traditional notions and stereotypes of women’s “natural” roles of nurturers and caregivers and also suggests that it is only mothers who can possess these values – not women without children and not men. This portrayal, in turn, evokes a sentimentalized and idealized notion of motherhood in contemporary culture, reminiscent of the suffrage movement where women relied on their distinct private sphere roles as mothers and caretakers to justify their entry into politics.47 And while the “motherhood” qualities listed might be useful for a politician to possess, as critics of the strategy have asserted, “parenting isn’t a seamlessly transferable skill to the running of a country.”48 In the United States, Sarah Palin, former Republican vice-presidential candidate, embodied this self-conscious representation of mothering in politics. She incorporated her children and her family into her campaign, where they garnered signiicant media attention. In so doing, she boasted that women could successfully combine politics and motherhood and integrate these values in popular culture. However, it should be remembered that the construction of the

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candidate and political communication is central to every campaign, and certainly this maternal imagery was, in part, strategically crafted and employed to appeal to a desirable demographic. Furthermore, employing maternal politics raises questions about speciic gendered identities and even representation in electoral politics. Can mothers be assumed to share what Iris Marion Young identiies as a “social perspective” that transcends their differences?49 And if so, do they possess inherently different political identities than men, fathers, or women without children? Do they govern differently? Should voters be electing a speciic gendered identity? All of these questions are debatable. But critics of the maternal strategy would argue that the notion of traditional gender roles in politics needs to be upended to move toward parity in politics. As Dana Goldstein writes, “women don’t deserve to be in politics because [they] are more compassionate or nurturing than men. [They] deserve to be there because [they] are human beings.”50 Reinforcing the idealization of motherhood in the popular media thus complicates the efforts some female politicians make to reconcile their roles as mothers and women and dismantle the traditional distinctions between public and private spheres. THE DOUBLE BIND

The interrogation of female politicians as mothers reveals that motherhood has been constructed as central to a woman’s identity in political and political culture, for better or worse. This reality is notably problematic for female politicians without children. As a result, a double bind exists for women politicians: while their role of mother is certainly complicated in the public sphere, if they are single or do not have children, their femininity is challenged. They might still fall prey to criticism in not upholding traditional, stereotypical assumptions about women’s “natural” role as mothers.51 Kim Campbell, for example, when running for leader of the PC Party in 1993 (a position that would lead her to become the irst female prime minister), had her “stability” publicly attacked and was accused of not having “a suficient stake in the future” as she did not have children. Other politicians publicly suggested that Canadians would identify more with her opponent, Jean Charest, because he had a spouse and children. While partisan attacks when running for public ofice are to be expected, Campbell found these comments “a slap in the face” to all women who could not bear children, as well as blatantly sexist and ahistorical. Canada, Campbell reminded readers, has a “long

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tradition of being governed by childless men.” John Diefenbaker, she was sure, did not endure the same objections.52 More recently, federal cabinet minister Rona Ambrose was forced to endure “humiliating and grossly inappropriate questions” about why she did not have children.53 A 2005 newspaper article stressed Ambrose’s decision not to discuss these issues publicly – the underlying insinuation being that the public did or should require an explanation as to why she did not have children. The article went one to assume that Ambrose’s work on the federal child care policy “cannot have been an easy issue for her to tackle” as she did not have her own children. “Sufice to say,” the article continues, “it is noble of her to have championed this issue.”54 While these comments raise questions about representative politics, they also insultingly and unfairly suggest that Ambrose’s lack of children made her emotionally vulnerable and that it must be a struggle for women without children to perform certain governmental roles. FURTHER CONSEQUENCES : DEFERRAL , DETERRENCE , AND DECISIONS

Motherhood thus continues to occupy an uncomfortable position in Canadian political culture. It is only marginally accepted, yet still portrayed as central to a woman’s identity. Given the possible logistical problems of mothering from across the country as well as the problematic cultural constructions of motherhood in the public sphere, many women might be dissuaded from running for public ofice. Mothers with young children might also experience more explicit deterrence from running for public ofice as even politicians have made comments that reinforce the supposed incompatibility of mothering and politics. Such comments, even if they raise legitimate concerns, potentially reinforce the supposed incongruity between motherhood and elected ofice. As Carney wrote after combining senior cabinet portfolios with single parenting, “I strongly believe that women with young and teenage children should think twice before being coaxed to run for federal ofice, unless they live … close to both home and work.” Carney writes about her personal role struggles and relects, “a member of the inner Cabinet, I was one of the most powerful women in Canada, but I would trade it all for the opportunity to just be Mom again.”55 Deb Grey, former MP, reiterates this point. She explains that while she certainly does not criticize women parliamentarians who have young children, she believes that women are still the primary caregivers of children, and the sacriice of a mother missing important events

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in a child’s life is somehow “sadder.” “I can’t explain it,” she writes, “and I know I get criticized for my view, but it just sits deep in my heart … I would not have chosen this ield if I had children at home … Sadly, we do not get a replay of our children’s growing-up years.”56 While there are politicians who run for elected ofice as mothers, for others, motherhood can be a deterring factor in seeking elected ofice. Anita Neville, MP, for example, chose not to run for ofice until after her children were grown. As a single mother, she felt that juggling parenting responsibilities and weekly trips to Ottawa would have been too much.57 Such concerns are certainly valid, but they are also problematic in trying to erode a democratic deicit of women in electoral politics. While there are numerous reasons for this democratic deicit, recent American studies suggest that traditional family role orientations “continue to hinder women’s emergence in the political sphere.”58 Family responsibilities undoubtedly do not preclude women from considering a candidacy, but it is more common for women to consider running after their child care duties are minimized. Women delaying their entry into politics means it is less likely that they will be able to “climb very high on the political career ladder,” which thus makes it less likely to have women in senior positions.59 Many politicians, both male and female, furthermore, refer to having to be away from their families or children when explaining their career decision to leave politics. While this explanation, at times, may not always be credible, family responsibilities do play an important role in one’s desire to remain (or not) in the public sphere.60 But when women employ this explanation, once again, the message is further, and automatically, troubled. Is it an assertion that the realities of combining (successful) politics and (good) mothering are too dificult? Even if this is not the intended message, is this the effect of the message? Does it reinforce a mother’s role as caregiver rather than as successful politician? Don Martin, in his biography of Belinda Stronach, expresses an almost embarrassed apology on behalf of columnists (himself included) who highlighted her children as a reason for her declining to enter the 2006 Liberal leadership race. The assumption was that family responsibilities would have been an appropriate or acceptable reason for her not to run, whereas her declared concerns about the democratic process were less legitimate. Martin informs readers that her children are the one aspect of her life that “politics does not touch,” to spare them from becoming a political prop.61 Here, the implication is that Stronach would never need to use them as an excuse to exit politics, as she was capable of handling both roles. A year later, however, Stronach does cite her children as one

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of the reasons that she chose to depart from federal politics. As her press release stated, “The heavy demands of public life on family time are real, and as a mother I want to spend some more time with my kids.”62 In a Maclean’s interview, she responds that while she is still “very interested in the issues,” being a politician is a big sacriice for one’s family.63 Given the demands placed on all politicians and public igures these explanations are justiiable, but they remain problematic in their suggestion that mothering and politics are incompatible. CONCLUSION

In 1964, Judy LaMarsh, only the second female cabinet minister in Canada, lamented, “I often thought about adopting a child. I’d like to have done that. But while you’re in politics you can’t do it.”64 A half century later, elected women continuously and bravely demonstrate the erosion of these cultural barriers. To return to Copps’s statement, babies and politics can and do mix, but not yet as easily as they should. While we are certainly making progress on this front in Canada, the accounts of women’s practical and cultural challenges with combining their roles as politicians and mothers reveal that motherhood still occupies a troubled site in Canada’s political and popular culture. Motherhood is constructed as central to a woman’s identity, yet a hindrance to her role as serious politician. As public igures, these politicians continuously engage with media constructions of gender and the negotiation of identity in the public sphere. Interrogating these cultural constructions encourages the fair and equal treatment of female politicians who are also mothers. It helps them to feel accepted and comfortable in their multiple roles and promotes them as role models, which, in turn, encourages more women and mothers to run for ofice. Because of the role of the media and popular press in constructing and promoting politics and political communication as popular culture, the representation of women in political life simultaneously changes the political landscape in Canada and the representation of mothers and mothering in the public sphere. These critical perspectives thus help change normative discourses of motherhood in popular culture, fulilling and offering empowered notions of mothering.

NOTES

1 Copps, Nobody’s Baby, 85. 2 Lawless and Fox, It Takes a Candidate, 52.

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15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

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Trimble and Arscott, Still Counting, 111. Carney, Trade Secrets, 329, 192. Ibid., 191. Trimble and Arscott, Still Counting, 112. Copps, Worth Fighting For, 54. Brodie, Women and Politics in Canada, 91–2. Fairclough, Saturday’s Child, 63. Brown, Being Brown,137. Trimble and Arscott, Still Counting, 108. Lawless and Fox, It Takes a Candidate, 60. Alexa McDonough qtd. in Sharpe, The Gilded Ghetto, 156. Jane Taber, “Can a Busy Female Politician Give Reliable Evidence? A Judge says No,” Globe and Mail, 13 August 2010, http://www.theglobeandmail. com/news/politics/can-a-busy-female-politician-give-reliable-evidenceajudge-says-no/article1247338/. Sharpe, The Gilded Ghetto, 155. Thurer, The Myths of Motherhood, 287. McKenzie, “Political Biography and Autobiography,” 110. McLaughlin, A Woman’s Place, 204. Fairclough, Saturday’s Child, 85. Brown, Being Brown, 126–7. Thurer, The Myths of Motherhood, xviii. Ibid., xxiv. Clark, “I’ve Changed my Mind – We Need Quotas to Get Women Into Politics,” Vancouver Province, 11 March 2007, A20. Copps, Worth Fighting For, 53. Mia Rabson, “Equal Rights for all? Canada’s Record of Encouraging Women Into Politics ‘An Embarrassment’ that ‘Has to be Addressed,’” Winnipeg Free Press, 15 January 2006, B5. O’Reilly and Porter, introduction to Motherhood: Power and Oppression, 6. Ibid., 7. Thurer, The Myths of Motherhood, xii. Ibid., 297. Hardy and Wiedmer, introduction to Motherhood and Space, 9. Campagnolo qtd. in McLaughlin, A Woman’s Place, 204. McLaughlin, A Woman’s Place, 204. Campagnolo qtd. in McLaughlin, A Woman’s Place, 204. Martin, Belinda, 12. Copps, Nobody’s Baby, 190. Copps, Worth Fighting For, 54. Phillips, “Democracy and Representation,” 228.

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38 Copps, Worth Fighting For, 51. 39 Tanya Talaga, “Horwath opens up about life as a single mom,” Hamilton Spectator, 20 March 2011, http://www.thespec.com/news/ontario/ article/500683--horwath-opens-up-about-life-as-a-single-mom. 40 CBC, “Stronach jumps into Conservative race.” 41 Brown, Being Brown, 127. 42 Diane Glass, “Should Female Politicians Play the Mommy Card? (Commentary)” Woman to Woman (blog), 15 March 2007, http://alt. coxnewsweb.com/blogs/content/shared-blogs/ajc/woman/entries/2007/ 03/15/should_female_p.html. 43 Shaunti Feldhahn, “Should Female Politicians Play the Mommy Card? (Rebuttal),” Ajc.com: Woman to Woman (blog), 15 March 2007, http:// www.ajc.com/blogs/content/shared-blogs/ajc/woman/entries/2007/03/15/ should_female_p.html. 44 Maura Reynolds, “Female politicians embrace a role seen as reassuring,” Los Angeles Times, 31 January 2007, A9. 45 Nicolson, “Motherhood and Women’s Lives,” 376. 46 Reynolds, “Mom is at home in House, Senate,”A9. 47 Lawless and Fox, It Takes a Candidate, 58. 48 Glass, “Should Female Politicians Play the Mommy Card?” 49 Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 136. 50 Dana Goldstein, “The Mommy Mantra,” American Prospect Online, 19 January 2007, http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_mommy_mantra. 51 Trimble and Arscott, Still Counting, 110. 52 Campbell, Time and Chance, 295. 53 Jeffrey Simpson, “Rona Ambrose Has Been Left to Smile Pretty for the Cameras,” Globe and Mail, 15 December 2006, A23. 54 Julie Smyth, “Alberta MP Puts New Face on Tory Child-care Stance: Head of Youth Caucus: Rona Ambrose has Ambitions to Lead Party Some Day,” National Post, 7 December 2005, A6. 55 Carney, Trade Secrets, 328. 56 Grey, Never Retreat, Never Explain, Never Apologize, 188. 57 Anita Neville qtd. in Rabson, “Equal rights for all?” B5. 58 Lawless and Fox, It Takes a Candidate, 53. 59 Ibid., 69. 60 Ibid., 51–2. 61 Martin, Belinda, 256. 62 Belinda Stronach, “Belinda Stronach Takes on New Challenges: Press Release,” Belinda Stronach, MP , 11 April 2007, http://www.belinda.ca/ nm-show.asp?story=297.

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63 Whyte, “Interview: You Have to Ask ‘Where’s the Best Use of My Energy?’” Maclean’s, 30 April 2007, 14. 64 LaMarsh qtd. in Sharpe, The Gilded Ghetto, 82. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brodie, Janine. Women and Politics in Canada. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson Limited, 1985. Brown, Rosemary. Being Brown: A Very Public Life. Toronto: Random House, 1989. Campbell, Kim. Time and Chance. Toronto: Doubleday Canada Limited, 1996. Canadian Press. “Sheila Copps Proud Mother of Baby Girl.” Toronto Star 27 March 1987, A8. Carney, Pat. Trade Secrets: A Memoir. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2000. Carstairs, Sharon. Not One of The Boys. Toronto: Macmillan Canada, 1993. Casgrain, Therese. A Woman in a Man’s World. Translated by Joyce Marshall. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1972. Copps, Sheila. Nobody’s Baby. Toronto: Deneau, 1986. – Worth Fighting For. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 2004. Everitt, Joanna, and Elisabeth Gidengil. “Tough Talk: How Television News Covers Male and Female Leaders of Canadian Political Parties.” In Women and Electoral Politics in Canada, edited by Manon Tremblay and Linda Trimble, 194–210. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2003. Fairclough, Ellen. Saturday’s Child. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995. Grey, Deb. Never Retreat, Never Explain, Never Apologize: My Life, My Politics. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2004. Hardy, Sarah, and Caroline Wiedmer. Introduction to Motherhood and Space. Edited by Sarah Hardy and Caroline Wiedmer, 1–11. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2005. Lawless, Jennifer L., and Richard L. Fox. It Takes a Candidate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Martin, Don. Belinda. Toronto: Key Porter Books Limited 2006. McKenzie, Judith. “Political Biography and Autobiography as a New Approach to the Study of Women and Politics in Canada: The Case of Political Ambition.” Journal of Legislative Studies 6.4 (2000): 91–116. McLaughlin, Audrey. A Woman’s Place. Toronto: Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1992. Nicolson, Paula. “Motherhood and Women’s Lives.” In Introducing Women’s Studies, edited by Victoria Robinson and Diane Richardson, 375–99. New York: New York University Press, 1997.

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O’Reilly, Andrea. Introduction to From Motherhood to Mothering. Edited by Andrea O’Reilly, 1–23. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. O’Reilly, Andrea, and Marie Porter. Introduction to Motherhood: Power and Oppression. Edited by Andrea O’Reilly, Marie Porter, and Patricia Short, 1–22. Toronto: Women’s Press, 2005. Phillips, Anne. “Democracy and Representation: or, why should it matter who our representatives are?” In Feminism and Politics, edited by Anne Phillips, 224–40. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Reynolds, Maura. “Mom is at home in House, Senate.” Los Angeles Times, 23 January 2007, A9. Sharpe, Sydney. The Gilded Ghetto: Women and Political Power in Canada. Toronto: Harper Collins Publishers, 1994. Street, John. “The Celebrity Politician: Political Style and Popular Culture.” In Media and the Restyling of Politics, edited by John Corner and Dick Pels, 85–98. London: SAGE Publications, 2003. Thurer, Shari L. The Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother. New York: Penguin Books, 1994. Trimble, Linda, and Jane Arscott. Still Counting: Women in Politics Across Canada. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2003. Whyte, Kenneth, “Interview: You Have to Ask ‘Where’s the Best Use of My Energy?’ I May be More Ambitious, But Who Wants to be Unambitious?” Maclean’s, 30 April 2007, 14–18. Young, Iris Marion. Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

6 MOTHERHOOD , MURDER, AND THE MEDIA

Joanne Hayes and the Kerry Babies Case Nicola Goc

On an icy spring night in 1984 in County Kerry, Ireland, an unmarried mother, Joanne Hayes, secretly gave birth to her second child in a ield and hid the dead body in a bog on the family farm. Two nights later, a farmer jogging along the cliff tops on the other side of Dingle Bay, a twohour drive from the Hayes’s farm, found the body of a newborn child. In a torrid police interview days later the young mother confessed to the stabbing murder of the second baby. Yet all of the scientiic evidence showed that she could not have been the child’s mother. She was nevertheless charged with the child’s murder, and when the body of her own child was later discovered, the police insisted that she must have given birth to, and murdered, twins, conceived by two different men. Six months after Hayes’s arrest the Department of Public Prosecution withdrew all charges against Hayes and her family, but the matter was not laid to rest. Four days later, the Sunday Independent mentioned the tragic and bizarre case in a feature story on police corruption. The subsequent public outcry at the alleged police brutality against the young mother led to a public tribunal of inquiry into the actions of the Irish police in 1985. Hayes became the focus of both the inquiry and the media coverage; and for almost a year, as the mother at the centre of the most sensational motherhood narrative of the late twentieth century, Hayes was the subject of front-page news stories in the local and national Irish press. Twenty-two years later, in May 2006, Hayes, an intensely private iftyyear-old Irishwoman, learned through newspaper reports that once again she would soon be the focus of intense media scrutiny. Hayes read in her local Kerry newspaper that the Irish Film Board was funding the development of two ilms about her deeply personal and intensely public

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maternal tragedy that unfolded through 1984–85. Irish playwright Gerard Mannix Flynn’s script, A Twist of Fate, was to be made into a feature-length movie with Pierce Brosnan, Liam Neeson, and Gabriel Byrne being approached to play lead roles. A second movie based on Irish journalist Nell McCafferty’s book, A Woman to Blame (1985), was also in production. Through her lawyer, Pat Mann, Hayes, “begged to be left in peace,” pleading with the ilmmakers to “stop raking up the past and to allow her to get on with her life.”1 She asked Mann to approach Flynn to ask him to abandon the project. For Hayes, Mann said, the “idea of this coming back on to the mainstream consciousness is very distressing. In fact there is nothing but distress in this for her.”2 Despite her pleas, the second ilm based on McCafferty’s book, which was republished by Cork University Press in 2010, was completed and is due for release in 2011. The ilm based on Flynn’s script remains in pre-production. Hayes’s  story has never been far from the public consciousness in Ireland, generating public discourse whenever issues of police corruption and infanticide come to the fore. The police treatment of Hayes, who was never brought to trial for infanticide, was, according to McCafferty, “a model for Irish male attitudes to woman. She was caught up in a time of rapid social change between two Irelands, an earlier Ireland in which the Catholic Church had held a moral monopoly and a new liberal and secular Ireland.”3 Although Hayes was initially charged by the Irish gardai with infanticide, the department of public prosecution did not take the case to trial in part because Dr Harbison, the state pathologist, had testiied at the coronial inquiry into the death of Hayes’s baby that it was impossible to say whether the baby had been born alive because the lungs were not fully inlated. Although under the Infanticide Act of 1949 the deliberate killing of a newborn baby in Ireland was a criminal offence, in line with Infanticide Acts in England and other Western countries, women who killed their newborn infants were generally regarded as mentally unsound and dealt with through the mental health system. Despite Hayes never being tried for infanticide, her treatment at the public tribunal of inquiry that was held to examine the police handling of her case saw her treated more as a defendant in a criminal trial than a witness at a public inquiry. Several books were written on the case in the 1980s.4 McCafferty’s book was the most sympathetic to Hayes and is considered the most authoritative contemporary book on the case. The books published at this time, while drawing upon the salacious details that came out of the tribunal, were generally sympathetic to Hayes as the victim of a patriarchal

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police and judicial system that allowed a young woman, a witness at a hearing, to in effect be tried and judged for her behavior within a moral framework. Her own book of her experience, My Story: Joanne Hayes (1985), written by Hayes with journalist John Barrett as her response to the indings of the tribunal and the media coverage, was an attempt to “talk back” to the media and to regain control of her life, as I will discuss later in this chapter. In 1998, Flynn wrote his acclaimed screenplay, which forms the basis for his upcoming ilm. In November 2004, just a week before a documentary on the mystery of the “Kerry Babies Case” was due to be released by RTE Television, Hayes offered to undergo DNA tests in a bid to once and for all put an end to the mystery and speculation. (To date no DNA tests have been carried out.) The announcement of plans for the release of two ilms on her harrowing experience relects the ongoing interest in this infanticide mystery. The story of Hayes is more than a study of infanticide and the failure in Irish law and order; it also highlights the ways in which the media frames mothers who step outside accepted moral boundaries. The moralistic frames of “good” versus “bad” mother, Madonna versus whore, continue to this day to create a dichotomy that impacts on all women as mothers. In the irst decade of the twenty-irst century several mothers were thrust into the public sphere and judged in terms of moral maternal boundaries. Between 1999 and 2003, Sally Clark, an English mother wrongfully jailed for the deaths of her two infant sons, was subjected to highly prejudicial media coverage, which framed her as a modern day Medea, killing her children in a jealous rage;5 in 2001 in the United States, Andrea Yates, a young mother suffering from postpartum psychosis, also became the focus of moralistic media framing in global press discourse when she drowned her ive children in the family bath;6 and then in 2007–08, English mother Kate McCann, whose three-year-old daughter went missing while the family was on holiday in Portugal in May 2007, was the victim of moralistic global media discourse.7 The highly prejudicial and intemperate media coverage of the McCann tragedy did not cease until Kate McCann and her husband inally launched a libel suit against the Daily Express and its sister newspaper, the Daily Star, as well as their Sunday equivalents. When a settlement was reached in the High Court and the newspapers agreed to run front-page apologies to the McCanns, the unbalanced global media discourse ceased immediately. In the twenty-irst century the news media continues to frame mothers who come into the media spotlight in terms of the binary maternal frames of “good” or “bad” mother. As Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W.

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Michaels argue, the “ultimate maternal delinquent” is the “murdering mom (always much more shocking, and thus more newsworthy, than murdering dads).”8 The “spectacle of the deadly mother,” they argue, allows other mothers to feel that whatever their failings, at least they are “nothing like ‘them.’ For a few moments we could believe that, despite the increasingly high standards of perfection emanating from the new momism, we were, indeed, good mothers” and we “had resisted the darker impulses of motherhood.”9 But as Douglas and Michaels realize, in reality, stories that demonize some mothers contribute signiicantly to a vigilante culture in which all mothers have to be carefully policed because they are, potentially, “their own children’s worst enemy.”10 This study will analyze the reportage of what became known as the “Kerry Babies Case” through Ireland’s two major daily newspapers, the Irish Independent and the Irish Press, and Ireland’s major Sunday newspaper the Sunday Independent, which broke the story of alleged gardaí corruption.11 By mapping the press coverage of the “Kerry Babies Case” this study will not only provide an overview of the story of one young mother, Hayes, and how she became the focus of an antipathetic motherhood discourse in the Irish news media, but it will also provide an analysis of news media practice that remains relevant to this day. In the conclusion, I will briely discuss ways of rethinking media coverage of maternal tragedy. It is the mystery and unanswered questions of the “Kerry Babies Case” that keeps the story in the public imagination, and so long as the truth about the deaths of two newborn babies in County Kerry in the 1980s remains unclear, this story will continue to attract attention. It began on a gelid spring night in 1984 on the west coast of Ireland when a cattle farmer named Jack Grifin was jogging along the cliff tops beside White Strand beach in Cahirciveen, County Kerry, and he caught sight of what he thought was a naked, black-haired doll lying wedged, face downwards, between the jagged rocks on the shore below. When he reached the small bundle he made the grim discovery that it was the body of a newborn baby boy that was being battered by waves against the rocks. A postmortem on the baby, who was to become known as “Baby C,” determined that it had been stabbed twenty-eight times in the chest and neck. Two nights earlier, and ifty miles away at Abbeydorney, on the other side of Dingle Bay, single mother Joanne Hayes had secretly given birth to a live baby boy and had hidden his dead body in a plastic bag in a bog on her mother’s farm. The complex tale of one young parturient Irish woman and two dead newborn babies came at a moment in Irish history when a heated

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national debate on contraception and abortion was being played out in the Irish parliament and the media, and when questions of garda corruption were at the forefront of public consciousness. The story of the “Kerry Babies Case” would be transformed by the Irish media into disparate news narratives, which created a motherhood discourse that continues to this day to inform an understanding of the modern maternal subject in Ireland. Hayes had been having an affair with a married man, Jeremiah Locke, for several years, and they had a three-year-old daughter, Yvonne. Although work colleagues and friends suspected that she was again pregnant in the spring of 1984, none of them aired their suspicions. However, when Hayes was hospitalised due to postnatal bleeding, the medical authorities knew that, despite her denials, Hayes had recently given birth. She left hospital a week later and on 30 April, her twentyifth birthday, she returned to work at the Tralee Sports Centre where she was an administrative assistant. A few hours after her return she was approached by Detective Tom O’Callager and Detective John O’Sullivan from the Tralee gardaí who asked her to accompany them to the station. What occurred in the station over the next twelve hours would eventually propel the “Kerry Babies Case” into the national media spotlight and would lead, half a year later, to the establishment of a tribunal of inquiry headed by a high court judge to look into the actions of the gardaí on that icy spring night at the Tralee station. When Hayes arrived at the station she was alarmed to ind that members of her family had also been brought in for questioning. During the hours of intense probing that followed it was put to Hayes that she had recently given birth to and had subsequently killed her baby. Hayes vigorously denied that she had been pregnant or had given birth. However, after eight hours of intense questioning she became anxious, realizing that she was being accused of the death of the Cahirciveen baby. Aware that the gardaí  knew nothing about her baby lying in a bog on the Abbeydorney farm, she inally broke down in front of O’Sullivan and confessed to the murder of her baby. As she recalled in her book of the events, “I told him the truth, that I had given birth to a baby alone in the ield on the farm and that I had hidden it there.”12  According to her signed confession, however, she said that she had given birth to a baby in her bedroom on the night of 12/13 April and that she had killed it by beating it with a bath brush and stabbing it with a knife. Her sister Kathleen, brothers Ned and Mike, and aunt Bridie Fuller all, according to the gardaí, made signed statements admitting that the birth had taken

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place in the bedroom, and, according to the gardaí, all except Bridie Fuller had described the killing and disposal of the baby’s body in the sea at Slea Head on the West Kerry Coast. (The gardaí later argued that strong currents and tidal movements had swept the baby’s body across the expanse of Dingle Bay and onto the rocks on Cahirciveen beach, a snug cove on the opposite coastline.) When a search of the ields at the back of the farmhouse failed to ind a baby’s body, the gardaí was convinced that Hayes was the mother of the Cahirciveen baby. She was charged with the murder of an unnamed infant and remanded in custody at Limerick Jail for a week. Her sister Kathleen, brothers Ned and Mike, and Aunt Bridie were charged with concealing the body and released on bail. The following night Kathleen Hayes telephoned Garda Liam Moloney and told him that the family had found the body of Hayes’s baby in a ield at the back of the farmhouse. The gardaí later retrieved a plastic bag from a thicket beside a bog on the farm with the body of a baby boy inside. The timing of the inding of Hayes’s baby was crucial to the events that followed. The gardaí  later admitted that if Hayes’s  baby had been found when she was still being questioned over the death of the Cahirciveen baby, Hayes and her family would have been eliminated from the Cahirciveen baby murder inquiry. As it was, the gardaí had a signiicant dilemma: they now had two dead newborn babies found ifty miles apart, one mother they suspected of infanticide, and signed confessions that contradicted the indings. How could they continue to maintain that Hayes had murdered the Cahirciveen baby as well as the baby found on the Abbeydorney farm? Despite the obvious contradictions, the gardaí, armed with their damning confessions from Hayes and members of her family that placed her baby on the beach at Cahirciveen, remained convinced that she was the mother of the Cahirciveen baby. But they now accepted that she was also the mother of the Abbeydorney baby. How could this be so? The gardaí’s case appeared to be irrevocably destroyed when blood tests showed that the babies had different blood types; the baby whose body was found on the Hayes’s farm had the same blood type (O) as Hayes and the father, while the baby on the beach had blood group A. But the gardaí were not so easily swayed, and against this compelling scientiic evidence they doggedly maintained their claim that Hayes was the mother of both babies. Their rationale was that Hayes had had sex with a second man not long after a sexual liaison with Jeremiah Locke, and that she had become pregnant at the same time by the two different men. This bizarre premise was supported by the heteropaternal superfecundation theory, which had recently been reported in the prestigious

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American medical textbook Williams Obstetrics.13 The gardaí seized upon this rare condition to argue that Hayes had given birth to nonidentical twins at the family farmhouse at Abbeydorney on April 12 or 13. But this theory could not explain the different blood groupings. The gardaí argued away this discrepancy by claiming that accurate blood readings could not be made because of the state of decomposition of the Cahirciveen baby. However, the Department of Public Prosecution was less convinced at the strength of their case and the charges against Hayes and members of her family were inally withdrawn on 10 October 1984. The gardaí did not take action against Hayes in relation to her concealment of the birth and death of her own child. At this time infanticide cases rarely came before the criminal courts and were generally dealt with by mental health authorities. In light of the failed charges against Hayes in connection with the Cahiriciveen baby, the police department argued that a case against the young mother for the concealment of the birth and death of her own child was not in the public interest. It is reasonable to argue that the authorities were reluctant to take further action against Hayes because any trial would spotlight the systemic failures in police procedure and the substantial mistakes made by individual police. A relieved Hayes returned to her family home, and to her young daughter, Yvonne, expecting that this traumatic and humiliating chapter in her life was now over. THE MEDIA

It was the investigative report by freelance journalist Don Buckley, published in the Sunday Independent with journalist Joe Joyce, that kept this bizarre case of two dead babies, and one young mother wrongfully accused of the murder of one of them, in the public realm. While the Irish press had reported the inding of the Cahirciveen baby and the subsequent charging of Hayes with murder, the disquieting story had not been prominent in the news. Stories of infanticide rarely made front-page news in Ireland in the late twentieth century. The era of naming and shaming infanticidal mothers had passed and such discomforting stories now generally remained hidden from the public gaze, to be dealt with behind the scenes by the judiciary, medicine, and social services. However, away from the public glare, the case against Hayes remained alive throughout the summer of 1984. The gardaí remained locked in a debate with the State Solicitor for County Kerry, Donal Browne, and the ofice of the Director of Public Prosecutions about whether charges

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should be laid. Browne was adamant that there was not enough evidence to charge Hayes, while the gardaí was equally adamant about pursuing the case. If it had not been for the Sunday Independent feature on the case, Hayes’s tragic and bizarre story may have easily slipped into the dark recesses of Irish consciousness. Ironically, Buckley and Joyce were not interested in the strange, sordid tale of illicit sex, illegitimate birth, and murder, or the case’s relevance to the debates on abortion and marriage that were being so hotly debated in Ireland at the time; rather, they were interested in exposing what they alleged was the corrupt conduct of the gardaí. By 1984 the Irish press had moved away from its traditionally conservative lapdog role, subservient to the church and state, and had moved into a fourth estate watchdog role, fulilling the expected role of the news media to scrutinize those in positions of power and expose corruption and wrong doing. Four days after the case against Hayes and members of her family had been thrown out of the Tralee court, on 14 October 1984, Buckley and Joyce broke their story of alleged gardaí  corruption in Ireland’s national Sunday newspaper the Sunday Independent. Buckley and Joyce had been investigating alleged abuses of power by the gardaí for almost a decade. Sociologist Tom Inglis argues that the “Kerry Babies Case” occurred within the context of “ongoing allegations – and categorical denials from the government and the gardaí – about the existence of a ‘heavy gang’ within the gardaí who extracted confessions through intimidation and abuse of those in custody.”14 In their Sunday Independent investigation Buckley and Joyce asked the question, how could Hayes and members of her family have provided detailed confessions of a crime they had never committed? Armed with a leaked copy of the gardaí ile and report, Buckley exposed in great detail the contents of the alleged confessions of the Hayes family. The report told how Hayes described to the gardaí how she had given birth to and then beaten and stabbed to death her baby in the Abbeydorney farmhouse. It also reported the alleged confessions of her brothers who told the gardaí that they drove the body over to the Kerry coast and cast it into the sea at Slea Head. The Sunday Independent article raised questions of gardaí harassment, which resonated with a sympathetic Irish nation. The night after the Sunday Independent story broke, Hayes and members of her family agreed to appear on Ireland’s lagship current affairs program Today Tonight to discuss these allegations of gardaí brutality. A nation watched transixed as Joanne Hayes talked about the night she gave birth to the baby in a ield on the Abbeydorney farm. When

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questioned by the show’s host Barry O’Halloran, Kathleen, Ted, and Mike Hayes made the sensational claim that they had all been forced to sign their confessions under duress and that they had all been physically abused by the gardaí. This program, in combination with the Sunday Independent’s investigative report, now placed the story of Hayes, her family, and allegations of gardaí corruption, irmly on the national news agenda and resulted in a widespread public outcry and demands from media and politicians for the minister for justice, Mr Michael Noonan, to investigate the matter. An internal gardaí investigation was instigated, and when it ended in November 1984, having failed to resolve the matter, the media scrutiny increased. It was obvious to the government that the issue was not going to go away. The political and civil rights voices became strident in the public discourse and the minister for justice, Noonan, responding to the media and public pressure, called for a tribunal of inquiry to look into the behavior of the gardaí. High Court Judge Mr Justice Kevin Lynch was chosen to head the tribunal and was given the brief to investigate the questioning, charging, and subsequent withdrawal of charges against the Hayes family. The tribunal was set to begin in early January 1985 and was expected to last no more than a week. The tribunal sat for ive months, and for ive months the daily news reports captivated the nation. Daily, the proceedings dominated the pages of the newspapers and lead nightly broadcast bulletins, creating a highly charged public discourse on the maternal subject in Ireland. THE POLITICAL CLIMATE AND MATERNAL DISCOURSE

The issues of illegitimacy, abortion, and divorce were high on the public agenda in Ireland in 1985. Two years earlier, in 1983, a successful referendum had been launched by anti-abortion activists, backed by the Catholic church and government representatives, that made abortion illegal in the Irish constitution.15 In January 1985, when the Kerry Babies Tribunal began, the Irish government’s controversial and long-awaited Family Planning Bill and the new Illegitimacy Bill were both due to come before the dail (the Irish parliament). The climate was one in which maternal narratives dominated the news discourse. For example, on the same day that the Irish Independent reported on its front page,“Protests Grow Over Joanne’s Ordeal at Babies’ Tribunal,”16 another report appeared on page nine announcing, “Illegitimacy, Birth Bills

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for the Dail This Session.”17 The following day, the front-page lead read, “Garda Help as Inquiry Judge Jeered in Protests,”18 while, on page twelve, journalist Gemma Hussey wrote a news analysis, “Why We Need Sex Education In Our Schools.”19 These interconnected news discourses were being brought to the public at the same time as a heated political row erupted over the Health Minister Barry Desmond’s plans to make contraceptives more freely available under the new Family Planning Act. When the Kerry Babies Tribunal began sitting in Tralee in January 1985, eleven of the twelve Tralee pharmacies refused to stock contraceptives. (In a sad irony, Hayes had hidden the body of her dead illegitimate baby in a bag from the O’Carroll’s Pharmacy, Tralee.) All of the priests in Kerry signed a statement, read out at all masses, that artiicial contraception and premarital sexual intercourse were always wrong. In Ireland sterilization was forbidden, and if pregnancy resulted from rape then the “right to life” of the unborn baby was to be respected. Premarital and extramarital sex were condemned and so was cohabitation – marriage was for life. Divorce was illegal. As feminist and journalist McCafferty reported, “While the Tribunal conducted its trial of womanhood, from January to June, the Catholic church engaged in a trial of strength with the Government over the right to control women’s fertility.”20 THE PRESS COVERAGE OF THE KERR Y BABIES TRIBUNAL

From day one, the tribunal was allocated the highest news values, and at both the Irish Independent and the Irish Press, senior reporters, including editors, were assigned to the story. It was to remain the dominant news narrative in Ireland throughout 1985 at the same time as a highly contentious motherhood debate over the issues of contraception and abortion was being played out in the Irish parliament and media. The dominant competing news discourses to come out of the reportage of the tribunal hearing were that Hayes was a martyred mother and the Garda a corrupt institution, and Hayes was an immoral young woman who violently killed her newborn baby. These frames, for half a year, allowed the Irish press to act in their fourth estate role as the public watchdog while at the same time informing and entertaining the public with scandalous stories about the private sexual life of one Irish mother. Hayes was portrayed in the Irish press both as an almost-Madonnalike igure and as an immoral young woman – at worst a whore, at best an ignorant girl from the counties. While the Irish media was creating salacious and sensational news about Hayes’s sex life, it was not critical

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of her as the mother of three-year-old Yvonne. Outside the tribunal she was portrayed as a loving mother, with the publication of Madonnalike images of mother and daughter, and as a heroic mother, entering the tribunal carrying large bouquets of lowers sent by her supporters throughout Ireland. These images ran incongruously alongside news stories portraying Hayes as sexually immoral, highlighting the dichotomous virgin-whore press binary. On the irst day of the tribunal, the Irish Press acknowledged the soap opera qualities of the case in their report: “Mr Justice Kevin Lynch faces a mammoth task of unraveling the mystery of the Kerry babies. A story as bizarre and macabre as any plot ever devised by Edgar Allan Poe or Alfred Hitchcock – began yesterday in a tension illed courthouse in Tralee Co. Kerry. The diminutive igure of 25-year-old unmarried mother Joanne Hayes – the central protagonist of the drama – sat, impassive, with members of her family throughout the irst long day of evidence to the tribunal of enquiry presided over by Mr Justice Kevin Lynch.”21 On the same day, the Irish Independent ran a special edition introducing their white-text, black-box heading: “Kerry Babies Inquiry,” which would become the paper’s moniker for their daily reports of the tribunal for the next year. Senior reporters Tony O’Brien and Noel Smith set the tone with their lead story: “Father Named as Grim Tale Opens Babies’ Inquiry,”22 promising a lurid exposé of the private lives of an adulterous couple. This lead story rejected the standard inverted pyramid news format of the day, prolonging the actual naming of the father, Jeremiah Locke, until the fourth paragraph. Even before reporting the purpose of the tribunal, salacious details about Hayes’s fecundity were presented in detailed reports about the birth of Yvonne and a miscarriage she had in the months before she fell pregnant with her deceased son, creating an unprecedented news discourse on the sex life of a young Irish woman. A large photograph of Hayes accompanied the Irish Independent’s frontpage story with the sympathetic caption: “Alone in the crowd: Joanne Hayes walks away from Tralee courthouse after the hearing yesterday, followed by cameramen and reporters.” The entire page ten (which from here-on-in, devoid of advertising, would become the paper’s designated “Kerry Babies Inquiry” page) was taken up with the inquiry and featured large, bold page-width headlines: “Macabre End of Two Infants: Tribunal hears of gruesome inds and ‘confessions.’”23 A week later in page-width bold headlines, the paper’s women’s editor, Marianne Heron, told readers, “Her Sighs and Sobs Have Ampliied for All to Hear,” reporting how the “pale, subdued-looking” Hayes whose “private life

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has been so graphically and cruelly exposed by the inquiry, looked as though she had been weeping” when she took the stand.24 Alongside, another sympathetic report headlined in bold font, “Joanne’s ‘False Confession’ Tells of Threats and Pressure to Answer Questions,” with a photograph of Hayes carrying lowers from supporters. In contrast, another report on the same page quoted Hayes telling the tribunal: “‘I fell in love with him – I wanted to become pregnant.’” She also admitted to the inquiry that she had been reluctant to disclose her third pregnancy because Jeremiah’s wife was also pregnant. On the adjacent page the dichotomous headlines continued: “She Wasn’t a Virgin When the Affair Started” and “Garda: ‘Convinced Me I Had Done it.’”25 The Irish press was able to cast a single mother, who had been having a long-term affair with a married man, and who had killed her newborn baby, both as a victim of an oppressed state and as an immoral young woman in the highly charged atmosphere of Ireland in 1985 where Irish women’s fertility was the topic of political, religious, and public debate. McCafferty later wrote about this time in Irish history as one of “great convulsion in the world that Irishmen ruled.”26  Heron told readers of the Irish Independent that it was a watershed moment for Irish women: “Had someone predicted a month ago that there would be a massive expression of sympathy for a young woman who not only was carrying on a with a newly married man, but had two children by him, the second of which she allegedly abandoned at birth, no one would have believed it.”27 JOANNE HAYES : MADONNA   AND WHORE

The press reported salacious details of Hayes’s illicit affair with a married man alongside harrowing narratives about Hayes as a victim of garda brutality. The tabloid Irish Press ran with vernacular headlines such as “Girl’s Lover Not Linked to Stab Baby,” “Love Declared in Letter to Boss,” and “Man Tells of Pregnancies in 2-Year Affair.”28 The broadsheets the Irish Independent and the Sunday Independent, despite their more formal language, were every bit as salacious: “Father Named as Grim Tale Opens Babies’ Inquiry,” “Tribunal Hears of Joanne’s ‘Cry for Help,’” “Tribunal Hears of Love Affair in a Mini,” “Crying Joanne Tells Inquiry of ‘Slapping,’” and “Joanne’s Shame.”29 Hayes was a witness at the tribunal but she was in effect a young mother on trial for her alleged immoral behavior. As McCafferty asserted at the time, “The Tribunal became a proxy trial for Joanne Hayes as a succession of male oficials – 43 in all –  including the judge, 15 lawyers, three

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police superintendents and 24 policemen – engaged in a public investigation in Catholic Ireland into the sexual life of a young woman.”30 The press reacted defensively to criticism of their reports, reminding the public of the role of the press to provide them with full and accurate reports. While some commentators in the Irish Independent and Irish Press questioned the necessity for the sordid details of Hayes’s private life to be exposed in public, rather than in a closed hearing, the newspapers did not moderate their lurid reports of her testimony. Explicit newspaper narratives continued with the Irish Independent’s page-ten coverage on 19 January displaying the dual news frame. The running headline at the top of the page read, “Tears Over ‘Fairy Tale Dream Romance’” followed underneath by, “I Pulled Baby by Neck: I Did Not Know What I Was Doing Says Joanne,” which was in turn followed by, “Annoyed With Wife’s Pregnancy.” This story reported how Hayes told the tribunal “she was ‘annoyed’ when a girl told her at a Christmas social that Jeremiah Locke’s wife was pregnant.” Then Hayes was again in the victim mode at the bottom of the page: “Kennedy Keeps on Probing But Joanne Holds Up.”31 The press coverage abated in the middle of the year as the tribunal came to an end and Justice Lynch retired to write his report on the proceedings. In October the report was released and the “Kerry Babies Case” again became front-page news. THE TRIBUNAL FINDINGS

Five months after the hearing ended, Justice Lynch released his 270-page report on the Kerry babies inquiry on 3 October 1985. In what was a surprise to many, Justice Lynch lambasted the Hayes family, and not the gardaí. He found that Hayes’s baby was born in her bedroom and died by choking when she put her hands on its throat to stop it crying. Justice Lynch also found that she had hit the baby with a bath brush in the presence of her mother and sister and that the family had agreed to dispose of the body and conceal the birth. Hayes, he said, was not the mother of the Cahirciveen baby. He also found that the gardaí resorted to unlikely, far-fetched, and self-contradictory theories in support of their suspicions that Hayes had had twins. The media now turned on Hayes. The Irish Independent’s front-page was damning: “Joanne’s Shame.” This bold headline ran across the width of the front page with the sub-heading,“Gardaí Slipshod But Exonerated.”32 A large photograph of Hayes nursing her daughter, Yvonne, accompanied the story, while the adjacent headlines read, “Wife Tries to Pick Up the

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Pieces.”33 The report by Tony O’Brien began, “Joanne Hayes and her family stood disgraced last night in the wake of the Kerry Babies Tribunal. It found that the Abbeydorney mother had killed her own baby. And her family – brothers, sister, mother and aunt – all told lies to mislead investigating gardia.” However, the Irish Independent was still having it both ways. On the top of page one sat a small, boxed headline, “‘My Own Story’ by Joanne Hayes,” with a portrait photograph of Hayes.34 The newspaper had bought the rights to Hayes’s book, which it was to serialize over the next month. CONCLUSION

Hayes was never tried for the death of her baby and no evidence has come to light on the possible identity of “Baby C.” The fact that Hayes was not charged with the murder of her child was not an uncommon occurrence. As noted earlier, under the Infanticide Act of 1949, the deliberate killing of a newborn baby was a criminal offence, but in line with Infanticide Acts in England and other Western countries, the woman was (and still is) usually treated supposedly sympathetically, quietly, and discreetly. However, the brutality of the murder of “Baby C” saw the Kerry gardaí treat that case quite differently, which then saw Hayes drawn into a very public murder inquiry. Although the Kerry Babies Tribunal found that Hayes had killed her child, no further action was taken. It was widely accepted that she had received just retribution for her actions through her public humiliation as a witness at the tribunal, and even her most ardent critics did not call for her to be charged over the killing of her child. The story of Joanne Hayes and the mystery of “Baby C” have continued to capture the Irish imagination. Whenever allegations of corruption within the Irish police force are raised the “Kerry Babies Case” is inevitably mentioned. Several of the gardaí involved in the case believe to this day that Hayes was the mother of both babies. In the highly charged atmosphere of Ireland in 1985, when Irish women’s fertility was the topic of political, religious and public debate, the Irish press played a signiicant role in the creation of the public persona of Hayes. By casting the young Irishwoman as a single mother, caught in a love triangle with a married man, who secretly gave birth to and killed her newborn baby, and at the same time as the innocent victim of gardaí corruption and of an oppressed state, the press created a potent and enduring igure of Irish womanhood in the late twentieth century. Hayes’s story,

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concomitant with the tragic story of “Baby C,” was irst brought into the public spotlight through the investigative reporting of freelance journalist Don Buckley working with the Sunday Independent journalist Joe Joyce. Two tragic maternal stories of birth and death coalesced, through Buckley’s report and subsequent journalistic investigations, to become enmeshed in the larger narratives of gardaí corruption and Irish women’s fertility in the late twentieth century. Through reports of the tribunal hearing in the Irish media, the public became transixed by stories about the most intimate details of Hayes’s private life. Her fecund maternal body was put on public display to be discussed and dissected in explicit detail at a time when sex education was absent from Irish schools and a woman’s right to contraception was being debated in the Irish dail. The news narratives of one young woman’s forbidden love, and of her adulterous sex, combined with graphic details of the deaths of two newborn infants, was laid out for the nation alongside highly charged allegations of gardaí corruption, entertaining and informing the Irish public for more than ive months. At the tribunal hearing Hayes, appearing as a witness, became the central igure in a proxy trial in which she was subjected to intense and intrusive questioning that saw minute details of her intimate private life exposed to the nation in a way unprecedented in Irish history. This exposure transformed young single mother Hayes into an emblematic igure of contemporary Irish womanhood and exposed the dilemmas facing all women in Ireland at the end of the twentieth century. Hayes, shattered by the experience and the intense media scrutiny, was determined to respond to the members of the tribunal, to the gardaí, to the media, and to the public through a book that told her version of events. In collaboration with journalist John Barrett, in Joanne Hayes: My Story she tells the narrative of her life, her relationship with Jeremiah Locke, her version of events on the night she gave birth to her second child, the police interviews that followed, and her experience of the tribunal. Steve MacDonogh, crusading Irish author and publisher, who had founded Brandon Books in Dingle in 1982, gave Hayes her voice. MacDonogh was a crusader for free speech and believed it was important to publish the works of those often silenced by the state and was often described as ighting a one-man war against censorship. When MacDonogh gave Hayes her voice she wrote, “My life has become public property and my body a subject for discussion all over the world.”35 This book was her attempt to “talk back” to that world, and, despite being poorly written, it sold well. However, her version of the interviews with the gardaí was vociferously contested by several of the gardaí and

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led to a libel writ from three gardaí, which cost the publisher £100,000 in damages and costs and almost bankrupted the company. The book was withdrawn from circulation. It has been mentioned in recent times in collections of Irish women’s writings, including The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions. While it did provide Hayes with the opportunity to tell her side of the events that captured a nation, the book, unlike McCafferty’s ine book, is not well written. Local journalist, Barrett, presents Hayes’s voice in an awkward style that makes it dificult to get a coherent and sustained sense of her narrative voice. When this book is mentioned in anthologies, the excerpts are no more than snippets followed by a précis of the Hayes case.36 As discussed in the introduction, the news media continues to frame mothers who come into the media spotlight in terms of the binary maternal frames of “good” or “bad” mothers. The fast changing media platforms and delivery systems of the twenty-irst century offer an alternative to the traditional news media and thus provide alternative ways of establishing discourses on maternal issues that can in turn talk back to and inluence the ways in which traditional, patriarchal media report maternal issues. Websites and blogging in particular allow individuals and groups outside of the mainstream news media to enter the public domain and establish alternative discourses on maternal issues. Sally Clark’s supporters set up a website (http://www.sallyclark.org. uk/) publishing the forensic and statistical reports that eventually exonerated her from any wrongdoing in the deaths of her infant sons. The friends and supporters of the McCanns continue to this day to maintain a website established to ind their missing daughter and to counteract the defamatory and damaging media coverage (http://www.indmadeleine. com/home.html). Through new media platforms, individuals can challenge the systemic practice that undermines the maternal position and provide new ways of communicating news about mothers brought before the public, especially those brought before the public in tragic circumstances. The way forward is for all of us to reject the “good” versus “bad,” Madonna versus whore dichotomies and to see immoderate, salacious, and moralizing media coverage as damaging to all women as mothers.

NOTES

1 Anne Lucey, “Don’t Make Films About Kerry Babies, Joanne Hayes Pleads,” Independent (London), 29 May 2006, http://www.independent.ie/nationalnews/don’t-make-ilms-about-kerry-babies-joanne-hayes-pleads-100296.html.

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2 Ibid. 3 McCafferty, A Woman to Blame, 7. 4 See, for example, Gerard Colleran and Michel O’Regan, Dark Secrets: The Inside Story of Joanne Hayes and the Kerry Babies; Gene Kerrigan and Derek Dunne, Round Up the Usual Suspects; McCafferty, A Woman to Blame; and Barry O’Halloran, Lost Innocence: The Inside Story of the Kerry Babies Mystery. 5 See Goc, “Monstrous Mothers and the Media.” 6 See Goc, “Mothers and Madness: The Media Representation of Postpartum Psychosis and Infanticide.” 7 See Goc, “Monstrous Mothers and the Media”; and Goc, “ Bad Mummy’: Kate McCann and the Media.” 8 Douglas and Michaels, Mommy Myth, 162. 9 Ibid., 170. 10 Ibid. 11 The Garda Síochána na hÉireann (Gardaí), the “Peace Guard of Ireland,” is the term used for the police force of the Republic of Ireland. The Garda is the term for “guard”; garda is also the name of an individual oficer, such as Garda Liam Maloney, plural: gardaí. Garda is the lowest rank in the force; a police station is called a garda station. 12 Hayes and Barrett, My Story, 40–1. 13 Pritchard and MacDonald, eds., Williams Obstetrics. This 1810 case described by the irst doctor to receive a medical degree in America, Dr John Archer, told of a white woman who had sex with a black man and a white man within a short time and subsequently gave birth to twins – one white, one biracial. 14 Inglis, Truth, Power and Lies, 206. 15 Taylor, “Case X: Irish Reproductive Policy,” 207. 16 Irish Independent, 24 January 1985, 1. In 1985, the 1978 Family Planning Bill, which had made contraceptives available on prescription to married couples, was liberalized further to provide access to contraception for single people over the age of eighteen. However, the bill did not pass without one of the bitterest political debates in Irish history. One MP opposed to the bill, a Mrs Glenn, told the house that the bill to provide access to contraception for single people was the “most revolutionary measure on the social plane since independence. No matter what age limit is provided it will mark a break with the ethos of almost the entire known history of this country. It will have the doubtful distinction of being the irst legislation since the penal days to be enacted in this land that is contrary to the law of God.” The bill was eventually passed during the sitting of the Kerry Babies Tribunal. Dáil Éireann. Health (Family Planning) (Amendment) Bill, 1985;

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Second Stage (Resumed), 243, volume 356, 20 February 1985, accessed 4 September 2011, http://historical-debates.oireachtas.ie/D/0356/ D.0356.198502200003.html. Irish Independent, 24 January 1985, 9. Ibid., 1. Ibid., 12. McCafferty, A Woman to Blame, 165. “Standing Room Only at Tralee Inquiry,” Irish Press, 8 January 1985, 1. Tony O’Brien and Noel Smith, “Father Named as Grim Tale Opens Babies’ Inquiry,” Irish Independent, 8 January 1985, 1. Irish Independent, 8 January 1985, 10. Marianne Heron, “Her Sigh and Sobs Have Ampliied for All to Hear,” Irish Independent, 18 January 1985, 10. Irish Independent, 18 January 1985, 10. McCafferty, A Woman to Blame, 35. Marianne Heron, Untitled, Comment. Irish Independent, 31 January 1985, 12. Irish Press, 8 January 1985, 5; 9 January 1985, 5; 10 January 1985, 5. Irish Independent, 8 January 1985, 1; 9 January 1985, 1; 10 January 1985, 1; 17 January 1985, 1; 4 October 1985, 1; 19 January 1985, 10. McCafferty, A Woman to Blame, 7. Irish Independent, 4 October 1985, 1. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Hayes and Barrett, My Story, back cover. Bourke, ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bourke, Angela, ed. The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions. New York: New York University Press, 2002. Colleran, Gerard, and Michel O’Regan. Dark Secrets: The Inside Story of Joanne Hayes and the Kerry Babies. Tralee, Ireland: The Kerryman, 1985. Douglas, Susan, and Meredith Michaels, The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women. New York: Free Press, 2004. Goc, Nicola. “‘Bad Mummy’: Kate McCann and the Media.” In Dialogues on Evil, edited by Charlene P.E. Burns, 169–93. Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press/ Fisher Imprints, 2009.

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– “Monstrous Mothers and the Media.” In Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil, edited by Niall Scott, 149–66. Oxford: Media Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2007. – “Mothers and Madness: The Media Representation of Postpartum Psychosis and Infanticide.” In Probing the Boundaries: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Health, Illness and Disease, edited by Peter L. Twohig and Vera Kalitzkus, 53–66. New York: Rodopi, 2004. Hayes, Joanne, and John Barrett. My Story: Joanne Hayes. Dingle, Ireland: Brandon, 1985. Inglis, Tom. Truth, Power and Lies: Irish Society and the Case of the Kerry Babies. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2004. Kerrigan, Gene, and Derek Dunne. Round up the Usual Suspects. Dublin: Magill, 1984. Lynch, Justice Kevin. Report of the Tribunal of Inquiry Into “The Kerry Babies Case.” Dublin: Government Publications, 1985. McCafferty, Nell. A Woman To Blame: The Kerry Babies Case. Dublin: Attic Press, 1985. O’Halloran, Barry. Lost Innocence: The Inside Story of the Kerry Babies Mystery. Dublin: Raytown Press, 1985. Pritchard, J.A. and P.C. MacDonald, eds. Williams Obstetrics. 16th edition. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1980.   Taylor, Judith. “Case X: Irish Reproductive Policy and European Inluence.” Social Politics 6, no. 2 (1999): 203–29.

SECTION TWO

Generational Motherhood

7 “ SHIT

AND STRING BEANS ,” BOREDOM AND BABIES

Bad Mothers in Popular Fiction Since 1968 Imelda Whelehan

This chapter examines the representation of “bad” mothers in women’s popular iction since the emergence of second wave feminism. The selected texts include some written at the height of feminism’s radicalism from the late 1960s and some produced under the banner of “chick lit” – a genre that emerged in the 1990s and focused on the relationship travails of single women, but then expanded to incorporate issues related to motherhood and long-term relationships, which has also become known as “mum lit” or “mommy lit.” This selection allows an exploration of women’s writing across two generations, where feminism dissolves into so-called postfeminism and ictional expressions of female experience move from those deployed to better interrogate gender politics and patriarchal power, to those where anxiety about identity is communicated humorously through depictions of obsession with the trappings of femininity. The textual comparisons offered in this chapter are intended to provide a snapshot of changes in the cultural portrayal of motherhood and mothering within and beyond feminism. Bad mothers have played a signiicant role in literature by women over the years – one thinks of the murderous Lucy in Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) or Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899).1 Yet what makes a mother “bad” is subject to changing economic and historical contexts and the vicissitudes of taste and behaviour. What does not seem to change is the intense feelings of inadequacy and guilt suffered by many mothers who regard themselves as perpetually on the threshold of bad motherhood – not because they actively harm or neglect their children, but because of their conlicted responses to their offspring, exacerbated by the volume of advice

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available to new moms, which implies that there is a single model of “good” motherhood. Fiction since the 1960s has found an outlet for frank expression of such feelings, conirming, in opposition to advice manuals, that there is no such thing as a perfect mother. I shall explore some well-known examples of confessional women’s writing emerging at the time of second wave feminism – Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (1969), Up the Sandbox! (1970), Such Good Friends (1970), Ella Price’s Journal (1972), Fear of Flying (1974), Norma Jean the Termite Queen (1975), Kinlicks (1976), The Women’s Room (1977), Braided Lives (1982) – set against Having it All (1992), I Don’t Know How She Does It (2002), Larger than Life (2002), Don’t Try this at Home (2003), and A Storm in a Teacup (2010). It goes without saying that the ictional mothers in these texts aren’t actually bad by any contemporary measure. In fact, were such women to exist, one would fear more for their health and sanity than for their children. This iction portrays white middle-class heterosexual women all too often chasing an unattainable model of perfection that constantly eludes them. From the late 1960s, motherhood as a concept was under renewed political scrutiny, particularly by feminists who drew attention to the absence of deinitions of fatherhood. Writers of the period foregrounded the artiiciality of the social expectations that accompanied motherhood, informed by a feminist critique that highlighted enduring retroactive myths of perfect motherhood in spite of massive social change in other arenas. Feminist critics at the time asserted that it is not marriage that ultimately robs women of their selves, but the act of bearing children. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) pronounced domesticity oficially stultifying and exhorted women to ind some meaningful (parttime) occupation for the sake of their own and their family’s health. Despite Friedan’s forthright and highly publicized conclusions, iction continued to depict women enduring the “problem that has no name,” using a confessional mode that exploits the intimacy of irst-person narration to convey an intensely subjective perspective on personal and domestic experiences. Heroines recount the symptoms of their malaise and readers are invited to attribute it a cause; by the mid-1970s, feministinformed narrators chart their active struggles to retrieve their identities while attempting to transform the behaviour of their respective partners. Feminist confessional writing shows a post-Second World War generation rejecting its parents’ legacy in strident political terms. Parents are depicted as representing conformity, frowning on their daughters’ attempts to live differently, not least because they seek to afirm the

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rightness of their own unquestioning life choices. Poignantly, the heroine recognizes how closely she resembles her mother and how this shared identity renders their generational and political differences irrelevant. In Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, Isadora’s mother is described as two different people: the resentful thwarted artist who rails against her domestic entrapment, and the generous and giving mom who nurtures her daughter’s talent. In the third of Jong’s Isadora Wing novels, Parachutes and Kisses (1984), serially married Isadora wonders whether the birth of her own daughter will compromise her writing and relects that “pregnancy doubled her, birth halved her, and motherhood turned her into Everywoman.”2 Isadora lives the tensions between art and domestic life; like her mother she adores the bond with her baby while mourning her lost self. In Lisa Alter’s Kinlicks, Ginny Babcock’s life story is interspersed with an account of her mother’s inal illness as she confronts the horror of inal separation: “Christ, her mother was abandoning her! She’d die, and Ginny would be left behind all alone … Tending her mother had illed the void for a time, but the void was still there, waiting.”3 Her picaresque life, including a long-term lesbian lover, traditional patriarchal husband, and feckless hippy lover, is contrasted with the life and expectations of her mother who philosophises that “grown children did what they had to do, and parents could only grit their teeth and watch and pray for them to get through it.”4 At the novel’s conclusion, Ginny takes her mother’s clock on her travels, suggesting a licker of continuity across the generations. In Marge Piercy’s Braided Lives, Jill’s relationship to her parents is strikingly dysfunctional; her mother cruelly manipulates her, pretending that she’s had a private detective follow Jill and her boyfriend to get them to admit their sexual relationship. Like Isadora, Jill has the worst confrontations with her mother but also the iercest love. She asks, “Is it our mothers, ourselves or our men who mold us?”5 The question is unanswerable, but when she becomes pregnant her mother helps her perform a secret abortion: only she understands the price of unplanned motherhood. Expectations attached to child care have changed so much that we may feel nostalgic reading accounts of children running freely in and out of neighbours’ houses in novels such as Marilyn French’s. Faced by suburban isolation, the mothers in The Women’s Room form a kind of collective, now more usually found at prenatal classes or day nurseries. Anxieties about play dates, improving games, and nutrition are completely absent in these earlier novels. Although there is guilt and anxiety aplenty, these women attempt to resist having motherhood absorb their

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entire being, even while they recognize that it can be suffocating, and that the liberal-minded educated men they met as peers at college are now as Neanderthal as their fathers. The mothers of contemporary mum lit are depicted as oppressed by their peers – other moms who seem to be succeeding where they fail. Contemporary motherhood is haunted by the notion that there is one right way to solve all dilemmas, despite the conlicting discourses that tell us otherwise. As Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels observe in The Mommy Myth, there has been a plethora of mothering manuals published since the 1980s and a substantial shift in the way mothers are portrayed in the mass media. We are not short of messages about how mothers should look and behave, and we will inevitably fail to live up to such oppressive images of perfection. The explosion of discourse about good motherhood is attributed, in part, to the breakdown of extended family networks, where women passed down wisdoms to the next generation. Though, as Rachel Cusk observes, this seems to be as much nostalgic craving for a lost simplicity as an historical reality: “In those days, the story goes, mothers were told what to do by their mothers … Like the great library of Alexandria, a world of knowledge has gone up in lames.”6 This myth of lost truths has contributed to the expanding child rearing manual and memoirs market over the two decades.7 It is with astonishing regularity that someone new reveals child rearing can be soul-destroying and identity-robbing, and yet as the textual examples here attest, these “truths” have been uttered many times before. The texts discussed focus on a homogenised dominant ethnic and economic group; the dominance of white voices in the women’s movement and in feminist iction and their shaping of the mainstream feminist agenda has been the subject of much commentary since. Even today, white, heterosexual, bourgeois women proliferate in mum lit as a genre, just as white women’s experience of motherhood dominates the lucrative self-help market, contributing to the fallacy that their experiences are universal, despite the obvious point that writers of colour, lesbians, and those from another class location would have quite different stories to tell. Although women of the second wave generation scrutinised the conditions of their experience from a gendered perspective, the next generation – the present generation of mothers – still struggle with a gendered imperative to over achieve. The “new momism” of the 1990s is as pernicious as the happy housewife of the 1950s: “Here’s the rub about the new momism. It began to conquer our psyches just as mothers entered the workforce in record numbers, so those of us who work (and

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those of us who don’t) are pulled between two rather powerful and contradictory riptides: Be more doting and self-sacriicing at home than Bambi’s mother, yet more achievement-oriented at work than Madeleine Albright … Now, here’s the real beauty of this contorting contradiction. Both working mothers and stay-at-home mothers get to be failures.”8 At the same time that this generation of over-achieving women are perfecting their maternal skills and setting the bar of great mothering ever higher, there is a reverse trend – the will to confess to “cheating.” It has become de rigeur to declare one’s failings, admit mistakes, and describe one’s subsequent journey on the path of righteousness. Either way, the developing affective relationship between mother and child becomes secondary to a declaration of technical expertise – feeding correctly, establishing sleeping routines, and cooking the right food. In this scenario, we’re all recovering bad mothers. We regard ourselves as bad mothers from the moment we pick up our irst child care manual. Cusk notes the scolding tone beneath the veneer of commonality suggested by the use of the irst person plural: “Like a bad parent, the literature of pregnancy bristles with threats and the promise of reprisal, with ghoulish hints at the consequences of thoughtless actions.”9 With a wealth of literature describing the way to approach birth (ideally vaginal and deinitely without pain relief or other interventions), many women have to come to terms with a lingering sense of inadequacy and failure if they have an emergency Caesarean or are unable to breastfeed. For Adrienne Rich, “Motherhood is earned, irst through an intense physical and psychic rite of passage.”10 Rich movingly narrates how, having borne three children under general anaesthesia, she felt inadequate having been denied the “natural” experience assumed to be the appropriate entry into motherhood. At one level, we know that instinct is overrated, but we seem to need this constantly demystiied by writers like Rich and Cusk, who describe frankly their ambivalent feelings and thus break “taboos” that have been transgressed many times before. In iction there is a similar process; the examples I explore here demonstrate how taboos are reanimated in order to be debunked once again, because the “truth” about motherhood has to be reinvented with each generation. Second wave feminism addressed so many silences about women’s lives that motherhood was bound to feature heavily in its iction. The central characters were often, by their own admission, on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Duped by the romantic felicities of courtship and early marriage, once they had children they lost the bond with their

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husbands, their sense of equality, or of belonging in the outside world. The central protagonists are usually well-educated, intellectually questing, and often artistically inclined young women. The novels, often told in the irst person, seem intensely personal, even autobiographical. The central characters’ marriages are based on solid foundations of compatibility and companionship, in sharp contrast to those of their parents. But with motherhood comes a dramatic sense of loss and a knowledge that their domestic arrangements bear no relation to the ideal partnership they once had in mind. Not all these writers had an active involvement in the women’s liberation movement, but their work had a powerful consciousness-raising effect because “we needed novels to ‘tell it like it is.”’11 Conservative critics found these novels banal and self-indulgent;12 but for many women readers, they offered close identiication with characters whose experiences were compellingly similar to their own. These are novels about the quotidian and the mundane. The confessional tone suggests secrecy and yet urgency – the sharing of something that the heroine herself does not fully understand. What these novels emphasize are women’s shared responses to motherhood. Objectively one might see the narratives as repetitive, but their salience and the audience’s hunger for them did not wane. Although the form and perspective varies over time, the need to retell the truth about motherhood is compulsive. Motherhood brings out a crisis of identity in all, particularly because unconditional love is blended with resentment and fear of loss of self. Lois Gould’s Such Good Friends describes Julie’s naked despair at her inability to soothe her child to sleep: “When he screamed in his crib at two A.M. I used to go in and pummel him in the dark. Then I’d come back a second time to pick him up, cuddle and rock him with the light on, so he’d only see the good Mommy and never be able to pick me out of the line-up as the other one.”13 This description of wilful violence of the Janus-like mother ruptures the passage in which it lies – an innocent enough description of her children’s anxiety at being left. In Anne Richardson Roiphe’s Up the Sandbox! Margaret echoes this clash of emotions when she describes her daily trip to the park. Studying the baby perched on her lap she observes evenly, “I could starve him – or leave him behind me, dropping him on the cement, crying in the park till the police come and assign him some nameless future … but he has nothing to fear because despite an angry thought or two, we are connected deeply and permanently.”14 Whilst feminist politics dispassionately anatomised the nature of the power relationships at the heart of the family,

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ictional characters focus on the affective ties that bind them to their children beyond their rage and despair and simultaneously separate them from their husbands and the world at large. The protagonist of Sheila Ballantyne’s Norma Jean the Termite Queen, like Margaret, imagines a life unfettered by the fact of her fertility as she seeks space and time to work on her pottery. Her anxiety about being a good mother is palpable from the birth of her irst child: “Some of my friends with babies had help, but … it represented some kind of failure on their parts. Others went it alone, like me. We never compared notes with any degree of honesty, because none of us wanted to appear weak or incompetent. As a result we all suffered alone.”15 Of the aids at their disposal, Benjamin Spock’s bestselling Baby and Child Care (1946) was a key resource. As Norma remarks, “We loved him; he bent over backwards to avoid promoting guilt in the new mother, offering dozens of possible solutions to every crisis, none of which worked.”16 In Alix Kates Shulman’s Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, Sasha Davis often disobeys Dr Spock’s edicts. A chapter punctuated with quotations from his book is offset by moments of chaotic and messy child care crises to emphasize the irony of trying to obey the “rules,” as well as Sasha’s utter divorce from other women who “could tell me things about my daughter I ought to know.”17 Her husband’s long working days rapidly deskill him; Sasha wonders, “How could he possibly learn on Sundays the intricate rhythm we had established during the week?”18 Norma’s lone experience of baby care in Norma Jean the Termite Queen is contrasted with her husband’s unfettered return to work after the child’s birth. The moment the baby irst defecates all over her is one of perverse awakening: “Nothing prepared me for this terrible yellow mess which was slowly seeping into the rug, my nightgown, the walls. I was still in my nightgown, although it was eleven o’clock in the morning. That was how it was four days after birth, when you were home alone with a new-born infant. A mental image of Martin, in class with his students, lashed through my mind: his white shirt, not a trace of yellow shit anywhere, his mind probing, soaring, cross-fertilising. It was my irst experience hating the father and the child simultaneously.”19 Her very physical, and abject, experiences of child care are set against the image of her husband’s mental liberation, which, apart from the pristine white shirt, offers no sense of embodiment. Norma, trapped in the bodily realities of her baby’s needs, envies her husband’s mental freedom; as such hatred cannot be rationalized in the discourse of child care, she seeks psychiatric help. In one of her recurrent fantasies she imagines herself as a large termite queen, whose only

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function is to reproduce: “Sometimes I stand in front of the color TV and whisper ‘sterilize me!’ This always upsets Martin, especially if he’s watching a ball game at the time.”20 Berated by nursery teachers for picking up her kids late, and having to stand away from the knife rack when her children assail her from all sides, Norma inds her own way through the mineield by creating a space in the garage for her pottery, forcing her husband to take an active role with the children. Some of Norma’s sentiments are shocking and the characters in such novels conirm that to admit to struggling with motherhood is to admit failure as a woman. Bettina Balser in Diary of a Mad Housewife inds her confessions so potentially explosive that she buys a strongbox in which to keep her diary. This resonates with the secret writings of the unnamed heroine in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) as well as the autobiographical context of the story – Gilman’s experiences of postpartum depression and the subsequent medical treatment, which involved the prohibition of all intellectual pursuits until she diagnosed herself as a “bad” mother and left her daughter in the care of her husband. Gilman later notes that, despite the technological advances made in the world, domestic labour remains curiously primitive: “by what art, what charm, what miracle has the twentieth century preserved alive the prehistoric squaw!”21 In Up the Sandbox! Margaret’s own housework duties strike her in the same way: “Despite computers and digit telephone numbers, nuclear ission, my life hardly differs from that of an Indian Squaw settled in a tepee on the same Manhattan land centuries ago. Pick, clean, prepare, throw out, dig a hole, bury the waste – she was my sister.”22 Sasha mourns the loss of spontaneity in her life; romance and children are starkly incompatible: “A highchair did not go with candlelight, nor mashed bananas with white wine.”23 Motherhood, not marriage, is the death knell on Sasha’s youth and attractiveness, as the female body is colonized both physically and mentally by the child. Yet while household drudgery deines these women’s lives, all these writers portray the depth of love for their children. As the narrator notes sardonically in Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room, “Having accepted the shit and string beans, [the mothers] were content.”24 This image underlines the mundanity of their daily lives, reducing them to the basic bodily functions, and in this fashion these heroines are their mothers and their mothers before them – performing a role essentially unchanged by their politics, aspirations, or affections. Dorothy Bryant’s Ella Price’s Journal features, unusually, a workingclass central protagonist who, having raised a daughter, decides to return

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to education, which prompts her to relect upon and renegotiate her relationship to her husband. But her real education begins when she borrows a copy of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962). Ella becomes pregnant and decides to burn her journals, but by the ifth and inal notebook (the same number as found in The Golden Notebook) she realizes that the baby will return her to a role she can no longer endure. As she decides to have an abortion, Ella realizes that it is domesticity, not education, that is making her depressed. She is not trying to ind her repressed feminine self, as her analyst suggests, but actually seeking a self that authenticates her will to live in the realm of ideas. This novel presents life choices as messy, upsetting, and contingent. Ella has been a good mother to her daughter, but feels unable to repeat the experience. The bleak predictability of such narratives is foregrounded, even celebrated by writers such as French, who has her narrator apologize for the banality: “it’s all true, it happened and it was boring and painful and full of despair.”25 Discussions of motherhood are twinned with seemingly obligatory accounts of abortion to emphasize the struggle to make reproductive choices. In contrast, in contemporary popular women’s iction discussion of either abortion or contraception is virtually non-existent. Today, representing a mother who has an abortion would exclude her from being a “good” mother. Bad mothers had a rather dizzying period of seductive power in the “bonkbusters,” the sex and shopping novels of the 1980s. Babies are abandoned and children estranged with fairy tale regularity, and daughters seek their real mothers (as in Shirley Conran’s Lace [1982]), or take revenge on behalf of their family (as in Barbara Taylor Bradford’s A Woman of Substance [1979]). In all cases, their strength derives, tangentially at least, from modern feminism. Emma Harte of A Woman of Substance is deinitely a superwoman who observes that “being underestimated by men is one of the biggest crosses I’ve had to bear all my life.”26 Emma’s obsession with family lineage is played out to melodramatic effect as all her children come to resemble their fathers and, except for the last, a child conceived in love, betray their mother. A failed mother of ive, Emma places her faith in the subsequent generation as past rifts are symbolically healed through the prospective marriage of her granddaughter to the grandson of her sworn enemy. Unlike the consciousness-raising novel heroine who emerges at the end with her newfound knowledge, Emma remains a cold and embittered woman. Her lust for revenge has brought her enormous wealth and, eventually, reconciliation, but it is implied that by every measure other than inancial, she is a bad mother.

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Chick litters, as I have discussed more fully elsewhere,27 are faced with the burden of “having it all.” Rather than the opportunities such a position promises in Helen Gurley Brown’s 1982 bestselling manual of the same name, “having it all” in the 1990s comes to mean being torn by the twin pulls of career and home life. The implied legacy of feminism in chick lit is that increasing social freedoms burden women with greater choice, and the consequences in the novels are almost universally negative, resulting in burnout. These writers acknowledge their generation’s astonishing good fortune in inheriting the successes of feminism, yet they suggest that something is lost in the process of entering a “man’s world” – and as a result such novels are almost obsessively concerned with femininity and its trappings. Where identity and selfhood were jealously guarded by the heroines of the feminist novels, here the search for self often involves an acceptance of an essential femininity that brings its own logic to romance, relationships, and parenthood. Balancing the conlicting components of one’s identity is still fraught with problems, as it was for earlier ictional heroines, but the outcome is signiicantly different. Representations of femininity in chick lit and mum lit are as nostalgic and wistfully rose-tinted as a Cath Kidston kitchen product,28 or UK TV cook Nigella Lawson performing the role of domestic goddess, but they lack the irony of these two examples. While heroines of feminist iction reconciled themselves to imperfection, these characters are crippled by the notion that a perfect mother exists via child care manuals and the mass cultural image of the “yummy mummy” – portrayals of the glamorous celebrity moms that feed the myth that life after the birth of a baby can and should resemble that which went before. Mum lit exposes, often humorously, the cost of aspiring to yummy motherhood; yet the solutions found to the problem of gelling professional and “natural” maternal identity generate some equally disturbing myths. The surge of interest in fashion, lifestyle, and beauty since the nineties places motherhood on a different continuum, as something that can be planned and imagined as part of a statement about one’s self and one’s taste. Motherhood becomes, arguably, a further endorsement of femininity, a softening of the harder capitalist edges of the successful woman. Yet successful women portrayed in Allison Pearson’s landmark work of UK mum lit, I Don’t Know How She Does It29 and Maeve Haran’s Having It All (which simultaneously honours and subverts Helen Gurley Brown with its title) enter motherhood expecting to over achieve. Unlike the bonkbuster where overachieving women could celebrate success, chick lit, and its spin-offs are a celebration of failure – the more catastrophic a woman’s domestic life, the better.

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In Haran’s novel, Liz, a television executive, cracks under the twin pressures of work and family and admits that she wants to become a stay-at-home mom. Her husband refuses to countenance such a change: “I want an equal. I want a woman who’s her own person with her own life. I don’t want to live with my bloody mother.”30 It is not unusual to ind the key male characters facilitating the protagonist’s freedom; the men’s feminism is inevitably exposed as well-meaning but wrong, to be counterbalanced by the woman’s late-lowering maternal instinct. These husbands are a far cry from the demonized or simply perplexed husbands depicted in iction of the previous generation; here men’s wellmeaning support immunizes them from any blame for the anguished choices their women need to make. Once Liz splits up with her husband and takes her children to the country she inds mothering just as stressful as work, but her friend acts as the voice of reassurance: “full-time mothers don’t do everything by the book, you know.”31 Having it All forcefully conveys the message that you can’t have it all and is a paean to motherhood as it is traditionally organized. As the narrator remarks, “What a crazy world it had become where every woman she knew handed their children over to someone else almost at birth and went back to work!”32 For Liz, “the biggest revelation over the last few weeks had been in discovering how much pleasure she got from small rituals … raking dead leaves, hanging clothes on the line, tidying out drawers, making pretty cushions.”33 Here domestic tasks are seen as healing and creative rather than soul-destroying and repetitive as portrayed by Gilman. This is the stuff of the lifestyle colour supplement rather than the gritty consciousness-raising novel. Contemporary good motherhood is frequently associated with retreat (especially to the countryside) for a simpler life and the enjoyment of children. The inference is that it is our crazy lives that alienate us from our children, which is the reverse of the message embedded in the consciousness-raising novel where educated women felt their lives atrophying once they dedicated themselves to motherhood. While feminists insisted that women with self-conidence, space for independent expression, and time to be themselves make better mothers, contemporary mum lit seems to suggest that you can’t be a good mother and be good at something else simultaneously. There are countless examples of chick lit that mixes stories of single life with those of women having babies, so that the narrative works on a continuum of young female experiences. In these cases motherhood is not always planned or welcomed, but accidental pregnancies, instead of resulting in abortions as in past feminist writings, are resolved by the

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heroine’s accepting the accident as a longed-for event, even the impetus she needs to cement a romance. Jane Green’s Babyville (2001) follows three women, one struggling to regain perspective after the birth of her baby, one desperate to conceive in a tired-out relationship, and one who gets pregnant on a one-night stand. The path to motherhood for all three is seen as ineluctable and all-encompassing, but the babies remain very much the accessories in the background, tucked in their baby slings or imagined at their christenings, being planned before they are even born. Only Sam, who is clearly struggling with the irst few months of motherhood and whose own mother is portrayed as “crap,” offers glimmers of a feminist sentiment: “She envisaged picnics on the Heath. Had dreamed of throwing her baby up in the air while he/she giggled uncontrollably and gazed at her with adoration. Sure, she had expected exhaustion and sleep deprivation, and she knew she wouldn’t have any more time for herself … but nothing had prepared her for the loneliness and the boredom.”34 Conlict with men, where it happens, is leeting; men in the world of chick lit are supportive and empathetic. There is even a licker of desire for the image of the expectant mother, barefoot and pregnant, as expressing a quintessential femininity. Adele Parks’s heroine in Larger Than Life (2002) epitomizes this image. It’s eight o’clock in the evening, I am bent double over a steaming bucket of water … when, suddenly, I catch my relection in the long bathroom mirror. Except it can’t be me. Can it? Because the woman scrubbing loors, well, for a start she’s scrubbing loors, secondly she’s wearing paint splattered non-designer jeans, which aren’t fastened but held up with a scarf. Her hair has dark roots showing through, it needs a wash and so is pulled back into a severe knot. She’s rotund. More alarming yet, she is half-smiling to herself as though she is gaining some satisfaction out of scrubbing loors and being inventive enough to use the small scouring pad to really get at the dirt in the grout between the tiles. Surely this isn’t my relection. That woman looks familiar, but she doesn’t look like me.35 The pregnant Georgina is undergoing a process of transition from independent single woman to mother, and this is underpinned by the narrative shift to third person, as if she views herself from a different vantage point. Importantly, she does not recognise the woman she sees, but that person is clearly content to engage in domestic chores and content to dispense with the usual chick lit trappings of designer clothes and careful

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grooming. Georgina ultimately opts for single motherhood, having recognized by the novel’s conclusion that motherhood is about failing to live up to one’s ambitions: “I’m not perfect, I am good enough.”36 Sharing a conspiratorial smile with another mother as she sits in the park, there are echoes of French as she acknowledges that “our days are seemingly endless battles against soiled nappies sticky hands and spew, yet, as each day passes by we feel cleaner, more digniied, more elevated than ever before.”37 While depicting motherhood as solitary and frustrating, it is also represented as a cleansing experience, which, in this case, surpasses that of adult romance. Mum lit announces a shift of focus on what motherhood means from the glamorous successful career woman found in chick lit. Instead of the obsession with weight, the wine-soaked social occasions and the numerous culinary disasters, there is the peer pressure of the antenatal class or the playgroup, the vomit on the silk shirt, the mad taxi dash to a nativity play scheduled in the middle of a key executive meeting. The self-deprecating humour promises a knowing irony that never tips into total seriousness, as if to attach too much weight to these scenes or apply a more fulsome social critique would be to enter into a more chaotic and dangerous realm of human experience. In these novels, one can identify symptoms of the new momism that Douglas and Michaels delineate as “a set of ideals, norms, and practices, most frequently and powerfully represented in the media, that seem on the surface to celebrate motherhood, but which in reality promulgate standards of perfection that are beyond your reach.”38 Mum lit is typically schizophrenic about motherhood and its representation. On the one hand, Katharine Reddy’s experiences in I Don’t Know How She Does It send up this new momism and inevitably herald more serious topics through the depiction of the ways in which women suddenly have little choice about their destinies when the realities of child care set in. Yet, the decisions these heroines make, seemingly engendered by their individual responses to motherhood, tend towards a conservative view of working motherhood. For instance, Katharine, like Liz Ward in Having it All, gives up her high-powered job to save her relationship and salve her sense of guilt about her children. She moves to Derbyshire, exchanges the city for the country, and offers wisdoms on motherhood that ultimately suggest the wrongheadedness of any singleminded career woman. Remembering her carefully orchestrated quality time with her daughter, she relects, “you just have to be around when it happens.”39 And while she is tempted to go back into business, the novel’s ending is suitably open. Utopian moments where the job its itself

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snugly round the life and family relationships recur but are uninterrogated. Katharine’s equally high-lying friend, Candy, also gives up her career to start up a mail order sex toys business at home. The possibility of working from home to one’s own timetable is described as a realistic solution to the age-old work/child care dilemma, though one suspects that few of the legions of home-based workers manage to successfully live this dream. The other source of conlict – the apportioning of domestic tasks – fades in signiicance. The reborn domestic goddess is miraculously able to do it all. This wholesale departure from the rat race suggests that feminism is abandoned because of the impossibility of socializing the workplace or encouraging men to take their full share of child care responsibilities. Kate’s idyllic life and Candy’s eficient home business are reminiscent of the mommy convert Diane Keaton plays in Baby Boom (1987). But what is more memorable about the ilm is the way that Keaton’s character is unsympathetically portrayed until she embraces her motherly responsibilities. Her new business – manufacturing “homemade” applesauce – emphasizes a more itting feminine accomplishment and again presents a pastoral utopia that places the onus for solving the work/mothering dilemma only upon the woman. There seems to be no benign way to present the career woman, since all these texts, conservative or otherwise, vividly depict the incompatibility of motherhood and work; yet subtextually they offer implicit critiques of the system that treats women who reproduce with contempt. The epilogue to I Don’t Know How She Does It partially undercuts the country idyll when Kate admits, after one coffee morning too many, to being “bored to the point of manslaughter.”40 Perhaps I am not the only reader who wishes that Kate had found a better solution to the motherhood trap than the country solitude and a substantial career break. The humorous descriptions of the juggling mother, which give the novel its impetus, are the spaces where the frustrations of the career woman/mother are allowed to be aired, before the guilt kicks in. More recent novels, such as Katie Pearson’s Don’t Try This at Home and Lucy Cavendish’s A Storm in a Teacup, further emphasize the gap between work and domesticity as both feature full-time mothers who embrace their roles in different ways. In Cavendish’s novel, the theme of retreat is revisited, as most of the novel takes place during the long school summer holiday when Samantha takes her four children to a cottage in Devon. Common to many of these novels, the relationship between husband and wife is subordinated to that of the mother with her children and with other mothers, and, in plot terms, the man is relegated

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to a largely offstage position. In this case, the husband’s job prevents him joining the family at the last minute, although the plot is bolstered by the possibility of his having an affair. Unlike the many tales of domestic inadequacy that early chick lit liked to celebrate, this heroine is astonishingly productive as a homemaker, having been equally effective as a breadwinner. The reason she is able to stay at home is that she once wrote a coffee table book about celebrity fridges, which became a global spinoff TV series, and which accounts for her main family income. This new spin on the “having it all” plot means that Samantha’s success both allows her husband to work in a less lucrative profession, and yet does not interfere with her primary mothering role. This offers another form of utopian retreat from the alienation of ofice work and a solution to the work/home dilemma witnessed in Having it All, and here Samantha seems to have created a haven from a heartless world. Cavendish’s novel (one of a series) does pursue more serious themes as Samantha encounters problems with each of her children in turn, such as cross dressing and teen drinking. Her friendships with the other moms, who are also holidaying alone, set shallow and ineffective “yummy mummies” against authentic battling mothers like her. Her attempt to be less of a tourist and more of a villager push her into an unholy alliance with the locals and the fading gentry, and if the character grows, it is only in her rude awakening to the true character of village alcoholic Noel. The overarching theme of the novel, however, is family unity and healing, which underscores virtue and community harmony. When the old lady of the local manor house dies, leaving her mansion to a children’s charity, Samantha’s commitment to giving back something to the village is rewarded, and her new friend Roisin is awarded a dream job as a manager of the charity. The book establishes Samantha as the hub of activity, someone who is both hugely energetic and effortlessly effective. Early on she nails her colours to the mast by asserting, “I now take some sort of strange pride in having a clean house and a well-stocked fridge and a stockpot on the go, while also looking after three children and a baby.”41 The children’s various crises are narrated with a humour that delects any sense of serious concern and the dysfunctional children in the novel only seem to belong to dysfunctional and damaged relatives, underscoring a well-trodden association between maternal virtue and the psychological health of a child. The return of the husband at the end, predictably innocent of any adulterous wrongdoing, allows for a felicitous ending without the complications of married life actually disrupting the low of the novel’s central concerns: “While everything else changes,

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nothing does for us really. Together John and I are like the trunk of an old oak and our friends and family are the branches swaying and breaking and drifting off with the wind that surrounds us.”42 Katie Pearson’s Don’t Try This at Home features a central character who, in her own admission, is a terrible housewife and, having had a demanding job in television, a mediocre mother. A wrongly addressed email critical of her boss galvanizes her to resign against her husband’s wishes. Besides, she remarks, “I’m fed up with being an emotional Houdini.”43 The book is constructed in the form of emails to her husband, her mother, her closest friends (a woman who is on the face of it a perfect mom, and the now-clichéd chick lit gay male best friend) and her erstwhile boss. While it is clear by Dorothy’s responses that her husband is against her wish to stay at home, her mother-in-law articulates a view that is once again becoming prevalent in the popular press: “It’s not right for a stranger to be bringing up your children. What’s the point in having them if you never see them?”44 Although Dorothy toys with rising to the defence of her working sisters, at this stage of the novel her mother-in-law’s opinion remains unchallenged. Like Samantha, she needs some of her illusions demystiied, the most powerful being that her best friend is coping as a mother, while in actuality she suffers a complete nervous collapse, which causes Dorothy to relect on the ingredients of good mothering. The more poignant subplot, which haunts the novel, is that Dot is a breast cancer survivor who lives in fear of a recurrence. Hence, her wish to see the dayto-day doings of her children is cast in a somewhat different light.45 Mum lit offers few surprises. In “telling it like it is” it continues the noble tradition of female confessional writing, and it conveys experiences with which its readers are already familiar, which allows them to measure their failings against someone who has always failed more spectacularly. Bad fathers have to be borderline criminal to attract blame, and virtue is easily achieved by the minimum of involvement: “A dad who knows the name of his kids’ pediatrician and reads them stories at night is still regarded as a saint; a mother who doesn’t is a sinner.”46 Depressingly, there is still no solution to the work/motherhood dilemma; mum lit’s fetishization of the maternal instinct makes one wonder whether it is children who need their moms or rather the moms who are clinging to their children, having retreated from a world where formalized equalities have failed to socialize the family home and where the drudgery of housework is irrevocably tied to the raising of children. Mum lit, by its existence, demonstrates that the issues foregrounded in the consciousness-raising novels are still of concern today. It presents

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problems that sometimes sit uneasily with their humorous portrayals. These women’s experiences are pitched against their longing for validation as good mothers, and the fact that these moms never stop thinking about life beyond the home and long for a sense of selfhood effectively denaturalizes the link between female destiny and full-time motherhood, as does French’s vivid portrayal of suburban women barely coping amidst the shit and string beans. Mum lit shows how the realities of long-term relationships and the transition to parenthood pose thorny problems and unanticipated sacriices. The contemporary answer to the undiscriminating and anonymizing mantle of motherhood is to ind a very individual way round it, but these contemporary novels’ endings suggest that motherhood unites and narrows experience into fairly predictable categories. Kate contends her children’s “need for me is like the need for water or light: it has a devastating simplicity. It doesn’t it any of the theories about what women are supposed to do with their lives.”47 This intimate connection, so tied to notions of biological ineffability, was a connection that feminism problematized but couldn’t sever; to be the mother and therefore the most needed was to be in a position of power even when it contributed to women’s powerlessness. Men’s capability to take on full parenting roles is humorously debated, but dismissed with a semi-essentialist inality: “women carry the puzzle of family life in their heads, they just do.”48 For the heroines of feminist novels, men should be part of the puzzle of family life, yet fatherhood remains ill-deined. Now, in an era where “parenting” is the preferred term, it is still the mother who lends this term meaning. The women’s liberation movement questioned the association of domestic labour with women and demanded men do their share, but to date little has changed in the economy of family life, and motherhood remains one of the most labour-intensive jobs a person can undertake. Feminism deftly exposed the ways in which the private sphere upheld male power by inding recourse to nature to explain the highly socially evolved role of the mother in Western society; what it proved unequal to was exploring affective bonds between couples and, of course, those that parents feel for their children – neither of them simple or without negative dimensions. Moreover, love for one’s children might send the most radical woman regressing to the nostalgic, mythical past of motherlore to which Cusk refers, never more so than when that love is laced with inadequacy, anxiety, and guilt. Adrienne Rich was right: motherhood is an institution, and we imbibe its norms from childhood; fatherhood has always had a more slippery

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designation. Motherhood is at once shrouded in a conspiracy of silence, yet supported by a thriving industry of mothering manuals that spend a disproportionate amount of time preparing the mother for birth. And the conlation of the medical fact of birth (the mother has to be there, the father does not) with the social construction of appropriate child care continues to generate a whole industry that simultaneously reassures and punishes and promises a bespoke set of lifestyle options through the rose-tinted lens of the glossy magazine. The truth is out there, so to speak, in the memoirs of mothers, the political critiques of feminists, and the consciousness-raising novel, but mum lit may be one genre unequal to the task of once again breaking the taboos. In mum lit, if men are not the problem and if self-deinition is not the answer, the blame can only rest on a generation of women selish enough to want it all.

NOTES

1 Lucy Audley keeps her son with his grandfather while she remarries for money, fakes her own death, and attempts to murder the boy’s father. Edna leaves her children with her husband believing she can never be like the other perfect “mother-women” and searches for a sense of self as an artist. She eventually takes her own life. 2 Jong, Parachutes & Kisses, 155. 3 Alther, Kinlicks, 556. 4 Ibid., 473. 5 Piercy, Braided Lives, 163. 6 Cusk, A Life’s Work, 117–18. 7 According to Douglas and Michaels, “Over eight hundred books on motherhood were published between 1970 and 2000; only twenty-seven of these came out between 1970 and 1980” (8–9). 8 Ibid., 11–12. 9 Cusk, A Life’s Work, 35. 10 Rich, Of Woman Born, 12. 11 Gerrard, Into the Mainstream, 111. 12 See, for example, Jane Larkin Crain, “Feminist Fiction,” Commentary 58 (6 December 1974): 58–62. 13 Gould, Such Good Friends, 71. 14 Roiphe, Up the Sandbox!, 12. 15 Ballantyne, Norma Jean the Termite Queen, 7–8. 16 Ibid., 7–8. 17 Shulman, Memoirs of an Ex-prom Queen, 242.

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18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

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Ibid., 239. Ballantyne, Norma Jean the Termite Queen, 8. Ibid., 16. Gilman, The Home: Its Work and Inluence, 83–4. Roiphe, Up the Sandbox!, 18. Both Gilman’s and Roiphe’s use of “squaw” to summon up the “primitive” dimensions of female domestic labour shows the race-blindness characteristic of white feminist writings of the time, not least in its attempted universalisation of female experience. Ibid., 273. French, The Women’s Room, 75. Ibid., 147. Bradford, A Woman of Substance, 20–1. Whelehan, The Feminist Bestseller. Cath Kidston is a UK-based designer who specializes in producing homeware with vintage-style loral designs. There is now a ilm version (released in 2011) starring Sarah Jessica Parker. Haran, Having it All, 177. Ibid., 199. Ibid., 207. Ibid., 212. Green, Babyville, 325. Parks, Larger Than Life, 287–8. Ibid., 400. Ibid., 401. Douglas and Michaels, Mommy Myth, 4–5. Pearson, I Don’t Know How She Does It, 350. Ibid., 351. Cavendish, A Storm in a Teacup, 57. Ibid., 356. Pearson, Don’t Try This at Home, 5. Ibid., 114. Tragically, the author, herself a cancer sufferer, died in December 2010. Douglas and Michaels, Mommy Myth, 8. Pearson, I Don’t Know How She Does It, 165. Ibid., 190.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alther, Lisa. Kinlicks. 1976. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1977. Ballantyne, Sheila. Norma Jean the Termite Queen. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1975.

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Bradford, Barbara Taylor. A Woman of Substance. 1979. London: HarperCollins, 1993. Bryant, Dorothy. Ella Price’s Journal. 1972. New York: Feminist Press, 1997. Cavendish, Lucy. A Storm in a Teacup. London: Penguin, 2010. Conran, Shirley. Lace. 1982. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1983. Cusk, Rachel. A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother. London: Faber & Faber, 2008. Douglas, Susan J., and Meredith W. Michaels. The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How it Has Undermined All Women. New York: Free Press, 2004. French, Marilyn. The Women’s Room. 1977. London: Abacus, 1986. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. 1963. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1982. Gerrard, Nicci. Into the Mainstream: How Feminism Has Changed Women’s Writing. London: Pandora, 1989. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Home: Its Work and Inluence. London: William Heinemann, 1904. Gould, Lois. Such Good Friends. 1970. London: Corgi, 1972. Green, Jane. Babyville. London: Penguin, 2002. Haran, Maeve. Having it All. London: Signet, 1992. Hewett, Heather. “You Are Not Alone: the Personal, the Political, and the ‘New’ Mommy Lit.” In Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, edited by Suzanne Ferris and Mallory Young, 168–201. New York: Routledge, 2006. Jong, Erica. Fear of Flying. 1973. London: Grafton Books, 1974. – Parachutes & Kisses, London: Granada, 1984. Kaufman, Sue. Diary of a Mad Housewife. 1967. London: Michael Joseph, 1968. Parks, Adele. Larger Than Life. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2002. Pearson, Allison. I Don’t Know How She Does It. London: Chatto & Windus, 2002. Pearson, Katie. Don’t Try This at Home. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2003. Piercy, Marge. Braided Lives. Harmondsworth, UK: Allen Lane, 1982. Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. 1976. New York: W.W. Norton, 1986. Roiphe, Anne Richardson. Up the Sandbox! New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970. Shulman, Alix Kates. Memoirs of an Ex-prom Queen. 1969. Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1985. Whelehan, Imelda. The Feminist Bestseller. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2005.

8 MOTHERING ACROSS GENERATIONS

L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables at 100 Irene Gammel

I do wish she’d lived long enough for me to remember calling her mother. Anne Shirley to Marilla Cuthbert about her biological mother1 What is it with Anne [of Green Gables]? I can hardly stomach it, so tightly wound are memories of my mother to it … and the love she had for it. Thordora, Comment on Blog Posting, “Anne of Green Gables, Never Change,” 16 July 2010 (ellipsis in original)2

The story of Anne of Green Gables, the precocious child raised by the aging sister and brother Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert at Green Gables, is a quintessential mother-daughter tale. Like a literary quilt passed down from generation to generation with each generation adding to its lore, ensuring its life into the future, it is a novel that mothers read to their daughters, and grandmothers pass on to their granddaughters as both a gift and a legacy. With its developmental themes, this novel is a tool for a cross-generational dialogue and for forging familial bonds. With ifty million copies of the novel sold worldwide, translations into over thirty-ive languages, and a multi-million dollar industry of tourism, entertainment and spin-off products, Anne of Green Gables has developed a popular culture identity outside the book. With television series and Hollywood movies, stamps, dolls, dollhouses, T-shirts, cookbooks, and a myriad of adaptations, Anne of Green Gables is a trademarked franchise, whose circulation is regulated by the Anne of Green Gables Licensing Authority, owned jointly by the heirs of L.M. Montgomery and the Province of Prince Edward Island.3 With a remarkably loyal fan base, as Geoff Pevere

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and Greig Dymond observe in Mondo Canuck: A Canadian Pop Culture Odyssey (1996), the novel “is the most widely read Canadian book ever written, and the basis of one of the most popular and enduring Canadian pop-cultural phenomena ever.”4 Far from abating, this pop culture phenomenon continues to grow, as illustrated in 2008, the centenary year of the irst publication of Anne of Green Gables, a year of festivities and new Anne-inspired books, television series, websites, and blogs in which the mothering theme remains central. In her prequel Before Green Gables, Budge Wilson superimposes a twenty-irst-century sensibility on Anne’s early life in Nova Scotia, down to Anne’s biological mother feeling baby Anne “move” in her belly. In Kevin Sullivan’s television mini-series Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning, Anne bonds with matriarch and businesswoman Amelia Thomas, played by Shirley MacLaine. In Heather Vogel Frederick’s young adult novel Much Ado About Anne, a group of contemporary Concord, Massachusetts, mothers organize a book club, and through it, the mothers and their twelve-year-old daughters connect not only to discuss Anne of Green Gables but to relive in their own lives situations that parallel the plots of Anne. The girls and their mothers bond by looking up maps of Cavendish on their laptop and citing popular quotations from the novel. Like the characters in Much Ado About Anne, in “the year of Anne,” I found myself drawn into the Anne family as the curator of a cross-Canada exhibit, Anne of Green Gables: A Literary Icon at 100 (1 May 2008–1 March 2009), and author of the scholarly book Looking for Anne, exploring the literary and popular culture sources, as well as the familial and personal sparks that inluenced the writing of Anne. Producing my own pop culture text in form of installations in Cavendish, Ottawa, Toronto, Winnipeg, and Vancouver, I was able to gain irst-hand insights into mothering in popular culture by delving into the world of Anne. Thus we enter the Anne centennial with a few personal snapshots. MOTHERING IN THE YEAR OF ANNE

4 June 2008, vernissage at Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa. Over 130 guests and political dignitaries from Ottawa, PEI, Japan, and Sweden crowd into the august halls of the oficial repository of Canada’s cultural heritage. The large transparent posters of glossy girls and fashion plates, the Victorian and Edwardian popular magazine inspirations for Anne, glow in the windows at 395 Wellington Street. Montgomery’s

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grandchildren and great grandchildren, the heirs and trademark holders, are present. Among the crowd, the mothers and daughters stand out, the young girls having donned the iconic Anne straw hats with the long red braids. A woman introduces me to her mother, Lorraine Wright (Webb), who grew up in the Cavendish house now known worldwide as Green Gables, and who recalls Montgomery visiting there. Concerned about preserving her mother’s legacy, the daughter appeals to me that scholars should record her mother’s memories for the future. The present meets the past, the ictional the real, and the generations meet across two centuries. On 18 June 2008, I arrive for the vernissage at Green Gables Heritage Site, Cavendish. Located in the Prince Edward Island National Park, the heart of “Anne Land,” this is the farm that inspired the atmosphere of the ictional Green Gables. It is the capstone of our exhibit tour. Already in June, bus loads of tourists pour into Green Gables, and by the end of August, the peak month, more than 200,000 tourists will have seen the exhibit. Tourists from across Canada, the United States, Sweden, and Japan pose beside our panels, turning them into digital mementos. Our outdoor exhibit’s tall black steel frames are anchored in the soil with large tent spikes. The colours of the panel images pop against the barn on the one side and Green Gables House on the other. A schoolteacher with her class of youngsters gathers around one of the panels; they are from Mississauga, Ontario, and have come to explore Anne at 100. The next generation consumes the story of Anne. 20 June 2008, the Site of L.M. Montgomery’s Cavendish Home. On this day, exactly one hundred years ago, Montgomery received in the mail her irst copy of Anne of Green Gables, sent by her publisher in Boston. Under a large white tent, with cameras blitzing, Canada Post and Japan Post have teamed up to commemorate the day with the release of new Anne stamps, the Canadian ones based on paintings by Ben Stahl and Christopher Kovacs, and the Japanese ones on the wildly popular Anne anime. The 150 guests, family members, and political dignitaries listen to the reading of Montgomery’s jubilant journal entry of 20 June 1908: “mine, mine, mine, – something to which I had given birth.”5 Anne Shirley was her daughter, a ictional creation who seemed like a real-life girl, walking beside her. This event also commemorates the site in which Montgomery lived with her grandmother Macneill, the woman who had raised her and whose complex mothering helped spark the novel. 1 July 2008, Ryerson University, Toronto. Back at my desk I sift through the guest book of the Anne of Green Gables at 100 exhibition that had taken place at the other end of the country, in the historic Irving

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K. Barber Learning Centre at the University of British Columbia. The Vancouver responses are friendly (“Welcome to BC, Anne!”), emotional (“I love Anne – need I say more”; “Thank you for information about beloved Anne”), and nostalgic (“Take me back to the time I read it for the irst time”; “Anne was such an important part of my childhood”). They are also familial (“My great-grandmother was L.M. Montgomery’s traveling companion”), and occasionally academic (“This exhibit has brought new insights to me about this story”; “Redeines Cultural Studies”). Like Elvis, as one visitor asserts, “Anne lives!” 9 July 2008, Toronto. Ramin Setoodeh, a reporter from Newsweek magazine phones from New York for an interview. (Since March, I have had thirty-one interview requests on the topic of Anne.) The reporter just visited Prince Edward Island and picked up a copy of Looking for Anne. He is writing a piece on Anne and young people’s literature focusing on Anne as a distinctly intelligent girl. He identiies a trajectory of intelligent, funny women, aligning Anne with the iconic American comedienne Lucille Ball. Anne’s popularity today, he explains his thesis, consists in the fact that the novel refuses to “dumb itself down” for the young reader; Anne is anathema to the ready-made consumables offered by the Internet or television. Having read Anne as a child, the American reporter is intrigued by the Anne kitsch that is for sale in PEI souvenir stores, but he deplores that Anne’s name has become Disneyied and that the Anne Shirley Motel and Cottages overlooks Montgomery’s graveside.6 Surely, Montgomery could not have liked this! The Anne industry has been built around her resting place, placing Maud eternally in the eye of the storm. As I delve into the research for this essay, Setoodeh’s Newsweek article appears on the newsstands across North America with the tagline, “‘Anne of Green Gables’ turns 100 this year, but she’s the most modern girl in the bookstore.” Most important, the piece is also a testimonial to the mothers who have kept her alive for a full century, as Setoodeh asserts: “As smart as Anne is, you aren’t likely to ind her in a classroom. She has survived largely through mothers who pass the book on to their daughters.”7 Setoodeh is certainly on to something, as feminist scholar Brenda Weber, who also critically comments on the novel’s low academic respect, recalls receiving the complete series in a carefully wrapped cardboard box after her grandmother passed away. Weber recalls, “Anne has been with our family for generations, although passed not from mother to daughter, but from grandmother to granddaughter, back to mother, to cousin, to aunt, ricocheting through the family, affecting others and passing some by.”8

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There is a distinctly female, maternal, and familial focus about this novel that continues to appeal to modern day readers in Western and nonWestern countries. Avonlea is a predominantly matriarchal society, populated by strong women, as K.L. Poe was the irst to argue: “The females in this series are separate from the male world and recognize this as a positive advantage, rather than a negative coninement.”9 Also emphasizing the maternal power that resides in the hamlet, Erika Rothwell notes that mother-monopolized child rearing patterns, as described by feminist sociologist Nancy Chodorow, provide the dominant social structure in Avonlea and relect the era’s accepted practice.10 Such maternal values continue to circulate within the Anne franchise today and may be a reason why the Anne series enjoys great popularity also in non-Western countries, such as Iran and China, in which family and familial duty play an important cultural role. So pervasive is Avonlea’s matriarchy that it inevitably pushes the tomboyish and precocious Anne Shirley toward a maternal destiny, as Cecily Devereux asserts. Anne of Green Gables is about “the conversion of an older woman from spinsterhood to a kind of spiritual motherhood,” and the shaping of Anne Shirley into a future mother. Devereux continues, “Anne’s whole story is rooted in an early twentieth-century imperial notion of progress, achieved through the advancement of women – or, at least, white Anglo-Saxon and, in English Canada, Anglo-Celtic women – as mothers.”11 These studies alert us to the ideological underpinnings of the mothering theme in the beloved, seemingly apolitical, Anne series. Mothering is a social institution with its own rules and entrapments, as Adrienne Rich has suggested in Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976). Yet by considering mothering in contemporary popular culture, this chapter hopes to open up new critical pathways in Montgomery studies by proposing that mothering in “Anne’s world” is actually more open-ended than formerly suggested, with the novel gesturing toward twenty-irst-century sensibilities and ambivalences. The fact that Anne is adopted is crucial here, I suggest, in that mothering is dramatized as a woman’s choice, even as it is invoked as a biological reality. Marilla consciously chooses to become a mother in the novel’s irst seven chapters, a slow process that provides some of the most memorable episodes of the book in scenes that have been reproduced in ilm, music, and visual adaptations for twenty-irst-century girls. Moreover, the blurring of the mother/grandmother age boundaries in the middle-aged igure of Marilla appeals to a twenty-irst-century audience across the lifespan, including grandmothers, mothers, and daughters, as it is in tune with our

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own era’s focus on mothering late in life, as seen in popular media coverage of celebrities such as Sharon Stone, Susan Sarandon, Holly Hunter, Geena Davis, or Meg Ryan, who became mothers, mostly through adoption, in their mid and late forties. By iltering the novel through the popular culture of her own era, as I argue here, Montgomery shaped some of the powerful mothering archetypes that remain prevalent themes in twenty-irst-century popular culture as they circulate through the Anne franchise. As we shall see, Montgomery shaped her maternal romance as a profound transformation of self, claiming the experience as a process of reinvention and family-building. Thus to understand the mothering archetypes in today’s popular culture, it is instructive to enter the pop culture of Montgomery’s era. MOTHERING IN MONTGOMER Y ’S POP CULTURE

In remote Cavendish, the dreamy but ambitious author consumed the global world through the popular magazines such as Godey’s Magazine (Philadelphia), to which her grandmother had a subscription, Modern Women (Boston), and The Delineator (New York), to name but a few of the family and fashion magazines that Montgomery devoured. An avid reader, she put great stock into the magazines’ advice columns,12 which discussed the styles of mothering, the mistakes of mothering, as well as the reluctance of some women to become mothers. These perennial topics provided the brightly coloured threads for Montgomery’s iction and relected conlicting ideologies and experiences about mothering as Victorian mores gave way to Edwardian modernity. Adoption and foster care were appealing topics in advice columns, for they allowed columnists and readers to explore new maternal identities, including the middle-aged mother, the single mother, and the working mother. Moreover, non-traditional motherhood allowed writers to shine the light on mothering mistakes in a post-Victorian culture that continued to idealize biological motherhood as a sacred duty for all women. As the changing values of the metropolis entered the small town of Cavendish through the modern magazines, the tension between the modern rights of the child and the old Victorian authority of mothers fuelled Montgomery’s imagination with the story of Anne, a story in which Montgomery, a motherless daughter, also had a deeply personal stake. When she wrote her inspired novel in 1905, thirty-year-old Montgomery felt imprisoned by constraints and duties revolving around mothering. As the sole caregiver for her aging and exacting grandmother, Lucy Ann

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Woolner Macneill, the woman who had raised her, Montgomery fulilled a maternal role that forced her to suspend her own freedom. Troubled by depression, Montgomery retreated into daydreams and her imaginative interior world in which she was in control. It was in iction that Montgomery was able to restructure her own life story, by creating the braided plotline of her maternal romance with the aging woman transforming herself through non-biological mothering and the child as the agent effecting the adult’s transformation. Around the time she was “brooding up” her novel, Montgomery was troubled by thoughts of her biological mother, Clara Macneill Montgomery, who had died of tuberculosis when Montgomery was just twenty-twomonths old. “It is a dreadful thing to lose one’s mother in childhood! I know that from bitter experience,” Montgomery wrote in her journal in January 1905, as her loneliness culminated in an anguished cry for her mother: “She would have understood – she would have sympathized.”13 Montgomery’s desperate yearning for maternal sympathy also echoes the era’s popular mothering columns. “Again it is sympathy; sympathy irst, last and always sympathy,” Mrs Birney had written in a piece entitled “Growing Up With One’s Children” less than a year earlier, in the April 1904 Delineator, urging mothers to show kindness and understanding toward their little ones, especially toward sensitive and temperamental children. A mother embodies “the sympathy which comprehends, which inspires and encourages to fresh effort.”14 In her column, Mrs Birney, the president of the National Congress of Mothers in America, encouraged mothers to write letters with personal observations regarding “The Mistakes of Mothers” and to seek counsel (not unlike the format of Dr Phil’s television self-help show today). Here in the “Childhood” column, Montgomery found the ammunition to critique the child rearing skills of her grandparents. “The older I grow the more I realize what a starved childhood mine was emotionally,” she lamented in her journal. “I was brought up by two old people, neither of whom at their best were ever very sympathetic and who had already grown into set, intolerant ways.”15 In just one such example, Grandmother Macneill refused to console her as a nine-year-old when her kitten died. Instead, the farmwoman had turned the event into a teaching moment, just as Marilla would apply a practical and not always sensitive moral to each and every situation. Deftly advocating the viewpoint of the motherless child, Montgomery, who irst began reading contemporary advice columnists in order to challenge her grandmother’s faulty child-raising practices, derived from

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these experts many of the themes developed in her iction. “Grown people are often remiss in the matter of speaking to children,” said Mrs Birney, who, in The Delineator of January 1904, used wording that anticipates Mrs Lynde’s overbearing commands to Anne in the novel; impolite and ungracious, they utter commands, “Johnnie, come here this minute.” (Compare with Mrs Lynde’s words to Anne: “Come here, child, and let me have a look at you. Lawful heart, did any one ever see such freckles? And hair as red as carrots! Come here, child, I say.”16) The adult must employ graciousness, Mrs Birney advised, in particular when talking with the “shy, timid child or the dreamy, absent-minded one, whose thoughts may be far away even while she looks at you.”17 Having evidently absorbed Mrs Birney’s message, Montgomery used her mothering philosophy and standard to mine Avonlea’s middle-class mothers for satire and reform by dramatizing what Mrs Birney called “The Mistakes of Mothers.” By describing how to adopt, so to speak, a problem child and educate her properly, the novel is also suggesting that mothering is less innate than it is learned through experience. Neither a biological mother, nor a perfect one, Marilla often overplays the role of dutiful mother with too much earnestness as many rookie mothers do. In Marilla we can see the pressures that a mother exercises on her daughter to make her conform to society. As Rich observes, “The anxious pressure of one female on another to conform to a degrading and dispiriting role can hardly be termed ‘mothering,’ even if she does this believing it will help her daughter to survive.”18 Still, Marilla is respectful of the rights of the child, providing a good mixture of pragmatic counsel, emotional sympathy, and structured discipline. “The child of nervous or sanguine temperament who has what is termed ‘tantrums,’ should be left alone,” says Mrs Birney.19 This is the very treatment that Marilla applies to punish Anne for her tantrum; Anne must stay in her room and cool down until she is ready to apologize. “The Apology” episode that follows is one of the most ironic and subversive scenes in girls’ literature. Wrapped up in her own theatre, overly dramatic Anne is unconscious of the force of her rebellion and unaware that she is playing her role too well. She drops on her knees with mournful penitence in her face, imploring Mrs Lynde’s forgiveness for having called her “a rude, impolite, unfeeling woman”: “Oh, Mrs. Lynde, I am so extremely sorry.”20 Marilla, who recognizes that Mrs Lynde is being duped by Anne’s theatrical behavior, becomes an involuntary accomplice by smiling, while the narrator and reader, equipped with the  highest level of perception, observe the initial stages of Marilla’s

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metamorphosis. The child is the agent of the transformation, while humour and sympathy are the catalysts. The story of Marilla’s conversion through mothering provides the novel’s emotional peak, leading Canadian writer Margaret Atwood to conclude that Marilla’s development is the central one in the novel, whereas Anne remains essentially unchanged.21 When Marilla is irst introduced in the novel, the narrative emphasizes her need for transformation: “Marilla was a tall, thin woman, with angles and without curves; her dark hair showed some gray streaks and was always twisted up in a hard little knot behind with two wire hairpins stuck aggressively through it.”22 The lack of softness mirrors the magazine discourse, in which the sexless spinster is marked with a gaunt and angular look. The novel’s trajectory presents the “Before” and “After” picture of a woman who is being illed out emotionally, if not physically, through motherhood. Likewise, skinny and scrawny Anne Shirley hates her own body, which is a mirror image of Marilla’s. In the course of the novel, Anne comes to accept her body, in the same way that Marilla comes to accept her motherhood, which is made visible in the softening of her expression and face, reminding us of Rich’s words about the embodiment, or profound corporeality, of the mother-daughter relationship. Rich observes: “I cannot help but feel that I inally came to love my own body through irst having loved hers, that this was a profound matrilineal bequest.”23 Meanwhile, Anne is given full agency in Marilla’s transformation. As a motherless child early in life, Anne has learned to be self-directed and to take charge. It is precocious and maternal Anne who corrects the errors of adults, transforms the outlook of a rigid spinster and a painfully shy bachelor, and brings emotional health to the Cuthberts. She even awakens Marilla’s sense of romance, when by the end of the novel the older woman recalls her own lirtation many years earlier. In Little Strangers: Portrayals of Adoption and Foster Care in America, 1850–1929, Claudia Nelson reminds us that Progressive Era iction writers used romance in single-parent adoption stories to establish the heterosexuality of the “oficially sexless middle-aged spinster.” As Nelson asserts, “Social, emotional, and sexual power is with the child.”24 The child’s power to reform the adult is a romantic fantasy that was and continues to be potent not only with juvenile readers but with adults. The penultimate scene of the novel, with Marilla and Anne sitting together on the red sandstone in front of the house, presents a tableau of maternal harmony and familial bonding: “[Mrs Lynde] came up one evening and found Anne and Marilla sitting at the front door in the warm,

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scented summer dusk. They liked to sit there when the twilight came down and the white moths lew about in the garden and the odor of mint illed the dewy air.”25 The maternal romance quest has found a material realization in the cross-generational bond irst initiated by Anne’s arrival at the doorstep of Green Gables, the threshold time and space that changed Marilla’s life and identity, prompting her to embrace the pleasures and vicissitudes of building family (a family extended with the adoption of twins Dora and Davy in Anne of Avonlea). PERFORMING MOTHERHOOD

As Rich reminds us, “if a mother had deserted us, by dying, or putting us up for adoption, ... the child in us, the small female who grew up in a male-controlled world, still feels, at moments wildly unmothered.” Rich continues, “The woman who has felt ‘unmothered’ may seek mothers all her life – may even seek them in men.” As a result, the motherless woman may spend the rest of her life mothering others, as Rich asserts: “In a sense she is giving to others what she herself has lacked; but this will always mean that she needs the neediness of others in order to go on feeling her own strength. She may feel uneasy with equals – particularly women.”26 No doubt, Montgomery’s exploration of mothering, her acute awareness of the complexities and failings of mothering, and her refusal to let Anne call Marilla “mother,” reminding us of the loss of the biological mother, were prompted by her own feelings of being “wildly unmothered,” to use Rich’s words, a feeling that gives her representations of mothering all the more poignancy not only in the Anne series, but also in her other novels.27 In her article “Performing Motherhood,” Margaret Stefler observes that motherhood in Montgomery’s journals, which were posthumously published from 1985 to 2004, was by no means an essentialist, biological element, but a performance. Montgomery, as Stefler notes, steps outside of the binary described by Susan Suleiman as “writing or motherhood, work or child, never the two at the same time.”28 In her own life – and her journals – she effectively uniied creation and procreation, writing, and motherhood, performing a post-Victorian, modern identity.29 With life mimicking art, Montgomery embraced her motherhood late, becoming a mother in her late thirties.30 She proudly presented her new identity as a mother of two sons, Chester and Stuart, in many carefully staged photographs and journal entries, a happy role that seemed to compensate for the disappointments of married life, although new biographical

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evidence reveals the heartbreak caused by Chester whom she spoilt and indulged into adulthood.31 Montgomery’s inal years were marked by the labour of maintaining the facade of the maternal and family romance she had popularized in her iction, and when she died in 1942 of a drug overdose, her second son Stuart removed the evidence that pointed to suicide. This dark family secret, which shocked the world in the centennial year, was revealed by none other than Montgomery’s granddaughter Kate Macdonald Butler, herself adopted by Stuart, who was present at almost every centennial event, as the patron and proud mother of the story of Anne at one hundred. It is she who has been at the forefront of the family’s reclamation and corporatization of Montgomery’s legacy, a businesswoman who helps to regulate a popular brand of maternal romance staged annually on Prince Edward Island and around the world. With its public conversion from “lonely” or “odd” single woman to socially integrated mother, the maternal romance spawned by Montgomery’s Anne remains a powerful myth in twenty-irst-century popular culture and is staged in glamorized form in the public reinvention of Hollywood divas from Mia Farrow to Madonna to Angelina Jolie. With her expanding international family since 2002, Jolie, for example, has performed the conversion from gothic sex goddess to sensuous earth mother, her pictures splashed over the tabloids with babies in her arm and around her neck and with her partner, actor Brad Pitt, in tow. With six biological and adopted children within as many years, the actress’s compulsive mothering may well have been prompted by Jolie’s early rejection by her own mother, actress Marcheline Bertrand, for whom baby Angelina was a painful reminder of her bitter divorce from actor Jon Voight, the baby’s father. (As Andrew Morton reports in Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography, for a full year, the baby was sent to live in a room by herself, a white room devoid of any stimuli, abandoned to the hands of a myriad of hired babysitters; it was, as Morton documents, the source for the emptiness at the core of Jolie’s personality.32) Journalists may be bafled by Jolie’s conversion from “home wrecker” to UN’s “goodwill ambassador,” but what few have recognized is that the conversion experience is at the heart of the maternal romance in which Jolie has taken a starring role. It is a romance predicated on the labour performed daily anew and reinforced in popular culture through carefully staged images of mothers engaged in spending time with their children, whereby the crews of nannies, teachers, and babysitters must remain carefully hidden from public view, as they would put into question the authenticity of celebrity mothering. (Rich describes the labour

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of the mothering experience: “We learn, often through painful selfdiscipline and self-cauterization, those qualities which are supposed to be ‘innate’ in us: patience, self-sacriice, the willingness to repeat endlessly the small routine chores of socializing a human being.”33) In this context, charity work is but an extension of mothering, just as it was for the good women of Avonlea. With her multiethnic family and globetrotting life, Jolie the actress cum humanitarian sets herself up in a lineage with Josephine Baker, the exotic and iconic actress and social rights activist who made front-page news during the 1950s when she embarked on her venture to become the adoptive mother of twelve multiethnic children.34 Similarly, pop singer Madonna, once the Material Girl, converted to Mother, when she gave birth and raised biological daughter Lourdes, adopted Malawian son David “to save a life,” and became involved in fundraising for charities. The missionary élan for charity work displayed by celebrities is a modern day enactment of the social duty felt and articulated by Marilla Cuthbert when she opts to raise Anne (or by Elizabeth Murray in Emily of New Moon, who gives Emily a home out of a sense of duty). From odd personages and weird outsiders, Montgomery’s mothers reclaim themselves from social stereotypes, while also providing the popular template for personal transformations and non-conventional family-building. Within the domain of popular culture, then and now, mothering is arguably the ultimate transformative experience, an opportunity for reshaping not only social image but character itself. At the same time, like the opposing strands of DNA, these transformative media images of mothering are tethered to their negative counterparts – the possessive, neglectful, selish mother. Where Anne’s foster mothers capitalize on Anne’s use value as cheap labour in the home (Mrs Hammond puts Anne to work on a brood of eight children; Mrs Blewett also considers her as a workhorse), modern day celebrity mothers engage their toddlers and infants in their commercial publicity work. Nothing could illustrate more the use value of children than the high price paid for celebrity baby photos to appear on covers of People or Hello! magazine. Popular media, then and now, cultivate the binary as a way of maintaining and escalating reader and viewer interest. As historian Karen Dubinsky has reported, cross-cultural adoption is framed in such a binary discourse, presented either as “child rescue” or as “child kidnapping,” the adoptive parent either praised for “saving” a child from starvation, or condemned for being imperialist by removing the child from its own culture.35 Much ink has been spilled on proving that two of Jolie’s adopted children each

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still has a living parent, thereby casting a shadow on the legitimacy of the adoption. Madonna, too, came under ire for “buying a baby” when she adopted David, who has a living parent, a poverty-stricken Malawian potato farmer and widower. As we consider the trajectory of mothering in popular culture from the early twentieth century to the twenty-irst century, what is striking, if not stunning, is the constancy of popular mothering archetypes. Marilla embodies the template of the imperfect mother who makes mistakes and yet igures as a mother ideal of selless action. Not only does Marilla overcome decades of ingrained prejudice when she offers a home to the unwanted orphan girl Anne, but she also conquers personal limitations as a stern and emotionally cold spinster, learns to navigate Anne’s temperamental dificulties, and builds a loving relationship with her adopted daughter. Perhaps it is this paradoxical combination of simultaneously lawed and idealized mothering that helps explain the high levels of reader identiication with the novel. Mothers know the dificulties of parenting and the guilt accompanying their failings, but there is compensation in the emotional power of the maternal romance, which is predicated on the afirmation of the mother-child bond as a most special bond that supersedes all others. Ironically, and perhaps incongruously, nowhere is this archetype more alive than in the glamorized celebrity supermoms, such as Jolie who became a mother when Maddox irst looked at her and bonded. Jolie’s very restlessness, which has deprived her children of a solid home base, has opened her mothering to extensive public scrutiny and criticism. Yet the same tabloid media have cemented her role as larger-than-life supermom. It was Jolie who reportedly spent a week at the bedside of adopted daughter Zahara, nursing her in sickness. It was Jolie who created a kind of nomadic home for her children by implementing new rituals, such as “family sleep.” It was she who turned the global world into a domestic playground and home. Meanwhile, like Matthew Cuthbert, Brad Pitt (formerly, “sexiest man alive,” now sporting Matthew’s look with odd scraggly beard) has become an assistant mom, acting as the male maternal supporter of supermom. Jolie also turned her back on her famous actor father and proclaimed her genealogy with her mother. In this maternal romance scenario, mom is reafirmed as the archetypal leader of the family, just like Marilla at Green Gables, who initiates actions and makes decisions, but occasionally needs Matthew’s gently correcting hand.

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EXTENDING THE BONDS INTO THE FUTURE

As twenty-irst-century mothers and grandmothers pass on the tattered personal copies of the book to their children and grandchildren, the gift of Anne of Green Gables is a legacy, just as the trip to Green Gables Heritage Site is a rite for parents to pass on their own childhood memories to their children. In July 2010, American television talk-show host Kelly Ripa posed as “Kelly Anne” in a much-publicized Live with Regis and Kelly show broadcast from Prince Edward Island. A photograph published in the Guardian captures Kelly Ripa with her own daughter, Lola, holding an Anne doll. With Kelly bending down to her daughter, the doll as a connector between mother and daughter, stages a mother-daughter bonding ritual of creating shared memories of time and place and extending the bond into the future. Moreover, by donning the hat with the red braids, the girl visitor at Green Gables slips on a new identity and becomes the red-haired Anne, a rascal and a wholesome child, who seduces her guardians with her imaginative personality and impulsive love. In Canada, where Anne is an icon, this ritual takes on national proportion, with the media, libraries, and governmental agencies such as Parks Canada, Girl Scouts, and Canada Post enabling the gathering of the Anne family during the centennial. In her biography of L.M. Montgomery, Canadian novelist Jane Urquhart ends the book with a loving tribute to her own mother, Marian, whose childhood in small-town Ontario was electriied by her reading of Montgomery’s books. Inspired by the literary ambitions of Emily and Anne, the young girl marched into the local bank to claim the town’s only typewriter in order to write her own novel. While the juvenile novel remained uninished, Marian did pass on her books by Montgomery to her daughter Jane, who put them to good use as inspiration for her own writing. Ultimately, the Anne industry offers intergenerational connectivity, all the more relevant given today’s reality of fragmented and fractured families. The rituals surrounding the bestowing and reading of the Anne books and the shared participation in Anne rituals is a way of creating familial connectivity and shared memories of time and place. “We’ve got each other, Anne,” says Marilla, after Matthew has died, “I love you as dear as if you were my own lesh and blood and you’ve been my joy and comfort ever since you came to Green Gables.”36 Marilla may be imperfect but through Anne she has found the words. Forced to look inside herself, after she is threatened with the loss of her eyesight by the novel’s end, she inds something of Anne. It is this brightly coloured thread of mother-daughter bonding, with the novel conjoining two

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profoundly autonomous personalities in a complex relationship, that has ensured the story’s popularity over a full century and will continue to ensure its legacy into the future.

NOTES

1 Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables (hereafter AGG), ch. 4: 40. 2 Thordora, Comment on “Anne of Green Gables, Never Change,” Crib Chronicles (blog), 16 July 2010, http://cribchronicles.com/2010/07/15/ anne-of-green-gables-never-change/. 3 For a theorizing of this popular culture phenomenon, see the essays in Gammel, Making Avonlea; and Rubio, “Anne of Green Gables,” 65–82. 4 Pevere and Dymond, Mondo Canuck, 13. 5 Montgomery, 20 June 1908, The Selected Journals, v. 1: 335. 6 Setoodeh, “It’s Still Not Easy Being Green,” 48–50. 7 Ibid., 49. 8 Weber, “Confessions of a Kindred Spirit,” 48. 9 Poe, “The Whole of the Moon,” 16; see also Huse, “Journeys of the Mother,” 131–8. 10 During Montgomery’s era, as Rothwell reminds us, even the head of the National Council of Women of Canada regarded mothering in terms of “the grand woman’s mission.” Lady Ishbel Aberdeen quoted in Rothwell, “Knitting Up the World,” 134. 11 Devereux, “not one of those dreadful new women,” 124, 125. 12 See Gammel, Looking for Anne, for a full discussion of the inluence of popular magazines on the shaping of Anne of Green Gables. 13 Montgomery, 2 January 1902, The Selected Journals, v. 1: 300. 14 Birney, “Childhood: Growing up with One’s Children,” 681. 15 Montgomery, The Selected Journals, v. 1: 300. 16 AGG, ch. 9: 65. 17 Birney, “Childhood: A Chapter on Manners,” 129–30. Montgomery owed this issue from which she clipped Clinton Scollard’s poem “Winter in Lovers’ Lane” for her scrapbook. 18 Rich, Of Woman Born, 243. 19 Birney, “Childhood: Temperament and Discipline,” 1076. 20 AGG, ch. 10: 73. 21 Atwood, “Revisting Anne,” 225. 22 AGG, ch. 1: 5. 23 Rich, Of Woman Born, 220.

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24 Nelson, Little Strangers, 134, 135. For more on the power and self-suficiency of the motherless girl in iction, see Åhmansson, A Life and Its Mirrors, 74–5. 25 AGG, ch. 38: 306. 26 Rich, Of Woman Born, 225, 242, 243. 27 As Rita Bode argues, “But the absent mother, essentially unknowable, keeps reasserting herself and forms the source of a lingering tension for Montgomery.” Bode concludes that “this search for the lost mother, the attempt to locate her emotionally, psychologically, and physically, haunts Montgomery’s iction as it does the journals throughout her writing life.” Bode, “L.M. Montgomery and the Anguish of Mother Loss,” 55. 28 Stefler, “Performing Motherhood,” 178. 29 For a different reading, see Thomas, “The Sweetness of Saying ‘mother,’” 40–57. 30 The author preceded her heroine in rejecting the opportunity to become a young wife and mother, breaking a number of romances and one lengthy engagement. She became engaged to Ewan Macdonald, a Presbyterian minister, in 1906 (after Anne of Green Gables had been turned down by several publishers, and she considered herself a failed author), but remained ambivalent about her engagement. When Grandmother Macneill died in March 1911, she released her granddaughter of the tightly controlled status of dependent child, but also deprived her of a material home in which she could write. (Grandfather Macneill had willed the homestead to his son John.) Thirty-six-year-old Montgomery decided to marry without delay. On her honeymoon to Europe, she visited her grandmother’s home in Dunwich, at the Suffolk coast in England, a spiritual homecoming, as she prepared herself for motherhood. She gave birth to Chester in 1912, to Hugh in 1914 (he died at birth), and to Stuart in 1915, in her new home in Leaskdale, Ontario. But as her boys grew up, she suffered the pains of mothering; Chester, her irst-born, in particular, disappointed her with professional and personal problems, including an extramarital affair and divorce that were a devastating blow to the image-conscious Montgomery. 31 See Rubio, Gift of Wings, 418–580. 32 Morton, Angelina, 1–2. 33 Rich, Of Woman Born, 37. 34 Morton, Angelina, 169–70. 35 Popular culture discussions of international adoption tend to oscillate between opposite tropes of “rescue” and “kidnap.” For details, see Karen Dubinksy, “Babies Without Borders: Rescue, Kidnap, and the Symbolic Child.” Journal of Women’s History 19, no. 1 (2007): 142–50. http://muse. jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_womens_history/v019/19.1dubinsky.html. 36 AGG, ch. 37: 297–8.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Åhmansson, Gabriella. A Life and Its Mirrors: A Feminist Reading of L.M. Montgomery’s Fiction. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1991. Atwood, Margaret. “Revisiting Anne.” In L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture, edited by Irene Gammel and Elizabeth Epperly, 222–6. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Birney, Mrs Theodore W. “Childhood: A Chapter on Manners.” The Delineator (January 1904): 129–30. – “Childhood: Growing Up With One’s Children.” The Delineator (April 1904): 680–3. – “Childhood: Temperament and Discipline.” The Delineator (June 1904): 1074–7. Bode, Rita. “L.M. Montgomery and the Anguish of Mother Loss.” In Storm and Dissonance, edited by Jean Mitchell, 50–66. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. Devereux, Cecily. “‘not one of those dreadful new women’: Anne Shirley and the Culture of Imperial Motherhood.” In Windows and Words: A Look at Canadian Children’s Literature in English, edited by Aïda Hudson and Susan-Ann Cooper, 119–30. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2003. Frederick, Heather Vogel. Much Ado About Anne. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008. Gammel, Irene. Looking for Anne: How Lucy Maud Montgomery Dreamed Up a Literary Classic. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2008. – ed. Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Gammel, Irene and Elizabeth Epperly, ed. L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Huse, Nancy. “Journeys of the Mother in the World of Green Gables.” In Such a Simple Little Tale, edited by Mavis Reimer, 131–8. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992. Montgomery, L.M. Anne of Green Gables. New York: Bantam Books, 1992. – Emily of New Moon. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1923. – The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, vol. I: 1889–1910, edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1985. – The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, vol. II: 1910–1921, edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987. Morton, Andrew. Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2010.

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Nelson, Claudia. Little Strangers: Portrayals of Adoption and Foster Care in America, 1850–1929. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Pevere, Geoff, and Greig Dymond. Mondo Canuck: A Canadian Pop Culture Odyssey. Scarborough, ON: Prentice Hall, 1996. Poe, Katrine L. “‘The Whole of the Moon: L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables Series.” In Nancy Drew and Company: Gender, Culture, and Girls’ Series, edited by Sherrie Inness, 15–35. Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997. Reimer, Mavis, ed. Such a Simple Little Tale: Critical Responses to L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992. Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton, 1976. Rothwell, Erika. “Knitting Up the World: L.M. Montgomery and Maternal Feminism in Canada.” In L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture, edited by Irene Gammel and Elizabeth Epperly, 133–44. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Rubio, Mary Henley. “Anne of Green Gables: The Architect of Adolescence.” In Such a Simple Little Tale, edited by Mavis Reimer, 65–82, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992. – The Gift of Wings: Lucy Maud Montgomery. Toronto: Doubleday, 2008. Setoodeh, Ramin. “It’s Still Not Easy Being Green.” Newsweek, 28 July 2008, 48–50. Stefler, Margaret. “Performing Motherhood: L.M. Montgomery’s Display of Maternal Dissonance.” In Storm and Dissonance, edited by Jean Mitchell, 178–93. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. Thomas, Christa Zeller. “The Sweetness of Saying ‘mother’? Maternity and Narrativity in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables.” Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne 34, no. 2 (2009): 40–57. Urquhart, Jane. L.M. Montgomery. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2009. Weber, Brenda. “Confessions of a Kindred Spirit with an Academic Bent.” In Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture, edited by Irene Gammel, 43–57. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Wilson, Budge. Before Green Gables. Toronto: Penguin, 2008.

9 “ YOU

HAVE TO TAKE IT AND OWN IT ”

Yo’ Mama Magazine as a Space of Refusal for Teenage Mothers Beth O’Connor1

Marginality [is] much more than a site of deprivation … It is also the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance … a central location for the production of a counter hegemonic discourse … a site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist. It offers the possibility of radical perspectives from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds … That space of refusal … is located in the margins. bell hooks, “Marginality as Site of Resistance”

INTRODUCTION

Bristol Palin. Jamie Lynn Spears. Juno. The Secret Life of the American Teenager. Teen Mom. 16 and Pregnant. Baby High. The Baby Borrowers. The “Gloucester Seventeen.” Over the past few years, it has become virtually impossible to turn on the television or lip through a magazine or newspaper without encountering the ubiquitous igure of the “teenage mother.” This cultural obsession with teenage pregnancy and motherhood prompted Maclean’s magazine to publish an issue with a cover article entitled “Suddenly Teen Pregnancy is Cool?,” in which the author argues that “unplanned pregnancy is now a pop-culture staple [and] the media is awash in it.”2 Absurdly, despite this heightened attention, teenage mothers have still not been accorded the opportunity to be experts on their own lives and to speak for themselves. The aforementioned 2007 Oscar-winning ilm

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Juno and the widely popular ABC family television series The Secret Life of the American Teenager are not written by teenage mothers. In fact, the latter collaborates with the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, an organization involved in several media programs that promote a prevention agenda.3 Reality shows, including NBC’s The Baby Borrowers with its tagline, “It’s not TV, it’s Birth Control,”4 and the MTV series Teen Mom, share this same agenda, emphasizing the need to prevent or avoid teenage pregnancy.5 In addition, it appears that they follow the reality show trend of portraying the “reality” of these teenagers’ lives from the producers’ viewpoint, thereby offering their subjects little to no editorial control over how they are being represented. Amidst the shock and fury elicited by Jamie Lynn Spears when she announced her pregnancy at sixteen, magazines painted the former Nickelodeon starlet and seemingly “innocent” younger sister to tabloid favourite Britney as a negative inluence on the many little girls who looked up to her, and questioned whether she would do the “right thing” in continuing her relationship with her child’s father.6 Finally, Bristol Palin, the teenage daughter of former Alaskan Governor and former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, whose pregnancy was revealed during her mother’s vice-presidential campaign, appears to be using the opportunities she has been accorded to speak to the media as a chance at redemption. Evidently, Bristol must be publicly mindful of her mother’s political aspirations and conservative values and has spent much of this time speaking out against teenage pregnancy and acting as a spokesperson for the Candies Foundation, a well-funded abstinence promotion organization whose mandate is to “provide information about the devastating consequences of teenage pregnancy.”7 Nowhere among these examples are the vast majority of teenage mothers – those who live their unscripted lives without cameras or paparazzi following them around – being given the opportunity to speak for themselves or to represent their lived realities. As we become more and more interested in our own constructions and representations of teenage mothers, we push their actual voices and experiences further and further into the margins. In fact, when they are not being used as a warning to other teenagers, teenage mothers are further marginalized by their complete absence from the media, including parenting magazines such as Today’s Parent, which simply ignores their very existence. However, dominant discourse is never uncontested. While groups that are marginalized and silenced in this way are typically depicted as being powerless, bell hooks reminds us that the margins to which we are

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relegated can, in fact, become the site of radical possibility. In Toronto, one group of teenage mothers is living proof of this claim. The writers of Yo’ Mama, a quarterly magazine written by and for teenage mothers,8 have created their own discursive space of refusal, wherein they have the freedom to speak out, speak to one another, resist the mainstream, move beyond stereotypes, and accurately represent their lived realities. By embracing their subjective experiences in order to reclaim control over their knowledge-production and their identities as teenage mothers, Yo’ Mama writers and readers are talking back “in a liberated voice [as] a gesture of resistance, an afirmation of struggle.”9 CONSTRUCTING A SOCIAL PROBLEM : MAINSTREAM DISCOURSE ABOUT TEENAGE MOTHERS AS EXEMPLIFIED IN TODAY ’S PARENT

The stereotypes surrounding teen motherhood are dificult to challenge and dispel because they simultaneously connote so many already-stigmatized, and at times contradictory, meanings: victimized by abuse or poverty, promiscuous, ignorant, welfare dependent, childish, neglectful, love-starved, emotionally unbalanced, and so on. Deirdre Kelly, “Warning Labels: Stigma and the Popularizing of Teen Mothers’ Stories”

Before we examine Yo’ Mama in depth, it is imperative that we irst briely review in more detail some of this mainstream discourse that attempts to silence or speak for teenage mothers. As media studies have shown, politicized issues, such as teenage pregnancy and motherhood, are “deined by and … relect the societal interests of dominant social groups,” which leaves less powerful groups, such as teenage mothers “at risk of being devalued and stereotyped in the media.”10 Overwhelmingly, as has been made evident, dominant groups deine teenage mothers as a social problem.11 They tell us that we are facing an “epidemic” of teenage pregnancy and a growing threat to “good” families, despite the decreasing birth rate among teenagers.12 Both popular mythology and social science research focus on the “issues” related to this diverse group – their high incidence rates of pregnancy, lack of family support, inadequate inances and/or education, lack of husband or male partner, and the increased risks to their children’s well-being – as well as possible “intervention strategies.”13 Never is teenage parenting constructed as a valid choice to be respected; instead, it is seen as a personal tragedy, a preventable, life-ruining mistake.14

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This dominant, oppressive discourse surrounding teenage mothers is implicitly tied to that of mothering in general, particularly to discussions of “bad” mothers. Given their rejection of conventional family patterns, their transgression of societal norms and assumptions about what makes a good mother, and their deiance of “normative deinitions of femininity,”15 teenage mothers are constructed as morally dubious and subjected to increasing condemnation.16 According to the dominant discourse that increasingly preaches abstinence for teenagers, teenage motherhood can and should be prevented. Therefore, a teenage mother is, arguably, the ultimate bad mother,17 an “allegedly dangerous anti-model” to “goodmother codes of conduct.”18 Outside of this shaming discourse, teenage mothers are further marginalized, stigmatized, and othered in the complete imbalance of perspectives and the silencing of their voices in both mainstream media and research literature. Self-appointed “experts,” such as journalists and social scientists, without any consultation, assume both the capability and the right to speak for this group.19 For teenage mothers, these “oppressive mechanisms” that stigmatize and silence them can translate into internalized stigma, feelings of intense shame, a decrease in selfesteem, and an increase in self-hatred.20 These consequences are not unintentional; part of the reason for the dissemination of such a negative discourse is that many believe that if we treat teenage mothers with decency, respect, and understanding, we will only encourage more teenage pregnancies. From this standpoint, stigma is upheld as one of many powerful deterrents.21 Some theorists who have explored the power of such dominant discourse have found that its strength derives from an assumption of normativity that masks the reality of elitist hierarchy in which those with power, those who control the discourse, position themselves as typical or normal, something Audre Lorde termed the “mythical norm.”22 The powerful, all-encompassing, and mythical norm of parenting in Canada is exempliied in Today’s Parent, the country’s leading parenting magazine, which obscures difference and erases not only the voices and experiences but even the very existence of teenage mothers.23 Published and owned by Rogers Media Inc., Today’s Parent is the most widely read parenting magazine in Canada.24 The magazine purports to market itself to all mothers with children aged fourteen and under, in an attempt to offer a supportive “parenting community” to Canadian parents.25 However, its intended audience is actually much more speciic: the target readership is between the ages of twenty-ive and forty-nine, with an

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average age of thirty-seven.26 Tellingly, the magazine does not even collect statistics on readers under the age of eighteen. Its ideal readership is conined not only to an age range that excludes teenage mothers, but also to educational and inancial categories that have the same effect: the ideal Today’s Parent reader is a college graduate who holds an annual household income of $75,000.27 A closer examination of the December 2007 issue of Today’s Parent makes explicit this audience and the magazine’s corresponding classist, racist, and elitist discourse about parenting.28 In one article focusing explicitly on thirty-something, middle-class, professional white couples with certain work-life balancing needs, the author discusses “fast ixes” for “miserable” holiday moods and suggests that mothers “hire help” to cope with holiday stress: “hire a neighbourhood teen to babysit while you shop. It may be worth the money.”29 The author offers no suggestions about what one might do to cope with stress if one is the neighbourhood teen. A second article with the same exclusive target audience describes how to balance “climbing the corporate ladder” with parenting.30 Perhaps the most obvious marginalization of teenage mothers is an article entitled “Parenting Through the Ages,” which begins, “We all have opinions on how age affects parenting. But in our increasingly ageless society, does the clock really matter?”31 Apparently, the article seems to answer its own question – that the clock does indeed matter – as it claims to examine mothers of “all ages,” but begins with women in their twenties and concludes with women in their forties. The article thus makes explicit the age range in which mothering is seen as acceptable – and which ages fall outside of this mythical norm. Its complete exclusion of any mother younger than twenty in a society that includes teenage mothers amounts to no less than social annihilation.32 Notably, the woman chosen to represent mothers in their twenties, Janelle, is a former teenage mother, but, while her age and the age of her son are mentioned, she is never explicitly positioned by the magazine as such. Nevertheless, the author’s description of Janelle’s experience as a young mother is telling. Using statistics to illustrate that irst-time mothers in their twenties are a “shrinking demographic” (even as she readily admits that the numbers have dropped only “slightly” from 24 per cent in 1996 to 22 per cent in 2004), the author then follows up this questionable analysis with a quote from “parenting expert” Alyson Schäfer: “there are just so few moms in their 20s and I think that can lead to feelings of isolation and loneliness.”33 Not only do the cited statistics call into question Schäfer’s comment, but also the author’s framing of the issue simply acts

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to reinforce the hierarchy of acceptable motherhood and further contribute to the invisibility and isolation of young mothers. THE HISTOR Y AND EVOLUTION OF YO ’ MAMA

People were getting tired of that whole cop-out, that they didn’t have a voice. Nobody’s gonna give you a voice. You have to take it and own it. Amanda Cain, former editor-in-chief, Yo’ Mama, interview with the author

Moving beyond the spaces in which the voices of teenage mothers are shut out or talked over, let us refocus our attention on the alternative discursive space that some have created instead, beginning with a brief examination of the history and evolution of Yo’ Mama magazine. Literature for Life. Literature for Life, the non-proit organization that publishes Yo’ Mama, was started in 2000 by Executive Director Jo Altilia, with a mission to “empower at-risk teenage mothers through literacy … to [help them] gain conidence, increase literacy skills, and improve their administrative and life skills … [and] to educate the wider community about teenage mothers, with the goal of eliminating stereotypes that create barriers to success.”34 Once launched, Literature for Life’s programs included “Women with Words,” a reading-circle program and book-discussion group for teenage mothers. In 2002, the staff at Massey Centre, a maternity home in Toronto for teenage mothers, felt that there was a breakdown in community among the residents. Many were being required to live there at the demand of the Children’s Aid Society (CAS) or the court in order to retain custody of their children, and they were coping with a lot of anger. In a specially designed workshop session, the group came together with the facilitator to devise a list of challenges they had in common with one another, including a lack of family support, inadequate education, being in receipt of social assistance, CAS involvement, and most evidently, their identity as teenage mothers living at Massey Centre.35 By compiling this list in the midst of a frustrating situation, these mothers recognized that their collective identity translated into a host of issues that were speciic only to them, yet they felt that they were not well-represented in the world outside Massey Centre, that “there’s nothing out there for us in our own voice.”36 Although there were many parenting magazines – all the young women cited Today’s Parent – these publications spoke neither to them nor about them. As an example of how far removed these magazines

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were from their own reality, they pointed to an article instructing mothers to cope with stress by handing their baby to their husband and going to the spa for the day. Rejecting this dominant, exclusive, and elitist discourse, the mothers decided to start their own parenting magazine, written by them and for them.37 With the help of Literature for Life, Yo’ Mama magazine was born. Yo’ Mama. Six teenage mothers were initially involved in the creation of Yo’ Mama. Although staff agree that the title of the magazine originated in this group, its actual meaning is up for debate. Altilia claims that it stands for “Young Mama.”38 Amanda Cain, a former teenage mother and former editor-in-chief of Yo’ Mama, however, shares stories of young mothers being harassed on the street by men who saw them with their babies and who would call out “Yo, Mama!” Cain claims that one of the young mothers in this original group wanted to reverse this catcall by turning it into a positive expression in which teenage mothers themselves would “call out” to other teenage mothers.39 The initial group worked well collaboratively, volunteering their time and working hard to compile issues of Yo’ Mama.40 Over time, the magazine has progressed and evolved, becoming more comprehensive in its content and distribution. By 2008, it had a paid editor-in-chief and staff of approximately thirty-ive teenage mothers, who had also begun a supplement to Yo’ Mama entitled Solace, addressing the issues of violence and victimization in the lives of young mothers.41 WRITING FROM THE MARGINS : YO ’ MAMA AS A “ COUNTER HEGEMONIC DISCOURSE ”

People read to know they’re not alone. People write for the same reason. Anna Quindlen, quoted in Laurel Touby, “Meet the Writers” Even the fact that [Yo’ Mama] exists is battling the stereotypes … Women are being proactive. Amanda Cain, former editor-in-chief, Yo’ Mama, interview with the author

Sandra Spickard Prettyman notes the tendency, or at least the desire, of teenage mothers to distance themselves from negative stereotypes, dismiss what they deem to be misrepresentations of themselves, and build more positive identities as good, competent, responsible, caring, hardworking, and loving mothers who are doing their very best to ensure a

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bright future for their children.42 While Spickard Prettyman’s analysis focuses on the spoken discourse in which teenage mothers engage, an examination of Yo’ Mama reveals that their writing is similarly both a response to dominant discourse and a creative exploration of the discursive space beyond restrictive mainstream narratives. In their written pieces, Yo’ Mama writers ight the stereotypes by reclaiming the identity of “teenage mother,” testing out their creativity, and encouraging their readers to do the same. The writers of Yo’ Mama, all teenage mothers, are the ones who determine its content. Ideas stem from their own experiences, the experiences of their peers, topics derived from other magazine and newspaper articles, ideas stimulated by attending community meetings and/or by learning about new issues, or whatever else may interest them for any reason. The group of writers meets to pitch ideas and then comes to a consensus on which topics should be covered in the next issue.43 Each issue contains regular features, including personal stories; research articles addressing lifestyle issues or focusing on educating readers; lists of community resources; recipes; “From There to Here,” inspirational interviews with former teenage mothers about the path taken to their current positions; book reviews; and, at the end, poetry, often submitted by readers.44 To grasp a sense of the diversity and range of the content of Yo’ Mama, one might consider the cover page of the Spring 2003 issue, which includes articles entitled “Why Magazines are Bad for Your Health,” a discussion of sexist images and their negative effects on young women, “Getting Your GED,” and “Food Banks: A Helping Hand.” While each of these issues can be among the most pressing in the lives of young mothers, they are never discussed in mainstream parenting magazines. The very fact that they are front-and-center on the pages of Yo’ Mama reinforces the crucial need for this alternative discursive space. Yo’ Mama also contains several pieces related to the empowerment of its writers and readers. The cover page of the Fall 2005 issue, devoted to the topic of body image, shows a photograph of a young topless mother, her arms covering her breasts, her face half-hidden, and her post-pregnancy stretch marks on her stomach prominently displayed. In contrast to countless magazines targeted to adolescent girls that depict unattainable perfection in their airbrushed, emaciated cover models, Yo’ Mama offers a resistant, renewed deinition of beauty, one to which young mothers are able to relate in a way that celebrates the female body in its reproductive capacity. Inside the issue, readers can ind an article about the beauty of stretch marks: “[Stretch marks] are etched upon

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your body to remind you of the beautiful child you sprang into this world, and so they should be named Beauty Marks.”45 Even in its very irst issue, Yo’ Mama contains an empowering article – again featured prominently on its cover –  that critiques the dominant societal belief that women should date any man rather than be single. In a humorous piece, author Debora Scorsone revokes this ideal by pointing out the senselessness of myths that state that happiness only exists within nuclear families and that she should be pitied for having a “gorgeous, intelligent, daughter.” She further points out that fairy tales are predicated on the false belief that “some guy” will “rescue [her] from [her] problems,” and explicitly invokes feminism to subvert these myths: “I think it’s about time Rapunzel learned how to build herself a ladder, and maybe get a job.”46 The common theme of rewriting the identity of the teenage mother as a good mother while simultaneously redeining the very term “good mother” offers a inal example of the resistant and constructive discourse that can be found in Yo’ Mama articles. In one article entitled, “You are a Good Mother and You Will Succeed,” Lindsay Kretschmer writes about her own experiences of being stigmatized as a young mother, revealing that this experience has made her less judgmental of others since she recognizes that everyone knows his or her own reality better than anyone else. She reminds readers that being a good mother is about doing your best for yourself and your children, and that struggles are only temporary while achievements are long-lasting. Kretschmer chooses to end her article in this way: “I believe in all the things a young mom is capable of, and I hope that through these words, I might inspire you to believe too.”47 Yo’ Mama writers’ self-empowerment is meant to inspire readers to feel their own increased sense of self-worth. Another regular feature, “From There to Here,” showcases former teenage mothers who have “made it,” who have managed to survive, raise their child(ren), and make a life for themselves. In an explicit attempt to help teenage mothers foresee a brighter future when the present may seem overly bleak, Yo’ Mama asks these women to tell their stories of pregnancy, labour, and child rearing, and to share tips and advice on how one might achieve similar success. For instance, one of these articles features an interview with Erin McMullan, a university graduate and Toronto-based writereditor who became pregnant at seventeen.48 Beyond offering stories of strength, empowerment, and inspiration, Yo’ Mama writers create a space that allows the personal to be political, in which mothers’ complicated human experiences of personal fallibility

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in the face of a variety of competing pressures and challenges are accorded the necessary opening in which to be expressed. In these pieces, readers can discover that there are women just like them who are also coping with the dificulties and challenges of being a teenage parent, who are speaking their truths, and in speaking out, are claiming valid authorship for these types of experiences. Lorde argues for the transformative potential of exposing oneself in this way when she states that “we sharpen self-deinition by exposing the self in work and struggle.”49 One example of this exposed honesty, published in the Fall 2003 issue of Yo’ Mama, is a labour story, the story about one’s labour and childbirth that teenage mothers are rarely asked to share in the same way as are older mothers. Author Ju-lee Kerr tells a funny and heartwarming tale of her son’s birth on 11 September 2000. In the midst of the excitement and chaos of childbirth, her baby is inally born at 2:17 a.m. Kerr’s words beautifully describe her feelings at this moment: “My legs and heart shake for an hour after. I’m stunned. I’m a mother. I’m scared. I’m a scared mother who is too terriied to hold her newborn baby. I’m shocked that I feel this way. It takes me almost 2 hours to gain my composure and conidence and I prepare to hold my tiny, baby boy. The irst thing I do is count his ingers and toes … He’s so pink, so soft, and so perfect.”50 By choosing to tell her birth story in this way, Kerr offers a more realistic, less idealized view of new motherhood as a shocking, terrifying experience, and creates a space that allows other women, particularly teenage mothers, validation for their own fears. This act is not only transgressive but also brave in a world in which mothers are held to unattainable standards of perfection, and the dominant image of mothers immediately after childbirth is that of smiling, happy, and calm women holding their newborn infants. At times, the exploration of teenage mothers’ reality takes on a more sober tone. For instance, one author attempts to connect to other women living in similar situations by relating her experience of living in an abusive relationship and her ensuing decision to place her baby for adoption.51 Beyond its resistant tales of empowerment, personal revelation, and discussions of topics relevant to teenage mothers, Yo’ Mama also offers complementary features pertaining to such a wide variety of subjects that they extend well beyond the scope of this chapter. To offer a very limited idea of the types of pieces one might ind between the covers of Yo’ Mama, consider the following list of issues that have been covered by the magazine’s writers thus far: dealing with sibling rivalry, telling your parents about your pregnancy, being a cutter, going to college,

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homelessness, Aboriginal identity, embarrassing child moments, selfcare, sexual health, fatherhood, circumcision, how to be a mother without losing your identity, breastfeeding, welfare, postpartum depression, teething, budgeting, violence against women, sexually-transmitted infections, drug use, potty training, meditation, separation anxiety, voting, and managing stress. Community resources are regularly listed, as are recipes for easy meals. Finally, Yo’ Mama writers also write book reviews on a plethora of woman- or mother-centred books, such as The Handmaid’s Tale and She’s Come Undone, as well as teen-centred books, such as The Amazing True Story of a Teenage Single Mom, and children’s books, such as Charlotte’s Web.52 While the diversity of the content and the quality of these articles are inarguably impressive, the writers’ style, tone, and syntax are equally so. Yo’ Mama writers and staff feel that the authenticity of their voice is paramount to reaching their audience, so their grammar, for instance, remains purposely imperfect, and the tone and syntax used in the articles relect the ways in which teenagers speak to one another.53 In order to position our intended audience as central, hooks reminds us that we must speak in their language: “To make the liberated voice, one must confront the issue of audience – we must know to whom we speak … the language we choose to use declares who it is we place at the center of our discourse.”54 For example, an article entitled “College Girl with Child” opens in the following way: “Sup, ya’ll I am writing to share with you my experiences as an oficial second year Advertising student at Centennial College. Yep – thas right – I made it through irst year and man, was it a challenge … Hear the joke though … I am not a school person! Yo, it took me 9 years to inish high school … there are deadlines that cannot be altered just because you have a kid (high school perk – lol).”55 Not only do the grammar and spelling remain untouched, but the writer’s choice of words, to speak informally in an adolescent vernacular, positions her as part of the same group to whom she is speaking, an audience that may be rendered marginal by other publications, but that is undoubtedly at the “center of discourse” in this one. The authenticity, speciicity, and creativity of each writer’s voice are perhaps best exempliied in the poetry that can be found on the back pages of Yo’ Mama. In every issue, the magazine invites readers to submit any type of writing of their choice.56 Offering readers and writers an outlet for their creativity is a central goal of the magazine, as Cain pointed out: “Young people are really creative and we don’t want to stile that. We don’t want it to be just journalism … if we wanted that, we

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could go to Today’s Parent.”57 Poetry thus allows this creativity to be expressed, while also offering a non-threatening way in which to do so. Poetry is a form of writing with which young people are initially most comfortable, offering teenage mothers the possibility of easing their way into published work. Once published, they receive payment, accolades, and encouragement, and as they develop more conidence as writers, they usually choose to venture into other forms of writing.58 While the written pieces published in Yo’ Mama form the alternative discursive space for the primacy of teenage mothers’ voices, the very act of writing, the process of compiling the magazine itself, has also had a hugely positive impact on the writers. The staff at Yo’ Mama have noticed a marked change in the young women who engage in this form of self-representation. They experience a boost in morale and self-esteem, they become proactive in having their voice heard, they learn and enhance their life skills, they earn money, and they recognize the value of their work and knowledge-production. In short, they become empowered as women and more able to tackle the various pressures with which they are faced.59 KNOWING ONE ’S AUDIENCE AND BUILDING COMMUNITY : TEENAGE MOTHERS READ YO ’ MAMA

Until I read Yo’ Mama, I thought I was the only one. Common refrain from Yo’ Mama readers, quoted in Cain, interview with the author

Distributing 5,000 copies of each of its quarterly issues to young-parent centres, hospitals, schools, early-year centres, and a direct mailing list of subscribers, Yo’ Mama, similar to other independent publications and zines, publishes on a smaller scale than mainstream magazines and often inds itself struggling to secure regular funding. As a unique publication, however, demand for Yo’ Mama is growing, as is local distribution, and groups from other cities in Canada and the United States are interested in either distributing Yo’ Mama or establishing a similar magazine.60 Deirdre Kelly argues that teenage mothers are “each other’s best support system.”61 In its distribution, the magazine’s priority is to do just this – to build a community of teenage mothers and a support system that combats isolation and loneliness. Readers are able to see their experiences and life stories not as marginal, but as centrally valuable and valid. For instance, many young mothers cope with mental health issues,

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and reading others’ personal stories and experiences of grappling with mental illness can help diminish their own sense of depression and isolation.62 Clearly, there is a huge gap in parenting magazines for teenage mothers and a correspondingly great need for the support system that Yo’ Mama is able to provide. Finally, social service providers also beneit as readers of this magazine. Workers at organizations that serve teenage mothers, organizations that also distribute Yo’ Mama, are able to read the written pieces and learn from teenage mothers in their own voices. They are better able to understand the issues and facilitate more advanced discussions in general. Some workers admit that, were it not for reading Yo’ Mama, they would never even have considered some of the covered topics as being relevant or of interest to teenage mothers.63 CONCLUSION

The very existence of Yo’ Mama speaks to its success as a discursive project. Born out of a collective frustration with the lack of magazines written by and for teenage mothers, the founding members of Yo’ Mama claimed this void as a creative space, one in which the teenage mother would not merely be included, but placed at its center. In that necessary space of refusal, as hooks so eloquently puts it, the writers and readers of Yo’ Mama have indeed used the margins as a site of resistance in order to imagine, create, and produce a new, counter hegemonic discourse. In doing so, Yo’ Mama reminds us that, despite the current obsession with the igure of the teenage mother, the dominant tendency to create and uphold stereotypical representations, and the various attempts to marginalize, silence, Other, shame, and speak for teenage mothers, there is an alternative discourse that demands our attention. Through its writing, its community-building, and its redeinition of what it means to be a teenage mother, Yo’ Mama allows its writers and readers to return to their lived realities as the only truth that matters in this space. In short, teenage mothers are not only talking back, they are naming their own, new world. In a conscious effort to support this placement of teenage mothers’ voices as central, as those that matter most where they are concerned, this chapter will deliberately conclude in the same way as does each Yo’ Mama issue – with a poem written by a reader. In this poem, Victoria Grant describes the power and the liberation one can derive from writing in one’s own voice, connecting with others, believing that one’s truths

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are valid, and, in perhaps the greatest manifestation of creative resistance, wearing the identity of “teenage mother” with pride. You’ve exercised your talents, and realized that there is so much power in words. Coming to that realization drives you to want your message to the world to be heard … I believe, my girl, that you have to [sic] capability to touch people deep within their hearts. That is why you continue to do what you do and write what you write. Because reaching the status of greatness, one day you just might … Your conviction, your passion, your sincerity, what you talk about is true. Strength, empowerment, a beautiful message lies deep within you … So when you look at yourself, LOOK AT YOURSELF and admire the woman you have become. Continue to push forward, take no steps back; do not allow all your hard work to become undone.64

NOTES

1 Many thanks are due to all who helped in the creation of this chapter. First and foremost, I must thank the staff at Literature for Life and Yo’ Mama, especially Executive Director Jo Altilia and former Editor-in-Chief Amanda Cain, for all of the work that they have done to make sure this “space of refusal” lives on, and for being so graciously supportive of my writing this piece and taking it out into the world. I would also like to express my gratitude to the teenage mothers and the staff at the formerly named Jessie’s Centre for Teenagers (now the June Callwood Centre for Women and Families) in Toronto, where I had the pleasure of working with some of the most sincere, resilient, and lovable women I have ever met. Finally, I am deeply indebted to Liz Podnieks for taking a chance by inviting me to be a part of this wonderful project, and to Rusty Shteir, one of my professors in the York University Women’s Studies Graduate Program, for encouraging me to develop this piece for conference-presentation and beyond. While every effort was taken to avoid inaccuracies, any and all errors that may have been overlooked are mine alone. 2 Gulli, “Suddenly Teen Pregnancy is Cool?,” 40.

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3 National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, “Entertainment Media,” The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, 2010, accessed 31 August 2010, http://www. thenationalcampaign.org/media/entertainment-media.aspx. 4 Siri Agrell, “Under 18, and Pregnant by Design,” Globe and Mail, 26 June 2008, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/article694163.ece. 5 Castillo, “Hardships and Lessons Return with ‘Teen Mom.’” To ensure that this prevention message is made clear to the audience, the irst two seasons of Teen Mom had public service announcements interspersed throughout the episodes, reminding us that “teenage pregnancy is 100% preventable.” By its third season, the PSA had changed, and advised viewers to “take control at itsyoursexlife.org,” a website that also promotes prevention. 6 Oh, “Are Jamie Lynn Spears and Casey Aldridge Getting Back Together?,” People.com, 13 August 2010, http://www.people.com/people/article/0,, 20412946,00.html. 7 Megan Slack, “Bristol Palin, Candies Foundation Team Up to Prevent Teen Pregnancy,” Hufington Post, 5 May 2009, http://www.hufingtonpost. com/2009/05/05/bristol-palin-candies-fou_n_196838.html. 8 Although Yo’ Mama occasionally has teenage fathers writing in the hopes of attracting teenage fathers as readers, its target audience and primary writing staff are teenage mothers. I have thus purposely elected to use the term “teenage mothers” throughout this chapter, as opposed to the more gender-inclusive “teenage parents.” 9 hooks, Talking Back, 18. 10 Bullock et al., “Media Images of the Poor,” 230. 11 Spickard Prettyman, “‘We Ain’t No Dogs,’” 156. 12 Wong and Checkland, “Introduction,” xv. 13 Spickard Prettyman, “‘We Ain’t No Dogs,’” 156, 158. 14 Kelly, “Stigma Stories,” 422, 429. 15 Ibid., 431. 16 MacIntyre and Cunningham-Burley, “Teenage Pregnancy as a Social Problem,” 63. 17 Kelly, “Stigma Stories,” 431. 18 Connolly, Homeless Mothers, 40. 19 Kelly, “Stigma Stories,” 439, 444. 20 Croghan and Miell, “Strategies of Resistance,” 445. 21 Kelly, “Warning Labels,” 166. 22 Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex,” 282. 23 Apart from this chapter’s brief introduction, a comprehensive analysis of the various ways in which pop culture is currently (mis)representing teenage

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29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

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motherhood lies beyond its scope. However, Today’s Parent warrants slightly more analysis than do the other examples mentioned since, as this chapter makes clear, its marginalization of teenage mothers is cited as one of the main reasons Yo’ Mama was created. Rogers Media Inc., “Who We Are.” Todaysparent.com, 1 November 2007. http://www.todaysparent.com/corpinfo/index.jsp. Ibid. Rogers Media Inc., “Today’s Parent 2007 Reader Demographics.” Ibid. This issue was randomly chosen, but offered several pertinent examples. For one such example of this discourse, see Kate Pocock, “Digging Up Roots,” 155–7. Embrett, “The Not-so-happy Holidays,” 43. Pachner, “Agents of Change,” 107. Finlay, “Parenting Through the Ages,” 165. As this example illustrates, teenage mothers are not the only ones excluded from the age range that has been deemed acceptable for irst-time motherhood in North America. Although celebrity culture has made it more acceptable for women to become mothers in their late thirties or early forties, this choice, especially as the age of the mother increases, can still be stigmatized for the supposed health risks to the child. As such, just as teenage mothers are viliied for their “stupidity,” older mothers may be criticized for their “selishness.” Of course, many mothers are judged and deemed to be unacceptable for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with their age. Finlay, “Parenting Through the Ages,” 166. Decision Partners, “Determining the Value of Yo’ Mama,” 1. Jo Altilia (executive director, Literature for Life), interview with the author, Toronto, 16 October 2007. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Amanda Cain (former editor-in-chief, Yo’ Mama), interview with the author, Toronto, 16 October 2007. Altilia, interview. Altilia, interview; Cain, interview. Spickard Prettyman, “‘We Ain’t No Dogs,’” 162. Altilia, interview; Cain, interview. Although Yo’ Mama does not strictly fall under the “grrrl zine” category, nor does it deine itself in this way, the link can nevertheless be made. Often motivated by a sense of isolation as well as alienation from, or disinterest in the mainstream, girls and young women who produce

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45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

their own media as part of the grrrl zine movement deconstruct and challenge stereotypes and become central agents, rather than invisible or controlled subjects. For more information on this topic, see Anita Harris, “gURL Scenes and grrrl zines: The Regulation and Resistance of Girls in Late Modernity,” Feminist Review 75 (2003): 38–56. As Kelly argues, this network of girls and women – in which I would include the writers and readers of Yo’ Mama – has created a “subaltern counterpublic.” See Deirdre M. Kelly, “Frame Work: Helping Youth Counter Their Misrepresentation in the Media,” Canadian Journal of Education 29 (2006): 27–48. Kretschmer, “‘On the Real,’” 21. Scorsone, “I’m Fine Thank You,” 1–2. Kretschmer, “You are a Good Mother,” 30. “From There to Here,” 30–1. Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex,” 287. Kerr, “The Labour Chronicle,” 9. Choices, “My Story,” 16. In preparation for this chapter, I conducted an extensive content review of Yo’ Mama, including all issues published from its inception in 2000 up to and including its last issue of 2007. These topics and book titles were randomly selected from the lists compiled as a result of this review. Altilia, interview; Cain, interview. hooks, Talking Back, 15. L.K., “College Girl with Child,” 19. For example, see “Recruiting Writers!,” 27. Cain, interview. Ibid. Altilia, interview; Cain, interview. Altilia, interview; Cain, interview. Kelly, “Stigma Stories,” 440. Altilia, interview; Cain, interview. Altilia, interview. Grant, “Look at Yourself,” 27.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Altilia, Jo, executive director, Literature for Life. Interview with the author. Toronto, ON. 16 October 2007. Bullock, Heather E., Karen Fraser Wyche, and Wendy R. Williams. “Media Images of the Poor.” Journal of Social Issues 57 (2001): 229–46. Cain, Amanda, former editor-in-chief, Yo’ Mama. Interview with the author. Toronto, ON. 16 October 2007.

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Castillo, Michelle. “Hardships and Lessons Return with ‘Teen Mom.’” The Today Show. 16 July 2010. http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/38281908/ns/ todayentertainment/. Choices. “My Story.” Yo’ Mama, Fall 2004: 16. Connolly, Deborah R. Homeless Mothers: Face to Face with Women and Poverty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Croghan, Rosaleen, and Dorothy Miell. “Strategies of Resistance: ‘Bad’ Mothers Dispute the Evidence.” Feminism & Psychology 8 (1998): 445–65. Decision Partners. “Determining the Value of Yo’ Mama to User Organizations: A Report to the Literature for Life Board of Directors.” August 2005. In author’s possession. Embrett, Cheryl. “The Not-so-happy Holidays: Fast Fixes for Your Miserable Mood.” Today’s Parent, December 2007, 43–4. Finlay, Liza. “Parenting Through the Ages.” Today’s Parent, December 2007, 165–70. “From There to Here with Erin McMullan.” Yo’ Mama, Spring 2006, 30–1. Grant, Victoria. “Look at Yourself.” Yo’ Mama, Fall 2005, 27. Gulli, Cathy. “Suddenly Teen Pregnancy is Cool?” Maclean’s, 28 January 2008, 40–4. hooks, bell. “Marginality as Site of Resistance.” In Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, edited by Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West, 341–3. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990. – Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1989. K., L. “College Girl with Child.” Yo’ Mama, Fall 2006,19. Kelly, Deirdre M. “Stigma Stories: Four Discourses About Teen Mothers, Welfare, and Poverty.” Youth & Society 27 (1996): 421–49. – “Warning Labels: Stigma and the Popularizing of Teen Mothers’ Stories.” Curriculum Inquiry 27 (1997): 165–86. Kerr, Ju-lee. “The Labour Chronicle.” Yo’ Mama, Fall 2003, 9. Kretschmer, Lindsay. “‘On the Real’: The Beauty of Stretch Marks.” Yo’ Mama, Fall 2005, 21. – “You are a Good Mother and You Will Succeed.” Yo’ Mama, Spring 2006, 30. Lorde, Audre. “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redeining Difference.” In Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, edited by Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West, 281–7. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990. MacIntyre, Sally, and Sarah Cunningham-Burley. “Teenage Pregnancy as a Social Problem: A Perspective from the United Kingdom.” In The Politics

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of Pregnancy: Adolescent Sexuality and Public Policy, edited by Annette Lawson, and Deborah L. Rhode, 59–73. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Pachner, Joanna. “Agents of Change.” Today’s Parent, December 2007, 107–16. Prettyman, Sandra Spickard. “‘We Ain’t No Dogs’: Teenage Mothers (Re) Deine Themselves.” In Geographies of Girlhood: Identities In-Between, edited by Pamela J. Bettis, and Natalie G. Adams, 155–73. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005. “Recruiting Writers!” Yo’ Mama Fall 2004, 27. Rogers Media Inc. “Today’s Parent 2007 Reader Demographics.” In author’s possession. Scorsone, Debora. “I’m Fine Thank You.” Yo’ Mama, Summer 2002, 1–2. Touby, Laurel. “Meet the Writers: Anna Quindlen.” Barnes & Noble. 1 Nov. 2007, http://www.barnesandnoble.com/writers/writerdetails.asp?cid= 976503. Wong, James, and David Checkland. Introduction to Teen Pregnancy and Parenting: Social and Ethical Issues. Edited by James Wong and David Checkland, xiii-xxiv. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.

10 MEDIATING RISKY MOTHERHOOD

A Discursive Analysis of Offline and Online Responses to the Oldest British Mother-to-be Maud Perrier

On 5 May 2006, the news emerged in the British Press that Patricia Rashbrook, a sixty-three-year-old psychiatrist, was seven months pregnant after in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment, which made her the oldest mother-to-be in Britain. The newspaper headlines that day relected both the controversy her pregnancy generated – “Uproar Over IVF Woman Expecting a Baby at 63” – and the mother’s side of the story – “I’m Not Too Old to be a Mother at 62.”1 The photographs on the front pages show Rashbrook as an extremely smiley, blond-haired, blueeyed, middle-aged woman. Although her husband is not present in the front-page photographs, we learn that she was recently remarried to a Mr Farrant, sixty, an academic. The articles also reveal that Dr Rashbrook has three grown children from a previous marriage and that she underwent fertility treatment in Russia, under the supervision of the Italian embryologist Severino Antinori. In this chapter, I offer a discursive analysis of the media coverage on Rashbrook’s pregnancy focusing on how discourses of risk were used as a frame for the debate online and ofline, in printed news media. By looking both at print media and Internet posts as interconnected sites for the emergence of new motherhoods, I explore how particular discourses evoked in the newspapers are being either taken up or rejected by the public. In the analysis of the press coverage, I focus on how discourses of “good motherhood” and risk intersect so that postmenopausal pregnancies come to be seen as the ultimate irresponsible and selish act. Following from this, my analysis of the BBC online debate concentrates

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on how the themes of the natural and social class were used to construct the mother as risky, and how this differed from the press and the print media. While the coverage of this event appears symptomatic of a more widespread trend of surveillance around women’s reproductive choices, I argue that, in this particular case, the risk-taking behaviour of Rashbrook was exonerated through normative discourses both ofline and online. COVERING NEWSPAPER COVERAGE : METHODOLOGY AND THE CONCEPT OF RISK

I carried out textual analysis of ten newspaper articles from the British press, which mostly focused on the couple defending their decision against critics. The newspapers I chose to look at (the Sun, Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph and the Times) all reported on the event following their particular in-house style, thereby more or less sensationalizing the coverage according to their readership. I chose these newspapers as they represent a good cross section of tabloid (the Sun), mid-market (Daily Mail) and broadsheet (the Daily Telegraph and the Times) daily newspapers and are the ones with some of the largest readerships in the UK. My method for interpreting the articles was discursive analysis. As there are multiple interpretations of discourse analysis, it is worth clarifying how I use the term. Generally, we might say that discourse analysis is concerned with the interrelationships between language and society,2 or, more speciically, that it involves developing hypotheses about the purpose and consequences of language in society.3 However, my approach to discourse analysis remains interested in its material effects outside of the discursive realm. Therefore, by exploring how the dominant discourse of motherhood is deployed and enmeshed with other discourses, we may be able to fathom its complex effects on women’s lives. Although Rashbrook gave birth in July, I chose to focus on the extensive press coverage of the announcement of her pregnancy on 5 May 2006. I irst became interested in the press coverage of this event because, even though journalists reported it as furthering the debate about the ethics of fertility treatment for postmenopausal women, the debate was particularly framed around risk. A decade earlier, cases of postmenopausal pregnancies were discussed in terms of the natural. As Angela Wall wrote in 1997, “when a sixty-three-year-old woman gives birth, most initial media responses seem to privilege voices that cry out against the unnaturalness of assisted reproduction.”4 By May 2006, this argument was

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absent from the debate, and the discourse was dominated by discussion of risk. The newspapers depicted both the health risks for the fetus and mother as well as the risks of early orphanhood for the child. The discourse of “good” motherhood intersects with risks in this coverage. WHICH RISKS ?

The risk society is part of a wider neoliberal discourse of individual responsibility, which manifests itself in an expanding privatization of risk management and in the increasing space given to expert advice. Notions of calculated risk have become an organising principle in current society and have also become moral issues whereby prudent behaviour is equated with good citizenship. However, in a postmodern context where science is no longer regarded as a source of solutions but part of the problem, scientiic experts are increasingly viewed with scepticism by the general public. This scepticism was relected in the articles that reported on the health risks associated with Rashbrook’s pregnancy. The Times quotes a spokesperson from the British Fertility Society whose comment appears cautious yet not entirely condemning of Rashbrook’s choice: “The British Fertility Society wished Dr Rashbrook well with her pregnancy but said that it had ‘serious concern about the infertility treatment of women over 50, particularly of the increased risk to the mother and the welfare of the child that results.’”5 The Daily Telegraph discussed health risks in most detail in its feature article entitled “Moral Dilemma”: “There is a long list of increased problems facing those who choose to have babies in their thirties and later. These include ectopic pregnancies, abnormalities in the foetus, pre-eclampsia, haemorrhages and premature rupture of membranes. Older mothers are also more likely to have conditions and diseases that can jeopardise the baby such as obesity, arthritis, depression, heart disease and cancer. In exceptional cases such as this one, these worries can largely be put to one side.”6 These examples seem to suggest that some journalists no longer automatically defer to the scientiic experts, as none is mentioned in this case. Moreover, risks are evoked with caution and are seen as only partly relevant. As Susan L. Cutter argues, this shift in the portrayal of risks in the media is characterized by the increased use of lay views in the media and the fact that debates over risks have been more dificult to keep within the scientiic community.7 “Unnamed risk” associated with the pregnancy was also used as a discursive device in the coverage of this event. Articles that noted the age of both

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Rashbrook and her husband also mentioned the possibility that their child would be orphaned quite early in life. The Times quoted a pro-life group representative who argued against Rashbrook’s choice: “Representatives from Pro-Life groups, however, condemned the pregnancy. Matthew O’Gorman of Life, said that the child would be ‘without a mother or father at the most crucial moment of adolescence or when that child is growing into maturity.’”8 The Daily Telegraph used another moral expert to make a similar point: “Josephine Quintavalle of the Pressure Group Comment on Reproductive Ethics, said: ‘You cannot buy life expectancy – that is the most important thing. It is a very worrying development.’”9 This argument featured very prominently in criticisms of Rashbrook and her husband. The views of supposed moral experts appeared to afford more weight to the criticisms against Rashbrook than scientiic experts’ opinions. That may be because newspapers were keen to frame debates around emotive issues, and the prospect of an orphaned child was more suited to this purpose than detailed descriptions of the dangers of pre-eclampsia. Moreover, I would suggest that the life expectancy and old age argument was more notably featured because it allowed issues of “selishness”’ and “irresponsibility” to come to the forefront of the debate. SELFISHNESS AND IRRESPONSIBILITY : THE INTERSECTION OF RISK AND “ GOOD ” MOTHERHOOD

The discourse of risk used to frame the debate about Rashbrook’s pregnancy intersects with the discourse of “good” motherhood in the press articles. “Selishness” and “irresponsibility,” two key words that recurred throughout the press coverage, were used to assess Rashbrook’s suitability and legitimacy for motherhood. The rise of ideologies of “good” motherhood can be traced back to the late nineteenth century when mothers started to be valourized and to gain power in the domestic sphere as pure and moral. From this point onwards, motherhood is seen as representing the ultimate and natural fulilment for women, and performing “good” motherhood involves a life-time commitment to being naturally self-sacriicing and selless towards one’s children. Ideologies of good mothering have changed signiicantly over the last ifty years and are characterized by being wholly child-centred and relect the “professionalization of mothering”10 and, most importantly, the intensiication of mothering.11 Following from this, a central and often unquestioned tenet of the dominant discourse of good motherhood is that children’s needs always come before their mothers’. This means that

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mothers’ interests and needs are either said to be identical to her child’s, or, if they are not, the mother should always put her child’s needs irst.12 I would argue that the charges of selishness and irresponsibility made against Rashbrook were linked to the fact that she was seen as putting her needs (i.e., her desire for a child) before her child’s best interests. Therefore, the dominant discourse of good motherhood positions the mother who takes risks, both for herself and her (unborn) child, as Other and outside of good motherhood. This was apparent in a comment from a column in the Sun: “This is a really egotistical move. The pregnancy is all about the mother’s needs and certainly not about the welfare of the baby. And of course it’s the baby’s interests that should always come irst.”13 Another critic makes a comparable point in an article where she argues that Rashbrook should have waited to become a grandparent: “A good mother after all wants the absolute best for her child and a very old mother is not the absolute best … She’s paid up to £50,000 to satisfy a totally selish desire.”14 The claim of “selish behaviour,” then, is used to position Rashbrook as an inadequate mother making an improper reproductive choice. Concerns over the welfare of the child, because of the risks associated with older motherhood, are put forward as paramount, in accordance with the dominant discourse of “good” motherhood. Rashbrook’s statement at the time of the announcement of the pregnancy also relects her awareness and internalization of the discourse of “good” motherhood/parenthood. As the Times reported, “Britain’s oldest expectant mother answered her critics yesterday, saying that her IVFinduced pregnancy, though ‘potentially controversial,’ had been planned responsibly.”15 Displaying responsibility, then, is a key criteria to be viewed as an acceptable mother. Having determined how the discursive frame of risk and the dominant discourse of “good” motherhood are linked, we can now see that criticisms of Rashbrook’s pregnancy and her “risky behaviour” as a future parent rely heavily on the discourse of “good” motherhood. I would suggest that the framing of the discourse of risk appears to simultaneously update and reinforce the currency of the dominant discourse of “good” motherhood. The discourse of “good” motherhood operates mostly by default so that it is increasingly deined in terms of what “good” motherhood isn’t – i.e., young, old, working-class, sometimes gay/lesbian. REDEEMED RISK - TAKING ?: GENDER, CLASS , AND SEXUALITY

Although papers tried to exploit the controversial nature of Rashbrook’s pregnancy, many featured lengthy articles that attempted to understand

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Rashbrook’s choice and examine the positive sides of the situation. The unanticipated sympathetic tone of these articles prompted me to ask, who can get away with taking risks? Although the work of Ulrich Beck acknowledges the interrelation of gender politics with the risk society, whereby the distribution of risks within modern societies follows established patterns of inequalities,16 more attention is needed to explore exactly how ideological discourses interact around risk to the advantage of some but not others. Following the connection between the discourses of risk and “good” motherhood, therefore, might mean determining who can and cannot be seen as a legitimate parent. This debate has received considerable attention from feminist scholars who argue that ideologies of motherhood exist not in isolation but as part of complex systems of domination that use differences amongst mothers, such as race, class, and sexuality.17 Moreover, recently a range of criteria is being discussed in the debate about who is “it” to be a parent.18 By looking more closely at the articles it became clear that a particular set of markers were highlighted as enabling Rashbrook to be seen as a legitimate mother. An emphasis on the expectant mother’s femininity was important in setting out the borders of legitimate postmenopausal motherhood. This emphasis was apparent in a short article in the Times where the doctor who performed Rashbrook’s IVF remarks, “She was slim, blonde and in perfect condition. She its all the criteria for maternity.”19 The doctor’s comment about her looks clearly helps him justify his involvement in the procedure. Moreover, this quote highlights the importance of an appropriate female body in order to evade the problematic nature of postmenopausal maternity. Youth was also a key factor in identifying the expectant mother as a suitable parent in many articles, and this criteria was particularly emphasized in a Daily Mail column entitled “Patti Has the Energy of a Woman Twice Her Age, Say Her Family.”20 A it, youthful, and conventionally feminine body is signiicant for delineating who can and cannot be a postmenopausal mother. The very prominent upper-middle-class status of the couple was also displayed in many articles. The couple’s class status clearly worked to their advantage for being assessed as adequate parents. Many journalists used the couple’s inancial security, for example, as an argument to help command respect towards the parents-to-be. Jane Wheatley argues in favour of Rashbrook in her Times article: “At least with this one, the baby will have the beneit of the love of two parents, stability and inancial security – things many children have to do without.”21 In the Daily Telegraph sociological research was cited to emphasize one of the positive aspects of older motherhood: “Social science statistics suggests that

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children of older mothers are more likely to do better in schools and enter into professional occupations.”22 Here, education, as a marker of class, is being drawn upon to secure for Rashbrook and her husband the status of “good” parents. The couple’s social class privilege, then, is vital in establishing them as potentially acceptable parents and, by contrast, constructs working-class mothers as deviant. Throughout the articles there were also scattered undertones of the importance of a heterosexual nuclear family as a suitable environment for adequate parenting. The couple’s status as married enabled them to be viewed within a heteronormative framework, which thereby afforded them the status of “proper” parents. The reason that Rashbrook and her husband give for the postmenopausal pregnancy develops this narrative further. In the Daily Mail, Dr Antinori describes why the couple were so determined to have children at their age: “They only married three years ago so that they want to have their own children. They love each other deeply and want to have children to show this love they have. It was a delight and an honour to help them.”23 This discourse also appeared in a Sun article that focused on the parents’ joy about the pregnancy, where a close friend of Rashbrook remarked, “She is very, very excited and more than a little daunted by it all. She wanted to seal her love for John with a baby – now her wish has come true.”24 Here the heterosexual narrative is elaborated so as to encompass the concept of romance; pregnancy, apparently at any age, is seen as acceptable as long as it remains within the bounds of romantic love. Love for a husband is seen as an appropriate reason for wanting a child, and this affords Rashbrook some respite from earlier claims of selishness. THE BBC ONLINE DEBATE

The BBC “Have Your Say” online debate opened on 8 July 2006, with the following invitation to readers: “Should fertility treatment be available to prospective parents of all ages? Are children with older parents disadvantaged? Are older mothers treated more unfairly than older fathers? Send us your comments and experiences.”25 This forum was set up after the announcement that Rashbrook had given birth to a healthy boy. It appeared as a “see also” link on the website’s main story, “Briton Becomes New Mother at 62.” The forum required users to log in to make a comment and included a moderator who could reject certain comments. I have made anonymous all the comments to protect the users’ identities as required by the editor of the BBC website. The online

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debate features 796 published comments, which were analyzed using a thematic qualitative methodology.26 In contrast to the newspapers where scientiic and moral experts’ views are the focus, in this online forum, the audience become the experts. Doing qualitative research on the Internet demands that the researcher considers the methodological and ethical implications inherent in studying online text. Overall, as Christine Hine argues, there is currently no prospect of formulating a single position on the ethics of Internet research.27 Therefore, I have been ethically guided by my own experience of doing ofline qualitative research and the requirements of the data owner. CHALLENGING MOTHER NATURE AS RISKY

Whilst the natural discourse was almost non-existent in the newspaper coverage of the pregnancy, in the online forum nature became the main frame for the debate. Interestingly, a discourse I thought obsolete reappears in this online space. The natural discourse – that is, the argument that Rashbrook’s decision to have a child was unacceptable because it is not natural for a woman of her age to be pregnant – was by far the most popular argument in the online debate; a search using the word “nature” returned over one hundred hits. It can be argued that the overwhelming presence of nature in the debate can be attributed to the fact it offers a readymade and easy answer to the question that is also the title of the forum: How old is too old to have a baby? Some members, in fact, make this their only point: “This is the easiest question ever! A woman is too old to have a baby when she starts the menopause. What could be simpler than that?” Clearly, then, one of the reasons the natural was a popular argument in this debate is that it provided a conveniently clear-cut explanatory frame for what counts as too old, with some members convinced that there was nothing to debate. However, if we unravel the foundations of this argument by problematizing the categories of the natural and biological, we might be able to fathom another reason why the natural argument has taken such a hold on the popular imagination in this online debate. The posts above indicate expectations about when it is seen as normal/abnormal for a woman to be fertile and delineates, on that basis, who counts as an in/appropriate mother. If we consider it normal for women in their postmenopausal years to be infertile, a fertile (and pregnant) postmenopausal woman violates medical and social

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norms. Therefore, the biological and social arguments appear to be interlinked so that if biological norms are broken, the social order is seen to also be at risk. Once the “natural” collapses into the social, this strategy is used to deine the boundaries of acceptable motherhood, leading in turn to claims of selishness and immorality for those who don’t conform: “It is unnatural. It is against God. It is against nature. She was given the menopause for a bloody good reason. Who was she to override something millions of years of evolution and design had dictated otherwise? Selish, stupid and immoral is what she is, nothing else.” This discourse is also described by Jennifer Parkes, who comments, “The view of post-menopausal women as inappropriate mothers derives from the strong cultural conception we have of the institution of motherhood. That motherhood does not include post-menopausal women may seem to be a matter of common sense, a view that falls in line with our commonly held beliefs and expectations of who can and should ‘mother.’”28 She also draws on Valerie Hartouni’s concept of “vision” to argue that the claim that postmenopausal motherhood is “unnatural” or somehow absurd is affected by the way in which we reproduce our social world. The sensibility that it is inappropriate for older women to parent derives from a particular way of seeing. Therefore, it seems that the biological/natural argument is used here to justify the value of static social norms. I would argue that this is the main reason for the prominence of this argument in the online debate; it is a valuable tool for members who wish to reinforce a normative and limited view of what constitutes acceptable motherhood. However, there were also a signiicant number of posts that relected a counter discourse about the validity of the natural argument. One commenter successfully pointed out some of its laws: “Ah, the old ‘it’s going against nature’ argument. Presumably the people who use this argument also refuse to take any medicine or receive any medical care when they are ill, and would prefer to die rather than go against nature. Obviously they also have many children because using contraceptives would go against nature. They don’t wear clothes because this would be going against nature too. Think before you write. You cannot criticise somebody for having a child at this age for this reason.” Here, it is the illogical and absurd quality of the natural argument when applied to other issues that is emphasized, thus showing that it forms no solid basis on which to judge Rashbrook and Farrant’s choice. Although the use of the natural argument is not criticized for its potential to lead to a reactionary outlook on reproduction and motherhood, some users are critical of it as unfounded

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reasoning. This criticism suggests that the notion of what is natural may have lost some of its resonance in the popular imagination. CLASS AND THE TEENAGE PREGNANCY COMPARISON

Many users went beyond considering the biological implications of “what is too old.” In relections about who has the right age for motherhood, attitudes to social class also became apparent. Posts comparing Rashbrook with teenage mothers were numerous in the online debate and enabled her to be viewed as a less risky mother. Like in the newspaper articles, the couple’s social class advantages established them as acceptable parents and, this time by direct comparison, constructed working-class teenage mothers as deviant. Whilst the newspaper articles did not openly use this tool of differentiation, one “Have Your Say” member quite clearly set up a binary between good (older) and bad (teenage) mothers: “They seem a nicer couple than the mouthy Vicky Pollards of this generation who will get pregnant and become lousy teenage mums.29 Our society really does need to get some proper family ethics and values back. I have no desire to see more irresponsible teenage drunken mums, do you?” This comparison was used to argue that there was nothing problematic about Rashbrook and Farrant’s choice because they would make better parents than others on three main grounds. Firstly, Rashbrook and Farrant were seen as more acceptable parents than teenagers because they would be able to provide inancially for the child. As one member notes, “The UK currently boasts the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in the whole of Europe and the government responds by handing over state beneits and heavily subsidised accommodation to these individuals by way of reward; teenage mothers who have limited life skills and no inancial ability to properly care for their children in an increasingly material world. Teenage parents may well have time on their side but criteria for being a good mother runs deeper than ones’ predicted life span.” This post suggests that inancial independence from the state is a key criterion to be obtained to gain the status of “good” mother. Financial security is evaluated here as more important than biological age, which suggests that Rashbrook’s choice is viewed favourably. Secondly, the comparison is also based on the supposed inability of teenagers to make competent parents: “There are too many teenagers having babies, but nobody questions their ability to raise a child. I see ill equipped young single women who are still essentially children themselves unable to

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cope emotionally with the huge demands of bringing another person into the world. At age sixty-two, this woman will possibly not be able to roll around on the grass with a small child but she will be able to provide the attachment needs and security a child needs to become an emotionally stable adult.” Here we see that the postmenopausal mother can evade the criticisms that her choice was problematic when her emotional maturity (rather than physical youth) is emphasized as a requisite for appropriate childrearing. Once more, support for Rashbrook is achieved by othering teenage mothers and depicting them as lacking emotional resources. Lastly, the teenage pregnancy comparison also features the importance of the nuclear family for securing the status of non-risky mother: “They’re self-suficient, together and loving. Yet older. Across this country children are being born to parasites who choose to live a way of life that they don’t fund. You and I do. Fathers disappear and there’s not a drop of love in the household. They bring their children up to be the ignorant and useless brats that make our lives misery. Yet the parents are younger. And so many of you are more bothered about the former. Bonkers.” Concern about absent fathers is a reminder that the married heterosexual couple is the only appropriate environment for acceptable parenthood. This, in fact, is what enables Rashbrook’s situation not to be seen as worthy of concern. Conversely, the language used to describe the children who come from “fatherless” homes shows great contempt for single teenage mothers. Having looked at the way the teenage pregnancy comparison works to support the Rashbrook/Farrant choice in the online posts, I would argue that it highlights the importance of social class as a marker of legitimate parenthood. Rashbrook’s risk-taking behaviour (in terms of age) can be exonerated using her non-risky middle-class position, including her familial and inancial situation, which are depicted in the posts as lifestyle choices and not as social inequalities. Thus, the process through which her maternity becomes less risky is characterized by class polarization. In the online posts, this is achieved by othering teenage mothers. Beverley Skeggs describes this process across the sites of the popular when she writes about how “various sites of the symbolic attach negative value to working-class personhood and culture.”30 She also charts the process of differentiation between culture worth having and culture that is not, arguing that it is precisely by constantly devaluing workingclass culture that the middle-classes are able to maintain their status. The teenage pregnancy comparison works similarly as it is through the process of class othering that Rashbrook and Farrant are able to obtain legitimacy as parents.

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CONCLUSION

Risk is a pertinent explanatory framework for analysing the representation of Rashbrook in two key sites of media coverage, as her mothering identity is constructed through and around the discourses of risk. She is represented as a risky mother because she is challenging nature and is perceived as selish and irresponsible, but she is not risky in class terms. Having looked at how discourses of motherhood and risk-taking intersect in this instance, we have seen that this link is key to the continued dominance of the discourse of “good” motherhood. Therefore, at a time when an increasing variety of motherhoods are visible in the public space, traditional discourses of motherhood around more recent risk concerns allows the ideological ideals of motherhood to prevail in media representation. In other words, the contemporary concerns around risk provide the latest version of dominant discourses about good motherhood. Similarly, we have seen how deep-rooted concerns about what is natural resurfaced in the online discussion and were used to argue against the legitimacy of Rashbrook’s choice. On the other hand, journalists and members of the public who supported her choice often did so on grounds of class privilege; by constructing her as less risky than others, they were reinforcing the normative borders of acceptable motherhood. Although Rashbrook’s pregnancy is presented as a story about changes in reproductive technology, my analysis alerts us to the fact that issues of class, gender, and sexuality continue to be central in the making of the “right” families. Methodologically, analysing material from both online and ofline sites was signiicant in getting a broader sense of both popular opinion and imagination about this story. Furthermore, although I initially set out to examine how the online posts picked up on the discourses used in the press, it is clear that this was in fact a much more complex process with both sites of debate simultaneously inluencing one another. Thus adopting a multi-sited methodology may constitute a worthwhile avenue for future media scholarship that seeks to establish how discourses emerge, shift, and speak back to one another in diverse media loci. The analysis of the Rashbrook case study has made it clear that we need to reine our perception of risk to understand how it shapes and mediates contemporary narratives of reproduction. The narrative that unfolded in the newspaper articles and the online posts showed that the Rashbrook/Farrant’s class status, their identities as middle-class, educated professionals, was key to their being portrayed as non-risky parents.

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Moreover, we saw how Rashbrook’s embodiment of youthful heterosexual femininity was utilized in the photographs to signify that she would be a “good” mother. Therefore, Rashbrook’s identity as a risk-taking mother was offset using a narrative based on class privilege, traditional family values, and normative femininity. This inding suggests that we need to attend to the ways in which narratives of the good parent in the media are not only gendered but also marked by class. I would argue that more research is needed that explores how risks, and who is constructed as legitimate to take them, follow established patterns of inequalities. This chapter has also highlighted that there is limited room in this media coverage for maternal subjects to contest the dominant discourses of “good” motherhood, which position her as risky, selish, and irresponsible because of her age. Interestingly, the strategies used to enable her to claim legitimacy as a parent and therefore challenge the idea that she is too old for motherhood relies on shifting attention to her heterosexual and class privilege. I would suggest the possibility of dominant discourses being challenged may lie in media such as online forums, which include more diverse public voices on this debate. However, such online sites do not automatically disrupt dominant ideals of the maternal, as we saw in the analysis of the BBC forum, where some comments othered working-class teenage mothers. The development of mummy blogs in recent years is worth examining as these are sites where women may engage with media representations of the maternal critically, which may allow more empowering and varied stories about mothers to emerge.

NOTES

1 David Sapsted, “Uproar Over IVF Woman Expecting a Baby at 63, Daily Telegraph, 5 May 2006, 1; Gordon Rayner, “I’m Not Too Old to be a Mother at 62,” Daily Mail, 5 May 2006, 1. 2 Stef Slembrouck, “What is meant by Discourse Analysis?,” accessed 15 September 2007, http://bank.rug.ac.be/da.da.htm. 3 Potter and Whetherell, Discourse and Social Psychology. 4 Wall, “Monstrous Mothers,” 5. 5 Will Pavia, “Yes, We Have Thought it Through, Says IVF Mother,” Times, 5 May 2006, 4. 6 Celia Hall and Sarah Womack, “When Is a Woman Too Old to Become a Mother?,” Daily Telegraph, 5 May 2006, 3.

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7 Cutter, Living With Risk. 8 Pavia, “Yes, We Have,” 4. 9 David Sapsted, “Uproar Over Woman Expecting a Baby at 63,” Daily Telegraph, 5 May 2006, 1. 10 Woollett and Phoenix, “Psychological Views of Mothering,” 42. 11 Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. 12 Lawler, “Children Need But Mothers Only Want,” 66. Lawler problematizes the assumptions behind the claim that good mothers have needs congruent with those of her child. Lawler argues that being a good mother requires the effacing of separate maternal needs and leads to children’s needs being hierarchically positioned as rightfully above maternal desires. 13 Deidre Sanders, “It’s All About Her Needs,” Sun, 4 May 2006, 7. 14 Virginia Ironside, “Why Didn’t She Just Wait to Become a Grandparent?” Daily Telegraph, 5 May 2006, 24. 15 Pavia, “Yes, We Have,” 4. 16 Ibid., 19. 17 Collins, “Shifting the Centre,” 45–67. 18 Campion, Who’s Fit to be a Parent? 19 Richard Owen, “Doctor Rejects Maverick Label,” Times, 5 May 2006, 4. 20 Gordon Rayner, “Patti Has the Energy of a Woman Twice Her Age, Say Her Family,” Daily Mail, 5 May 2006, 4. 21 Jane Wheatley, “Better Late…” Times, 5 May 2006, 4. 22 Hall and Womack, “When Is a Woman Too Old,” Daily Telegraph, 5 May 2006, 3. 23 Rayner, “We’re So Happy to Have Created a Life,” Daily Mail, 5 May 2006, 10. 24 Clodagh Hartley and Emma Morton, “We Are Happy … And a Little Scared,” Sun, 4 May 2006, 7. 25 BBC, “Have Your Say: How Old is Too Old to Have a Baby?” BBC Online. Accessed 15 September 2007, http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa? threadID=2511&&&&edition=1&ttl=20070924155352. 26 My methodology initially identiied a range of categories for the posted comments. However, this soon proved ineffective as many posts overlapped, and there were too many cross categories. Instead, I chose to focus on two categories to allow space for close analysis. The quoted posts that illustrate my point were chosen as representative of posts that shared a particular argument. 27 Hine, Virtual Methods, 6. 28 Parks, “On the Use of IVF by Post-menopausal Women,” 82.

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29 Vickie Pollard is a ictional character in the BBC comedy series Little Britain. She is caricature of a feckless working-class teenage mother. 30 Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture, 96. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity London: Sage, 1992. Campion, Mukti Jain. Who’s Fit to be a Parent? London: Taylor and Francis, 1995. Collins, Patricia Hill, “Shifting the Centre: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing about Motherhood.” In Mothering: Ideology, Experience and Agency, edited by Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey, 45–67. New York: Routledge, 1994. Cutter, Susan L. Living With Risk: The Geography of Technological Hazards. London: Edward Arnold, 1993. Hays, Sharon. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Hine, Christine, ed. Virtual Methods: Issues in Social Research on the Internet. Oxford: Berg, 2005. Lawler, Stephanie. “Children Need But Mothers Only Want: The Power of ‘Needs Talk’ in the Constitution of Childhood.” In Relating Intimacies: Power and Resistance, edited by J. Seymour and P. Bagguley, 64–99. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1999. Parks, Jennifer. “On the Use of IVF by Post-menopausal Women.” Hypatia 14, no. 1 (1999): 77–96. Potter, Jonathan, and Margaret Whetherell. Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviours London: Sage, 1987. Skeggs, Beverley. Class, Self, Culture. London: Routledge, 2004. Wall, Angela. ‘‘Monstrous Mothers: Media Representations of PostMenopausal Pregnancy’’ Afterimage 25 (1997): 14–17. Woollett, Anne, and Ann Phoenix. “Psychological Views of Mothering.” In Motherhood: Meanings, Practices and Ideologies, edited by Ann Phoenix, Anne Woollett, and Eva Lloyd, 8–46, Sage: London, 1991.

SECTION THREE

Pregnant and Postpartum Bodies

11 AND NOW, THE BREAST OF THE STOR Y

Realistic Portrayals of Breastfeeding in Contemporary Television Kathryn Pallister

INTRODUCTION

“Breast is best,” says the public health campaign, though many mothers ind themselves on the receiving end of disapproving looks and comments when they breastfeed their infants (or worse, toddlers) in public. As well, experienced breastfeeders know that initiating and continuing breastfeeding can be dificult in the face of physical and emotional postpartum challenges, yet many women who have never breastfed assume that the act itself will occur as spontaneously and naturally as it did for Brooke Shields in the 1980 ilm Blue Lagoon. While many women in North America do make the choice to breastfeed, the act itself often happens out of the public eye, in homes or private nursing rooms in public places. Since media portrayal of infant feeding has often meant bottlefeeding, many people’s exposure to breastfeeding is limited until they become parents themselves. The health beneits resulting from breastfeeding for both mothers and infants are well documented. Nutrition for Healthy Term Infants, a joint report of the Canadian Paediatric Society, Dietitians of Canada, and Health Canada, states that in developed countries, infants who breastfeed experience lower rates of many childhood conditions and diseases ranging from diarrhea to ear infections.1 Research also indicates that breastfeeding may also prevent Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) and improve cognitive development.2 Breastfeeding women may have an easier postpartum recovery, delayed ovulation, and possibly lower rates

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of ovarian and breast cancer.3 In terms of inancial issues in the healthcare system, infants who are exclusively breastfed have lower rates of hospitalization and less need for prescription drugs and doctor’s ofice visits.4 And, of course, formula has ecological and political drawbacks that make it undesirable for many parents as a irst choice for infant feeding. Given this logical information, then, it seems illogical that many women, across the spectrum of categories of social class, education, and race, choose not to breastfeed. Public service messages through mass media, healthcare providers, and government organizations adamantly spread the word about the beneits of breastfeeding, though “there is little robust evidence, however, that education increases rates of breastfeeding, and most women who choose formula feeding ‘know’ that breastfeeding would be better for their babies.”5 Rather, “to a large extent, social and cultural norms guide women’s decisions about whether to breastfeed.”6 Through this chapter, I aim to draw out how contemporary media portrayal of breastfeeding is both relective of societal attitudes and has the potential to transform those attitudes. By using examples from popular television programs, I address how mass culture inserts itself into people’s everyday lives through the parasocial relationships formed between audience and characters. As a result, mass media may help to effect a broad change in both the social context in which infant feeding takes place as well as the minds of women who ultimately make the choice about how and when to feed their children. First, I will provide some general information about current rates of breastfeeding, government initiatives to increase breastfeeding, and factors that may inluence women’s choices to breastfeed. Then, I will examine a number of examples from popular television shows in the past decade that illustrate how television may encourage women to breastfeed. When characters on popular programs such as Friends, Sex in the City, and The Ofice choose to breastfeed, even if they face some minor challenges along the way, female viewers may identify with these characters and be more likely to breastfeed, if that option is available to them someday. The examples I have selected for this study portray breastfeeding in a non-idealized way, which helps women to understand that breastfeeding is an imperfect, though desirable, choice. These popular programs also have a wide fan base and the potential to inluence a broad cross section of viewers to see breastfeeding as a more socially acceptable choice, which in turn provides support for breastfeeding women.

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THE CURRENT STATE OF BREASTFEEDING

In 2003, the World Health Organization’s Global Strategy for Infant and Young Child Feeding began recommending exclusive breastfeeding for the irst six months of life and up to age two or even longer.7 The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Canadian Paediatric Society have followed suit. Yet, in 2003 the World Health Organization reported that “no more than 35 per cent of infants worldwide are exclusively breastfed during the irst four months of life.”8 In Canada, about 85 per cent of new mothers begin breastfeeding their infants, though only 16 per cent breastfeed exclusively for six months.9 The numbers are even lower in the United States where about 72 per cent of mothers initiate breastfeeding but only about 13 per cent were doing so exclusively at six months.10 While many political and sociocultural factors account for these statistics, “media portrayal of bottle-feeding as normative” has been pointed out a special area for concern.11 As a result of the connection between breastfeeding and female sexuality, showing bottle-feeding in media such as television is a less risky and thus more common production choice than portraying breastfeeding. While the aim of increasing breastfeeding rates must be supported by speciic policies related to health care, because the decision to breastfeed is not made based exclusively on scientiic evidence, change must also take place at the sociocultural level. Advocacy for breastfeeding can range from encouraging family and employer support of breastfeeding to recognizing that media portrayals of breastfeeding may have some inluence on broad societal perceptions of breastfeeding and women’s decisions to begin and continue the practice. Before continuing on to examine the sociocultural factors that inluence women’s decisions to breastfeed, I would like to look briely at the notion of inluence through a critical lens. While the implementation of governmental policies that encourage breastfeeding is meant to support women, some messages frame breastfeeding as a duty and put the infant’s needs in front of the mother’s. The US Public Health’s “Babies Were Born to Breastfeed” media campaign, for example, features pregnant women riding a mechanical bull and participating in a log-rolling competition and equates these activities with choosing not to breastfeed, as if the these “choices” required the same amount of thought and commitment. As Rebecca Kukla argues, “there are many American women, especially women from the socially vulnerable groups least likely to breastfeed, for whom breastfeeding is not in fact a livable choice, and likewise an

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educational campaign designed to change women’s choices will be either ineffectual or seriously damaging to women.”12 Kukla provides several examples to support her case, including situations where the mother is a victim of sexual abuse, has an eating disorder, has a non-ideal body type, lives in a situation where she has little or no privacy, or is of a racial or ethnic background that makes any public bodily display particularly risky. Rather than mandating breastfeeding, Kukla believes we ought to “stop romanticizing breastfeeding and take a cold, hard look at its lived implications for women,” including the sexual context of breastfeeding.13 She writes, “When we hide the real, deeply culturally embedded barriers to safe, comfortable breastfeeding, we tell mothers who face these barriers that they are unmotherly, shameful, incapable, defective, and morally inadequate. We then combine this with the message that breastfeeding their child (exclusively and on demand) is the only decent choice, the only way of refraining from harming their children, and their responsibility as mothers.”14 Taking Kukla’s point into consideration, the incorporation of positive yet realistic portrayal of breastfeeding on television has the potential to make viewers question their broad social views of breastfeeding, which puts women a double bind by making breastfeeding the most responsible choice, on the one hand, but a choice that is not supported by society at large, on the other hand. “Making explicit” some of the challenges of breastfeeding (such as how breastfeeding can impact employment) as well as some of the ways that these challenges can be overcome (such as pumping and bottle-feeding expressed breast milk) can ease the tension the double bind exacts on women. FACTORS INFLUENCING THE CHOICE TO BREASTFEED

Clearly, a number of factors inluence individual women’s choices about breastfeeding, with mass media playing what might be described as a small yet potentially important role in the decision-making process. First of all, formal policies and educational initiatives provide perhaps the most obvious ways to increase the rates of breastfeeding. As well, “baby friendly” hospitals, which educate all mothers about the beneits and techniques of breastfeeding, have been cited as a way to increase the rates of breastfeeding. More community-based support has also been suggested as a way to help women breastfeed in a more extended way.15 However, an article in the British Medical Journal found that programs such as La Leche League, which provides in-person and online support and advice for breastfeeding women, do not signiicantly increase the rate

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or duration of breastfeeding.16 Another study found that women were likely to make their choices about breastfeeding based on their perceptions of whether their friends and relatives had positive or negative breastfeeding experiences, concluding that this “embodied knowledge” had a substantial inluence on infant feeding practices.17 Encouraging women to nurse in public, as well as normalizing breastfeeding through mainstream media portrayal, thus has the potential to help increase breastfeeding rates and duration. Typically, however, the media are seen as providing little support for breastfeeding, and even seen as being anti-breastfeeding, speciically through the portrayal and advertisement or sponsorship of formula. In Mothering magazine, Jennifer Coburn writes that “part of the resistance to breastfeeding in the US stems from the popular culture’s portrayal of nursing and bottle-feeding,”18 including episodes of Chicago Hope and Law and Order that featured breastfeeding mothers whose babies died as a result of insuficient milk syndrome. The Chicago Hope program was further chastised for having a formula company as one of its sponsors, and while the formula company claimed to have no prior knowledge of the subject matter of the episode, breastfeeding advocates were aware of the storyline well before the air of the program because of previews of the storyline on the network’s website.19 In their content analysis of British media portrayals of infant feeding, Leslie Henderson, Jenny Kitzinger, and Josephine Green found that “bottle-feeding was shown more often than breastfeeding and was presented as less problematic. Bottle-feeding was associated with ‘ordinary’ families, whereas breastfeeding was associated with middle class or celebrity women.”20 The study concluded that positive portrayals of breastfeeding were nearly absent from media portrayals, despite the clear health beneits breastfeeding provides. To me, this is an important point. For many women, breastfeeding is problematic, and “positive” idealized media portrayals may be more discouraging than encouraging as these women struggle with the techniques and physical and emotional repercussions of being a beverage dispenser. When women viewers compare their breastfeeding dificulties with effortless “positive” media portrayals of breastfeeding, they may conclude that stopping breastfeeding is the best choice for them. Clearly, portraying breastfeeding as completely positive is misleading at best and harmful at worst. Thus, I argue that breastfeeding should be portrayed not simply positively but realistically. Yes, there are clear physical, emotional, and mental beneits to both mother and child. But there are certainly costs for modern mothers: exhaustion, pain, loss of

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mobility, engorgement, impact on work and social life, and embarrassment, just to name a few. Yet television can have a positive impact on its viewers’ perceptions and practices of breastfeeding, as viewers often engage in parasocial relationships through the development of a sort of pseudo-friendship and identiication with the characters they see.21 While skeptics might conclude that only the most delusional and socially withdrawn viewers would construct these parasocial relationships, Jinshi Tsao found that people do engage in these relationships independent of their satisfaction with their real social lives.22 This view justiies focusing on dramatic television as a force of social marketing for public health issues such as breastfeeding. The portrayal of breastfeeding on television is made problematic, however, by current societal views on the acceptability of breastfeeding. A Journal of the American Dietetic Association study found that 72 per cent of respondents think it is inappropriate to show a woman breastfeeding on television.23 In fact, people seemed to think of breastfeeding as more acceptable in public than in the media, which can be attributed to societal views about the sexual nature of the breast. Thus, “it is important to encourage the media to portray breastfeeding as a normal, desirable, and achievable activity.”24 CURRENT EXAMPLES OF BREASTFEEDING ON PRIME - TIME TELEVISION

Whether media portrayals of breastfeeding are a mirror of societal trends or the reason for these trends, media such as television may have a role in some women’s decisions to breastfeed as well as in shaping broader social perspectives on the issue. Some recent portrayals of breastfeeding are positive and realistic in their presentation of the challenges that mothers face when beginning and continuing to breastfeed their children. The inclusion of direct reference to breastfeeding is relatively unusual in popular television programming in North America, though several popular programs in the last decade, such as Sex and the City, Yes, Dear, Desperate Housewives, ER, Friends, Friday Night Lights, and The Ofice, have consciously depicted the act of breastfeeding in ways that ring true with real women’s lived experiences. The examples I’ve selected for this study do an admirable job of ensuring all viewers see breastfeeding as a positive, workable feeding choice for parents, while at the same time depicting some of the challenges of that choice. Sex and the City pushed the envelope in many facets of women’s lives, including the subject of breastfeeding. When the character Miranda Hobbes, a single lawyer in her thirties, has a baby, Miranda’s single,

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child-free friend Carrie drops by to wish her well.25 Carrie is lummoxed when Miranda, suitably disheveled as most new parents are, struggles to breastfeed her baby. Miranda tries unsuccessfully at irst to get him to latch on, and when she inally succeeds and can relax and enjoy her visit with Carrie while he nurses, Carrie just about knocks the door down as she rushes out, claiming that Miranda needs time alone to breastfeed. Though she is portrayed as a savvy New Yorker, Carrie clearly has little prior experience in seeing the challenges of breastfeeding up close and personal. In a later episode, the women head off to Atlantic City for a weekend outing, a rarity with nursing mother Miranda as part of the group.26 Miranda successfully juggles the schedules of the baby’s father and her nanny and is able to go away, but she decides to end her night early to go back to her hotel room to pump her breast milk to ensure that her milk supply keeps up with her son’s needs. This mention of pumping, while ostensibly constructed as a bit of an annoyance, also shows the viewers that breastfeeding does not necessarily tie a mother to her infant 24/7. Rather, with the use of a breast pump, she can enjoy some of the pleasures of her previous child-free life, and the baby’s father can take a turn caring for the child. A rather humorous presentation of breastfeeding appeared on the family comedy Yes, Dear. In one episode, two couples are at a local park and see a woman breastfeeding her toddler.27 Though they all agree out loud that the child is far too old to still be nursing, one mother, Kim, is still breastfeeding her toddler son, who is about eighteen months old at the time. When the others learn that she has not stopped breastfeeding, they are disturbed. Kim obviously feels a bit strange about it, too, as she has consciously kept her continued breastfeeding relationship under wraps by nursing her son alone in his room at night. When pressed for her reasoning behind this continued breastfeeding, the slender Kim blurts out that it is because she likes the larger breasts she has with breastfeeding and doesn’t want to quit because her breasts will shrink back to their former size. While viewers could easily, and appropriately, interpret the episode as reinforcement of the societal perception that extended breastfeeding is a deviant behaviour, another reading is also possible. Kim’s resistance to follow the norm regarding the length of her breastfeeding is seen as a choice that beneits, rather than punishes, her, even if the beneit is as supericial and sexually charged as larger breasts. While she does agree rather quickly to wean her son, the decision is made with her clear statement that she has enjoyed her opportunity to breastfeed.

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The popular program Friends also portrayed breastfeeding in a realistic light, particularly in the last two seasons as Rachel has a baby with Ross. While an episode in the irst season showed the friends slightly disturbed when Phoebe tasted Ross’s ex-wife’s expressed breast milk in a bottle for Ross to feed their son while he has custody,28 the show did an admirable job of portraying Rachel’s decision to breastfeed in season eight. Shortly after Rachel gives birth, the show depicts her struggle to begin breastfeeding, albeit a struggle that lasts mere moments under the leering glare of Joey, who is attracted to the lactating Rachel.29 The simple depiction of the early dificulty of breastfeeding, a process assisted by a helpful maternity nurse, demonstrates the sort of challenge that many women face as they begin to breastfeed, a behaviour that, while natural, is also learned (though not always as quickly as a half hour sitcom demands). Having Joey leer at her might seem negative, and a reason not to breastfeed, but it is a typical issue that many women face, and Rachel essentially ignores the leers as she focuses on the baby. Later in the season, Rachel wants to return to work a few days early to ensure that a competitor does not replace her permanently. The competitor took over her job when Rachel was on what he calls her “baby vacation,” to which she replies, “My idea of a vacation does not involve something sucking on my nipples until they are raw.”30 When she asks Ross to look after their daughter later in the episode so that she can return to work immediately, he sarcastically says, “Just give me your breasts and we’ll be on our way.”31 Again, this depicts the genuine struggle that women who work outside the home must reconcile: the beneits of giving breast milk weigh against the limitations it may place on the mother. Another popular program, Desperate Housewives, showed breastfeeding briely in the pilot, when mother of four Lynette Scavo is nursing her six-month-old daughter at a funeral.32 She does this rather matterof-factly, and even says to her daughter, “ease up you little vampire.” Again, while this can be interpreted negatively, it shows that breastfeeding can in fact be uncomfortable or even painful at times, yet women can and do continue to breastfeed. In an episode in the second season, the show depicts a mother who is still breastfeeding her ive year old at Lynette’s company’s daycare.33 The practice makes many employees uncomfortable, as she nurses the child in full view, and Lynette takes it upon herself to encourage the child to self-wean. While this sort of extended breastfeeding relationship is outside the norm, the mother makes clear that it is everyone else’s problem if they don’t like her choice. As well, she is particularly upset at losing the breastfeeding relationship

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for her own personal beneit of a higher metabolism. This unapologetic treatment of extended breastfeeding, for the mother’s beneit as well as the child’s, serves as a positive, if comedic, model for viewers. The long-running series ER showed breastfeeding and related themes a number of times over the course of its thirteen years. Characters who gave birth, such as Dr Elizabeth Corday and Nurse Carol Hathaway, are portrayed throughout several episodes as breastfeeding or pumping, and they make references to their breastfeeding experiences. The program also has more unusual portrayals of breastfeeding, such as when Dr Susan Lewis’s nurse boyfriend, Chuck, is shown using a supplemental nursing system (SNS) while feeding their infant.34 Considering these images, to say that ER’s portrayal of breastfeeding is positive and realistic isn’t entirely accurate. To be sure, the women who breastfeed often make negative references, such as having to pump to feel comfortable during a long work shift, or that they’re avoiding caffeine or alcohol because they’re breastfeeding, but these are authentic issues that many working women who breastfeed and/or pump breast milk face. The portrayal of the man with the SNS is less mainstream, yet it does represent the range of breastfeeding activities in which some people engage that could be seen as more acceptable through these mass-mediated representations. More typical breastfeeding practices are portrayed in the NBC program Friday Night Lights. High school principal and football coach wife Tami Taylor has a baby, and the issue of breastfeeding regularly occurs in the series that season in a variety of everyday occurrences. For example, in one episode, Tami comes home after a book club meeting and has had a few glasses of wine, and she tells her husband that she has to go “pump and dump” so her infant daughter won’t be drinking the alcohollaced breast milk that evening.35 In doing so, she demonstrates how she adapts her breastfeeding practice to meet both her own and her daughter’s needs. A more recent example of breastfeeding occurs in an episode of The Ofice titled “The Delivery.”36 After giving birth, Pam is concerned, like many new mothers, that the baby isn’t getting enough milk. She then faces a common situation – the maternity nurse suggests giving the baby a bottle. Pam refuses because of her research into infant feeding and nipple confusion. When Pam observes her hospital roommate breastfeeding with ease, she seems discouraged, though, when Pam accidentally feeds the wrong baby during the night, she learns that the baby is a particularly enthusiastic nurser. Later, a male lactation consultant arrives (this is The Ofice after all) to assist, and Pam gratefully accepts his help

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without a trace of discomfort as he manipulates her breasts to aid in improving the baby’s latch. Jim, her husband, is obviously not as comfortable with the male consultant as Pam is, and when he offers to help her himself Pam tells him “it would be weird” if he did, acknowledging but rejecting the sexual connotation of breastfeeding. These prime-time portrayals of breastfeeding realistically address the drawbacks of breastfeeding, from initial challenges to later limitations and to societal pressure to limit breastfeeding. However, they also show many positive aspects, from subtle creation of breastfeeding as an obvious choice for single, married, working, and at-home mothers to the not-so-subtle mention of the increased size of lactating breasts. CONCLUSIONS

Through their realistic portrayal of breastfeeding in women’s everyday lives, these dramatic television programs carve out a space for viewers – men and women, parents and child free – to talk back to the dichotomous representations of infant feeding that have typically dotted the North American mediascape, which have simultaneously told women they should breastfeed their infants but that the public doesn’t want to see breastfeeding, particularly in the mass media. The television examples discussed here work to normalize the process of breastfeeding by bringing it into people’s living rooms, so current and potential breastfeeders, as well as the general public, can see how breastfeeding actually meshes with women’s lives in both public and private settings, from the maternity ward to toddlerhood and beyond. One reason why breastfeeding has been largely absent from maternal representations is that its portrayal is inextricably linked to the sexual connotation of women’s breasts. Several of the contemporary representations discussed in this chapter acknowledge this issue, while at the same time subtly push viewers to rethink this automatic connection. When Rachel ignores Joey’s leering as she learns to latch on her new baby, she is symbolically telling them that her breasts are being used for their primary purpose, infant feeding, rather than providing sexual pleasure for men. The Ofice pushes this symbolic representation even further with the use of a male lactation consultant. While Jim automatically registers the sexual connotation, Pam desexualizes the situation as her attention is solely focused on learning how to breastfeed. In a sense, this sexual connotation often associated with breastfeeding sets up women to occupy one or the other of the traditional Madonna/Whore roles.

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Rather than simply operationalizing the Madonna aspect of the nursing mother, acknowledging but then dismissing the sexual aspect helps to transform existing conceptions of breastfeeding yet ensures that the representations are not idealized and thus repressive. Indeed, many of the representations provide an empowering vision of breastfeeding that shows women what they can realistically expect if they do choose to breastfeed. Numerous references to pumping clearly illustrate that nursing mothers can return to work or enjoy a night out, even drink alcohol, and still provide breast milk for their children. While showing that pumping can be inconvenient, these representations also allow for others to care for infant children while mothers work or socialize. Even the more unusual SNS portrayal on ER widens the circle of care for infants beyond the mother. As well, showing the positive beneits for breastfeeding mothers (larger breasts, higher metabolism), even if done so in a humorous way, positions the practice of breastfeeding as a positive choice for both infants and mothers. In a sense, the more unusual and farfetched portrayals of breastfeeding reinforce the normality of the “usual” breastfeeding situation at the same time as they provide alternative representations. For example, the portrayal of extended breastfeeding into toddlerhood or early childhood shows that, while many women choose to wean before this point, some do elect to extend the relationship and do so for their own, positive reasons, despite societal pressure to discontinue breastfeeding. The use of an SNS in ER, or The Ofice’s Pam’s mistaking her roommate’s baby for her own, represent less common practices of breastfeeding that still fall within the range of people’s actual choices, whether those include breastfeeding a child that isn’t one’s own or having someone who isn’t the mother “breastfeed” a child. While society may not readily approve of these more unusual practices, exposure to this range of breastfeeding activities may help people become more accepting of typical breastfeeding choices. Also important is the representation of those who are uncomfortable watching women breastfeed, and the representation of women who choose to breastfeed despite others’ discomfort. This suggests to viewers that, while watching breastfeeding may make them somewhat uncomfortable, they need to get past this feeling because the mother’s desire to provide her baby with breast milk trumps any squeamishness they may feel. Showing but rejecting this discomfort warns women that family and friends may resist their decision to breastfeed. By choosing to breastfeed where and whenever they must, however, women can affect social attitudes towards breastfeeding.

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The media examples identiied in this study show that the nature of breastfeeding portrayal, in all its varied forms, appropriately relects and encourages increased societal acceptance of breastfeeding. I believe these portrayals can and do positively inluence women’s breastfeeding decisions through parasocial exposure to the practice and by helping to create a more pro-breastfeeding attitude in society at large. This parasocial effect can be further enhanced if these portrayals are increased in number, further normalizing the practice for viewers. More importantly, representing a wide spectrum of women who make the choice to breastfeed is essential to reach groups of women who may be less likely to choose breastfeeding. The women in the examples discussed in this paper are white, attractive, thin, and middle-class. Realistic, non-idealized representation of women who are non-white, or who have non-normative body types, or are in lower socioeconomic strata who choose to breastfeed – without making the choice a duty or obligation – may help pave the way for a wider participation rate for women who choose to initiate and continue breastfeeding. Clearly, the decision to breastfeed is complex, as women must weigh the scientiic and medical evidence, their own lifestyle needs, and their own and others’ attitudes about the choice. The appearance of breastfeeding in a mass media context naturalizes it and encourages women to choose to breastfeed without the negative inluence of limiting choices that some public health campaigns present. While I don’t want to overstate television’s inluence on complex situations as breastfeeding, one thing is clear: if as many women copy Rachel’s decision to breastfeed her child as they copied her hairstyle in the mid-nineties, the World Health Organization’s job of promoting breastfeeding would be a snap.

NOTES

1 Canadian Paediatric Society, “Beneits of Breastfeeding to Infants in Canada,” Nutrition for Healthy Term Infants. 2 Ibid. 3 American Academy of Pediatricians Work Group on Breastfeeding, “Breastfeeding and the Use of Human Milk,” 1035. 4 Breastfeeding Committee for Canada, Affordable Healthcare Begins with Breastfeeding, 5–7. 5 Hoddinott and Pill, “Qualitative Study of Decisions about Infant Feeding,” 30. 6 Hannan et al., “Regional Variation,” 284.

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7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

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WHO, Global Strategy for Infant and Young Child Feeding, 7. Ibid., 5. Millar and Maclean, “Breastfeeding Practices,” 24. Center for Disease Control, “Breastfeeding Practices: Results from the 2005 National Immunization Survey,” accessed 17 April 2007, http://www. cdc.gov/breastfeeding/data/NIS_data/data_2005.htm. American Academy of Paediatricians, “Breastfeeding,” 1. Kukla, “Ethics and Ideology in Breastfeeding Campaigns,” 4–5. Ibid., 5, 7. Ibid., 9. Coutinho et al., “Comparison of the Effect of Two Systems,” 1099. Graffy et al., “Randomised Controlled Trial,” 3. Hoddinott and Pill, “Qualitative Study of Decisions,” 5. Coburn, “From TV to Real Life.” Ibid. Henderson, Kitzinger, and Green, “Representing Infant Feeding,” 3–4. Giles, “Parasocial Interaction,” 280. Tsao, “Compensatory Media Use,” 89. Ruowei et al., “Public Beliefs about Breastfeeding,” 1164. Hannan et al., “Regional Variation,” 284. “Anchors Aweigh,” Sex and the City. “Luck be an Old Lady,” Sex and the City. “Weaning isn’t Everything,” Yes, Dear. “The One with the Breast Milk,” Friends. “The One Where Rachel Has A Baby, Part 2,” Friends. “The One Where Rachel Goes Back to Work,” Friends. Ibid. “Pilot,” Desperate Housewives. “Could I leave you?,” Desperate Housewives. “Try Carter,” ER. “How Did I Get Here?,” Friday Night Lights. “Delivery,” The Ofice.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

American Academy of Pediatricians Work Group on Breastfeeding. “Breastfeeding and the Use of Human Milk.” Pediatrics 100, no. 6 (1997): 1035–9. Breastfeeding Committee for Canada. Affordable Healthcare Begins with Breastfeeding Support and the Use of Human Milk. 4 April 2004. http:// www.breastfeedingcanada.ca/pdf/webdoc47.pdf.

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Canadian Paediatric Society, Dietitians of Canada, and Health Canada. “Beneits of Breastfeeding to Infants in Canada.” In Nutrition for Healthy Term Infants. Minister of Public Works and Government Services, Ottawa, 2005. Accessed 15 September 2011. http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/fn-an/pubs/ infant-nourrisson/nut_infant_nourrisson_term-eng.php. Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Breastfeeding Practices–Results from the 2005 National Immunization Survey. 2005. Accessed 17 April 2007. http://www.cdc.gov/breastfeeding/data/NIS_data/data_2005.htm. Coburn, Jennifer. “From TV to Real Life: Lack of Education Causes Tragic Results.” Mothering, July–August 2000. Accessed 25 March 2004. http:// indarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0838/is_2000_July-August/ai_76614508/print. Coutinho, Sonia Bechara, Pedro Israel Cabral de Lira, Marilia de Carvalho Lima, and Ann Ashworth. “Comparison of the Effect of Two Systems for the Promotion of Exclusive Breastfeeding.” The Lancet 366 (2005): 1094–100. Desperate Housewives. Episode 1, “Pilot.” Directed by Charles McDougall and written by Marc Cherry. First broadcast 3 October 2004. ABC. Desperate Housewives. Episode 40, “Could I Leave You?” Directed by Pam Thomas and written by Scott Sanford Tobis. First broadcast 26 March 2006. ABC. ER. Episode 159, “The Longer You Stay.” Directed by Jonathan Kaplan and written by Jack Orman. First broadcast 4 October 2001. NBC. ER. Episode 226, “Try Carter.” Directed by Jonanthan Kaplan and written by R. Scott Gemmill. First broadcast 14 October 2004. NBC. Friends. Episode 2.02, “The One With the Breast Milk.” Directed by Michael Lembeck and written by Adam Chase and Ira Ungerleider. First broadcast 28 September 1995. NBC. Friends. Episode 8.24, “The One Where Rachel Has a Baby, Part 2.” Directed by Kevin S. Bright and written by David Crane and Marta Kauffman. First broadcast 19 September 2002. NBC. Friends. Episode 9.11, “The One Where Rachel Goes Back to Work.” Directed by Gary Halvorson. First broadcast 9 January 2003. NBC. Giles, David. “Parasocial Interaction: A Review of the Literature and a Model for Future Research.” Mediapsychology 4 (2002): 279–305. Graffy, Johnathan, Jane Taylor, Anthony Williams, and Sandra Eldridge. “Randomised Controlled Trial of Support from Volunteer Counsellors for Mothers Considering Breastfeeding.” British Medical Journal 328 (2004): 26–31. Hannan, Abeda, Li Ruowei, Sandra Benton-Davis, and Laurence GrummerStrawn. “Regional Variation in Public Opinion about Breastfeeding in the United States.” Journal of Human Lactation 21, no. 3 (2005): 284–8.

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Henderson, Leslie, Jenny Kitzinger, and Josephine Green. “Representing Infant Feeding: Content Analysis of British Media Portrayals of Bottle Feeding and Breast Feeding.” British Medical Journal 321 (2000): 1196–8. Hoddinott, Pat, and Roisin Pill. “Qualitative Study of Decisions about Infant Feeding Among Women in East End of London.” British Medical Journal 318 (1999): 30–4. Kukla, Rebecca. “Ethics and Ideology in Breastfeeding Advocacy Campaigns.” Hypatia 26, no. 1 (2006): 157–80. Millar, Wayne J., and Heather Maclean. “Breastfeeding Practices.” Health Reports. Ottawa: Health Statistics Division. 16, no. 2 (2005): 23–31. Accessed 5 October 2011.  http://www.statcan.gc.ca/studies-etudes/82-003/ archive/2005/7787-eng.pdf. The Ofice. Episodes 117 and 118, “The Delivery, Part 2.” Directed by Harold Ramis and written by Charlie Grandy. First broadcast 4 March 2010. NBC. Perez-Escamilla, Rafael. “Evidence Based Breast-feeding Promotion: The BabyFriendly Hospital Initiative.” The Journal of Nutrition 137 (2007): 484–7. Ruowei, Li, Jason Hsia, Fred Fridinger, Abeda Hussain, Sandra Benton-Davis, and Laurence Grummer-Strawn. “Public Beliefs about Breastfeeding Policies in Various Settings,” Journal of the American Dietetic Association 104 (2004): 1162–8. Sex and the City. Episode 67, “Anchors Away.” Directed by Charles McDougall and written by Michael Patrick King. First broadcast 21 July 2002. HBO. Sex and the City. Episode 69, “Luck be an Old Lady.” Directed by John Coles and written by Julie Rottenberg and Elisa Zuritsky. First broadcast 4 August 2002. HBO. Tsao, Jinshi. “Compensatory Media Use: An Exploration of Two Paradigms.” Communication Studies 47, no. 1–2 (1996): 89–109. World Health Organization. Global Strategy for Infant and Young Child Feeding. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2003. Yes, Dear. Episode 2, “Weaning isn’t Everything.” Directed by Andrew D. Weyman and written by Douglas Leiblien and Bobby Bowman. First broadcast 19 October 2000. CBS.

12 WATCH THEM SUFFER, WATCH THEM DIE

Depictions of African Mothers and Motherhood in Famine Footage and Fernando Meirelles’s The Constant Gardener H. Louise Davis

The production and display of images that reiterate the iconographic Christian image of the Madonna with Child are particularly prevalent within the United States and Great Britain. Since the 1980s, the emaciated Madonna with a starving child attached to her futile breast has become a means to represent not only famine but also the infertility of Africa and African women. These images betray the Western tendency to simplify the problems of postcolonial Africa and deny the effects of Western foreign policies upon individual people(s), nations, and the continent as a whole. In recent years, the image of the humble Madonna struggling against all odds in Africa has begun to surface in iction ilm. As Fernando Meirelles’s 2005 ilm The Constant Gardener reveals, her presence serves similar ends in ictional representations as in news coverage; in both instances she functions as that which makes African suffering and suffering in Africa palatable for Western audiences. Through a comparative analysis of the groundbreaking British news coverage of famine in Africa produced by the Michael Buerk and Mohammed Amin in 1984, and Meirelles’s The Constant Gardener, I situate the birth of the contemporary black Madonna in Western popular culture in famine coverage and illustrate the problematics of constructing parodic replicas of the Madonna with Child icon to represent the African continent and African motherhood. I assert that these less than holy depictions of the African mother not only veil the causes and conditions of suffering in Africa and allow Westerners to exculpate

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themselves for their role in the everyday suffering of African people, but also reinforce traditional gender positions in the West by suggesting that, in contrast to the failing African mother, the Western woman should be positioned as productive mother. ETHIOPIAN MADONNAS OF FAMINE FOOTAGE

In October 1984, BBC correspondent Michael Buerk accompanied VisNews cameraman Mohammed Amin to a refugee camp in Korem, a northern province of Ethiopia. There they produced two lengthy television news reports, totaling over ifteen minutes of ilm, that exposed a modern day “biblical famine.” The irst report, renamed the “Faces of Death” by NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw, was viewed by over 425 news agencies worldwide and aired to over 470 million television viewers.1 The report can be described as seminal in its representation of African famine, not only because it began what was to become a continuous stream of atrocious famine images contextualized within the frame of Christian symbols, but also because it set the precedent for future media coverage of African famines by constructing appropriate symbolic victims, cementing images of Ethiopians as frail and starving in the minds of Western viewers, and establishing a dichotomous logic that deined and separated the African victims from the Western savior igures. In such footage, the African Madonna with Child – an image that has since become such a cliché that it has contributed to what African feminist Ama Ata Aidoo describes as the “setting” of a permanent and negative image of the “African woman in the mind of the world”2 – functions as an extremely useful visual symbol because it not only immediately renders the unfamiliar familiar;3 it also strengthens the impact of the shocking footage while containing the psychical threat that the abject and emaciated African woman poses to the Western viewer. In Buerk and Amin’s text, as in many similar texts produced in the same vein, the abject mother is not simply contained within the boundaries of the refugee camp, or simply within the frame of the camera or screen, but also by Western mythology. She has been reduced to an age-old symbol, so layered with ideological meaning that she is no longer allowed to exist as a woman, as a mother, as a citizen, or as a subject. In his opening narrative to the irst news report, Buerk humbly describes the scene of famine as “biblical,” an adjective that not only speaks to the way in which Amin captures images of dying Ethiopians, but also inluences Western viewers’ interpretations of the images they

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see. As an establishing shot reveals a dirty, dusty plain illed with ragged starving people, Buerk narrates, “the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night on the plain, it lights up a biblical famine.”4 In the same way, both Amin’s footage and Buerk’s narrative will shed light upon and expose the famine as an event. And, for any Western viewer likely to forget the biblical analogy, if the image of the donkey in the opening wide shot did not impress it enough upon the viewer, both ilmmaker and journalist continuously reiterate the biblical nature of the scene by producing images and narrative of biblical proportions that replicate the iconic Madonna with Child image. Despite the fact that millions of Ethiopians were at risk of starvation, Buerk and Amin’s main focus tends to emphasize the plight of the individual “human struggling with a hostile environment in order to eke out a living.”5 Throughout the short ilm, the camera almost always only focuses on the suffering of a mere few. The opening shots of the Buerk/ Amin documentary that surveyed the plains of Korem quickly give way to a shot of an individualized victim.6 The irst close-up is of a veiled mother holding her child. While the shot holds their images, and the child tries to suck on the cheek of the mother with dry gums, Buerk describes the scene to which we are witness. The images are punctuated with words such as “hunger,” “desperation,” and “wasted people.” The camera zooms out slightly to reveal the child’s body, skeletal with ribs protruding. The implication is obvious; this mother cannot produce milk for her child. Her body is “desperate,” it is her child who suffers from “hunger,” these are the “wasted people.” Seconds later, in a line of people waiting for admittance to the camp, another mother with child is made visible. As the camera tracks down a line of new refugees it looks at them if only for a moment. She holds her child who, in turn, holds her breast. The breast lies limp in the child’s hand, unproductive and ungiving. The image again implies that African women cannot feed their children; it insinuates that, in the words of Aidoo, the African woman “is breeding too many children she cannot take care of, and for whom she should not expect other people to pick up the tab. She is hungry and so are her children.”7 The repetition of the image only serves to afirm the common Western assumption that this is not an anomaly, but the norm. It is no accident that Amin and Buerk (or later news coverage of the famine) would rely on such obvious imagery to illicit sympathy for famine victims. Due to its religious connotations, the image was recognizable; it had proven fruitful in other, unrelated social movements; and it allowed for the construction of the ideal victim. The Madonna image is

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effective because it draws on a long tradition of depicting female humility and suffering. When looking at her, potential donors are exposed to an image of an innocent victim who appears (because she is constructed to appear so) too ashamed to look at the camera or to beg for help. She is the deserving poor – the humble and meek victim of circumstance. Former director of Médicins Sans Frontières Rony Brauman argues that it is this type of “pure” victim that Westerners prefer to see.8 He states that, within famine footage, “the only familiar landmark in this merciless, anachronistic landscape is this image of the victim,” and that, in order for the media to pay said victims any attention, they must appear to be “100 per cent victim, a non-participant.”9 By presenting famine victims in a recognizable format, such media producers enable viewers to comprehend the catastrophe displayed on their television screens. However, in simplifying and Westernizing the bodies of Africans, the producers of such images ultimately misrepresent events. The African woman in famine footage functions as a veil; her existence, her specularization, glosses over the actual causes and conditions of famine in Africa. At the same time that the image conceals the actual causes and conditions of Third World catastrophe, it also creates the Third World.10 Despite being immediately recognizable, despite its usefulness as a symbol, there are, however, times when this Madonna-esque image is not employed, perhaps because it is deemed inappropriate. The third mother and child pairing offers a stark contrast to the previous Madonnas presented. Approximately one-third of the way through the ilm, Amin focuses the camera upon the head of a child in distress. At irst the child appears as peaceful as the previous, recovering child. However, both the camera movements and Buerk’s narration soon rid the viewer of this misconception. The camera, which primarily focuses upon the child’s head, quickly zooms out to present an almost full shot – an establishing shot – of a dying body. The mother of the child sits at the edge of the bed, unmoving. She is unable to touch her daughter because of the medical tubes and doctors that surround and separate her from the child. On one hand, the space between the mother and child – the replacement of the mother by Western medical apparatus – serves to reafirm the stereotypical notion that the unproductive African mother cannot care for her offspring; on the other hand, the space is indicative of the gulf that separates life and death. Buerk narrates, “This three-year-old girl was beyond any help. Unable to take food, attached to a drip, but, too late. The drip was taken away.”11 As a way of distancing the audience, giving them time to digest the implications of the image, the camera then cuts to an

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image of a doctor removing medical tubes from the scene; as Buerk states, the child no longer needs them. Seconds later, the camera cuts back to a medium shot of the child’s body. Buerk informs us that “only minutes later, while we were ilming, she died.”12 The mother remains still. She does not touch the child even when the tubes have been removed. As Buerk tells of the girl’s death, in a hushed tone, Amin re-establishes the scene with a cut back (medium shot) to the upper half of the girl’s body. The camera pauses there only for an instant before beginning a simultaneous slow tilt downward and zoom outward, moving from her head to her knees. The purpose of the camera’s maneuvering is to expose the child’s whole body, to show corporeal death in its entirety. But, as the camera moves over the warm corpse, an almost unnoticeable white hand (reminiscent of a “hand of God” perhaps) – anticipating this movement – reaches in from the lower right side and carefully removes the blanket from the child’s lower half. The result is a full shot in which the dead child lies almost completely uncovered. Her emaciated legs and her immature genital area are exposed for all the world to see. Ironically, while they refuse to depict the act of dying in the Ethiopian refugee camp, Buerk and Amin seem to have no qualms displaying the genitalia of a dead three year old. One wonders if Western photojournalists would ever depict a white European or American child thus. The invasion of the camera’s gaze and the white man’s hand into the child’s space, onto the child’s body, robs the child of all dignity, and yet the offensive nature of this pornographic image received little comment when it aired. This footage is intended to horrify and shock, to elicit sympathy from Western audiences unfamiliar with the rigors and tragedies of mass famine. However, the psychic distress such an image may cause for the viewer is minimized both by the distancing camera techniques and the ways in which the mother and child pairing is framed and staged. The rapid zooms and cuts not only serve to provide the observer with a more complete view of the dying child and her surroundings; they also serve to literally distance the viewer from the abject body that she or he is so desperate to see. This distance – like the intrusion of the doctor with his tubes – anesthetizes the image, making it palatable. Buerk’s white hand and hushed voice, the medical tubes and the doctor’s exit, disrupt the biblical narrative and change the overall tone of the documentary, if only for a moment. What we see on screen is no longer biblical tragedy, but the transition of a living female to abject corpse. This image presents the worst fears of viewers, the closeness of death and abjection, while maintaining it safely within the camera frame, within an Ethiopian refugee camp. Despite the presence of the mother at her

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daughter’s makeshift bedside, the image does not evoke the iconic Madonna with Child image. The living mother (even if she is on her last legs) is kept separate from her daughter and remains isolated in her grief. Buerk tells us that this has happened to her before, that “the mother had lost all her four children, and her husband.” The fact that the Madonna with Child framing is not used in this instance is particularly revealing; it proves the limitations of the sanitizing effect of Christian iconography. The icon is not replicated here because, to do so, would be to create psychic distress for the Western viewer. Even in a refugee camp in Northern Ethiopia, during the one of the worst famines in recorded history (1983–85), the boundaries between life and death must be consistently established and reinforced. To display a mother holding her dead child would violate the taboo that separates the living from the dead. In addition, to present a live Madonna holding a dead child would also cause irreparable damage to the Madonna with Child icon. The inal image of mother and child in the documentary is again reminiscent of the Madonna with Child icon, not because it visually mimics the iconic image, but because of the shared bond implied between the mother and the child and the relationship between the mother/child pairing and the earth. It differs from previous parodies in the sense that the mother and child depicted are dead and both are completely veiled, wrapped in a shawl. Their faces are not visible; all the viewer sees is their feet, intertwined. As Buerk notes, “This mother and the baby she bore two months ago, wrapped together in death.”13 There is an air of peace and tranquility to the image; the covering over of the bodies implies a respect for the dead. The viewer is again reminded that, even in Korem, there is a ritualized discarding of that which is abject; order is maintained with funeral rites and burial rituals. Death is rendered familiar and acceptable through this ritual. The same ritual of shrouding the dead that enables Ethiopians to maintain civilization in the face of such trauma is mimicked by the camera’s refusal to invade and prod beyond the death shroud. This image is possible because it does not violate the boundary between life and death, but it does serve to reafirm, once again, the inadequacy of Ethiopian mothers to provide sustenance for their children. The succeeding shot of a man crying, a man we assume to be husband and father to the dead, further strengthens the inferiority of the Ethiopian family unit, implying that the grieving father is as impotent and incapable of providing for his children as the dead mother, his wife. The fact that this image of Ethiopians as incompetent has become set in the Western imagination is made most clear in a 1987 cover of Time,

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which again relies on this now cliché icon of the Madonna with Child to immediately cue the viewer – the potential reader – as to the nature of the cover story.14 As in the footage, the cover shows a ragged and veiled Ethiopian mother with a naked child at her breast. Yet, unlike in the famine footage, this mother/child pairing has been removed of all context except for the brief narratives provided by the ethnocentric captions. The background has been matted to make the pair appear in a vacuum – as if the “Ethiopian problem” itself occurred in a global vacuum. The caption indicates that, only three years after the Buerk/Amin documentary caused worldwide sensation, the starving Ethiopian woman and her emaciated child, iconic as they may be, are considered passé. The caption that accompanies the image reads, “Why are Ethiopians starving again?” The sense of Western boredom, which Susan Moeller describes as “compassion fatigue,” is made evident by the use of the word “again,” and perhaps explains why now, in the twenty-irst century, images of starving Africans seem to have little effect upon Western audiences.15 The second caption, “What should the world do – or not do?” is typical of the Western need to deny responsibility for occurrences in Africa. Like the Buerk/Amin documentary, such tabloid-esque images suggest that there is nothing more to Ethiopia than refugee camps, that nothing exists beyond the camps, and that all that is outside is death. This death, as the documentary shows, is either contained within abject women’s bodies by the woman’s skin or (if that fails) the camera’s frame, or it is pushed to the edges of the camp in designated gravesites. BLACK AND WHITE MADONNAS IN THE CONSTANT GARDENER

Fernando Meirelles’s 2005 ilm, The Constant Gardener, attempts to challenge stereotypical representations of Africa and African bodies by reconstructing and redeining “Africa” through a non-imperialist and postcolonial lens. However, despite its attempt to present the heterogeneity and vibrancy of the African continent, the text fails in this particular aim, partially because of its uncritical reliance upon the Madonna with Child construction, and partially because the African mother, Wanza Kilulu, around whom the plot supposedly revolves, functions as little more than a white man’s memory, a trace. Her story – like that of her white counterpart, Tessa – is only revealed in the context of a larger mystery, as a result of a white man’s desire to uncover (as Buerk does when he removes the dead girl’s blanket) some sort of authentic truth.

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The ilm traces the journey of British foreign diplomat, Justin Quayle, as he attempts to reconstruct events leading up to his wife’s (Tessa Quayle) brutal murder. While working with AIDS patients in the slum of Kibera, Tessa and her friend and co-activist Dr Arnold Bluhm discover that multinational pharmaceutical company, Three Bees, have not only been performing illegal drug trials upon unsuspecting Kiberan residents, but have also covered up the fact that over sixty Kiberans (including mother-to-be, Wanza Kilulu) have died as a result of the trials. Following his wife’s trail, Justin also inds evidence of Three Bees’s immoral and illegal practices. At the same time, he realizes that it was senior level British oficials, having been inancially encouraged to turn a blind eye to the drug trials and protect the interests of Three Bees, who arranged for Tessa and Arnold to be assassinated before they revealed to the international press the evidence they had compiled. Just prior to committing suicide in the remote region of Kenya where Tessa’s body was found, Justin arranges for an exposé of both Three Bees and the British oficials that enabled the trials. While justice is ultimately served, and the sacriice of Wanza Kilulu and others is made public, Three Bees simply alters its name and moves to another part of Africa to continue testing. The story’s mystery surrounds the lives and consequent deaths of two mothers: Tessa, the visible white mother, and Wanza Kilulu, the invisible black mother. The deaths of both women are the impetus for the plot. Ironically, however, the viewer knows not of the impetus for the mystery nor for Tessa’s death until it is explained by and through the actions and remembrances of Justin. As the title suggests, the ilm’s focus is upon Justin. Thus, it comes as no surprise, speciically considering the history of Western cinema, that the screen is aligned with Justin’s (the white male’s) look. Because of this alignment, the aims of the ilm collapse into themselves because observers are inluenced into taking on or appropriating the white male look, of being “irresistibly drawn to the ‘mirror’ of an ideal ‘whiteness,’”16 even if they are not white men. And, thus, the African woman is somehow elided, lost within the ilm, while the white woman is relegated to role of object and mother. The stories of Tessa and Wanza intersect in the maternity ward in Kibera, at the moment when both women give birth. Tessa gives birth to a dead male child and Wanza dies shortly after bearing a healthy son. The viewer is irst introduced to the stories of Wanza and her son as Tessa wet nurses the boy; like the African women of famine footage, Wanza is too weak to feed him herself. Tessa can provide sustenance for Wanza’s child in a way that the dying African woman cannot. Wanza

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subsequently dies, leaving the child’s fate in the hands of others and Tessa with a mystery to solve. Wanza functions as nothing more than a plot device, a source of mystery. The mystery that surrounds her, however, provokes the same questions as starving Ethiopians in the 1980s: Why can the African woman not feed her child? Why is she dying? What help does she need? How can the white woman help her less competent sister? As a result of setting, staging, and the skin colour of the child, the image of Tessa feeding Wanza’s child is reminiscent of mother/child pairings presented in famine footage. However, because Tessa is white and the child she feeds is black, because the image crosses a racial boundary (the idea of a white Madonna having the child of a black man – a black Jesus – may not be palatable to many Western Christians) this particular image can be described as a risqué replication of the Madonna with Child image. Nevertheless, as in famine footage, speciically in the case of the dying three year old, the image does not blur the most taboo of boundaries – the boundary between life and death. Rather, death is kept at a distance from Tessa while she nurses; Wanza is contained within a back room, and Tessa’s own dead baby has been removed from the scene. Tessa consistently pushes both physical and symbolic boundaries, and it is for this reason that she must die. Her death allows for the reestablishment of proper boundaries, especially of colonial sensibilities. In the hospital scene the viewer is primarily shocked upon irst seeing Tessa with a black child; he or she is, momentarily, led to believe that Tessa has been unfaithful to Justin and that Arnold is her child’s father. The shock brought on by both the thought of Tessa’s inidelity and of the blurring of a racial boundary within an iconic image, however, is countered in two ways: primarily by the recognition that the child is not Tessa’s but Wanza’s and, secondarily, by the implication that Tessa, as a white woman, is a giver and maintainer of life and order. So, by the end of the ilm, the viewer becomes aware that Tessa does not transgress as many boundaries as she could have; ultimately, she does everything Justin’s way. She travels throughout Kenya and shares hotel rooms with Arnold, but she does not sleep with him. Despite their similarly subordinate position, beneath the white man, the distance between black man and white woman is always maintained. The maintenance of such distance allows Tessa to remain pure, like the Madonna she evokes in the hospital scene. Tessa is presented as a holy mother. Throughout the ilm she functions as a mother of Africa, a savior who aids the helpless child in its development and understanding of the

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world. Her journeys into city slums and bandit country are designed as both information gathering and information sharing missions. The people respect Tessa; they call her “Mama Tessa,” they brings her gifts, and they take her suggestions as orders. And, like the Virgin Mary to God, she brings the messages and offerings of the people back to the patriarch. In fact, all her actions are determined by the patriarchal bureaucracy within which Justin is immersed. As Tessa’s friend Ghita tells Justin, after Tessa’s death, “She wanted to do it [expose Three Bees] your way, through channels.”17 In her role as go-between Tessa also functions liminally. She transgresses borders, borders that the men would reinforce: Arnold tells her, “if you were my wife, I’d tie you to the bed.” In a similar vein his boss, Sandy, tells Justin, “If you can’t control her, you should keep her locked up.” As go-between, Tessa becomes potentially contagious (consider the implication that her unborn baby dies as a direct result of her travels in and out of the slums and her interactions with diseased black bodies). She is most dangerous, however, not because she brings the diseases of the slums back into the home, but because she transports the knowledge and language of the colonial masters into the slums. Here it mutates, takes on new meanings that cannot be controlled or regulated, which, like AIDS, the disease referred to in the healthcare education play performed in the slum, spread invisibly and maliciously. The appropriation and alteration of white man’s culture and words are reiterated over and over again when the African children ask Tessa, in their Kenyan accents, “How are you?” This is a politeness, typical of wealthy British society, but it seems out of context and awkward when spoken in the slums of Kibera. Another reason why Tessa must be stopped, at least in the eyes of British oficials, is that she refuses to abide by the constraints of her gender. Despite her white privilege, Tessa is still susceptible to the laws under which all women live; she is surveilled, negated, and eventually murdered because she refuses to remain in one space. She refuses to give up her movements and be, literally, tied down, even by motherhood. At the same time that she is mother to Africa, she also functions as Africa. Despite their appearance everywhere, the black body cannot function as Africa; the dark secrets of the black woman are too dangerous and threatening to observe in Western texts, and, thus, the white woman must stand in. Tessa transgresses spaces but becomes a space herself. While she navigates the slums, developing a mental map of the areas she traverses, she too functions as a map. She is to be explored, to provide secrets. This is most evident in the scene where Justin, who

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pretends to be Jacques Cousteau, famous under water explorer, is ilming a pregnant Tessa in the bath. Tessa’s body is not only contained within the bath, but also within the frame constructed by the camera. As Justin guides the camera over her body, in a way not dissimilar to Amin and Buerk’s guidance over the body of the dying African girl, he builds up a topographical picture – an image of a whole connoted through a combination of fragments. In his Cousteau-esque accent, he describes Tessa’s body as easily navigated. He uses word such as “territory” and “exploration” to explain both her being and her actions. In addition, like Africa, like African female bodies, Tessa’s body is both mapped and penetrated by the white man; it is mapped by the act of ilming and penetrated by the camera’s and/or the spectator’s look. The distinction between Tessa and the African woman is that, as map, as that which can be inscribed, Tessa is visible. The ilm clearly delineates her markings and her penetration. We irst see Tessa in Africa marked as pregnant, fertile, and productive; a penetration must have occurred to render this marking possible. She is again inscribed as Africa when we are informed that she was raped and beaten to death, like the continent under colonial rule. In contrast, however, Wanza is not even marked. Alive she is invisible, redundant; dead, she is not even marked by a grave. She is buried beneath white lye (pun intended); she is rendered invisible by whiteness. As woman, as mother, as Africa, Tessa remains a mystery to Justin, a dark continent that must suffer rape and death – be inscribed by the hands of white men – in order to reveal itself. Justin’s journey of exploration ultimately results in a fragmentation of that which is mapped or discovered. Like Africa under colonialist rule, Tessa is revealed in fragments. During the sex scene between her and Justin, parts of her body are unsheathed and captured as fragments, which allows the camera to build a full picture of her without ever revealing her totality. The ilm’s mystery slowly unravels, but even in death, Tessa is nothing more than a part that is a sum of a whole. CONCLUSION

This type of common construction of a dying or diseased African Madonna with Child presented in texts set in Africa is particularly telling of both Western attitudes towards and misconceptions of the “Dark Continent.” Through the indirect reference to a classic Western, Christian image, the producers of media images guide viewers to speciic cultural

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readings of the image, readings that make it possible to simultaneously identify with and repudiate the body depicted on screen. The African Madonna with Child can be described as that which mimics the iconic Christian image of Mary and Jesus. The mimic has multiple effects; it not only contextualizes the foreign body within a comprehensible Christian framework, thus rendering the unfamiliar familiar, but it also renders the African body – even in its most abject state – completely redundant and unthreatening. Both the irst Buerk/Amin news report of famine in Korem and Meirelles’s The Constant Gardener are texts that prove how the rituals of the media and of Western viewing habits effectively sanitize the abject, desirable, and taboo African woman and the woman in Africa. Through careful mastery of the camera and the editing process, and as a result of her construction as a bad copy of an ideologically heavily loaded icon, she is rendered unthreatening. She is nothing more than a conduit or symbol, one that has no subjectivity, agency, or control over the ways she is represented. Despite her potential to thrill or even titillate, the African woman and her white counterpart become nothing more than a corporeal marker to be inscribed or covered over as the media producer and/ or viewer sees it. In essence, both function as empty signiiers, to be used as Western image producers and consumers deem appropriate, and to be provided meaning only through the context of the white man’s story and as a result of the white man’s action. Despite their admirable aims to expose human rights abuses in Africa and call upon Western viewers to ight against global injustice, both the Buerk/Amin news coverage of famine and The Constant Gardener, because of their reliance upon the Madonna with Child icon, simply re-employ the same aged symbols to the same ends. Both texts exculpate Western viewers of all responsibility toward African nations either by focusing on the veil that is the Madonna image or completely burying the African mother. Neither exposes the patriarchal colonial systems that, despite the processes of decolonization, continue to destroy women’s lives in Africa on a daily basis. While, as Aidoo asserts, such negative images of African women have been extremely commonplace in Western news texts, the BBC has, in recent years, started to address the problems associated with stereotyping and silencing African women by providing coverage in which they have a voice. More positive representations of African women as agents can similarly be found in documentary reports of catastrophe in Africa produced and disseminated (often via the Internet) by global aid charities such as

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Oxfam, Refugees International, and Care. When pairing their images with their voices, African women no longer function as humble Madonna-like igures, but as subjects in their own right. But while providing “victims” with a voice appeals to some BBC viewers and would-be donors, depictions of speaking African women are not necessarily well-received by all viewers. This is made most evident in online responses posted after the BBC’s 2009 report on the ramiications of and solutions to the current food crisis in Ethiopia.18 The sevenminute report, currently posted on YouTube, differs from the Buerk and Amin report in that it provides the women with a voice. African women, depicted alongside their children, talk openly about their struggles with famine and the effects of aid. Likewise, the responses to the report also differ to that expressed by the public after Buerk and Amin’s text was aired. With venom, and in a vein similarly dismissive as many other posts, one viewer comments, “Eight children and fertile land, fuck food aid and their AIDS.”19 Another retorts, “They breed like lies, and overwhelm the crops. They get what they deserve. Nature will weed them out to a sustainable population.”20 A third later states, “Dude, Africans keep having children when they damn well know they won’t be able to feed them all.”21 Such responses, unsubstantiated as they are, simultaneously demonstrate the power of the African voice and of Western resistance to the empowerment of African women. The deconstruction of the African Madonna image is met with anger, intolerance, spite, and dismissiveness – all strikingly different from the piteous responses evoked by less empowering representations of Ethiopian Madonnas. The violence of some responses echoes the violence with which the women in Buerk/ Amin and The Constant Gardener are brutally silenced, as much by the camera as by the men who speak for them or violate them. This small example among many shows that, while news agencies may have changed tactics, the public is not necessarily ready to view African women in different, more positive ways. As Westerners, we have been trained to view or receive Africa and Africans in certain contexts, through set formats and narrative structures, and we are perhaps not all ready to perceive of the African continent as a space where other peoples’ lives, as opposed to our Western fantasies, are enacted. Given such shifts in the news media, it seems possible (or at least I am hopeful) that, in the not too distant future, the African Madonna of humility will become a stereotype of the past, and that African women’s voices may become even more prominent. While news outlets such as the

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BBC are representing African women in more empowering ways, ictional representations seem to be lagging behind the media. That said, the past twenty-ive years has seen a number of artists attempt to subvert the Madonna igure, and their work has been displayed in very public places, often controversially. Most notable among those working to recuperate the Madonna are artists Damien Hirst and Cindy Sherman, both of whom, in producing art that sexualizes and humanizes the Madonna, and in placing said art in public locations, publicly challenge traditional readings of her as humble maternal icon.22 Perhaps more signiicant to the discussion here, however, is the work of British artist Chris Oili who, in 1999, shocked the US public with the exhibition of his Holy Virgin Mary at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Oili’s piece, a depiction of the Madonna with Child made from dung and adorned with disembodied breasts and buttocks, caused sensation and outrage when exhibited, not only because it subverted an iconic religious image, but also because it drew attention to the abject nature of the Madonna with Child image, speciically when the Madonna with Child is constructed as black. Both as a result of its medium and the contents of the image, Holy Virgin Mary exposed Western photographers’, journalists’, and artists’ uncritical use of the African female body as a metaphor for the failings of Africa, and the complex contradictions – the fascination and repulsion – that surround Western depictions of the black body. The controversy over Oili piece, leading to its condemnation by New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, is once again evidence of Western resistance to the re-envisioning of the Madonna image. And perhaps it is such resistance that hinders popular ilmmakers from representing African women in more positive ways or from recuperating the Madonna igure. Such recuperations of the Madonna igure are key to undermining the function of the African Madonna in the Western popular imagination and would beneit women worldwide by detaching humility and suffering from popular notions of the maternal. NOTES

1 Angela Penrose, administrator of the University Relief and Rehabilitation organization, provides the viewing igures for the Buerk/Amin documentary; the report was seen by over thirty million viewers in the UK and the USA in October, and, according to the BBC, “was later shown by 425 of the world’s broadcasting organisations with a total audience of 470 million.” See Jannson, Harris, and Penrose, The Ethiopian Famine, 154.

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2 Aidoo, “African Woman Today,” 39. 3 The irst recorded date for an art piece depicting the Madonna with Child is Simone Martini’s fresco, “Madonna of Humility” (1341) now located in the Palace of the Popes. For a detailed description of Martini’s fresco see Meiss, “The Madonna of Humility.” Other signiicant Madonna icons are Duccio Di Buoninsegna’s “Madonna and Child” (ca. 1300), and Andrea Solario’s “Madonna with Green Cushion” (1507). When analyzing the Buerk/Amin footage I also had the works of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine in mind. 4 Michael Buerk and Mohammed Amin, Footage of Ethiopian refugee camp in Korem, BBC, London. 23 October 1984. 5 According to Jay Ruby, this type of emphasis upon the human versus the environment is a convention of documentary ilm, having been the theme of the irst, popular ethnographic documentary, Nanook of the North. See Ruby, Picturing Culture: Explorations of Film and Anthropology, 11. 6 For a discussion of the ideological function of highlighting the plight of the individual in media footage, see Christian Lahusen, The Rhetoric of Moral Protest, 147. 7 Aidoo, “African Woman Today,” 39. 8 Médicins Sans Frontières is an independent medical aid agency. 9 Brauman, “When Suffering Makes a Good Story,” 154. 10 For more detailed discussion on the causes and conditions of famine in Ethiopia see David A. Korn, Ethiopia: The Politics of Famine. 11 Buerk and Amin, Footage of Ethiopian refugee camp. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 For the cover image, see http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641, 19871221,00.html. The relevant cover story “Famine Hunger Stalks Ethiopia Once Again” (Time Magazine, 21 December 1987) can also be found in online archives at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ article/0,9171,966291,00.html. 15 Moeller identiies multiple reasons why US audiences experience compassion fatigue, including boredom (10), formulaic coverage that “makes us feel that we really have seen this story before” (13), the number of crises presented in the media competing for audience attention (11), the remoteness or the apparent permanence of problems (12). She notes that the news media exacerbate compassion fatigue by assuming that audiences have short attention spans and thus targeting them with “staccato bursts of news, hyped and wired to feed … addiction” (10). 16 Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World, 29.

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17 The Constant Gardener, directed by Fernando Meirelles (2005; Los Angeles, CA: Universal Studios, 2006), DVD. 18 “Ethiopian Famine Worse Than 1984,” BBC World News, YouTube, broadcasted 22 October 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= ZLKOGR48pm8. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 I am referring to Hirst’s The Virgin Mother, a sculpture of ten meters in polished and painted bronze, located, at Hirst’s request, on the seawall in Fontveille Harbor, Monaco. The sculpture is visible from land, sea, and the adjacent Oceanographic Museum. For a lengthier discussion of the piece and its location, see http://www.presse.gouv.mc/304/wwwnew.nsf/1909$/5 EB03BA996CE6D91C12576F7004354CAGB?OpenDocument&1GB. I am also referring to Cindy Sherman’s Untitled # 216 and Untitled # 226. Untitled # 216 is part of MoMA’s permanent collection and has been publicly exhibited. BIBILOGRAPHY

Aidoo, Ama Ata. “African Woman Today.” In Sisterhood, Feminisms, and Power: From Africa to the Diaspora, edited by Obioma Nnaemeka, 39–50. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1998. Brauman, Rony. “When Suffering Makes a Good Story.” In Life, Death, and Aid: The Médicins Sans Frontières Report on World Crisis Intervention, edited by Francois Jean, 149–58. London: Routledge, 1995. Buerk, Michael, and Mohammed Amin. Footage of Ethiopian refugee camp in Korem. London: BBC. Broadcast 23 October 1984. YouTube. Posted 13 November 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYOj_6OYuJc. – Footage of Ethiopian refugee camp in Korem. In Live Aid 1985. 4 Disc Set. Directed by Vincent Scarza. Miami: Rhino Studios, 2004, DVD. The Constant Gardener. Directed by Fernando Meirelles. 2005. Los Angeles, CA: Universal Studios, 2006. DVD. “Ethiopian Famine Worse Than 1984.” 2009. BBC World News. YouTube. Posted 19 October 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= ZLKOGR48pm8. “Famine Hunger Stalks Ethiopia Once Again – And Aid Groups Fear The Worst.” Time Magazine, 21 December 1987, 34–42. Hirst, Damien. Virgin Mother. Bronze. Musée Océanographique, Monaco, 2004.

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Jannson, Kurt, Michael Harris, and Angela Penrose. The Ethiopian Famine. London: Zed Books, 1987. Korn, David A. Ethiopia: The Politics of Famine. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990. Lahusen, Christian. The Rhetoric of Moral Protest: Public Campaigns, Celebrity Endorsement and Political Mobilization. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co, 1996. Meiss, Millard. “The Madonna of Humility.” The Art Bulletin (1936): 435–65. Moeller, Susan D. Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death. London: Routledge, 1999. Oili, Chris. Holy Virgin Mary. Victoria Miro Gallery, London, 1996. Ruby, Jay. Picturing Culture: Explorations of Film and Anthropology. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000. Sherman. Cindy. Untitled # 216. MoMA, New York, 1988. – Untitled # 225. 1990. Colour coupler print mounted on foamcore. Private Collection. Accessed 15 August 2010. http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/ lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=4985523. Silverman, Kaja. The Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge, 1996.

13 THE REALITY OF TV LABOUR

Birth Stories1 Dominique Russell

I started watching Birth Stories in my irst weeks postpartum. A Canadian reality TV program that follows two or three couples through pregnancy, labour, and birth, it is a fascinating window onto current birthing ideologies and practices.2 For me it provided an opportunity to conirm the choice of a home birth with what I perceived to be “the institutional violence” of the hospital births represented.3 It also provided a cathartic focal point for tears that might have otherwise gone unanchored. The mothers I spoke to about the series had a similar engagement. Some sought out the program while pregnant to learn as much as they could; others found it “addictive” postpartum. Everyone cried at the irst shot of the newborn, even if they might rage at its treatment and that of its mother. We were all eager to swap stories as we discussed the show.4 My initial interest in researching the show was to explore the way the diverse cast of mothers were made uniform, with Birth Stories reinforcing the obstetric myths of the technocratic model of birth. As my research progressed, however, that premise became more nuanced. Birth Stories’ variations and at times chaotic narrative and stylistic formula make its ideology hard to discern and render it less than absolute. The master narrative that is created through voiceover, editing, and camera work shares much with the medical model of birth, but the diversity of participants and the willingness of the show’s producers to adapt to their wishes mean that alternative narratives are also present. Where its dominant paradigm represents birth as a dangerous undertaking that needs to be managed by medical experts, some participants talk back to that perspective, challenging the passivity of the mother within it.

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In the next few pages I navigate some of these tensions in the show, between its format as reality TV and its origins in oral stories, its intention to represent diversity and endorsement of the technocratic model of birth, the narrative structure of the show itself, and the stories the participants want to tell. That is, I explore how mothers make their own use of the show at the level of production and reception, creating issures in its unconscious ideology and reality TV formula. REALITY TV AND ORAL NARRATIVES

As reality TV, Birth Stories is part of a genre that emerged in full force after 2000, characterized by protagonists who are ordinary people and unscripted dramatic situations.5 Within this genre it can be classiied more narrowly as a “docu-soap”; presenting “visual evidence of real life,” it is a “combination of observational documentary and characterdriven drama.”6 Unlike most docu-soaps, however, Birth Stories emerges from and as part of a narrative form that has always existed. Robbie Davis-Floyd calls birth stories a “women’s speech genre” whose importance “cannot be overstated.”7 These stories are central to understanding and integrating a life-changing event; told in emphatic individual terms, they are part of a larger political discourse and of the culture of birth. Della Pollock asserts that birth stories “rehearse the body politics at the heart of debates over reproductive technologies, genetic engineering, abortion rights, welfare reform, and custom law, signifying a contest for control over the meaning and value of giving birth of which they are, in turn, a vital part.”8 Birth Stories thus its an existing niche, fulilling a need for information through storytelling and functioning as part of the initiation into a “secret sisterhood.”9 Unlike oral birth stories, however, these programs show, rather than tell the story. That is, they do not involve narrative as knowledge for the participant. Birth stories are told and retold by new mothers, often differently each time, as a way to incorporate and make sense of a transformative experience. Understanding is gained in and through the telling. In Birth Stories, while the mother can tell the story, she is only one of many narrative agents that include other participants and the “recipe” of the show.10 Nevertheless, for the audience, who later return the stories to the realm of oral, intimate sharing, the show promises a way of knowing, and a context for their own experience. The stories can become part of the “repertory of the group.”11

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These real TV births shape social ideas of “normal birth,” with perhaps greater force than ictional representations, where a conventionalized shorthand is used. As Anita Biressi and Heather Nunn put it, “television produces a ‘realistic,’ ‘common sense’ … view of the social world, and reality TV inevitably raises the ante.” They add, “these ‘non-ictional systems’ … are part of the mechanisms of power; they are ‘instrumental’ in the sense that … they [have] real effects in the world.”12 OBSTETRIC POWER

One such “real effect” is to “relect, reinforce and mediate existing power relations,” as Laura Stempel Mumford notes of television generally in relationship to gender.13 Birthing is a kind of ground zero of such relations; as Davis-Floyd notes, “the birth process … is and always has been a matrix of gender differentiation.”14 Its medicalization and subsequent isolation and ritualized uniformity serve to reinforce the subjugation of women’s power to that of the patriarchal institution, precisely when female power is at its height. To quote Davis-Floyd again, “society and its institutions cannot exist unless women give birth; yet the birthing woman in the hospital is shown not that she gives life, but rather that the institution does.”15 Davis-Floyd holds that the medical model positions women as passive and in need of “managing,” a premise that underlies my work here. This isn’t to equate the medical model with the masculine, however. As Pollock points out, the aspects of ideology that most affect birthing, namely the high value placed on technology and the separation of self from body, are shared by men and women. The model does, however, reinforce the subordinateness of the birthing mother, with power lying with the doctor (male or female) and the medical apparatus. The technocratic model of birth, despite sustained challenges from the holistic model (“natural childbirth”) since the 1970s, remains hegemonic, and part of its power is in the ritualistic repetition that makes its premises appear to be true. It has become the “common sense” view of birthing, as summarized by Sheila Kitzinger’s description of birth on television: “on TV, birth is presented as a medical event that is safe only in the hands of doctors, and if women obey the doctors, everything turns out all right. Those who ask questions or opt for home birth are setting themselves up for a medical emergency.”16 Birth Stories, drawing on a broad selection of participant experiences, necessarily represents this hegemonic birth story precisely because it is the most common.

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But it also reinforces the technocratic model of birth in other, subtler, and unconscious ways. Henci Goer, whose work challenges the premises of medicalized birth, talks about “re-writing the play” using a theatrical metaphor for birthing practices. Inluenced by Davis-Floyd’s work, she insists on the importance of examining “the inversions and perversions” of the language of obstetrics.17 Similarly, Emily Martin analyzes “the creation of new birth imagery” as part of the forms of resistance to the medical analogy of production.18 For the same reasons, it seems essential to consider the language of birth on television and the way the “common sense” social reality is produced, reproduced, and challenged in birth stories that are represented as lived, unmediated fact. Birth Stories’ narrative line is less driven by labour than by other ancillary types of transformation. Birth is at once the dramatic climax of this transformation and incidental as a lived experience. Labour itself, with its plot-points of the onset of contractions, dilation, transition, birth, and after birth, often claims the greater part of oral birth stories. How the labour felt, what was learned about the body and the self in extremis, whether the labour was empowering or humiliating, and the ethics of care are not only part of the story, but also precisely what Kitzinger, Pollock, and others claim is integrated as part of a new maternal identity. In Birth Stories, however, while labour is often shown in detail, it is mainly subservient to the ending of the healthy baby itself. Davis-Floyd argues that obstetrics is a collection of rituals designed to reinforce core cultural values. These values assert action and control as necessary and assert the separation of mind and body as fact. A series of myths – with their underlying metaphor of the body as machine and the female body in particular as an untrustworthy machine – structure and justify medical intervention and are naturalized in individual storytelling.19 As Martin notes, in our birth culture the woman is alternately seen as a labourer and machine engaged in the “production” of a baby, with the production overseen by the doctor (mechanic/manager). The myths that guard that power relationship, principal among them that obstetrics is a “science deriving from rational, objective assessment of the facts” rather than a belief system that attacks alternatives “as if they were religious heresies,”20 include the notion that epidurals pose no risk, that Caesareans are the safer option, and that home births are dangerous. These myths are present throughout Birth Stories in many of the women’s birth experiences and beliefs, as well as in subtler elements of the series itself.

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THE REAL

These series seem inevitable, given the need they fulill, and yet somehow strange in their splaying of bodily and emotional intimacy as “factual entertainment.”21 More than reality shows about work, dating, or even marriage (which are, in large part, a performance), birth is an encounter with the Real in the Lacanian sense: the point at which the symbolic derails. Its compelling urgency would seem to preclude self-conscious performance. Giving birth is to be on the threshold of life itself, and despite medical advances, close to death.22 “We are mortals, not natals,” writes Christina Mazzoni, and adds, quoting Carol Poston, “at the moment when potential motherhood becomes actual … we are surely seeing that in giving birth, one commits another human being, if not oneself, to death.”23 Death, however, is excluded from the world of reality TV. The docusoap, especially, keeps real risk at bay; stories have a “successful outcome” and audiences feel, as Annette Hill notes, “fearful and safe.”24 Audiences can be sure that in births shown on television, despite threatened dangers, everything will be okay. This is the message its audience wants to hear. Birth Stories is clearly directed at pregnant and postpartum women. Both its timing and most of its advertisements exclude a general audience, and it seems to provide an “educational” alternative to daytime soaps. Yet the series is tied to traditional daytime television that “arose out of a commercialized interest in domesticity … and addressed a female viewer about domestic duties and leisure interests,”25 and, indeed, can be seen as a kind of entry point or acculturation into domesticity. Hence, a lot of screen time is taken up with leaving the work world and “nesting,” preparing the baby’s room and buying baby gear. Norms of “good mothering” and to a smaller extent what might be termed “domestic fatherhood” are reinforced in the participants’ recounting of their expectations of parenthood, and in the idealized images of parent and child of the diaper and toy ads. In addition to these advertisements, Birth Stories positions its audience as consumers in a number of ways: as parental consumers, charged with the care and feeding of baby and “the economic apparatus,”26 as consumers of medical (and occasionally doula or midwifery) services, and of birth stories themselves. In a less direct way than when the presence of a belly invites oral birth stories, Birth Stories weaves its viewer into a web of women “contracted by maternity … to be subject of and subject to birth stories.”27 Whether pregnant or not, viewers are interpelated as part of a “speciic interpretive community.”28

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Following the conventions of documentary television, the style of Birth Stories is a non-style; its refusal of an aesthetic is part of its guarantee of the “real.”29 Despite this “explicit denial” of aesthetic effects, its “referentiality is performed though style,” and that style is revealing.30 Narration, camera work, editing, and sound subtly create uniformity in the birth stories and ilter the experience of birth. Unlike oral birth stories, that ilter is not chosen by the subject. As much as there is something of a shared control of the storytelling, as I will demonstrate, the style itself makes the decisive statement. The three narrative levels that I mentioned in the irst section – the participants, the formula of the show itself, and the audience – compete for control of the narrative, but it would be naive not to see the imbalance: the participants and the audience have little say in the “how” of representation. Nevertheless, unlike most reality shows (its successor Birth Days, for example), Birth Stories does not have a set look and pattern; rather it is varied both in visuals, sound, and narrative. Episodes trace several women’s (or couple’s) trajectory through pregnancy to postpartum, with usually one birth per show. Births cross the spectrum from holistic home births to scheduled Caesareans, and a broad range of experiences, including lesbian couples, single mothers, large families, and young mothers, are represented. Because of the time lapse and inter-cutting between stories, the narrative formula is less obvious than in more closed reality TV shows. The documenting of a family can begin and end at different points, with a combination of interviews, scenes, and voiceover. Most often, a postpartum interview closes each story. The voiceover is discreet, almost patrician (typically “lower in pitch and slower than … women’s voices are naturally”) and takes up each story as the participants seem to be telling it. Thus, for example, it will come in after a participant’s comment and afirm what we are being told or are seeing on-screen. The voiceover functions as a “narrative audienceorienting device” and is understated.31 That it refers to the dificulty of the pregnancies, conlict, and turmoil in its hushed “authoritive” tone is a subtle clue to the direction of the master narrative. STEPHANIE ’S STOR Y

Let me describe one woman’s birth story as it is presented on Birth Stories (episodes 50–51). Stephanie, who was both a respondent from an alternative mother’s group and participant on the show, describes her experience with the show in almost entirely positive terms. She felt

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respected and that she had control over the events. In fact, she became friends with one of the producers. She was shown, and approved, a copy of the inal cut without the voiceover. She felt, however, that the voiceover changed the episode and afirms the medical version of events that she herself denies. After labouring for several hours, the baby is found to be breech, and she is given an “emergency c-section.” As Goer has shown, and as Stephanie now asserts, the notion that a breech position necessitates a Caesarean is an obstetrical myth. While Stephanie’s family gives the doctor’s version of the emergency, it is the authority of the off-screen voice that “orients the viewers decisively in certain directions of interpretation.” The voice that Jérôme Bourdon claims “governs television” here closes off other interpretive possibilities.32 With the emergency thus established, Stephanie’s disappointment in her postpartum interview seems all the more displaced, and again the voiceover underlines this: “back home from the hospital, Stephanie is still hurting about the birth she and Roger didn’t have” (my emphasis).33 Acknowledging the medical narrative’s tight closure around the arrival of the “healthy baby” and the displacement of the mother as protagonist, Stephanie holds her disappointment at arm’s length: “I wanted a memory of it,” she says inally. But her emphasis has been on her husband: “I wanted him to have the whole experience, to go through the stages of labour and see his baby born.” Roger’s narrative mitigates her perspective, however: “I got to see Abby just as soon as I would have otherwise.” We’ve already seen this visually – a close-up of the newborn, a close-up of Roger as he asks about Stephanie, and then father and newborn turn down the hallway. “Stephanie is ine,” the midwife reassures him,34 but clearly she is not.35 The impression of her laying lat on the bed, eyes closed (the Caesarean was not ilmed, so there is only the before and after) is of a tree felled. A contrast to other Caesareans, when the mother is ilmed through the operation, or when the postpartum segment begins later after the birth, here the operation is shown not as painless and calm, but as devastating. Stephanie’s immediate contrast in the episodes is a Native woman, Crystal, who lies prone throughout. Crystal’s hesitation over the pronunciation of certain words in the postpartum interview, ilmed from a slightly downward angle, her quieter speech, and the instructions she receives during labour denote her lesser cultural capital. Stephanie’s is a far more commanding performance, and she exudes conidence, even in her certainty of not-knowing: “The one thing I know about childbirth is that you don’t know anything about childbirth. You never know what’s

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going to get thrown at you.”36 She takes the role of interviewer with Peter, a videographer who has worked on Birth Stories but is, at that moment, a participant on the show with his wife Jacquie as they expect their irst child. But what particularly sets Stephanie apart is that she is ilmed repeatedly in the “American shot,” from the knees up, from below.37 It is a shot that Birth Stories tends to reserve for the obstetrician or nurse attending the birth. The loss of Stephanie’s self-assurance and authority is all the more striking given the authority accorded through this shot. Stephanie, in fact, seems to capitulate to the show’s dominant narrative, one that dovetails with the obstetrical model. Her inal words are “in the end you have a baby, so there’s no real disappointment in that.”38 Yet, these words are said off-screen, over a shot of father, children, and newborn. Stephanie’s absence from the happy family scene and the slight catch in her voice – an extra breath left in as the title sequence begins – indicate that for her, there might be. BIRTH TIME / NARRATIVE TIME

Pregnancy is to be both endured and enjoyed, and there are many obstacles along the way, but labour is all about the happy ending. Birth Stories, even as it whispers almost lugubriously about danger and travails, moves relentlessly towards an uplifting inale. As in Stephanie’s story, it demands that the inal note be upbeat. The labouring mother’s pain is shown – and many yell for relief – long enough to realize how hard it is to watch someone else’s pain. Intensity is quickly relieved by cutting away, except in the arrival of the newborn, which is lingered over visually and reinforced musically as the stand-alone tear-jerker. Other emotions are acknowledged quickly. One episode, moving between a career woman’s sense of loss of identity and a young pregnant woman’s bone marrow disease and subsequent departure of her partner, breaks to the next story as soon as sorrow is expressed.39 It is given to the funereal extradiegetic music to underline moving moments the way a laugh track punctuates humour in comedies. But the  participants themselves, willingly exposing themselves in intimate moments, seem protective of the privacy of their pain and reject a narrative that would make them victims with a chirpy “what’s the point of focusing on the bad bits?” tone. Stephanie is putting on a brave face, and generally, the participants’ poise undermines the ly-on-the-wall pretenses of the show. Like other participants in reality TV shows, they have

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learned to “act,” to play themselves and in some sense gain control of their self-representation. They tell stories – not their birth stories, but their how-we-met romances, their family histories, and their projected stories of transformation. They show and pose for photographs, videos, and stare in the mirror. Almost as much time is given to these posed representations as to labour itself. The participants and the show’s image track point to the artiice of the program’s premise (and promise) of unmediated access to “real life.” Rather like a home movie, where the audience is known and acknowledged, the pitch is somewhere between the formality demanded by a great aunt and the informality of talking to a sister. There is more than voiceover and acting, obviously, to story construction. The docu-soap’s producers and crew are, of course, writing a drama, and in reality TV the drama is written through editing. This drama – of transformation, with men and women taking on a new role, and a baby entering the world – is astonishingly intense in “real life”; many women describe the experience as “being out of time” or “transcendent,” and, of course, the language of “miracle” hints at a what one nurse refers to as the “opportunities of the holy” that often take place in hospitals. Midwifery’s self-references are full of the language of diffuse spirituality. On television, however, time never stops and is continually measured in minutes, seconds, hours. This time pressure dovetails with the medical model of birth, where time is carefully measured out and assigned to each stage. Birth must be it into the television schedule just as it must it into the hospital’s. As I mentioned, it often seems oddly anticlimactic on Birth Stories. Nevertheless, it is the focal, tear-jerking moment and the guarantee, in a sense, of the “real.” I am aware that I am using language that comes very close to a description of the “money-shot” in pornography. Both the occasional blurring of the vagina40 and the credits with the words “birth stories” undulating over a naked woman’s body remind me of the coy “classy” and educational tone of CityTV’s SexTV , even as Birth Stories desexualizes its representation of birth. Various critics have used the term “money shot” in relationship to reality TV. Linda Grindstaff uses the analogy to describe “ordinary people’s willingness to sob, scream, bicker and ight on national television … Like pornography, daytime talk exposes people’s private parts in public. It demands external visible proof of a guest’s inner emotional state.”41 As I have noted, painful emotional states are not the focal point on Birth Stories; the show maintains a certain amount of discretion and the

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participants are self-protective. And although the term “money shot” might refer to shots of the vagina, it seems the “external visible proof” of the internal process is the “prize,” the close-up shot of the baby itself. The jouissance of the baby’s appearance is the ending that closes off all other narrative trajectories. AESTHETICS

One of my respondents wondered if perhaps television “doesn’t have the visual language for the spirituality of birth” and another commented that perhaps a technical issue of camera placement leads to a fragmented representation. As I compared it to a documentary entitled Birth: Eight Women’s Stories by Nancy Durrell McKenna, however, the desexualizing and the cleaning up of birth in Birth Stories became obvious. Narrative compression both abbreviates and de-intensiies the birthing process.42 McKenna’s documentary proves the choice of camera angle and distance not to be limited; deep focus, rather than classical editing, is used to convey holistically the personhood, bodily effort, and partnership of the process. Birth Stories uses the close-up almost obsessively, fragmenting face and vagina, baby and partner. Its style dovetails with the mise-en-scène of the Caesarean section in which a screen literally divides the head from the “nether regions.” But it also works with hospital birthing generally, as the “mother’s body is, in effect, reconstructed within the time-space zone of Cartesian rationality. Like the magician’s assistant, she is cut in two, her head, brain, mouth, and voice divided from the mechanical labor of her lower body.”43 The close-up is the most common shot on television, where as Pierre Sorlin notes, “most of the time we watch people talk.”44 Though birthing is deeply physical, the pattern holds; on Birth Stories we mostly watch people talk, to each other, to doctors and midwives, to the camera. Labour itself is dominated by talk – joking, coaching, and instructions. This is both because of the chatter around the event and because, as Bourdon points out, “television is always talking. That is a convention that might be stronger than the social and moral convention of what can be said: something has to be said.”45 Participants know this and come up with something whenever the camera points at them. The silence that often accompanies the work of creation, “the speaking silence of bodily crisis and pain” is rarely present, and when it is present in the participants, the show moves in with extradiegetic music.46 The rare second of silence is striking – a caesura of focus amidst the noise. During the actual

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birth sequences the conventional language of television both in sound and visuals, with its “proximity to the face and the emotions displayed there means that the close-up is both sensational and mundane.”47 An everyday miracle, birth in Birth Stories is ilmed in an ordinary way – “managed,” we might say, by the conventions of the small screen. Its shot/counter shot structure, moreover, often bypasses the mother. She looks, we see. The omission of the mother’s reaction shot is highly signiicant if we consider how often agency is constructed through the gaze on television. Without returning to the early seventies debates about the politics of form, I want to suggest that the show’s ideology – its taken-for-granted master narrative – can be read in part in the interstices of its style. Like the voiceover, it seems to hang back, while nevertheless constructing a highly conventional and normalizing discourse on birth. The technocratic model and the powerful conventions of television reinforce one another. This is not to say, though, that television lacks “the visual language for the spirituality of birth”; however powerful the conventions, these can be shifted, played with and against. In this regard it is striking how Birth Stories’ luidity resists the formulaic repetition of reality tv. Because it does share its narrative with its participants, they can break and bend its low within the set stylistic parameters. Stephanie, who acquiesces to the requirement of a happy ending (a healthy baby, full stop) nevertheless reveals the devastation of a C-section by insisting painful footage be left in. One birthing mother’s planned home birth, announced as risky because of the baby’s size, ends with the voiceover exclaiming, “an allnatural birth that hardly had mom breaking into a sweat!”48 Though the birth sequence follows the pattern of fragmentation and emphasis on the baby, the intensity of the mother’s silent concentration infuses those conventions with something akin to spirituality. CONCLUSION

Not even the conventional language of representation can blur the compelling moment of entry into the world. This is the “pure pleasure” of a show offering other, less innocuous pleasures, such as comparisons of lifestyle and parenting choices, life circumstances, houses, and spouses etc., that partly fuel the fascination with the reality TV genre. The newborn’s irst breaths are where my respondents reported tears, and perhaps in these audience tears we can ind something of the missing “holy moment” of the birthing process.

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Birth Stories, with its origins in a still current oral form, passes from television back to an oral form in the commentary of its audiences. Like the participants, they can challenge the master narrative, making their own use of these birth stories. I, for one, watched “against the grain,” and other women I spoke to reported an educational facet perhaps unintended by the producers, as they learned what they did not want, and then engaged in the perverse pleasure of watching what is abhorred. While it embraces the North American mainstream narrative of birth, Birth Stories also normalizes other family arrangements (lesbian, mixed race, single mothers, teenage mothers) that might be morally distasteful for some viewers. Heteronormative rules are broken and the unusual is not held up to ridicule, as in other reality shows. Instead, the “home movie” interpellation means viewers can ind themselves cooing over a baby in company they might otherwise avoid. Viewers who embrace the holistic model of birth may ind themselves rejecting the premises of the medicalized births on offer but also beginning to understand why so many women want to give birth in hospital. Seeing women I liked and respected choosing this path made me temper my views. Birth Stories attempted to capture birth with openness and to allow its participants to shape their stories. The luidity of its formula and the competing narratives within it gave the participating mothers-to-be some opportunity to provoke and challenge the codes that mediate their representation. Participants, producers, and viewers engage the master (technocratic) narrative of birth in different and at times contradictory ways. Nevertheless, one cannot lose sight of the fact that the dominance of that narrative, in which birth is in the hands of professionals, gains the force of “common sense” through repetition. The powerful emotional impact of the “money shot” – that beautiful, miraculous newborn that appears despite the dangers the voiceover has stressed throughout – seems to reinforce the power of the obstetric rituals that predominate. Thus I’m mindful of Goer’s caution: “Every live baby and mother (and it is amazing how tough women are) provides reinforcement that the system works to those imbued with its beliefs.”49 And, I would add, to those who hesitate on its borders.

NOTES

1 An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the Association for Research on Mothering “The Motherlode Conference” in Toronto,

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5 6 7 8 9 10

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28 October 2006. Thanks to Allegra Hill and Aislinn Mosher of Cinelix as well to the Koalamamas and others who discussed the show, especially Stephanie, Tamara, and Fortunato, who read and commented on drafts of this chapter. Cinelix produced 101 episodes of Birth Stories from 2000 to 2004 in association with Slice (formerly Life) and Living (UK). Kitzinger, Birth Crisis, 4. My sample was small and in no way representative of a general audience. Six women from an alternative Toronto mother’s group agreed to participate in an informal study in which we watched a few episodes while I recorded the free-lowing comments during and after. It was not my intention to get a broad-spectrum reaction, but rather to see what pleasures the show held for those resistant to the technocratic model of birth. I also spoke to other viewers in unplanned conversations. Stephanie was interviewed three times, twice by phone and once in person in October–November 2006. For a fuller discussion of reality TV see Fiona Green in this volume. Hill, Reality TV , 59, 27. Davis-Floyd, Birth as an American Rite, 37. Pollock, Telling Bodies, 1. Davis-Floyd, Birth as an American Rite, 35. John Corner describes the docu-soap “recipe” as “observation of routine, institutional action overlaid by commentary and interspersed with interview sequences” (95). Davis-Floyd, Birth as an American Rite, 36. Biressi and Nunn, Reality TV, 3, 24. Stempel Mumford, “Feminist Theory,” 117. Davis-Floyd, Birth as an American Rite, 70. Ibid., 95. Kitzinger, Birth Crisis, 2. Goer, Obstetric Myths, 2. Martin, Woman in the Body, 5. Goer, Obstetric Myths, 351, Martin, Woman in the Body, 54–67. Goer, Obstetric Myths, 349, 354. Kilborn, “Docu-Soap,” 112. Rich, Of Woman, 166. Mazzoni, Maternal, 179. Hill, Reality TV, 138. Ibid., 22. I am playing on Frederic Jameson’s turn of phrase. Pollock, Telling Bodies, 2.

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28 Bourdon, “Live Television,” 192. 29 Corner observes that “an apparent absence of style (a kind of ‘degree zero’ television) constitutes at least part of the conventional grounds of trust and credibility” (96). 30 Ibid., 93, 96. 31 Lury, Interpreting Television, 62. 32 Bourdon, “Live Television,” 186. 33 Episode 51, Birth Stories, Cinelix/Slice (Canada); Life (UK). 34 The midwife is not identiied as such. 35 Episode 51, Birth Stories, Cinelix/Slice (Canada); Life (UK). 36 Episode 50, Birth Stories, Cinelix/Slice (Canada); Life (UK). 37 For an example and discussion of the American shot, see “The American Shot,” http://prog.trincoll.edu/langmedia/readailm/project_iles/us_shot/ planswithframes.html. 38 Episode 51, Birth Stories, Cinelix/Slice (Canada); Life (UK). 39 Episode 37, Birth Stories, Cinelix/Slice (Canada); Life (UK). 40 It is blurred, or not, according to the wishes of the participants. Blurring, ironically, underlines the sexuality being erased. 41 Quoted in Biressi, Reality TV, 30. 42 Stan Brakhage’s Window, Water, Moving Baby (US, 1959) uses the fragment metonymically to convey the sexuality of birthing. Similarly Elena Tonetti-Vladimirova’s documentary on “conscious birth,” Birth as We Know It (US, 2006) also emphasizes sexuality, provides equal time to facial and vaginal close-ups, intercutting luidly between them. I’ve chosen McKenna’s documentary for comparison instead of other possibilities because its format and perspective is closest to Birth Stories. It is clear, however, that genre and intentionality affect stylistic choices. I’m not trying to suggest the superiority of one mode over another, but rather to show the range of stylistic possibilities that are available. 43 Pollock, Telling Bodies, 55. 44 Sorlin, “Television and Close-up,” 121. 45 Bourdon, “Live Television,” 191. 46 Mazzoni, Maternal Impressions, 180. 47 Lury, “Closeup,” 102. 48 Episode 88, Birth Stories, Cinelix/Slice (Canada); Life (UK). 49 Goer, Obstetric Myths, 358. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Biressi, Anita, and Heather Nunn. Reality TV: Realism and Revelation. New York: Walllower, 2005.

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Bourdon, Jérôme. “Live Television is Still Alive.” In The Television Studies Reader, edited by Robert Allen and Annette Hill, 182–95. New York: Routledge, 2004. Brakhage, Stan. Window, Water, Moving Baby. USA. 16mm ilm, 1959. Corner, John. “Television, Documentary and the Category of the Aesthetic.” Screen 44, no.1 (2003): 92–100. Davis-Floyd, Robbie. Birth as An American Rite of Passage. 1992. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Goer, Henci. Obstetric Myths Versus Research Realities: A Guide to Medical Literature. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1995. Hill, Annette. Reality TV : Audiences and Popular Factual Television. New York: Routledge, 2005. – “Fearful and Safe: Audience Response to British Reality Programming.” In From Grierson to the Docu-Soap: Breaking the Boundaries, edited by John Izod and Richard Kilborn,131–44. Luton: University of Luton Press, 2000. Kilbourn, Richard. “The Docu-Soap: A Critical Assessment.” In From Grierson to the Docu-Soap: Breaking the Boundaries. 111–19, 2000. Kitzinger, Sheila. Birth Crisis. London; New York: Routledge, 2006. Lury, Karen. Interpreting Television. London: Hodder Arnold, 2005. – “Closeup: Documentary Aesthetics.” Screen 44, no. 1 (2003): 101–5. Martin, Emily. The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. 1987. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. Mazzoni, Christina. Maternal Impressions. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. McKenna, Nancy Durrell. Birth: Eight Women’s Stories. UK. Video, 2001. Pollock, Della. Telling Bodies, Performing Birth: Everyday Narratives of Childbirth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. 1986. New York:W.W. Norton, 1995. Sorlin, Pierre. “Television and Close-Up: Interference or Correspondence?” In Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable?, edited by Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffman, 119–26. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998. Stempel Mumford, Laura. “Feminist Theory and Television Studies.” In The Television Studies Book, edited by Christine Geraghty and David Lusted, 114–30. London: St Martin’s Press, 1998. Tonetti-Vladimirova, Elena. Birth as We Know It. USA. Video, 2006.

14 MOTHERING IN THE MIDDLE AND SELF - CARE

Just One More Thing to Do Debra Langan 10 Ways to Bring Sexy Back Do you feel as if you’ve traded in your smokin’ stylish self for a sweatpantswearing schlump? Here’s a New Year’s resolution: Put yourself at the top of your to-do list. 1. Get Pretty. 2. Get a Babysitter. 3. Get a Haircut. 4. Get Naughty. 5. Get Pampered. 6. Get Silly. 7. Get Sudsy. 8. Get Frisky. 9. Get Shopping. 10. Get Moving. Rachel Morris, Parents, January 2008

Dominant discourses on self-care aimed at mothers and women more generally are evident in a variety of texts that we encounter in everyday life. They are embedded in popular magazines, like the above excerpt from Parents magazine, in what people say when they encourage mothers to “take care of themselves,” and in the scholarly literature. In this chapter, I explore popular parenting magazines to deconstruct discourses that relate to mothers taking care of themselves. My position is that mothers’ self-care is not the sole responsibility of mothers, but that it is also the responsibility of social institutions. An examination of some of the social contexts in which women mother today furthers my argument that dominant discourses of self-care must be contested; self-care must not be downloaded onto the backs of women who are mothers. They are already carrying enough of the care burden. My own experience as a mother has informed my analysis of discourses of self-care. How many times have people, with very good intentions, encouraged me to “take better care” of myself, with suggestions to get more sleep, exercise more, take a vacation from work and family, and make more “me” time – a “put-your-feet-up” kind of advice? When friends,

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colleagues, and family say this to me, it always irritates me because I feel as if I have just been given one more thing to do. I am repeatedly left wondering why they do not understand what I am going through, why they do not appreciate why I ind it so dificult to take better care of myself. Over time, I have become invested in analyses of self-care advice that have relieved the guilt I felt for not taking better care of myself. Feminist poststructural theories address the connections between cultural narratives, social inequalities, and women’s lived experiences. Sandra Bartky argues that the “imposition of normative femininity upon the female body requires training” and that “the modes of training are cultural phenomena properly described as ‘disciplinary practices.’” “Disciplines of the body in general fragment and partition the body’s time, its space, and its movements.”1 As I argue in this chapter, the self-care discourses in the magazines include, and extend beyond, women’s disciplinary practices on their bodies to encompass regimens that fall within the realms of household labour and intimate partner relationships. These discourses are framed as self-determining and have social appeal because they are in keeping with widely-shared, taken for granted ideas about the importance of individuality and choice.2 As Nicola Gavey argues, “Discourses, which support and perpetuate existing power relations, tend to constitute the subjectivity of most of the people most of the time.”3 Thus, the persuasive and pervasive inluence of self-care discourses renders the disciplinary practices that follow from them particularly disempowering. Mothers are in the middle of competing roles. They may be caring for children, caring for older adults, shouldering the majority of domestic labour, and working outside the home. Attempting to manage numerous roles simultaneously leads to complicated subjectivities for mothers; they experience competing values around caregiving, unpaid domestic work, paid work, and the attainment of particular lifestyles. The tensions among these roles have emotional consequences; mothers often experience persistent guilt, never feeling that they’ve attended suficiently to the care of all these others or themselves. Mothers’ strains are often viewed as personal or intrapsychic, not socially caused, which creates the impression that it is their fault that they are stressed and inding it dificult to cope. Inadequate government support means more pressure is put on mothers. Lower than expected pension and security income, loss of subsidies for health care, and too few daycare options are three examples of government cutbacks.4 Megan Boler’s deconstruction of discourses of care has pertinence for my analysis. As Boler suggests, the representation of “self-care” for

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women “individualize[s] social problems and neglect[s] to analyze how the economy of [self-care] in fact serves capitalist interests.”5 I would argue that “caring for ourselves” discourses are embedded in rhetoric espoused by many social institutions in contemporary culture, including medicine, education, law, the media, and the corporate world. While undoubtedly mothers do have some responsibility for their own care, the discourse of self-care detracts our attention away from the responsibilities that social institutions should uphold for our care. Boler notes, “It is cost effective to teach women to internalize appropriate control of their emotions by teaching them to take ‘responsibility’ and learn ‘selfcontrol.’ Thus the social, economic and political forces that underlie mothers’ issues are masked, and the individuals are blamed for lack of self-control.” To teach women to be self-disciplined, self-motivated, and to get along, beneits the workplace. Capitalism has an intrinsic interest in social eficiency. We are sold, in “common sense terms,” ways to take care of ourselves.6 This point becomes readily apparent when we look at the discourses in parenting magazines. Tremendous social change over the past few decades has resulted in additional roles and responsibilities for women within many families. In Women in the Middle: Their Parent Care Years (2004), Elaine M. Brody discusses the realities of mothering today for many women. She uses the phrase “women in the middle” (the inspiration for my use of the phrase “mothering in the middle”) to describe the complex social contexts in which many women nowadays operate as mothers. Data from the 2006 Statistics Canada census reveals that since 1981, the numbers of seniors in Canada has almost doubled, having increased from 2.4 to 4.2 million, so that they now represent 13.1 per cent of the Canadian population (in 1981, they represented 9.6 per cent of the population). It is predicted that the numbers of seniors in Canada will increase from 4.2 million to 9.8 million between 2005 and 2036 as the baby boomers born between 1946 and 1965 begin turning sixty-ive. Seniors will represent 24.5 per cent of the population by 2036.7 Other demographic changes have occurred in concert with the growing population of seniors or older adults.8 Birth rates are lower and people are having babies later.9 The result of these combined demographic changes is that there are fewer adult children to take care of the growing older adult population. As the number of older adults has grown, and the government and community have been slow to respond, “the family” has stepped in and responded. More speciically, it is the women in families who are “the primary care providers to children, seniors, differently abled, and sick and housebound adult relatives.”10

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Baby boomers currently make up a large segment of the group who are “mothering in the middle.” Very old people are likely to have adult children who might also be described as “old.” Consequently, there is a growing, very old, population being cared for by their old children. These old children are “mothers in the middle,” also referred to as “the sandwich generation,” because they have had their own children at an older age. Sometimes there is more than one layer to the sandwich. Because of longer life spans, now in some families, three or four generations are alive at the same time. These social contexts have characterized my own lived experience. My mother and father had me in their mid-forties. I had my son and daughter at age thirty-nine and forty-one respectively. I am one of the sandwich generation. While caring for my children, the household duties, my work as a professor, and to a lesser extent, my husband, my aging parents also required care, and I have found it dificult to take care of myself even though I am extremely privileged. I am white, able-bodied, ableminded, heterosexual, and I have a good education, a good job, a considerate husband, and healthy children. The experience of demeaned, unsupported caregiving labour becomes more intensiied when mothers, who are less privileged than I, face particular situations because of features of identity that are less valued in the society, such as being poor, having children with disabilities, being a visible racial minority, being a single mom, being lesbian. The important point is that for those who are “mothering in the middle,” and for those who are not, there are social contexts that burden and complicate the lives of mothers, which render “taking care of oneself” a chore, if not an unattainable notion. The qualitative discourse analysis that follows is grounded in an availability sample of twenty issues of two parenting magazines, published in either 2005 or 2006: Parents, “America’s #1 family magazine since 1926,” and Today’s Parent, “Canada’s #1 Parenting Magazine.”11 My analysis focuses on the advertisements, articles, and copy that address mothers’ self-care, and is framed by the following four general observations. First, although they use the word “parent” in their titles, the magazines are clearly aimed at mothers, not fathers. Second, most of the time, mothers are represented as young, white, middle class, able-minded, able-bodied, and heterosexual.12 Representations of the social contexts experienced by those who are “mothering in the middle” are missing from parenting magazines. Tension between paid work and domestic labour is acknowledged, but issues surrounding the speciic situations of mothers who are also in the middle in terms of years, generations,

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values, responsibilities, are missing. Third, mothers are told how they, through their own individual care work, should attend to their needs. The emphasis is on buying products and concepts of what constitutes normalcy. While it is important to recognize the way in which mothers can be empowered by caring for themselves, what is missing are more macro-level analyses that would shed light on issues that work against the best interests of mothers and, as a result, work against mothers’ attempts to take care of themselves. Fourth, self-care takes several forms, particularly in Parents magazine. Today’s Parent had comparatively little on taking care of oneself as a mother, and it was much more focused on taking care of children. Parents magazine addressed self-care consistently by offering advice on how a mother could take care of herself by herself. Even in sections devoted to “Time for You,” while always on how the mother could perform the care, sometimes the focus strayed from how she could take care of herself to how she could take care of her husband.

“ TAKE

CARE OF YOURSELF ”

= “ TAKE

CARE OF YOUR LOOKS ”

Andrew Sparkes helps us understand our feelings about the body by exploring the relationship between the body, self, and identity. He draws on the work of Featherstone (1991), who argues that dominant discourses found in popular media continually send out messages about the ideal “look” and represent an important point of comparison that affects both how we see ourselves, and how others see us.13 Clearly, the makers of Pantene have read Sparkes’s work, for they explicitly label “the look” in the Pantene advertisement.14 Because most bodies do not look like this mainstream image of beauty, mothers, and many other women for that matter, are left feeling inadequate about their bodies. This assessment has important implications for how they feel about other aspects of self. Sparkes explains that if someone is not able to attain a “body beautiful,” that person is seen as individually to blame because she or he has not tried hard enough or is lazy.15 Women in particular are expected to attain certain standards of beauty, even when they challenge the dominant ideas around the body beautiful, as they do, for example, in female bodybuilding. In a sense, you are damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. A two-page spread in the May 2006 issue of Today’s Parent, entitled “This is Your Body on Motherhood,” emphasizes the importance placed on achieving the body beautiful. The copy reads (and this is but a brief excerpt), “After having a baby your body will never be the same. Truer

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more dismal words have never been written. But what if you could ix your mommy body? … Throw out your morals, your sanctimonious ‘my stretch marks are badges of honour’ … All together now: ‘We loved nursing our babies … but we mourn the loss of our once perky nipples.’ A mastoplexy (or boob hoist) will run you $4,000 to $6,000.”16 Similarly, in the May 2006 issue of Parents, plastic surgery is promoted as a means to get your body back to that pre-motherhood look. “I had a Tummy Tuck,” the copy reads, and “it would take more than diet and exercise to get her [Stacey’s] body back.”17 This statement of Stacey’s “problem” is very interesting. “Getting one’s body back” suggests that it has somehow been lost or taken away. The celebration of what her body has done (i.e., given birth to twins) is buried in this characterization of Stacey’s situation. This article goes on to highlight other “Nip/Tuck Mommies” and their reasons for plastic surgery: “I hated my big boobs”; “My varicose veins were killing me”; “I was too young to look so saggy.”18 The last quote suggests that saggy is okay at an older age, but we never get to see any images that celebrate this type of mommy. Articles that discussed plastic surgery appeared in the May 2006 issues of both Parents and Today’s Parent magazines, which suggests that surgical transformations of the body are becoming more popular in mainstream culture. If a mother doesn’t want to go that far, however, there are other ways to work toward “the look.” L’Oreal, for example, has a wrinkle “decrease”19 that can eliminate those distasteful lines for mothers, wiping away all the signs of aging that can attest to the maturity and wisdom that you have gained through your experience as a mother.20 The copy for this product reads, “You laugh, you frown, your skin contracts and wrinkles deepen,” and then goes on to present “proven results on expression lines and wrinkles.” The message is that less expression would lead to fewer of these types of problems for mothers. In other words, mothers should keep their emotions in check, hiding the fact that they have them. Other forms of self-regulation are seen in articles that encourage weight control through diet and exercise.21 Such practices are good not only for achieving “the look,” but for maintaining good health. A wellbalanced diet and opportunities for exercise are linked to social class status, and other intersecting features of identity, as I discuss below. Women generally continue to be disadvantaged in terms of income, when compared to men, and this has implications for their health. “The look” is the reason behind articles (and there are many of them) that detail various colours and applications of make-up.22 An ad for McDonald’s is particularly noteworthy as it exempliies how the popular

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appeal of “self-care” infuses corporate advertising. The copy reads, “I have soft radiant lipcolor that lasts thanks to McGriddles. Between picking up toys and setting up play dates, I usually can’t ind my lipstick, much less the time to put it on. But now I can, thanks to McGriddles.”23 While I can understand how saving time by eating fast food would leave more time for make-up application, it is unclear how McGriddles would make the lipstick last for a longer period of time. Typically, food consumption rubs off lipstick, thus requiring re-application, regardless of the type of food being consumed. There are lotions and potions of all varieties to aid in achieving the look and the beauty that results. As one ad for hair care product Inner Science points out, “Beauty is more than ‘skin deep.’ We all know that beauty starts on the inside. But part of feeling conident and comfortable with yourself is knowing that you look your best.”24 “Inner science” can make that outer you coincide with that inner you. Another technique that can help in this regard is to give yourself a “mask makeover,” that will “treat yourself to a ‘me’ moment” and give “your face and hair a healthy dose of nutritious TLC.”25

“ TAKE

CARE OF YOURSELF ”

= “ TAKE

CARE OF YOUR HEALTH ”

Discourses of self-care that perpetuate ideologies of individualism with respect to maintaining good health are dominant in our society, and our investment in these discourses is often dificult to move beyond. Dennis Raphael argues that physical health, or illness, is directly related to social determinants of health.26 What this means is that no matter how much you try to take care of your own health, if you are a woman who is poor, and/or a racial minority, and/or disabled, and/or older, you are more likely to be subject to ill health. Of course, it is important to try to take care of one’s health in the ways advocated in the magazines. That is, maintaining healthy eating, exercise, and relaxation routines will not hinder, but hopefully help, the quality and quantity of life. Still, the inclusion of a more macro-level analysis of the social causes of illness is missing, and the impression is that it is up to mothers, as individuals, to control their health. One article that advocates “5 Health Tests You Should Never Skip” is a good example of how the responsibility for health is placed on the backs of individual women.27 In a similar article entitled “7 Best Ways to Prevent Breast Cancer,” breast cancer is characterized as an illness that is preventable through individual selfmanagement practices like “get to know your breasts.” This kind of

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dominant discourse, I would argue, causes mothers to feel guilty when they develop breast cancer, for they see the cancer as their fault.28 Wendy Mesley’s documentary, “Chasing the Cancer Answer,” which aired on CBC’s Marketplace in March 2006, challenges individualistic explanations of breast cancer and argues that individuals are, for the most part, unable to control the onset and development of cancer in the ways that media, medical institutions, pharmaceutical companies, and the Canadian Red Cross suggest. Cancer rates have skyrocketed, and the focus is on treatment rather than prevention because cancer treatments have come to serve the interests of capitalism. In acknowledging how the social determinants of health impact parents and their families, we look to an improved quality of life for women through things like more secure employment, more government funding for and equal access to health care, better social services, better day care for children, and more research on cancer prevention.

“ TAKE

CARE OF YOURSELF ”

= “ TAKE

CARE OF YOUR STRESS ”

Although the kids, the husbands, the paid work, are stressful, as mentioned earlier, these stresses relect only some of the lived realities of mothering. Those stresses that I argued characterize “mothering in the middle” are omitted in the analyses of what causes stress. This leads to “Desperate Housewives” whose creative solutions include, “I tell my husband to keep an eye on our two-year-old son … while I ‘go to the bathroom.’ Then I sit on the toilet lid and read.”29 In a similar testimony, a mother talks about how, when she has sought refuge in the bathroom, the thing that makes her happiest is hearing her husband sing to her child. What is wrong with this picture is not how the women attempt to ind time to care for themselves, but a culture that supports the idea that fathers do not have to do more than babysit for a brief period while the mother remains within earshot. Much of the advice on taking care of oneself is, arguably, patronizing, while at the same time appealing to us. One solution to stress involves “laughing,” which, while it may be good for stress relief, we have already seen contributes to the need for wrinkle removal.30 It seems that moms just can’t win. Other solutions include bubble bath; an Olay product, which “works all day so you don’t have to”; and Aveeno body wash, which “help[s] to relieve stress while you shower. Now that’s multi-tasking.”31 And inally to enhance calm, meditate during your commute to work, but as the copy reads, only “if you’re not driving.”32

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Often the purpose of taking care of oneself relates to others’ desires to see you in good shape so that you can take care of other people. So, taking care of yourself also translates into you taking care of you and your husband’s sexual relationship. There are articles on how to give him a better massage (the copy promises that “if you give, you shall receive!”),33 remedies you can use for “Great Sex,” and in case you need a frame of reference, there’s an article that allows you to compare you and your husband with other parent couples.34 (Those who have a high frequency of sex must have mothers who really care.) Missing in these analyses is a consideration of how a myriad of stress-related factors can affect a mother’s ability to take care of her sexual relationship. Certainly one of the factors that contributes to stress for mothers is lack of familial or governmental support for things like housework and child care. In Canada, married women (ages twenty-ive to ifty-four) spend, on average, twice as many hours on primary child care when compared to their husbands.35 Furthermore, women (ages twenty-ive to ifty-four) spend, on average, 2.4 hours per day on housework, compared to 1.4 hours for men.36 “Women generally feel more time stressed than men, regardless of length of workday or presence of children.”37 Another factor that exacerbates stress is inancial problems. “Taking care of yourself” for mothers also means that mothers should take care of money problems. Routinely, mothers lack power in families either because they work exclusively in the home for no pay, or they work outside the home for less pay than men. These two issues do not get taken up in the magazines. Rather, mothers are instructed on “smart moves” or strategies to get their husbands to stop withholding money from them, and/or to stop making them feel guilty about spending money on either family or personal items.38 These articles resonate with ideologies of equality, the idea that “just because he makes more than you doesn’t mean that you’re not equal.” But the issue of mothers’ lack of earning power (and that of women more generally) is nowhere to be found. Data from the 2006 Statistics Canada census shows that men and women continue to experience pay differences overall, regardless of their age. As they grow older, the disparity in men’s and women’s earnings increases. Data from the 2006 Statistics Canada census reveals that in 2005, women aged twentyive to twenty-nine who were working full-time earned eighty-ive cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts. Women aged thirty to thirty-four who were working full-time earned seventy-nine cents for each dollar received by their male counterparts. Women aged ifty to iftyfour who were working full-time earned seventy-two cents for every

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dollar earned by their male counterpart.39 In this same report, Statistics Canada offers additional statistics that point to the differences in women’s and men’s earnings when compared within comparable categories like immigrant status and educational background. Regardless of the variations in the statistics, women always earned less than men when factors other than gender were held constant. Anne Marie Ambert and Catherine Krull describe “pay inequity by gender and overall inequality” as a structural source of poverty for women.40 For divorced women and their children, the situation is particularly problematic. A single mother is far more likely than a male worker to earn a low salary and have trouble meeting inancial obligations as a result. The vast majority of lone parents are mothers (about 90 per cent), and their earning instability is especially high.41 More than half of lowpaid women live in low-income families.42 When family earnings are compared according to race alone, we see signiicant differences, and those who do not have English as a irst language have lower earnings, overall, than those whose irst language is English. For immigrants, labour market outcomes are better for men than their female counterparts.43 In sum, the extent to which mothers are able to take care of themselves is linked, in large part, to earning power, and compared to men, women are systematically disadvantaged in this regard. As is evident from the previous discussion, money is required to achieve most of the self-care solutions that are promoted to deal with a woman’s appearance, health, and stress. CONCLUSION

The discourses and ideologies in the parenting magazines relect the broader, neoliberal, ideology characteristic of the themes of individuality and expansion of personal freedom that are emphasized in contemporary capitalist societies.44 The ideology of neoliberalism casts individuals “as rational, entrepreneurial actors whose moral authority is determined by their capacity for autonomy and self-care,” “work[ing] to convince us that we can shape the conditions of our lives.”45 The end result is that the recognition of structural constraint and social hierarchy is diminished, overshadowed by “the neoliberal injunction that we can be and do anything.”46 Thus, when the ideals espoused in the magazine around self-care are not achieved by women, women see this “failure” as their own fault. Self-care becomes just one more thing that should, but does not, get done, which adds to an internalized list of inadequacies.

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By recognizing the social contexts in which mothers operate, we problematize taken-for-granted notions of self-care and shift the focus from individualized, privatized solutions that place the responsibility on the backs of mothers to social structural impediments to, and solutions for, mothers’ self-care. I am not suggesting that we disempower women with respect to self-care, but I am arguing that the responsibility for mothers’ self-care must also come from changes in the ways in which our social institutions, including family, government, the economy, media, medicine, and education, address and are held accountable for this issue. This kind of critical analysis is missing in parenting magazines. Corporate media compete for advertising dollars and make parenting magazines available to a mass media audience.47 New media like the Internet “operates on completely different principles which allow the consumers of information to have a different relation to the producers – in fact, it radically diminishes the barriers between them and creates possibilities for important new forms of audience activity.”48 Moms deliberate parenting issues on many Internet sites (e.g., moms.com) and there is a high level of anxiety about motherhood relected in their exchanges.49 These Internet sites, like the magazines, are infused with corporate advertising, and mothering becomes linked to consumer culture and the perception that buying things will enhance one’s ability to be a good mother. While an in-depth analysis of resistance to the magazine messages is not possible in this chapter, audiences of parenting magazines are undoubtedly more than just victims of the media conglomerate.50 There are a large number of books, television programs, organizations, websites, ilms, and other people criticizing the corporate control of the media and working on these issues more generally.51 Critiques of media are arguably more common inside the academic world than they are to a wider readership,52 and library access to many books and peer-reviewed articles is restricted to those who are university-afiliated.53 While many sources share the critical orientation of this chapter, what is often missing is a speciic focus on how patriarchal, consumerist culture constructs and promotes the importance of individually-initiated self-care for mothers. Certainly one of the most preeminent sites of information, research, and advocacy on mothering for academics and non-academics alike has been the Association for Research on Mothering (ARM) (http://www.yorku.ca/arm/), an activist, feminist organization founded in 1998.54 Through ARM, women have engaged internationally, confronting, analyzing, and working to change issues that affect mothers, including depictions of motherhood in popular

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culture. In May 2010, ARM was forced to close its operation due to a lack of inancial support from its home institution, York University, Toronto, Canada. This development relects the corporatization of the university and the values and practices that follow.55 ARM has established a new identity as the Motherhood Institute for Research and Community Involvement (http://www.motherhoodinitiative.org/) and continues its original mission. In sum, there is ample evidence that social movements involving mothers from varying social locations are underway to displace dominant discourses and practices related to mothering and self-care. While this task is not easy, progress can be made through ierce advocacy, collective endeavours in which we must all be engaged.

NOTES

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Bartky, “Suffering to be Beautiful,” 17. Ibid., 25. Gavey, “Feminist Poststructuralism,” 464. CBC News, “Canada Creating Fewer New Daycare Spaces: Study,” 10 April 2008, http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2008/04/10/childcare-study.html. Boler, Feeling Power, 88. Ibid., 86–7. Statistics Canada, “Demographic Trends and the Geography of Aging,” in A Portrait of Aging in Canada, last modiied 27 February 2007, http:// www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/89-519-XIE/2006001/demographic.htm. While Statistics Canada uses the term “seniors” to describe those who are sixty-ive years of age and older, I use the term “older adults” to avoid the negative stereotypes that accompany terms like “seniors” and “the elderly.” Brody, Women in the Middle, xvi. Gustafson, “Understanding Women and Health,” 285. These are the taglines on the magazines’ covers. See Parents July 2005, 109; Parents July 2005, 91; Parents May 2005, 99; Parents March 2005, 103. Sparkes, “Relections on the Socially Constructed Physical Self,” 89; Featherstone, “The Body in Consumer Culture.” Parents, April 2005, 96. Sparkes, “Relections on the Socially Constructed Physical Self,” 91. T.K. Demmings, “This is Your Body on Motherhood,” Today’s Parent, May 2006, 70, 71. Megan Mattes, “I Had a Tummy Tuck,” Parents, May 2006, 94.

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18 Ibid. 19 The term “de-crease” is the language used by L’Oreal to convey the message that the cream will remove creases, or wrinkles, in the face. 20 Today’s Parent, April 2005, 14–15. 21 See Parents, June 2005, 115 and May 2005, 113 for relevant images. 22 See Parents, March 2005, 19 for relevant images. 23 McDonald’s advertisement, Parents, May 2005, 98. 24 Inner Science hair product ad, Today’s Parent, April 2005, 76. 25 Barrie Gillies and Megan Mattes, “Your Ten-Minute Mask Makeover,” Parents, March 2005, 107. 26 Raphael, The Social Determinants of Health. 27 “5 Health Tests You Should Never Skip,” Parents, June 2005, 104. J. Edward Hill, MD, “a family physician and the president-elect of the American Medical Association,” is cited as the source of information in this article. 28 Aimee Herring, “7 Best Ways to Prevent Breast Cancer,” Parents, June 2005, 108. 29 “Desperate Housewives, Our readers come clean about some of the creative ways they let go of their stress,” Parents, January 2006, 80. This quotation is attributed to reader Stacey Conway of Jim Thorpe, PA in the magazine. 30 Susan Smith Jones, “7 Steps to Stress Relief,” Parents, June 2005, 115. 31 Olay ad, Parents, May 2006, 24; Aveeno ad, Parents, May 2005, 17. 32 Kathleen Hall, “Have a Calm Commute,” Parents, July 2005, 132. 33 “6 Moves for a Better Massage,” Parents, May 2005, 116. 34 Reshma Memon Yaqub, “Good Marriage, Bad Sex,” Parents, May 2005, 119; Brent W. Bost, “Home Remedies for Great Sex,” Parents, June 2005, 122. 35 Marshall, “Converging Gender Roles,” 11. 36 Ibid., 8. 37 Ibid., 15. 38 Deborah Pike Olsen, “Smart Money Moves for At-Home Moms,” Parents, May 2005, 33. 39 Statistics Canada, Earnings and Incomes of Canadians Over the Past Quarter Century, 2006 Census, May 2008, http://www12.statcan.ca/ english/census06/analysis/income/pdf/97-563-XIE2006001.pdf. 40 Ambert and Krull, “Effects of Economic Changes and Inequalities on Families,” 132. 41 Morissette and Ostrosky, “Earnings Instability,” 6. 42 Ibid., 1.

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43 Statistics Canada, “Study: Delayed Transition of Young Adults,” The Daily, 18 September 2007, http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/070918/ dq070918b-eng.htm. 44 Baker, “Great Expectations,” 3. 45 Baker, “Young Mothers” 277; Baker, “Great Expectations,” 3. 46 Baker, “Great Expectations,” 1, 3. 47 Hrynyshyn, “Review Essay,” 678. 48 Ibid. 49 Hall and Bishop, Mommy Angst, vii. 50 Hrynyshyn, “Review Essay,” 678. 51 Hrynyshyn, “Review Essay,” 676; Kilbourne, Killing Us Softly 4. 52 Hrynyshyn, “Review Essay,” 675. 53 Many scholarly publications focus on representations of motherhood (e.g., Kaplan 1992; Fowkes Tobin 1990; Hall and Bishop 2009). Jean Kilbourne’s Killing Us Softly (1, 2, 3, and 4) video series provides another example of a critical analysis of how advertisers portray images of women generally. Furthermore, on Kilbourne’s website, a lengthy list of “Resources for Change” is available to identify and evaluate myths and values underlying society (http://www.jeankilbourne.com/assets/ Resources2010.pdf). Similarly, the Media Awareness Network (http:// www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/index.cfm) “promote[s] media literacy and digital literacy by producing education and awareness programs and resources (often in our schools), working in partnership with Canadian and international organizations, and speaking to audiences across Canada and around the world.” 54 I initially delivered a version of this chapter as a conference paper/slideshow at the Association for Research on Mothering’s Annual Conference, “Carework and Caregiving: Theory and Practice,” 5–7 May 2006, York University, Toronto, Ontario. 55 See Debra Langan and Mavis Morton, “Through the Eyes of Farmers’ Daughters.” BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ambert, Anne-Marie, and Catherine Krull. “Effects of Economic Changes and Inequalities on Families.” In Changing Families: Relationships in Context, edited by Anne Marie Ambert, 117–45. Toronto: Allyn and Bacon. 2005. Baker, Joanne. “Young Mothers in Late Modernity: Sacriice, Respectability and the Transformative Neo-liberal Subject.” Journal of Youth Studies 12, no. 3 (2009): 275–88.

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– “Great Expectations and Post-feminist Accountability: Young Women Living Up to the ‘Successful Girls’ Discourse.” Gender and Education 22, no.1 (2010): 1–15. Bartky, Sandra Lee. “Suffering to be Beautiful.” In “Sympathy and Solidarity” and Other Essays, edited by Sandra Lee Bartky, 13–29. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleield Publishers, 2004. Boler, Megan. Feeling Power: Emotions and Education. New York: Routledge, 1999. Brody, Elaine M. Introduction and “Women in the Middle: How It Happened.” In Women in the Middle: Their Parent Care Years, edited by Elaine M. Brody, xv–xvi and 3–22. New York: Springer Publishing Company, 2004. Featherstone, Mike. “The Body in Consumer Culture.” In The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory, edited by Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth, and Bryan S. Turner, 170–96. London: Sage, 1991. Fowkes Tobin, Beth. “‘The Tender Mother’: The Social Construction of Motherhood and the Lady’s Magazine.” Women’s Studies 18, no. 2/3 (1990): 205–21. Gavey, Nicola. “Feminist Poststructuralism and Discourse Analysis: Contributions to Feminist Psychology.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 13 (1989): 459–75. Gustafson, Diana L. “Understanding Women and Health.” In Feminist Issues: Race, Class, and Sexuality, edited by Nancy Mandell, 266–86. Toronto: Pearson-Prentice Hall, 2005. Hall, Ann, and Mardia Bishop. Mommy angst: Motherhood in American Popular Culture. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2009. Hrynyshyn, Derek.“Review Essay: The Mainstreaming of Media Critique.” Canadian Journal of Communication 30 (2005): 673–9. Kaplan, Ann. Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama. London: Routledge, 1992. Keller, Kathryn. Mothers and Work in Popular American Magazines. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. Killing Us Softly. Directed by Sut Jhally. Starring Jean Kilbourne. Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation, 1979. Killing Us Softly 3: Advertising’s Image of Women. Directed by Sut Jhally. Starring Jean Kilbourne. Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation, 2000. Killing Us Softly 4. Directed by Sut Jhally. Starring Jean Kilbourne. Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation, 2010. Langan, Debra, and Mavis Morton. “Through the Eyes of Farmers’ Daughters: Academics Working on Marginal Land.” Women’s Studies International Forum 32, no. 6 (2009): 395–405.

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Marshall, Katherine. “Converging Gender Roles.” Perspectives. Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2006. http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/75001-XIE/10706/art-1.pdf. Mesley, Wendy. “Chasing the Cancer Answer.” CBC Marketplace. Originally broadcast 6 March 2006. Morissette, Rene, and Yuri Ostrovsky. “Earnings instability.” Perspectives. Ottawa: Statistics Canada. 2006. http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/ 75-001-XIE/11006/art-1.pdf. Raphael, Dennis. The Social Determinants of Health: Canadian Perspectives. Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s Press, 2004. Sparkes, Andrew C. “Relections on the Socially Constructed Physical Self.” In The Physical Self: From Motivation to Well Being, edited by Kenneth R. Fox, 83–95. Illinois: Human Kinetics, 1997. Statistics Canada. Earnings and Incomes of Canadians Over the Past Quarter Century, 2006 Census. May 2008, Catalogue No. 97-563-X, http://www12. statcan.ca/english/census06/analysis/income/pdf/97-563-XIE2006001.pdf. Still Killing Us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women. Directed by Margaret Lazarus and Renner Wunderlich. Starring Jean Kilbourne. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Documentary Films, 1987.

15 S / KIN OF VIRTUAL MOTHERS

Loss and Mourning on a Korean Birthmothers’ Website Hosu Kim

An increasing number of heterosexual, same-sex couples, single women and men from the United States and Western Europe ind transnational adoption a reliable venue through which to create a family. A transnational adoptive family involves two mothers – a birthmother and an adoptive mother.1 Relecting the political, racial, economic, and national asymmetries between the two parties involved in transnational adoption, current adoption discourse in the West has predominantly focused on adoptive mothers and their motherhood, despite the undeniable signiicance of birthmothers. This trend has been challenged by a recent proliferation of cultural works by adoptees and critical analyses of transnational adoption. A steady visibility of transnational adoptees and an ever expanding body of adoption scholarship has inadvertently, if not inevitably, brought attention to those who have been absent from the adoption triad for so long – birth families and especially birthmothers. Within this context, this chapter critically observes the recent emergence of Korean birthmothers within the current academic and popular discourses of adoption via a popular Korean media outlet, an Internet blog. Over the past ifty years, South Korea has become known for the longest and largest involvement in transnational adoption. Korea’s history of transnational adoption traces its origin back to the Korean War (1950–53). Initiated as a temporary relief in a crisis of war, transnational adoption has developed into a child welfare institution in Korea. Since the 1950s, almost 200,000 Korean-born children – mixed race, poor, orphaned, and out-of-wedlock babies – left Korea and found homes in the United States and Europe.2 However, recent demographic, political,

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and cultural shifts in Korea have overshadowed Korea’s continued involvement in transnational adoption as a sending country. Amidst these changes, transnational adoption is fading into a shameful memory, part of Korea’s history. As the story of transnational adoption is folded into the past, Korean birthmothers are being rendered ghostlike. By examining the Korean birthmothers’ website, , translated as “The Sad Love Stories of Mothers who Sent Their Babies Away for Adoption,” this chapter illuminates the seemingly simple fact that many Korean women are still becoming birthmothers.”3 This website offers a rare public forum for young, unwed Korean birthmothers to give voice to experiences and losses that have been publicly disregarded. The website offers an archive of what might not otherwise be available – the stigmatized life experiences and the unspeakable losses of birthmothers. Further, it facilitates mourning these losses through a virtual practice of mothering. In order to engage the Korean birthmothers’ Internet community, I consider Internet technologies as a crucial apparatus, rather than a mere medium, through which the stigmatized group of birthmothers emerge into virtual mothers. In this regard, I venture across disciplinary boundaries and employ theories and methods of the body, trauma, affect, and mothering via the Internet. Treating birthmothers’ accounts as the skin, the wounded skin, the membrane that embodies traumatic memories, this chapter examines how the skin is cut, produced, managed, remembered, and resounded in relation to affective qualities of stigmatized losses. This research aims to draw out a felt quality of virtual mothering and to offer a critique of the dominant search and reunion narrative. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF BIRTHMOTHERS IN SOUTH KOREA

The history of transnational adoption from South Korea is bifurcated into phases before and after 1988. Initiated as a temporary relief program in the aftermath of the crisis of the Korean War, transnational adoption soon became established as a child welfare program for war orphans, mixed race, and/or poor children in need of care and a home. The number of children adopted from South Korea increased exponentially during the 1970s and 1980s, reaching a maximum of more than 8,800 children in 1985. This uninhibited growth was halted in 1988 when the Korean government, in its preparation for the Seoul Olympics, was accused by many in the Western media outlets of baby selling in exchange for foreign currency.4

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Since then, South Korea has undergone demographic, political, and cultural shifts in the practice of transnational adoption. The South Korean government, in response to the Western media’s criticism, implemented various strategies, including promoting domestic adoption to decrease the number of transnational adoption placements. As a result, the number of children available for transnational adoption each year has decreased steadily. The vast majority of Korean children who were sent for adoption were born to young, unmarried women whose ages range from late teens to late twenties. This decrease in the number of Korean children placed in adoption today is a striking contrast to the increasing number of Korean adoptees raised in North America and Europe who visit Korea every year. Mandated by a global, neoliberal economic restructuring, the Korean government has acknowledged this demographic turn and re-signiied Korean-born adoptees as a national asset, incorporating the category of people deemed “overseas Koreans.”5 Combining a demographic turn and political re-signiication, “returning” Korean adoptees have steadily become a media spectacle whose life histories are shaped into a particular narrative, the narrative of an adoptee’s search for his or her roots and the subsequent reunion with the birthmother.6 Through this narrative, the Korean birthmother is rendered a central and important igure for the irst time in the history of transnational adoption. The igure emerges as a sacriicing mother, now middle-aged or elderly, who was herself a victim of abject poverty but provided a better life opportunity for the child via her choice of transnational adoption. Against the traditional and naturalizing motherhood crafted in the narrative of search and reunion, I analyze the contemporary birthmothers’ emergence into Internet technologies with a careful rumination over technological, social, psychical contexts and processes through which contemporary birthmothers go virtual. BIRTHMOTHERS GO VIRTUAL

Approaching personal narrative as performance requires theory which takes context as seriously as it does texts. Kristin Langellier, “Personal Narrative, Performance, Performativity”

Contemporary birthmothers who grew up during the 1980s and the 1990s, when an economic necessity was no longer considered as a sole cause for adoption from Korea, still identified economic reasons for their adoption decision. It is accurate to say that being a single mother

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would be an economic disadvantage because there is prejudice and discrimination against single motherhood in contemporary Korean society. Pregnancy outside marriage, if it is not a precursor of a legitimate marriage, is still looked down upon, despite an increasing social acceptance of premarital sex. With the social pressure against single motherhood in Korea, the majority of young women choose to terminate their unplanned pregnancy if a marriage with the baby’s father is unlikely. Today, the majority of women who choose adoption are pressured to do so because of the stigma against single motherhood in Korea. The social stigma against the birthmother, entangled with motherhood ideology within heteronormative kinship and citizenship, engenders an impossible psychical, familial, social condition for an unmarried woman to acknowledge a baby and her motherhood. In order to recognize a child as her baby, she cannot help but admit to her improper sexual conduct. She fails, irstly, by not being able to contain her sexuality and, secondly, by giving a birth to an “illegitimate” child, both of which deem her unit for motherhood. On the other hand, the social expectation of a mother role in a woman’s life penalizes a birthmother for her failure to mother. This contradictory normativity of motherhood in the heterosexual middle-class family domain not only delegitimizes her motherhood, but also puts a birthmother into a psychic condition under which she cannot acknowledge what she has lost because of adoption – the child and her mothering – without viewing herself as an inadequate or failed subject already. Such impossible conditions for the loss – her stigmatized losses, the loss of her child, and the loss of her mothering – play out in online encounters with spatial and temporal rearrangements that offer communication free from social conventions necessitated by face-to-face interactions.7 A sense of anonymity on the Internet grants birthmothers more freedom to engage their personal narratives of loss as well as construct the sense of a shared experience. According to Kristin Langellier, such personal online narratives may have, “transformative power to assert self-deinitions about … the existence, worth and vitality of a person or group as meanings not otherwise available to an audience.”8 Via the “here and now” spatio-temporality of the Internet, the postings, which are imbued with feelings of shame, guilt, and pain, present a site of performativity, a performativity of mothering deiantly foreclosed to birthmothers outside the domain of the heteronormative kinship imaginary.9 To contemplate the emergences and tendencies of birthmothers’ accounts over the Internet, I employ the phrase virtual mothering. Virtual

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mothering does not privilege a naturalistic or any predetermined quality of mothering. By employing the term virtual, I maintain a critical distance from a biogenetic motherhood prevailed in the discourse of birthmother.10 The term virtual is a composite of interrelated concepts. First, I intend to describe a liminal existence of birthmothers over and via Internet technologies by drawing upon Margaret Morse’s observation on virtual landscapes. In her words, virtual landscapes are “not entirely imaginary nor entirely real, animate but neither living nor dead.”11 Morse’s usage of virtual aptly applies to the marginal location of birthmothers in adoption discourse but also indicates its mode of being-inbetween over a space-time of mothering on the Internet. However, her usage of virtual does not capture what is vital to a life on the Internet, in other words, its becoming via the Internet. To attend to certain movements and dynamism involved in becoming a virtual mother on the Internet, I also draw on Brian Massumi’s use of the term virtual, which is not the opposite state of actual, but an unactualized and incipient state that has the inherent quality of a body, that includes a body, both human and nonhuman.12 Applying Massumi’s use of the term virtual to the emergence and tendency of virtual mothering demands a reconiguration of body as a becoming rather than a being through the Internet technologies. This shift from being to becoming a virtual mother pays careful attention to the ways in which a birthmother articulates herself into a virtual mother. Here, I draw upon Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion of “machinic assemblage,” a concept that informs a new notion of the body, one that is not delimited to a body of an organism, but includes both organic bodies and mechanical machines.13 This notion considers the body to be permeable and radically open to join and adapt to other bodies through machinic relationships. Thus, body is always in formation, in process of, rather than a ixed or given. The virtual mother emerges as the organic bodies of birthmothers join with Internet technologies, or vice versa. At its interface, virtual mothering is being in formation with a reconiguration of what has been lost over adoption and thereby carves out a new form of bodies, identities, and relationalities. At the heart of virtual mothering lie unactualized forces or tendencies toward the birthmother’s stigmatized losses – a baby and a mothering via telling. Such tendencies toward a mothering are illustrated in the birthmothers’ accounts and recounting of the event over the Internet. Stacy H. Jones argues that telling is a powerful mode of mothering, particularly signiicant in the absence of “naturalized connection” with a baby.14

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Jones eloquently delineates a narrative development of adoption storytelling and performing (adoptive) motherhood: “While such [adoption] stories might begin with loss and are lushed with shame, they unfold in the tripled movements that loss and shame make: toward painful decision making, toward the impossibility of any simple or natural maternal connection, toward a reigured and renewing relationality.”15 The birthmothers’ online postings tell and retell of the losses and the process through which they become virtual mothers. Birthmothers’ stories driven by loss often are lushed with shame and the pain over the decision they have made. In the absence of her baby through adoption, when there is no longer a “natural” maternal connection with the baby, a birthmother instead engages in telling. Birthmothers’ telling online reiterates and reigures what has been lost – the baby and the act of mothering – and thereby renews a mother-child relationship virtually. SKIN OF VIRTUAL MOTHER

The birthmothers’ online postings are a performance of virtual mothering in which they describe pain and shame. This performance brings to the surface that which has up until now been unspeakable so that it creates a point of contact with the stigmatized loss of birthmothers. In his provocative article, “Skin Memories,” Jay Prosser argues that “skin remembers the trauma that actually happened … [and] the fantasy that ought to have happened.”16 Treating skin as a site of registering trauma as well as a site for unconscious investment, Prosser refers to skin autobiographies as a type of writing in which the author’s stigmatized skin is understood as the somatic delivery of what is unspeakable and repressed. Here, I expand his analysis of a skin autobiography to birthmothers’ Internet postings, which are observant of the bodily event and bodily memories of pregnancy and a baby’s departure from her. In his analysis of stigma and skin autobiography, Prosser sharply points out that “writing skin is obviously an attempt to work out, to express (that is both to articulate and thus to expel) a stigmatized skin/ sin.”17 Via writing skin, the birthmother processes stigmatized losses by expressing a stigmatized skin/sin that includes her mothering body, the body of her baby, as well as her lack of mothering. Over the process of articulation, she also expels what is unspeakable – the stigmatized losses – from her. As she expels the stigmatized losses from her body onto the Internet website, her writing skin disperses her mothering body and the baby from her own body into the realm of virtual and ininite in which

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her “auto” of biography indicates no longer “self” of a birthmother, but instead yields to a collaborative, affective, incessant quality of virtual mothering over the Web. By writing out their stigmatized losses, birthmothers trespass the boundaries – a rupture from the two skins – of human and of machine and its subsequent coagulation that brings forth a new surface of the virtual mother. So I conceive of this website in terms of skin, the skin of virtual mothering. Rendering the website as a skin of virtual mothering means examining how the traumatic effects of loss leave their mark and, more importantly, how they circulate their affective modalities of pain, shame, and guilt. In the following analysis of birthmothers’ postings, I dwell on ruptured, blushed, re-covered, and re-membered skin from which birthmothers’ pains, agonies, ambivalence, shame, and guilt toward the stigmatized losses are rendered into a virtual mothering. RUPTURED SKIN

No mother’s body is just an emptied shell after her baby is delivered; for birthmothers, it is rather a volatile site for the remembering of their lost baby and lost mothering. (Byori) Date: 2001.10.05 23:25 Subject: Crying myself to sleep what if I could have nursed you even once, I wish I could have hugged you even once … After delivery, my breasts were illed with lowing milk. They looked swollen. What if I held your hand that you stretched out to me while I cut the umbilical cord … I would have not been as devastated as I am right now.

ID:

The pregnancy and delivery of a baby changes a woman’s body into that of a nursing mother. But in the absence of a baby, the birthmother, along with numerous birthmothers on the Internet, reported a suffering from inlammation of the breasts due to a lack of nursing. She writes her own skin that was smoldering with her belated love and regrets for what she could have offered, remarking on its painful sensation. The intense and excruciating pain lies overwhelmingly at the heart of a birthmother’s skin autobiography. With regards to a becoming of virtual mothering and the sensation of pain reverberating throughout the website, I apply Sara Ahmed’s poignant analysis of pain sensation and reforming a

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border of the body.18 Ahmed’s attention to the affective push of pain sensation guides us to read birthmothers’ pain and their subsequent thrust onto the website as a reformulation of bodies: “This perceived intrusion of something other within the body that creates the desire to re-establish the border, to push out the pain, or the (imagined, material) object we feel is the ‘cause’ of the pain. Pain involves the violation or transgression of the border between inside and outside, and it is through the transgression that I feel the border in the irst place.”19 Driven by the intense pain sensation, the birthmothers engage the Internet to “push out” the pain or “the baby.” The intense feeling of pain draws birthmothers to the Internet where they can unload the weight of secrecy and sorrow. But, more importantly, it gives life to a virtual baby as a way of getting away from the source of pain. By driving out the stigmatized skin/sin, in other words, her mothering body, her baby, and her lack of mothering, and its subsequent dispersion over the Internet, she brings her stigmatized kin – a baby – out to the world, foregrounding a virtual kinship. Thereby emerges a virtual mother. The following excerpt illustrates common interactions between a mother and her virtual baby. (love for sea) Date: 2002.02.15 20:06 Subject: My dear son, Moon Hyunook Hyunook, how have you been doing? I, a mother, whenever I miss my child, Ooki or want to see him, I come here because this is where you are. I just inished work and here I am. … I have to work overtime for the next three days. But I will come and see you here (after those days). I love you. You are more precious than my life. ID:

One of the most prevalent themes found in birthmothers’ postings is a birthmother’s concern for her baby’s well-being and her pain of not being able to take care of her infant.  Yet, as is illustrated by the birthmother above, many birthmothers treat this website as though it houses her virtual baby. She uses this site as a space where she can “come and see” her baby and express her love toward her baby, thereby engaging a practice of virtual mothering. RE - COVERED SKIN

The affectivity of pain facilitates rather than inhibits the pained body and fosters a virtual mothering over the Internet. As the baby is virtually

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created in a process through which she gets away from the pain, the traumatic igure of the birthmother starts to emerge as a virtual mother on the Internet. The excruciating pains that resonate within the space of this website denotes the birthmother’s ambivalent relationship toward the stigmatized losses. In essence, they give her a baby and the act of mothering, which has up until now been denied the unmarried woman. Upon entry to the website “The Sad Love Story,” each birthmother is asked to choose her own screen name. Often, she creates a nickname associated with the baby, such as her state of mind toward her baby, the baby’s date of birth, or the baby’s intended name. Sometimes, she keeps her screen name, as a baby’s mother (e.g., [Minyoung’s mommy]; [Dahbin’s mommy]). Many names express a woman’s sadness, guilt, shame, and love towards her baby: (bad mother); (sad mother); (sad self); (shameful mommy); (I am sorry, Haesol); (love for Hosuk); (love for Jinsung); (unseen love); (it is too late); (a smoldering knot in her chest). Some adopt random nouns, such as (id), or a gibberish English, a string of English characters that does not have any concrete meaning in English. Often those jumbled strings of English characters are decoded into a Korean name or another signiicant word when the computer keyboard shifts to Korean character sets. For example, gywjd becomes in Korean character sets, which translates into Hyojung, a common irst name for a woman. A woman becomes a virtual mother by uttering her baby’s name or her baby’s birthday, or her emotional state toward the baby.20 Yet, such utterances may not be identiiable to anyone else, including the baby. Thus, her screen name serves as an outer layer that protects her identity from the stigmatizing term birthmother. In other words, she reveals the baby and her status as a birthmother via an alias, which conceals her identity. This site of kinship masquerades equally as it reveals a stigmatized skin, sin, and kin, which resonates with a sense of ambivalence in the following excerpt. ID: 12 09 (December 9th) Date: 2005.07.19 23:26 Subject: My baby My lovely baby I miss you so much that I might go crazy My heart feels like exploding I would rather go crazy; then I wouldn’t have any memory of you

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I wish I had no thought of you Tears come along whenever I think of you several times a day My heart aches The birthmother invites amnesia to overcome her emotional devastation. She yearns to be free from her child as much as she wants to keep (or be reunited with) her child. Her virtual mothering is conigured by a tension between a desire to connect with and to disconnect from the baby at the same time. Such ambivalence toward the unspeakable losses is manifested with shame and guilt leshed out on to the website, the skin of a virtual mothering. The following account suggests the ways in which shame and guilt work at the becoming of virtual mothering: ID: (Byori) Date: 2002.07.27 02:45 Subject: My dearest son I miss you so much. No one would know how much I miss you. I would like to die, but because of you, my son, I can’t even contain the thought. I know it is stupid. But I don’t think people outside the world welcome me. So … I am living with a heavy sense of guilt. Even if I smile, it is not a real smile. No one understands. (SIGH). I wish the wind would blow me away and take me to my son, Byori … Then, I could kneel down in front of him and apologize for my wrongdoing. Can we go back in time? Her sense of alienation from and being shunned by society is palpable. In the post, the birthmother’s unfulilled mothering drives her to thoughts of suicide, yet it is the very idea that she is a mother that keeps her alive. However, such living, after a separation from a baby through adoption, may turn herself into a corpse, a living corpse. As both accounts suggest, birthmothers become virtual mothers through their simultaneous attempts to remember and to forget, to connect to and disconnect from their babies. THE RE - IMAGINED SKIN

Skin autobiographies are as layered as the skin itself. Into skin, they intercalate, not simply memory, but memory as it is ictionalized and fabricated in the unconscious. Jay Prosser, “Skin Memories”

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The skin memories do not just remember the conscious. The birthmother’s ambivalent relationship to the loss sets a psychological condition that is melancholic, as the following account suggests: Screen name (JeongHwan’s mom) asks, “How are you [my son] doing? Today, I bought a rainbow rice cake.21 As I ate it in order to celebrate, instead of my baby, tears came along.”22 This act of swallowing displayed by JeongHwan’s mother may suggest the traumatic effect of loss. According to trauma scholars, Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok in their book, The Shell and The Kernel, incorporation occurs when there is “no other choice but to perpetuate a clandestine pleasure by transforming it, after it has been lost, into an intrapsychic secret.”23 They continue, “everything will be swallowed along with the trauma that led to the loss. Swallowed and preserved. Inexpressible mourning erects a secret tomb inside the subject.… The loss is buried alive in the crypt as a full-ledged person.”24 By swallowing a rainbow rice cake, the birthmother “buries” her baby, living elsewhere, in her body, effectively turning herself into a “crypt.” By swallowing she turns herself into a shell of what is unspeakable. In the process, this act of incorporation brings two incompatible lost love objects – the baby and the ideal of traditional motherhood – into coexistence within her body. By writing out, she frees herself from her own crypt body impregnated with a living child to the Internet, thereby emerging a virtual mother. Yet, a virtual mother’s melancholic state does not fully resolve with “swallowing.” In her book The Melancholy of Race, Anne Anlin Cheng discusses the psychological consequences of the loss on the development of a melancholic subjectivity.25 By attending to the untenable and forbidden aspects of the lost object, Cheng posits that the act of “swallowing” the lost object facilitates one’s complex ambivalent relationship toward the object. For a Korean birthmother, what she has lost via adoption – a baby out-of-wedlock and the ideal of motherhood – poses untenable ideals and inspires not only a love but also a profound resentment. Such complex and convoluted relation one might have to the losses, as Cheng argues, leads the melancholic subject to relegate the loss into “the imaginative loss of a never-possible perfection” by entertaining a iction of possession.26 By entertaining the fantasy of return and reunion with the baby, numerous women on “The Sad Love Stories” site manage to survive many heart-wrenching moments in the aftermath of the adoption. In some accounts, the fantasy is a ictionalized narrative in which the baby is imagined as “studying abroad at a little bit younger age compared to

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others” or “traveling right now.” Both illustrate the denial of loss by suggesting an inevitable homecoming and reunion between mother and child, an all-too-familiar script of the adoption narrative in contemporary Korea. Underlying the most prevalent fantasy of reunion, birthmothers admit what they are told to believe: they are too young, too poor, too unmarried to raise their child. These ideas push birthmothers to defer their mothering and motherhood until a later part of their lives. One anonymous posting stated, “I am becoming a mother whom my baby will not feel ashamed of. So I should not drink. Until the time we meet again, I will live earnestly. . I am going to study hard and enter college.” The vast majority of posts that express such hope for a future reunion suggest that a birthmother is becoming a virtual mother within “this elaborate structure of loss-butnot-loss” through the deferral and phantasmic rendering of her motherhood, rather than a renunciation of it.27 RE - MEMBERED SKIN

Skin re-members, both literally in its material surface and metaphorically in resignifying on this surface, not only race, sex and age, but the quite detailed speciics of life histories. Jay Prosser, “Skin Memories”

The child’s birthday is, not surprisingly, a day that is well-remembered and most frequently posted by a birthmother. However, her wish postings, unlike a mother’s birthday wish, are interwoven with a restless, ambivalent, and painful memory of a child’s departure from the mother’s own body. The following string of posts illustrates how the website embedded with unspeakable events and its accompanying stigmatized losses foster a sense of belongingness and therefore re-members birthmothers into a critical population of virtual mothers. ID: Real Pooh Date: 2002.01.29 13:03 Subject: Se Hoon, Happy Birthday Today is the third birthday of my son, Se Hoon. Please let’s celebrate! Until last year, I was devastated and drank a lot. I have decided not to do that again. My Se Hoon, born into a dificult situation. However, I believe, he is living happily with adoptive parents now … Please congratulate me!

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Reply 1. ID: Date: 2002.01.30 00:46 I am happy for your son’s third birthday. My baby is almost three too. I can’t even imagine how much she must have grown by now. I hope to see you at some point in person. Congratulations again! Reply 2. ID: Date 2002.01.29 18:22 CONGRATULATIONS! I am sure he is growing bright and happy like the snow outside I hope you are doing well. Cheers, someday you will be able to see your son, Se Hoon Reply 3. ID: Date: 2002. 01.30 20:37 Sorry for my belated congratulations. It’s already been three years? Dear Se Hoon, Happy birthday to you    I hope you grow healthy and brave. A mutual recognition of the baby and celebration for the baby’s birthday in the baby’s absence reveals the complexity of the child’s birthday for birthmothers. The child’s birthday simultaneously marks the day of meeting and separating from the baby. The child’s birthday is a day that her child becomes an illegitimate, thus turned into a social orphan and an adoptable baby. This shared, participatory act of telling and retelling facilitates the transmission of a traumatic memory and composes the skin of virtual mothering. Underneath the skin that celebrates a child’s birthday lies the fact that there was a baby who is now living somewhere else with someone else. And this skin signiies the shameful and painful event of adoption. Such transmission of a traumatic memory brings a shared awareness of the stigmatized losses and recognition of the social deaths of birthmothers. This website conigures not only a site of virtual mothering but more importantly a site of memorial over the social deaths of birthmothers and their orphaned children. S / KIN OF VIRTUAL MOTHERING

So far we have traced over the skin of the Korean birthmothers’ website that is ruptured, re-covered, re-imagined, and re-membered by numerous Korean contemporary birthmothers. Treating birthmothers’ postings online

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as a skin autobiography, I engage the ways in which their unspeakable losses are archived and circulated through the affective low of pain, ambivalence, shame, and guilt. An excruciating pain ruptures the boundaries across which organic bodies and machine bodies cut and forge into one another by pushing out the source of the pain – the stigmatized skin/sin. Thereby pain from the loss foregrounds a virtual kinship formation between a birthmother and a baby. However, the site of virtual kinship is deeply blushed with a sense of ambivalence toward the lost objects and soon re-covered with an often painful alias as well as phantasmic accounts of incorporation and ictionalized narratives of deferred motherhood. By bringing one another to witness what is unspeakable, the skin of the website is expanded to remember a pronouncement of social death over birthmothers and re-members them into virtual mothering. Over the processes, a new form and practice of mothering, which I phrase virtual mothering, rises. My analysis of the birthmothers’ website “The Sad Love Story” was inspired by Prosser’s claim that “skin disorder in skin autobiographies can remember a stigmatization that is as much cultural as familial.”28 The birthmothers’ website may project a skin disorder of routinized gendered violence and an appropriation of women’s reproductive labour rather than a skin disorder of unruly sexual conduct and its excessive, subsequent children at the interstices of everyday gendered domination, exploitation, and a legacy of colonialism, as well as of Western domination in a circuitry of neoliberal global capitalism. Departing from a dichotomous way of conceptualizing motherhood as either nature or nurture, a virtual mothering challenges a naturalistic and predetermined identity and practice of mothering and instead highlights its performative aspect outside the disciplinary and discursive framework of motherhood in the traditional family imaginary. The birthmothers’ accounts disturb an overwhelming silence of birthmothers in transnational adoption by articulating the detailed accounts of emotional and psychological costs of adoption, which many argue is a lifelong process. Their accounts reveal a deiant contradiction of popular media’s discourse on adoption in Korea, portraying adoption as an economically driven event in Korea’s past. Secondly, the virtual mothering lays a theoretical and political groundwork under which all mothering involved in transnational adoption should be considered. Bringing two mothers, a birthmother and an adoptive mother, who are often divided by the stark differences of biological, cultural, socioeconomic backgrounds, closer to one another highlights a biopolitical underpinning of the transnational adoption practice. As of

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today, Korean women, the majority of young, unmarried birthmothers, make the reproductive “choice” of adoption, by relinquishing the babies to realign themselves with the normalized citizenship of heteronormative kinship. However, the same principle of normalized heteronormative kinship propels most adoptive parents in the United States and Western Europe to seek their reproductive choices by adopting these social orphans. Despite such similarities, adoption discourse of motherhood pits these two groups of women – birthmothers and adoptive mothers – in opposition to one another, foreclosing a critical dialogue on women’s reproductive labour and justice that crosses the boundaries of race, class, sexuality, and nationality in the context of transnational adoption practice.  In closing I ask, how might we imagine a scholarly and political framework in which birthmothers and adoptive mothers recognize the complex dynamics of obstacles and privileges that bind them, and how might we push forward to build solidarity for women’s re/productive justice?

NOTES

1 Here the term “mother” is used to denote a igure who functions as the main caretaker for the adoptee. 2 Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs, The Current State of International Adoption. 3 The website is http://cafe.daum.net/Adopteesmam. The postings I discuss in this chapter were retrieved from 12 October to 31 October 2005. I last visited on 31 October 2010. Established by a birthmother in 2001, the website sparked immediate responses from birthmothers for the following two years during which there were about twenty daily posts on average. The website has survived, and, as of April 2010, it has hosted more than 240 birthmothers. However, the majority of accounts were posted during 2001 and 2005. 4 In January 1988, the US magazine Progressive published a feature story on Korea’s involvement in “foreign adoption” as a number one sending country. The story brought a more negative attention to the practice, in Newsweek, the New York Times, Herald Tribune, Daily Telegraph, and Washington Post. See Hubinette, Comforting an Orphaned Nation. 5 Kim, Adopted Territory. 6 For more detailed arguments on this search and reunion narrative, see Hosu Kim, “Television Mothers.” 7 Chun, Control and Freedom, 2.

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8 Langellier, “Personal Narrative, Performance, Performativity,” 136. 9 Diana Taylor describes a “shared and participatory act of telling and listening” that therefore functions as a venue for “the transmission of traumatic memory” (167). Here telling and listening online can at best be described as a shared experience of telling and retelling of stories of the pains and losses. 10 The category of birthmother is not all too clear, given that the patriarchal culture often gives custody over a child to a husband who later relinquishes his child for adoption. Until the early 1980s, children at orphanages were available for transnational adoption. The majority of their living parents may not necessarily have the information about a child’s adoption. 11 Morse, Virtualities, 185. 12 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 30–2. 13 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 88–91. 14 Jones, “(M)othering Loss,” 126. 15 Ibid., 127. 16 Prosser, “Skin Memories,” 53. 17 Ibid., 65. 18 Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 24. 19 Ibid., 27. 20 Only a few of the 240 women who self-identiied as birthmothers over the past nine years revealed their names. 21 The rainbow rice cake signiies a baby’s one-hundredth day of his or her life. 22 Posted on 8 November 2001 and retrieved on 5 November 2005. 23 Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, 131. 24 Ibid., 130–1. 25 Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, 7. 26 Ibid., 17. 27 Ibid., 9. 28 Prosser, “Skin Memories,” 62. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abraham, Nicolas and, Maria Torok. The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanlaysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004. Cheng, Ann Anlin. The Melancholy of Race. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Chun, Wendy H. Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.

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Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Hubinette, Tobias. “Comforting an Orphaned Nation: Representations of International Adoption and Adopted Koreans in Korean Popular Culture.” PhD diss. Stockholm: Stockholm University, 2005. Jones, Stacy H. “(M)othering Loss: Telling Adoption Stories and Telling Performativity.” Text and Performance Quarterly 25 (2005): 113–35. Kim, Eleana J. Adopted Territory: Transnational Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Kim, Hosu. “Television Mothers: Loss and Found in the Narrative of Search and Reunion.” In Proceedings of the First International Korean Adoption Studies Research Symposium, edited by Kim Park Nelson, Eleana Kim, and Lene Myong Petersen, 125–43. Seoul: International Korean Adoptee Associations, 2007. Langellier, Kristin M. “Personal Narrative, Performance, Performativity: Two or Three Things that I Know For Sure.” Text and Performance Quarterly 19 (1999): 125–44. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs. The Current State of International Adoption. (Kungeoe ibyang hyonhwang). Seoul: Ministry for Health, Welfare, and Family Affairs, 2009. Morse, Margaret. Virtualities: Television, Media Arts, and Cyberculture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Prosser, Jay. “Skin Memories.” In Thinking Through the Skin, edited by Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey, 52–68. New York: Routledge, 2001. “The Sad Love Stories of Mothers who Sent Their Babies Away for Adoption.” ( .) Postings retrieved from 12 October to 31 October 2005. Last visited 31 October 2010. http://cafe. daum.net/Adopteesmam. Taylor, Diana. Archive and Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memories in Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

SECTION FOUR

Medical Interventions and Reproductive Technologies

16 FOSTERING THE PASSIVE MATERNAL EXPERIENCE

Language and Prescription in the What to Expect Series of Maternity Literature Sally Mennill

When the expectant father character (played by Seth Rogen) in Judd Apatow’s 2007 ilm Knocked Up encounters the book What to Expect When You’re Expecting, he declares, “This is basically a giant list of things you can’t do.”1 Rogen’s assessment is analogous to that of many expectant parents who encounter “America’s Bestselling Pregnancy Book.”2 Parents often comment that the book creates more worry and fear for them, despite its self-proclaimed comforting and reassuring intent. Despite attempts to educate and reassure, prescriptive literature marketed to North American expectant parents in the twenty-irst century often serves to frighten, silence, and alienate its audience in matters of childbirth. What to Expect When You’re Expecting offers a prime example of this effect. Despite advances made by feminist movements, medical research, and postcolonial understandings of reproductive rights, echoes of Victorian values and imperialist agendas have evolved into the technocratic priorities of our present day. The historic institution of Motherhood in its more contemporary incarnation continues to inform the goals and discursive ideas contained in twenty-irst-century childbirth advice.3 Analysis of the changes that differentiate two updated versions of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, the second edition published in 1991 and the third in 2002, shows a continued agenda promoting the priorities of contemporary medical hegemony. As this chapter argues, What to Expect When You’re Expecting remains structured to inspire fear in its readers by promoting a version of normalcy that favours medical imperatives and, most importantly, advocates a

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passive role for birthing mothers.4 An historical examination of prescriptive parenting literature and an analysis of the second and third editions of What to Expect will show that this popular guide ignores diversity while advocating women’s passive adherence to heavily interventionist childbirth. In early-twentieth-century Britain and North America, issues of citizenship and nation building were at the forefront of the emerging need to regulate child rearing. Inluenced by the social purity movement, emergent theories of social Darwinism and the eugenics movement, state and empire priorities turned to health and child rearing to boost imperial clout. Public health emerged as a widespread social movement and motherhood was the primary target.5 As the century progressed, propaganda aimed at mothers and mothers-to-be became entrenched in public health doctrine, solidifying the idea that mothers are the key to a healthy nation and that they must be educated in the proper care and feeding of the citizens of tomorrow. In her comprehensive analysis of British mothering discourses in the early twentieth century, Anna Davin interrogates the institutionalization of motherhood, linking the effort to imperial interests. Davin identiies the contradiction in the emerging institution: “Because of the declining birthrate, motherhood had to be made to seem desirable: because high infant mortality was explained by maternal inadequacy, the standards of mothers must be improved.”6 As such, motherhood was constructed and hegemonically enforced as a digniied and dutiful role, so long as it was carried out according to the guidelines of the state. Imperial decline, racial imperatives, class stratiication, and social status are all factors that contributed to this period of mother-blaming and informed the abundance of pamphlets, seminars, books, and lectures that were made available to the mothers of Britain. Biologically- and imperially-based reasoning informed the need for mass-marketed maternity literature, which was geared toward the working classes so that good soldiers would be bred for the empire, and geared toward the middle and upper classes so that they would continue to be on top of the socially stratiied society. Katherine Arnup’s book on educating mothers in Canada shares much of Davin’s theoretical argument,7 operating on the assertion that “reproductive biology is profoundly shaped, inluenced, and at times, determined by the social organization of society.”8 Like Davin, she emphasizes the role of industrial capitalism and the declining birth rates as instrumental in the impetus for the advent of mass-marketed literature. Arnup traces themes in the maternity advice disseminated from the 1920s to the

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1960s, noting that the medicalization of motherhood quickly became the primary goal, replacing the raising of good soldiers and the perpetuation of the race that appeared so crucial in the earlier part of the century. Despite the medical imperative, themes of race and class run through the advice literature that Arnup analyses, just as they run through much of the state-dominated ideological output of the mid-twentieth century. During the inter-war years and especially after the Second World War, women’s waged work was blamed for their incompetence as mothers. The context for marketing maternity advice was devised accordingly. As Arnup points out, “many authors maintained that motherhood, too, was a profession, requiring specialized training and preparation.”9 Much of the literature geared towards middle-class women stressed the importance of staying at home and focusing on their role as mothers. At no time was this more prevalent than in the postwar era when the institution of motherhood was heavily promoted in order to get women out of the factories and back into the home so that returned soldiers could have their jobs. In the postwar era an increase in commercially produced books and media presentations complemented extant radio shows, governmentmade pamphlets, and lecture series to widely address the issues of birth and child rearing for mothers. These sources looked at a range of topics from prenatal care to birth, nutrition for children and habit training. The tone and discernible aim of the materials altered over the period, just as the method of output did, changing from the scientiic management-style of child rearing, popularized in Canada by the very public raising of the Dionne quintuplets in the late 1930s,10 to the more permissive Spockean mandate of the 1950s.11 More recently, contemporary scholars, such as Sharon Hays, have identiied the current parenting mandate as “intensive mothering,” a complex bridge of the contradiction inherent in the drive to be successful professionals and devoted, nurturing caregivers at the same time.12 The defense of the empire, the perpetuation of the race, and the role of women in society were all factors that informed the discursive elements that came into play in the process of educating and medicalizing mothers in the irst half of the twentieth century. The importance of child rearing and the amount of education and attention required to heed the ideas and doctrines of the various time periods were, however, mostly available to those mothers who were not required to work. Class played not only an ideological role in the construction of motherhood, it had practical ramiications for those mothers who needed to work in order to support their families.

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Child birthing and child rearing literature has indeed been deined by its white, middle-class, and heterosexual angles. As numerous historical studies involving prescriptive literature have pointed out, such manuals are not so much a relection of how parents birth and raise their children but of how the dominant ideology advocates the birthing and raising of children.13 Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-irst, articulating, perpetuating, and disseminating white, middle-class and heterosexual visions of motherhood is certainly the predominant role of birthing and parenting manuals. Recent publications by Robbie DavisFloyd, Harriet Marshall and Anne Woollett, among others, identify, deconstruct, and interrogate the role of contemporary mothering manuals in North American culture.14 In particular, contemporary scholars pinpoint the effects of discursive regulation and biopower on the writing and reading of these texts. Davis-Floyd identiies the biomedical technocracy as the hegemonic force informing the discursive construction of child birthing, arguing that “under the technocratic model the female body is viewed as an abnormal, unpredictable, and inherently defective machine.”15 She points out that at the very base of this construction is the scientiic model of destroying a natural process and replacing it with a supposedly better cultural process,16 leading to the argument that pregnancy and labour are deined in Western society “as a dysfunctional medical process and through the selective application of medical technologies for the de- and reconstruction of that process.”17 Birth is no longer something that women’s bodies do; it is something they do dangerously and must therefore be redeined technologically. What to Expect When You’re Expecting reiies the theory that women’s bodies are lawed and that medical technology will correct these laws. Marshall and Woollett’s discussion of the regulative role of pregnancy texts offers a textual analysis of publications popular in Britain in the late twentieth century, deconstructing “the recurring use of certain repertoires, attending to tensions in their use and the ways in which parents, mothers and health professionals are positioned, located as subjects and hence accorded or disallowed certain rights.”18 Their analysis identiies the absence in these texts of embodied knowledge on the part of mothers: “The pregnant body is rendered as isolated from women’s previous knowledge or interest in their bodies, and pregnancy is decontextualized – separate and distinct from women’s prior histories and experiences. The notion of preparation and gaining of bodily knowledge is set out as if for the irst time.”19 Pregnancy and birth, according to the model these articles expose, becomes about risk management and

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any problems that arise are thus the fault of the individual reader who did not manage her body wisely. Indeed, risk as a Foucauldian technology of power looms large in the discourses of the contemporary medical hegemony, an indication of the extent to which Western cultures are dominated by science and technologybased ideological power. Biopower, as Foucault labeled the hegemonic effects of state-sanctioned medicalization,20 is a governing force in the creation and marketing of mothering manuals. As Deborah Lupton argues, “This increasing power of scientiic medicine, it is contended, has detrimental effects for the traditionally disempowered and exploited social groups by delecting questions of social inequality into the realm of illness and disease, there to be treated inappropriately by drugs and other medical therapies.”21 While feminists and Foucauldian scholars have recently set about challenging and overcoming the effects of biopower, criticizing the medical profession “as a patriarchal institution that used deinitions of illness and disease to maintain the relative inequality of women by drawing attention to their weakness and susceptibility to illness and by taking control over areas of women’s lives such as pregnancy and childbirth that were previously the domain of female lay practitioners and midwives,”22 the effects of medical hegemony are still recognizable in many popular conceptualizations of mothering. Changes between the 1991 and 2002 versions of the labour and delivery chapter of What to Expect When You’re Expecting show that deconstructions of medical hegemony have yielded developments in the language used to construct modern motherhood. Yet, despite these improvements, the manual still serves to indoctrinate its potential readers to the medicalized versions of appropriate child birthing choices. The very implication that there are choices, is, indeed, couched in the language of risk, passivity, and the separation of woman from her embodied knowledge. Marshall and Woollett’s analysis of child birthing and child rearing manuals outlines the ways in which coercive language and social construction are used to regulate women’s agency in reproduction. In particular, they identify the construction of normalcy, class-based understandings of what constitutes “good” mothering, and a communication of reassurance as the coercive mainstays of the books they analyze.23 My analysis of the changes in the birthing chapter between the second and third editions of What to Expect When You’re Expecting focuses on the relative presence of these three factors with particular reference to the frameworks of normalcy that exclude minorities and alternative forms of birthing, the discursive advocacy of assuming an attitude of submission to the

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medical system during labour and delivery, and the presence of fearmongering in the structure of the book. On the whole, the third edition of the manual shows improvement in its removal of heterosexual assumptions, the inclusion of some traditional child birthing practices, and the removal of some fear-instilling language. Nonetheless, the updated tome manages to maintain its tone of passive adherence to medical hegemony. It retains a fear-inducing tone, and it is ripe with suggestive language that serves to construct the reader as a passive observer in the delivery of her baby. The progression from second to third editions of What to Expect’s birthing chapter relects an awareness on the part of its authors and editors of the increasing popularity of alternative forms of birthing as well as a broadened awareness of the impact of medical hegemony on racialized and working-class women. However, its continuing reliance on mechanistic, passive, and suggestive language still serves to promote women’s unempowered adherence to medical constructions of risk and safety. In short, as Seth Rogen’s character said, the book provides a list of everything you should not do while pregnant. Prescriptive literature has a potent concern with normalizing. What to Expect spends signiicant time reassuring women that what their bodies are doing is “normal.” In the process, however, the book constructs or contributes to the hegemonic construction of an exclusive birthing experience. The second edition of the book advocates a middle-class, heterosexual, white concept of birth. Much of this construction is echoed in the third edition; however, signiicant changes are also apparent. Certainly the most potent ideological construction evident in the second edition is that of the middle-class, heterosexual family context.24 References to participants in the child bearing and rearing processes are invariably “your husband” and “the father,” with frequent allusions to the idea that work, for the pregnant woman, is optional. Very little use of the gender-neutral terms partner or spouse is made, and no reference is made to a male partner out of wedlock. Adrienne Rich acknowledges the mandatory presence of a husband/father in her discussion of the determining factors of the institution of motherhood: “Motherhood is admirable … only so long as mother and child are attached to a legal father: Motherhood out of wedlock, or under the welfare system, or lesbian motherhood, are harassed, humiliated, or neglected.”25 In the case of the second edition of What to Expect, motherhood outside the normative middle-class, heterosexual, married framework is simply neglected. The third edition attempts inclusivity, however, with the terms “husband” and “father” replaced with gender-neutral and non-matrimonial terms such as “coach” and

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“partner.” Sections on how the coach can help the mother through the birthing process even go so far as to acknowledge the possibility of a nonmale, non-married birth partner: “But don’t tell her you know how it feels (you don’t, if you haven’t gone through labor yourself).”26 Acknowledging that not all women give birth with married male partners breaks through previous adherence to white, middle-class, and heterosexual dominance. Acknowledgment of non-mainstream ideas about the act of birthing is also noticeable in the third edition, if only very slightly. The second edition manages to Other its Chinese readers in a section on how to relieve the pressure of back labour: “Acupressure: This is probably the oldest form of pain relief – and you don’t have to be Chinese to try it.”27 The third edition shows signiicant improvement in its similar section, which states, “Acupressure. This treatment, which has its roots in ancient Chinese medicine, is probably the oldest form of pain relief.”28 A subtle change in sentence construction acknowledges the roots of acupressure without implying that “normal” people ind the idea foreign. African-American readers are also othered by the structure of the book, most notably in the chart depicting the Apgar score given to babies at one and ive minutes after birth. In both editions, the chart depicts the various aspects of the Apgar score, noting the factors determining the appearance of babies’ skin according to whiteness-related criteria. A footnote in very small lettering is included at the bottom of the chart in both editions: “In non-Caucasian children, the color of mucous membranes of the mouth, of the whites of the eyes, and of the lips, palms, hands, and soles of feet will be examined.”29 Rather than including skin differences in the chart itself, non-white babies are footnoted. While it is doubtful that these authors intended to perpetuate racialized categorizations, their treatment nonetheless continues this problematic aspect of mainstream advice manuals’ constructions of normalcy. Such constructions tend to exclude any ideas about birth that stray from hospital-directed, medically-determined practices of birthing, particularly in the second edition of the book. The entire birthing chapter in the second edition references birth that takes place in the hospital, under the direction of a medical doctor. While the book acknowledges that it is possible that have a midwife attend the birth, in its early chapter on the type of practitioner one can choose, the bulk of the section describing birth centre-based practices identiies all the possible reasons why a choosing a birth centre and/or midwife would inevitably end up in a hospital delivery by an unfamiliar obstetrician. In addition, any and all references to a practitioner in the birthing chapter are to a doctor. The

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second edition, in short, advocates against midwife care and out-ofhospital deliveries simply by leaving them out of the book. The third edition demonstrates acceptance of midwifery and out-ofhospital birth, albeit as secondary options to hospital-driven care. The section on “Birthing Alternatives” in the early chapters of the book is signiicantly expanded, referring to numerous care options including birthing centres, home births, and midwives. While medically-managed hospital births are still the default in terms of language used to discuss birth, the third edition normalizes the birth plan as an active communication tool between the expectant mother and her practitioner(s). The third edition also refers to the usefulness of doulas,30 according them agency and identifying the importance of their role as advocates. For example, the third edition suggests, “if a doula is present, she can continue to help out, concentrating on the more practical aspects of postdelivery care.”31 Reference to the helpfulness of doulas, the usefulness of birth plans in communicating the mother’s needs to her practitioner, and alternating references to doctors and midwives indicates that the authors and/or editors of the third edition of What to Expect recognize developments in the de-medicalization of child birthing in North America. Unfortunately, most of the references to doulas are analogous with the removal of agency from the birthing mother. Indeed, perhaps the most problematic aspect of the structure of What to Expect When You’re Expecting is its use of passive language, implying that the active agents in the birthing process are professionals in whose care mothers place themselves. For example, in the third edition the doula is most often cast as the woman to whom the birthing mother surrenders her agency, despite the fact that the doula’s mandate is to enable the mother’s agency. On the subject of administering IV luids, the edition suggests: Though you can’t always make the decision about whether or not you should have an IV, you do have a right to know what the IV is infusing into your veins. Ask the nurse or doctor who inserts it. Or have your labor partner read the label on the bottle. Occasionally medication may be ordered without your being consulted. If this happens, ask to speak to your practitioner as soon as possible. Better still, have your coach or doula do the talking for you.32 In effect then, the book is depicting the labouring woman as a helpless, voiceless, inert being who is at the mercy of doctors, nurses, coaches, and doulas. By positioning decision making as a possibility rather than a right,

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this discourse removes agency from the mother’s birthing experience, affording dominion over the entire event to the practitioner in charge. Passivity is far more prevalent in the second edition than the third; however, it still dominates the advice and analysis offered in the later version of the book. In the second edition, this lack of empowerment is readily apparent in the book’s narrative voice. When describing aspects of pregnancy and birth that the authors feel are relevant, the narration is from an active second person perspective. However, when the book is describing medical procedures it reverts to the passive voice, implying that interventions will occur regardless of how the birthing mother feels. For example, in the section describing the “pushing and delivery,” the authors describe various procedures that may be performed by hospital personnel with no reference to decision making or consent on the part of the labouring mother. This section uses language such as “this will be done” and “forceps may be used.”33 The language is similarly passive when medical procedures are described: “Your membranes may be artiicially ruptured” and “an IV may be started.”34 Rather than phrasing these procedures as choices the woman will face upon arrival at the hospital, they are passively phrased as things that might happen to the woman. This language denies the agency of the woman in determining what happens to her body throughout the process of delivering her baby, which illustrates what Marshall and Woollett identify as the pregnant body being universalized and the pregnant woman being cast in a passive, protective role.35 The passive woman is discursively separated from her active body. Inluenced, no doubt, by the growing feminist critique of Western medical hegemony and the abundance of pro-active and empowering birthing manuals that are more prominent as the twenty-irst century advances,36 the third edition of What to Expect When You’re Expecting uses more active language in its portrayal of women’s birthing experiences. Some of the passive language from the second edition is removed. For example, in the section describing arrival at the hospital or birthing centre, one of the bullet points states that “depending on the policies of your practitioner and hospital, and hopefully your preferences, an IV may be started.”37 The second edition uses the word “possibly” instead of hopefully, implying that there’s only a chance that the woman’s wishes will be taken into account, whereas the third edition implies that her preferences ought to be sought. Other examples of active language in the third edition include persistent references to “what you may feel or notice,” as compared to the second edition’s “what you may be feeling or

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noticing” in the descriptions of the progressive steps of labour. Finally, the third edition favours membranes rupturing themselves unlike, as we saw above, someone else rupturing them: “Your membranes may rupture (or be ruptured) during this phase, if they haven’t earlier.”38 Despite these assertions of women’s active participation in the birthing process, the third edition, by and large, is still heavily dependent on the passive voice, using language that strongly discourages any active involvement on the part of the mother. In the “Labor Induction” section of the book we see a particularly disempowering discussion of procedure. The section begins with a subtitular quotation, “My doctor wants to induce labor. I’m upset because I had wanted a natural delivery.” The tone of this quotation already implies that the woman has surrendered her agency to her doctor, which is only emphasized by the use of the phrase “had wanted.” She doesn’t want a “natural” delivery anymore; she used to want one until her doctor set her straight. The section goes on to place the agency in the hands of “nature”: “There are a variety of medical situations in which it is probably wise – or even necessary – to deliver a baby before nature appears ready, willing, and able to do so.”39 The mother doesn’t deliver the baby in this instance; “nature” does. Again, we see the separation of the mother from what her body does, constructing the mother as a passive observer and thus denying her presence in the labour and delivery process. The use of the passive voice, and the consistent portrayal of women as passive observers always in deference to their practitioner’s wishes, is more or less consistent between the second and third editions of What to Expect When You’re Expecting. The disciplinary power of the medical hegemony is active and, indeed, relied upon in this book. The authors, in their quest to inform women of the trials and tribulations of pregnancy and childbirth, promote the submission of their readers to medical domination. Beyond the linguistic structure of the birthing chapter of this manual, the broader structure of the book also fosters fear. This is, again, an area in which the third edition differs minimally from the second. While purporting to comfort and reassure readers by informing them of all the possibilities in childbirth, the labour and delivery section of the book is structured in such as way as to normalize intervention. The only visible difference from second edition to third is the more frequent use of the word “concerns” to replace “fears.” The most obvious occurrence of this fear-mongering effect is in the fact that the irst discussions to appear in the chapter are of all the things that could go wrong in labour and delivery. While other popular pregnancy manuals begin their birth section by

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describing what most often happens in labour and delivery,40 this one begins by addressing “What You May Be Concerned About,” including problems with the mucous plug, meconium-stained membranes, and inadequate amniotic luid.41 Moreover, each section that describes a potential problem often ends in a description of the most horrifying thing that could happen without explaining how it works or any possible resolutions. For example, in the irst section of the labour and delivery chapter, a description of the mucous plug and its activity ends with the statement, “If your discharge should suddenly become bright red, especially if it seems to amount to more than an ounce (about 2 tablespoons), contact your practitioner immediately. Actual bleeding could indicate premature separation of the placenta (see page 516) or placenta previa (see page 505) both of which require prompt medical attention.”42 Similarly, the next section, which discusses “rupture of membranes,” ends with the panicky situation of prolapsed umbilical cords. This pattern of describing a moment that occurs during labour and then ending the section with a description of the most terrible thing that could happen and an urgent plea to call the doctor sets a tone of fear for the reader rather than explaining the problem in detail and suggesting how the problem might be resolved in consultation with a practitioner. Informing the reader more fully of the nature of each problem and identifying possible solutions, while still advocating a call to the practitioner, would serve to empower the woman, rather than frighten her into submission. The absence of agency, be it in the form of linguistic passivity or fearinducing lack of information, is compounded by the persuasive nature of the authors’ discourse. Most commonly, the authors neglect the notion of choice relative to any particular procedure or intervention, suggesting that women are more inclined to choose what the doctor wants anyway. For example, after suggesting that physicians will induce labour if it has not begun on its own within twenty-four hours of the membranes rupturing, the book suggests that “many women who have experienced a rupture actually welcome a sooner-than-later induction, preferring it to twenty-four hours of wet waiting.”43 This is a classic example of DavisFloyd’s theory about cultural processes replacing natural ones. Here, the process of starting labour is constructed as messy and too long, whereas the possibility of induction removes the inconvenience. What this section fails to mention is that induction often results in especially painful labour and what is known as the “cascade of interventions” that women often do not ind manageable.44 Two pages later, What to Expect discusses induction in terms of how it works and how the pregnant body reacts.

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Here, the authors explain contractions in detail, mentioning that labour might be shortened as a result of induction but leaving out the fact that it is intensiied by the heightened level of oxytocin in the body. Signiicantly, the agents in this description are the uterus and the contractions, not the labouring woman. The description of the feeling of induced labour is limited to an invocation of possible unpleasantness: “Some women ind the sudden onset of hard labor that sometimes occurs with induction unpleasant; some even feel cheated by the artiicially shortened duration of their laboring experience. Others are relieved by such a down-to-business birth.”45 The idea of induction is planted in an earlier section of the chapter; then the actual description and explanation of the process neglects to mention any speciic negative side effects. All the while, none of the effects of the experience have been directly attributed to the woman herself; rather, the individual parts of her body are having the experience. Perhaps the most telling aspect in the discussion of induction in this book is in its introduction, which constructs the occurrence of labour initiating itself without the interference of medical technology as uncommon. After stating that sometimes babies need to come out before their mother’s body wants them to, the authors go on to say, “In some cases, a cesarean section is the best way to accomplish this. In other cases, when there’s no immediate risk to baby (due to distress for instance), both baby and mother are deemed able to tolerate labor, and the practitioner has reason to believe that a vaginal delivery is possible, induction is usually the irst choice.”46 By structuring the introduction of the concept in this way, the authors manage to Other vaginal delivery on the third page of forty-three-page chapter that has yet to describe what vaginal delivery is. In their deconstruction of the regulative role of pregnancy texts in Britain, Marshall and Woollett label this misconstrual of choice: “The potentially problematic nature of pregnancy and the repertoire of the pregnant body as risk and pathology are used to advocate medical testing and intervention.”47 The authors of What to Expect effect this concept by structuring their book in such a way as to favour medical intervention over biologically-instigated vaginal birth.48 Allegiance to hegemonic understandings of medicalized of childbirth is prominent in What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Despite reduction in the heterosexist, marriage-focused, and class-based ideas that inform the authors’ understanding of motherhood across editions, the third edition of “America’s bestselling pregnancy manual” continues along the path of its historic predecessors, promoting the subordination

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of women to contemporary hegemonic ideals of their physical behaviour. Examinations in the evolution of the institution of motherhood show a contemporary ideology informed by a state-sponsored medical system that relieves women of agency in birthing via discourses of risk and technological persuasion and the absence of thorough information. What to Expect When You’re Expecting adheres to this ideology by promoting passivity and submission of its readers to medical control without question and by its suggestive structure, which features medical intervention over mother-driven and practitioner-assisted vaginal birth. Despite innovative successes of obstetrical practice in mortality reduction, the disempowering of pregnant and labouring mothers by the denial of choice and the discursive separation of woman from her body will not lead to easier and more satisfying birthing outcomes. We must strive to articulate and disseminate an equally long list of things one can choose to do to accompany what Seth Rogen deemed the “giant list of things you can’t do” that is What to Expect When You’re Expecting.

NOTES

The author would like to thank the various readers who have offered their ideas on this chapter. 1 Knocked Up, directed by Judd Apatow (Santa Monica, CA: Universal Pictures, 2007). 2 Murkoff, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, 3rd edition, back cover. 3 Rich, Of Woman Born. Adrienne Rich was the irst to identify a difference between the institution of Motherhood and mothering as an individual act. She deliberately uses the uppercase to refer to Motherhood, the institution. 4 A fourth edition of the manual was published in 2008, after this chapter was written. Future research should certainly examine the various editions and changes in language and attitudes. 5 See, for example, Dodd and Gorham, eds., Caring and Curing: Historical Perspectives on Women and Healing in Canada. 6 Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” 13. 7 For a similar perspective on American child rearing advice, see Ehrenreich and English, For Her Own Good – 150 Years of Experts’ Advice to Women. 8 Arnup, Education for Motherhood, 5. 9 Ibid., 42. 10 Arnup, “Raising the Dionne Quintuplets.”

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Spock, The Pocket Book of Baby and Child Care. Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, x. See, for example, Gleason, Normalizing the Ideal and Gölz, “Family Matters.” See also M. Sbisà, “The Feminine Subject and Female Body in Discourse about Childbirth,” The European Journal of Women’s Studies 3, no. 4 (1996): 363–76; C.H. Browner and Nancy Press, “The Production of Authoritative Knowledge in American Prenatal Care,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 10, no. 2 (1996): 141–56; A. Hewison, “The Language of Labour: An Examination of the Discourses of Childbirth,” Midwifery 9 (1993): 225–34; Ann Oakley, Essays on Women, Medicine and Health (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1993); Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (Boston: Beacon, 1987); Barbara Katz Rothman, Recreating Motherhood: Ideology and Technology in a Patriarchal Society (New York: Norton, 1989). Davis-Floyd, “The Technocratic Body,” 3. Davis-Floyd uses the example of salmon to explain this theory, derived from Peter C. Reynolds (Stealing the Fire: The Mythology of Technology, 1991), which explains that damming a stream stops salmon from being able to spawn, so scientiic technology is brought in to allow salmon to spawn artiicially, rather than removing the dam. Davis-Floyd, “The Technocratic Body,” 21. Marshall and Woollett, “Fit to Reproduce?,” 354. Ibid., 357. In P. Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader, 140. Lupton, “Foucault and the Medicalisation Critique,” 96. Ibid., 97. Marshall and Woollett, “Fit to Reproduce?,” 355, 356, 369. The third edition also shows an awareness of social stratiication among women; however, it is still aimed at middle-class readers. Rich, Of Woman Born, 196. Murkoff, Eisenberg, and Hathaway, What to Expect, 3rd ed., 365. Murkoff, Eisenberg, and Hathaway, What to Expect, 2nd ed., 276. Murkoff, Eisenberg, and Hathaway, What to Expect, 3rd ed., 343. Murkoff, Eisenberg, and Hathaway, What to Expect, 2nd ed., 287; 3rd ed., 356. Notably, the accessibility of doulas is class-based, inasmuch as they are costly. Murkoff, Eisenberg, and Hathaway, What to Expect, 3rd ed., 376. Ibid., 347. Murkoff, Eisenberg, and Hathaway, What to Expect, 2nd ed., 304.

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34 Ibid., 295. 35 Marshall and Woollett, “Fit to Reproduce?,” 356. 36 See, for example, Kitzinger, The Complete Book of Pregnancy and Childbirth; Simkin et al., Pregnancy, Childbirth and the Newborn; and Gaskin, Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth. For instance, these manuals begin by describing the normal physiology of birthing and deal with possible deviations and problems later on so as to educate mothers without alarming them. In addition, Kitzinger, Simkin, and Gaskin focus on the decisions that parents can make with medical advice, rather than decisions that will be made for parents by practitioners 37 Murkoff, Eisenberg, and Hathaway, What to Expect, 3rd ed. 363. Emphasis added. 38 Ibid., 364. 39 Ibid., 339. 40 Kitzinger, The Complete Book, 248; Odes and Morris, From the Hips, 118. 41 Murkoff, Eisenberg, and Hathaway, What to Expect, 3rd ed. 337–9. 42 Ibid., 338. 43 Ibid. 44 Kitzinger, The Complete Book, 334–9. 45 Murkoff, Eisenberg, and Hathaway, What to Expect, 3rd ed., 341. 46 Ibid., 339. 47 Marshall and Woollett, “Fit to Reproduce?,” 361. 48 Browner and Press identify this as the differentiation between authoritative knowledge and embodied knowledge, much the way Marshall and Woollett discuss the ideological separation of woman from her body. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arnup, Katharine. Education for Motherhood: Advice for Mothers in Twentieth-Century Canada. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1994. – “Raising the Dionne Quintuplets: Lessons for Modern Mothers.” Journal of Canadian Studies 29, no. 4 (Winter 1994/95): 65–85. Browner, C.H., and Nancy Press. “The Production of Authoritative Knowledge in American Prenatal Care.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 10, no. 2 (1996): 141–56. Davin, Anna. “Imperialism and Motherhood.” In Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, edited by Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, 87–150. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Davis-Floyd, Robbie. “The Technocratic Body: American Childbirth as Cultural Expression.” Social Science & Medicine 38, no. 8 (1994): 1125–40.

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Dodd, Diane, and Deborah Gorham, eds. Caring and Curing: Historical Perspectives on Women and Healing in Canada. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1994. Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. For Her Own Good – 150 Years of Experts’ Advice to Women. New York: Doubleday/Anchor Books, 1978. Gaskin, Ina-May. Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth. New York: Bantam, 2003. Gleason, Mona. Normalizing the Ideal: Psychology, Schooling, and the Family in Postwar Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Gölz, Annalee. “Family Matters: The Canadian Family and the State in the Postwar Period.” Left History 1, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 9–50. Hays, Sharon. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Hewison, A. “The Language of Labour: An Examination of the Discourses of Childbirth.” Midwifery 9 (1993): 225–34. Kitzinger, Sheila. The Complete Book of Pregnancy and Childbirth. New York: Knopf, 2005. Lupton, Deborah. “Foucault and the Medicalisation Critique.” In Foucault, Health and Medicine, edited by Robin Bunton and Alan Petersen, 94–112. New York: Routledge, 1997. Marshall, Harriet, and A. Woollett. “Fit to Reproduce? The Regulative Role of Pregnancy Texts.” Feminism and Psychology 10, no. 3 (2000): 351–66. Martin, Emily. The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. Boston: Beacon, 1987. Murkoff, Heidi, Arlene Eisenberg, and Sandee Hathaway. What to Expect When You’re Expecting. 2nd ed. New York: Workman, 1991. – What to Expect When You’re Expecting. 3rd ed. New York: Workman, 2002. Oakley, Ann. Essays on Women, Medicine and Health. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993. Odes, Rebecca, and Ceridwen Morris. From the Hips: A Comprehensive, Open-Minded, Uncensored, Totally Honest Guide to Pregnancy, Birth, and Becoming a Parent. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007. Rabinow, P., ed. The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton, 1976. Rothman, Barbara K. Recreating Motherhood: Ideology and Technology in a Patriarchal Society. New York: Norton, 1989. Sbisa, M. “The Feminine Subject and Female Body in Discourse about Childbirth.” The European Journal of Women’s Studies 3, no. 4 (1996): 363–76.

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Simkin, Penny, Janet Whalley, Ann Keppler, Janelle Durham, and April Bolding. Pregnancy, Chidlbirth and the Newborn: The Complete Guide. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001. Spock, Benjamin. The Pocket Book of Baby and Child Care. New York: Pocket Books, 1946.

17 MOTHERHOOD , PRIME - TIME TV, AND GREY ’S ANATOMY

Latham Hunter

I came across the television drama Grey’s Anatomy at a particularly fraught time in my life, shortly after I defended my PhD thesis and gave birth to my irst child in the same week. My earnest, rigorous pursuit of academic professionalization came to a jarring halt and I found myself sitting and breastfeeding my ravenous son for substantial swaths of my heretofore highly productive days. I borrowed my aunt’s DVD of Grey’s Anatomy’s irst season as a diversion but, predictably enough, I began using the series to decipher my new reality – my sudden location between motherhood and professionhood. Ultimately, I found that Grey’s Anatomy’s irst three seasons offered me a new model for understanding and politicizing motherhood and reproduction by continually pushing mothers, pregnancy, and “mothering” into professional, public, and maledominated spheres. These kinds of complex dislocations were largely absent from television prior to the 2005 arrival of Grey’s Anatomy, when it debuted as a mid-season replacement. Mainstream American TV has not been kind to mothers. After the supposed gains made by shows such as One Day at a Time (1975–84), Cagney & Lacey (1982–88), Murphy Brown (1988–98), Sisters (1991– 96), and Roseanne (1988–97),1 mothers have almost disappeared from the televisual landscape. From 1990 to 2006 in no fewer than forty-nine series on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and the WB alone, mothers were killed, divorced, sent to an insane asylum or jail, or vaguely written off as negligent in shows featuring single fathers in the lead role.2 Most of these single dad shows didn’t last more than a season; yet, year after year, new ones surfaced across the major networks, as if the creative forces behind television production were bound by some strange obsession to see single

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fathers succeed with TV audiences, thereby eliminating mothers from the broader script altogether. The actor Robert Urich was cast as a widower with kids in three different shows by each of the three major networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) from 1990 to 1993, as if each was certain that the concept must work, no matter how many times it had failed before (with Urich and with other relatively recognizable actors like Richard Lewis, Tony Danza, Dudley Moore, Dan Aykroyd, Gregory Hines, Sinbad, Tom Arnold, Bob Saget, Gabriel Byrne, and Richard Dreyfuss). In 1999, a glimpse of progress appeared in the form of three new series that not only kept mothers in the picture, but also featured multiple mothers: Once and Again (1999–2002), Judging Amy (1999–2005), and Providence (1999–2002) were all well-received, lasting for three, six, six, and ive seasons, respectively. Gilmore Girls (2000–07), which featured two mother-daughter relationships, premiered a year later in 2000 and lasted seven seasons.3 Even more encouraging was the fact that so many of the mothers on these shows were working mothers and thus existed in both the private sphere and public sphere alongside men. However, there was a simultaneous growth of shows that, while including mothers and/or wives in the cast, constructed a representation of the American family that privileged masculinity as the head of the family, as evidenced in the titles alone.4 Two of these shows – Everybody Loves Raymond (1996–2005) and Frasier (1993–2004) – became veritable institutions, and King of the Hill is currently in its twelfth season. The most popular shows of the late 1990s and early 2000s featuring women all treated motherhood as a kind beatiic end point for the characters, rather than a subject deserving of ongoing attention and development. Both Ally from Ally McBeal (1997–2002) and Rachel from Friends (1994–2004) chose the well-being of their respective children over the advancement of their careers by the series’ end; Ally leaves her job and moves for the sake of her daughter, while Rachel decides to stay with her child’s father rather than move away for a signiicant career promotion. Moreover, the Friends inale celebrated the achievement of Monica’s lifelong dream – she and Chandler adopt twins – and showed Phoebe, looking longingly at the babies, wistfully tell her new husband, “I want one.” In the Sex and the City (1998–2004) inale, two of the four female leads end up married with babies by the last episode, the other two having inally secured their respective Mr Rights. This kind of inevitable gravitation towards motherhood as the prime directive is in keeping with what Bonnie Dow argues in her deinitive book, Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the Women’s Movement since 1970, regarding earlier shows

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such as Murphy Brown and Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman; Dow writes that popular culture has constructed a “woman = mother” equation.5 Ultimately, the recent history of American television has offered slight progress in its representation of mothers in a few shows, but overall, has remained mired in the tendency to write mothers out of the picture, or else reduce them to an essentialized, nurturing entity that eclipses any kind of identity apart from The Mother. Dow discusses these two trends at length, concluding that the former undervalues motherhood, while the latter is a “romanticization of motherhood” that “serves a profoundly patriarchal purpose: It encourages women to become so invested in mothering that they fail to question the oppressive social and economic arrangements that traditional ideals of mothering uphold.”6 In observing the television landscape in the twenty-irst century, I ind that Dow’s 1996 observations are more accurate than ever, with one signiicant exception. Grey’s Anatomy represents an undeniable leap forward in the televisual representation of motherhood. Through each of its irst three seasons Grey’s Anatomy demonstrates its absolute commitment to telling stories about motherhood and the pregnant body in both the medical and personal senses. Its action is set in motion through a fairly familiar trope. In Redesigning Women: Television After the Network Era, Amanda Lotz identiies this trope as “returning home and starting over” and examines the way women protagonists tend to come back to the family home/town as adults.7 This was the case in Any Day Now (1998–2002), Providence, and Judging Amy. Ally McBeal’s decision to join the law ofice of Fish and Cage could also be seen as a kind of retreat towards home or childhood; she lees sexual harassment at one irm by going to the irm where her childhood sweetheart works. Gilmore Girls also begins with a similar starting point, when Lorelai begins to make weekly visits to her family home and reconnects with her parents (particularly her mother, whose presence in the series grows season by season) after ifteen years of estrangement. This is a problematic trend in that the shows suggest that the female protagonist is only of interest, or worthy of narrative attention, once reinstated in the domestic sphere where she will take up a dual infantilization and maternalization. Sidney from Providence, for example, “mothers” her family while constantly being fussed over by her own mother from beyond the grave. It might seem as if Grey’s Anatomy follows the same pattern, but it is in fact a disruption of it. Meredith Grey returns home after medical school to her mother’s house in Seattle, the house where she grew up, and lives there by herself. The family home is there, but also not there: it

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is a transitory place, tentatively and unevenly packed up as Meredith intends to sell it. Her mother, too, is there but not there; suffering from Alzheimer’s, she is at a nursing home, only rarely recognizing her daughter and never in any really cognisant, present sense. The series begins, therefore, by dislocating the mother from the family home, from the daughter, and even from her own identity as a mother. Meredith copes by keeping the house, but shifting its familial identity; she invites two of her fellow surgical residents to live with her. They spend their irst evening together watching tapes of Meredith’s mother performing famous groundbreaking surgeries. It is a fascinating image: Meredith and her co-workers in her familial home merrily watching the mother doubly abstracted from Meredith’s life, physically and mentally, but who is still offering a kind of generalized guidance through her professional legacy. Early on, through images like this one, the show signals its intent to map a contentious, complicated terrain of motherhood unlike those we’ve travelled though the likes of Providence and Gilmore Girls. Even before Addison Shepherd, an obstetrical surgeon, joined the cast of characters in the second season, there were several pregnancy plot lines in the irst season despite the fact that it was only nine episodes long. In one, a pregnant woman discovers she has breast cancer and must decide between her life or her child’s.8 In another, a pregnant woman’s husband discovers that he has an ovary, and therefore couldn’t have fathered his wife’s baby. These two stories coincide with Meredith’s best friend Cristina’s discovery that she is pregnant, her attempts to deal with this reality, and her decision to schedule an abortion.9 There is a precariousness attached to the pregnant body in these episodes; each of the three unborn children pose a threat to the mother. The irst will likely kill the mother; the second will reveal her inidelity and potentially end her marriage; and the third will almost certainly derail the mother’s intense career plans. This precariousness is ampliied by two other plot lines in the irst season – that of the “blue baby” that would have died if not for Meredith being in the right place at the right time10 and the toddler who needs half her brain removed.11 Now, given that Grey’s Anatomy is a medical drama and is largely set in a hospital, one might expect stories of precarious health and its effect on personal relationships. But because these stories take place alongside Meredith’s struggle to deal with her mother, and Cristina’s struggle to deal with her pregnancy, I ind that the two sides – the professionals and the patients – throw each other into relief and highlight their concomitant efforts to come to grips with a kind of generalized heartbreak associated with pregnancy and mothering.

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Certainly, the number of pregnant bodies at risk only grows through the second and third seasons. Cristina’s pregnancy results in a burst fallopian tube, a miscarriage, and an emergency surgery.12 A preemie baby must undergo surgery after her addict mother abandons her.13 One girl falls into a coma after being shot; she is pregnant, and her parents must decide whether to let the baby live or take their daughter off life support.14 In a particularly memorable episode, another of Meredith’s co-workers, Alex, uncovers the body of a pregnant woman at a ferry crash.15 Her face has been crushed and she is unrecognizable. Moreover, she has lost her memory and has no idea who she is. Her identity rests in two things: her spectacular injuries, and her advanced pregnancy, thereby joining these two elements to further the sense of risk and vulnerability connected to the pregnant body. I think it is signiicant to my thesis that the two most elaborate surgeries done in the irst three seasons (i.e., the surgeries featuring the entire cast of surgeons working on one case) both involved pregnant bodies: the delivery of quintuplet girls and the attempt to save a pregnant car crash victim.16 In the former case, the quints are delivered successfully but then face a host of preemie health problems that devastate the mother. In the latter, a baby girl is salvaged from a pregnant body that is wrecked by “catastrophic” injuries that shock the surgeons and force them to simply leave it, cut open and covered in plastic, in the hopes that it will somehow revive enough to handle more surgery. The baby is delivered, but the mother dies not long after. The sheer magnitude of both these surgeries lend them an emotional urgency that is never really resolved: the quints ight an uphill battle, and the daughter of the car crash victim, while healthy, is without her mother. The images of so many surgeons bent over mother(s) and child(ren), working urgently to save as many lives as possible, further communicates an acute precariousness. Metaphorically, the pregnant body cut open and laid bare (and in the case of the car crash victim, left cut open and laid bare under transparent plastic) illustrates a bloody physical vulnerability that isn’t often accorded to pregnancy and delivery in television shows. Grey’s Anatomy revisits this perspective repeatedly, depicting surgeries on babies in utero,17 and further constructing the pregnant body as one habitually invaded and laid bare. I am reminded in particular of an episode featuring a woman with two uteruses; she is pregnant with a baby in each, and it soon comes to light that they have different fathers.18 To complicate things ever further, the babies have different due dates, and to deliver them both at the same time would kill one of them. Once

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again, the pregnant body becomes a locus for anxiety about physical survival and identity. To whom do these two daughters belong? Where do the mother’s loyalties lie? Will one be sacriiced for the other? Will the father remain connected to these children and their mother? Certainly and at the very least, the double uteri reinforce the notion of the pregnant body as a medical case requiring serious surgical intervention where, once again, the belly must be split open to resolve the pending catastrophes inside. This notion of the catastrophic belly is made even more graphic in the episode when Miranda Bailey, Meredith’s resident advisor, gives birth.19 As she labours in one part of the hospital, her husband is being operated on in another part, where there is also an unexploded bomb in the belly of a third patient. Meredith ends up holding the bomb while it is still lodged in the man’s abdomen; it’s a long, nerve-wracking ordeal that only becomes more so, moving in emotional lock-step with Miranda’s increasingly dificult and heart-wrenching labour. The episode reaches its dramatic climax by intercutting shots of the slippery, bloody bomb being pulled from the patient’s belly with shots of Miranda inally pushing her baby’s slippery, bloody body from her uterus, with a third set of shots of Miranda’s husband latlining on the surgical table and then being brought back to life. This is not a delicate metaphoric statement. This is a very obvious patchwork of images that links the pregnant body to an extreme form of risk in the shape of the bomb and under the spectre of death. At irst glance it might seem as though all these perilous pregnancies relect a kind of patriarchal fearmongering that constructs pregnancy as a dangerous state requiring intervention and monitoring on the part of a male-dominated profession. I would suggest, however, that something else is going on. If, as Dow so convincingly argues, women on TV have typically been equated with a motherhood that is natural, and inevitable, then Grey’s Anatomy poses a direct challenge to television’s normative, essentializing treatment of motherhood. It creates scenarios where the genesis of motherhood – pregnancy – is an often debilitating, risky venture that is unlinchingly physical. Gory, even. Pregnancy ceases to be a mythic teleological predictor of motherhood as a conversion to total fulilment and becomes a physical condition, and an often tricky one at that. I am reminded in particular of Miranda as she tells the chief of surgery that she is pregnant, and testily recounts all the physical sideeffects she’s suffering. She also genders her suffering by placing herself at odds with the masculine: “I’m pregnant, you blind moron. My heart rate

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is 110. I’m burning 3,000 calories a day; my legs are swollen; I’ve got indigestion and gas. Did you know that carrying a boy in your uterus means that you burn 10 per cent more calories than if you’re having a girl? Guess what I’m carrying? I tried for seven damn years and a month before my fellowship notiications the stick turns blue. MEN. From the very beginning they just suck the life right out of you. I’m not leaving. I’m pregnant.”20 This is not to say that the show removes any sense of maternal “glow.” There are many instances in which the arrival of a baby is treated with great tenderness, such as the safe arrival of Miranda’s baby. But an emphasis on the physicality of pregnancy – the anatomical dimensions, circumstances and consequences of reproduction – is one of the ways the show unsettles the ideological construction of women’s logical, natural connection to motherhood as exempliied by series like Dr Quinn, Murphy Brown, Ally McBeal, and Once and Again. However, this unsettling of the naturalness of the connection between women and reproduction does not result in a privileging of the ideological notion that reproduction should be monitored and guided by the historically male-dominated medical profession. In other words, Grey’s Anatomy refuses to cede any reproductive territory to the masculine. It goes to parodic, even grotesque, lengths to establish a kind of ludicrous association between masculinity and the pregnant body. The second season of the show featured three men needing surgery because their bodies and/or selves mimic a kind of pseudo pregnancy. The irst swallows ten “Judy dolls” (Barbie doppelgangers) because, he tells Meredith, they help him feel less empty.21 Much is made of his x-ray – a belly full of faces – which several staff look at with varying degrees of surprise, humour, pity, and consternation. The bloody, shitty heads are removed by a disgusted Miranda, put in a bag marked clearly and boldly as “BIO HAZARD,” and tossed in the garbage. The second man actually seems to be pregnant, assuming the shape and symptoms of his pregnant wife, and even turning the proverbial stick blue.22 What is removed from his abdomen is a grotesque tumour that is disturbingly similar to a baby’s body. Yet another male patient is admitted for eating his novel; once cut out of his belly, it is a bloody and blackened lump.23 The author’s metaphoric appropriation of pregnancy to illustrate his creative process (giving birth to a novel) and his creative remorse (the novel is bad) is made palpably pathetic and laughable. And gross. In point of fact, there is no little degree of absurd grossness (or bio-toxicity) in each of these three cases, which suggests that while Grey’s Anatomy portrays a panoply of pregnancy’s mortal risks and physical burdens, it clearly deines those

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sufferings as unique to the pregnant female body. I detect a certain galvanization in this, as if the show is demanding that pregnancy and birth be recognized as more than a metaphor or fantasy, and that they be recognized as a female province unencroached upon by the masculine body. It is certainly itting that the show’s obstetrical surgeon is a woman, thereby creating a distinctly female authority in matters of pregnancy, birth, newborns, and gynaecology in general. But is this reclamatory or essentializing? The show reckons with this kind of question constantly, as it portrays varying degrees of maternal neglect, sacriice, and ambivalence, thus privileging the female experience of parenting (and acknowledging the widespread reality that women still do the lion(ess)’s share of parenting) but doing so in a way that reveals the cracks and issures in the dominant social beliefs about motherhood as uniquely nurturing, satisfying, and all-consuming. It presents us with a mother whose passivity has allowed her adult daughter’s giant tumour to go untreated24; a truly despicable mother whose critical harassment leads to her daughter’s back alley gastric bypass surgery in Mexico25; a premature baby girl left behind by her addict mother26; an exhausted Catholic mother of seven who pleads to be “accidentally” sterilized during her impending C-section27; a mother with a severe bleeding ulcer from the ravages of her chaotic family and bratty children28; and a baby girl abandoned in a trash can by its fourteenyear-old mother.29 In yet another episode, a new mother suffering from breast cancer is consumed by her resentment towards her baby (breastfeeding masked the cancer until late in the disease’s progress) and the concomitant guilt going along with this resentment.30 In the same episode, Miranda is suffering her own maternal resentment and guilt when a male peer suggests that new motherhood has addled her professional abilities. This is after previous episodes in which Miranda has struggled with inding an equilibrium between her professional and personal life, clumsily bringing her baby to work and indignantly feeling like she’s being “mommy tracked.”31 In the end, Richard, the chief of surgery, counsels her not to squelch the sensitivity and awareness her experiences as a mother have taught her. As a result, she quietly goes in to talk to the breast cancer patient, revealing that she is the only person to recognize why the patient resents her child because she, too, has blamed her baby for the trials of trying to ind that elusive equilibrium between mothering and professional work.32 Miranda’s empathy enables the patient to ind some solace and demonstrates how a productive balance between her professional and maternal capacities yields a situation in

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which she achieves excellence as a healer, not just a surgeon. Rather than cause Miranda inner turmoil, her decision to be both a mother and a surgeon feeds and expands her professional capabilities. The case of the working mother versus the stay-at-home mother is one of the most pervasive approaches to motherhood in the media today. Magazines, newspapers, and television news broadcasts have all shared in the debate over which role is more fulilling for women, and/or which is better for kids.33 Moms who “opt-out” of the working world are generally looked upon more positively thanks to our neoliberal atmosphere,34 but Grey’s Anatomy relects upon this debate with complexity and sensitivity. One episode is particularly relevant: a girl, Mia, is run over by her nanny, driving an outsized SUV that made the girl all but invisible.35 The nanny is distraught, and the parents ire her outright. But when Mia regains consciousness, she begs to see the nanny, thereby rejecting her mother’s attempts to comfort her. The mother has a “power career” in law, and confesses helplessly to Meredith, “I love my job. I love my daughter.” Meredith sees herself in Mia and says that people in demanding careers shouldn’t have kids. (Miranda is understandably offended by this comment). Of course, Meredith is responding to her own experience; in a previous episode, her mother Ellis rants that she “shouldn’t have had a kid,” and Meredith must watch her mother, gripped by Alzheimer’s, relive the panic and desolation of the moment when she learned that she would have to raise Meredith by herself.36 Upon hearing her mother’s revealing memory shift, Meredith gently tells Ellis that she did her best, and “that’s all anyone can do.” Meredith’s forgiveness works to extend the audience’s ability to imagine a more lexible acceptance of these conlicted mothers. The episode concludes with Miranda at work, singing to her baby boy over the phone, “Mama may have … Papa may have … but God bless the child’s got his own.” Coming, as it does, after a shot of Mia being comforted by both her nanny and her mother, I ind that this last scene calls for a new understanding of mothering as something that is nurturing but also that allows space for independence and growth of the mother as well as the child. This point is especially wellmade with regards to Meredith, who comes back into her parents’ lives, but ultimately must leave behind and forgive both their failings in order to create a life that is her own. Whatever kind of parents we’re dealt, we must all survive and learn to do on our own. And our parents must go on living their lives after we’re born and grown – must have their “own” too. The show presents us with a variety of mothers with professional aspirations who do their best. Cristina isn’t cavalier about her pregnancy,

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but she simply can’t see herself going through with it. Addison has also had an abortion; on what would have been the baby’s due date, she is sad about it, but not remorseful.37 Izzy, pregnant at the age of sixteen, believed that her daughter would be better off with adoptive parents, and yet she still misses her girl. Ellis and Miranda have children in the midst of their respective “power careers,” and both do their best, although they are torn and often tormented by their decision. The show is fairly sensitive and non-judgmental in its treatment of these different women and their different choices, and it is signiicant that they have all chosen to maintain professional lives. Perhaps the show’s stance is best summed up by Miranda, who responds thus to Cristina’s hesitant question about how Miranda decided to go ahead with having her (unplanned) baby: “You do what you can, when you can, why you can, and when you can’t, you can’t.”38 Dow offers a succinct summary of the “problematic assumptions of postfeminism”: “that patriarchy is over, that liberal feminist individualism can solve women’s problems, and that our ‘choices’ are what really determine our fates.”39 The issue of women’s choice, so regularly trumpeted in the media as a sign of feminism’s obsolescence, is treated with complexity; the women in Grey’s Anatomy do have choices, but they aren’t clear or easy, or without tough consequences. Quite regularly they contradict the pervasive televisual rule that for women characters “family comes irst.”40 Really, one wonders if any of these women feel that they live unfettered, choice-illed lives, which challenges any complacency or sense that we, as professional women, have achieved full equality. To place this critique in a representation of women – women who are excelling in a male-dominated profession – at the forefront of gender equality makes it a powerful statement indeed. One of the more acute depictions of the ongoing inequality perpetrated in an as-yet patriarchal society is Addison’s treatment of her patient, Rose, the Catholic woman pregnant with her seventh child who asks Addison on the quiet if her impending C-section could double as a sterilization.41 Addison sympathizes with the exhausted mother; Rose’s tubes are tied under the pretense of a “complication.” Alex, a male intern, suggests to the stunned husband that he consult a lawyer, and almost immediately Addison is faced with a malpractice suit. Rose, afraid of her husband’s reaction, refuses to tell the truth. In this episode, Addison and Rose’s needs (to be helped and to help in accordance with their own understandings of their capabilities and their limits) are mitigated and denied by patriarchal institutional structures (religion, medicine, and law) and personiications. Alex, the chauvinist male intern, derogates

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Rose. Rose’s husband refuses to acknowledge Rose’s needs. Richard, the chief of surgery, chastises Addison for getting into legal trouble. The women end up trapped on opposite sides of what should be the same purpose – to determine the experience(s) of motherhood and the treatment of mothers on their own. The above storyline dramatizes the dificulty in negotiating within a culture whose feminist inheritance struggles for growth in an as-yet stubbornly patriarchal power structure. The show’s many, many motherdaughter relationships illustrate this struggle to move beyond the second wave in a generational sense. All three of the female interns – Meredith, Cristina, and Izzy – have tenuous, conlicted relationships with their mothers. The latter has only been in contact with her mother once in the show thus far; we see her inally giving in and calling her mother at the end of an episode after compulsively trying to bake her way into a memory of cupcakes her mother made.42 Meredith sums things up succinctly as she escorts Cristina’s mother away from her sobbing daughter: “We don’t do well with mothers here.”43 Izzy’s mother is barely present for only a few seconds – just a silence at the other end of Izzy’s phone call. Meredith’s mother is a constant, stressful presence in her life. Cristina’s mother – a traditional upper-class wife who loves to decorate and wishes her daughter would get married – surfaces once to profoundly irritate her daughter. The mothers appear in varying degrees and in varying forms, but they are never easy to deal with. This is mirrored in some of the patients the interns treat. In addition to the harsh mother-daughter portrayals I’ve already mentioned in this essay, there is the case of a daughter, Nina, who obsessively keeps her mother Cathy alive with an indefatigable regimen of treatments, medications, and elaborate dollhouse-building projects.44 Cathy’s body is essentially frozen and atrophied; her muscles seem to have hardened and she can’t move her body. But as her condition worsens, her daughter Nina refuses to let her go. The massive dollhouse she steadfastly works on in Cathy’s hospital room is clearly a symbol of the domestic life Nina wants so badly – a perfect home with, presumably, a perfect family inside. When Cathy dies it is portrayed as a beneit not only to Cathy, who’s ready to die, but to Nina, who is now freed (although not willingly) from the frozen and atrophied life she lived as her mother’s constant nursemaid. This strikes me as similar to Meredith’s admission that when her mother was healthy, she had bad grades and was unable to hold down a job. In effect, she was a “bad ass” and “partying way too hard.”45 When Ellis falls ill, it draws Meredith back to her family home and forces her to look after her mother, yes, but the Ellis Meredith knew

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is effectively dead, and this frees Meredith from her previous role as rebellious, resentful daughter. Meredith is freed even further when her mother – after savagely and, even worse, lucidly berating her daughter for being merely “ordinary,” and thus failing her completely – dies.46 While frozen and unresponsive after a near-drowning, Meredith “visits” her mother who is also on the verge of death.47 In this space between life and death, portrayed as an empty hospital, Meredith achieves a more satisfying and inal break with her mother; Ellis tells Meredith that she’s “anything but ordinary” and tells her to “run.” Meredith comes back to life and is embraced by her best friend Cristina. These few minutes of television construct a very sophisticated illustration of feminist tensions in a so-called postfeminist world. When Meredith runs away from Ellis, back to a world where her mother no longer is, she is greeted irst by her friend, another woman the same age in the same profession with many of the same struggles. The show never demonizes Ellis, but nor does it endorse her very stern, rigorous, and isolated model of second wave professional achievement. Rather, it suggests that Meredith take what she’s been given by her mother, for better or worse, and move on independently to ind her own way with other women who ind themselves located in a territory that still doesn’t have a name. Is it postfeminism? Post as in “after” or as in “anti”? The third wave?48 I wonder if we might see Meredith as being delivered from her mother (a second time) and reborn to her new family – her friends at work. Perhaps the point is belaboured when Meredith’s new stepmother, a recent and gradually welcome addition to her life, dies under Meredith’s care. After her death, the show introduces us to Meredith’s second half-sister, the irst having been introduced previously. It is as if the mothers disappear while new female peers multiply, growing in solidarity as they witness each others’ experiences and offer support and critique. Meredith says it best herself, to Cristina, “You’re my sister. You’re my family. You’re all I’ve got.”49 This representation of postfeminist or third wave female solidarity redresses one of the greatest weaknesses that Lotz identiies in prime-time TV shows: “I had not realized the necessity of a community of female characters for telling many of these stories until I compared the series I have been writing about with many emerging after 2000.”50 I would not, however, say that Grey’s Anatomy has resorted to an essentialization of gender roles by arguing that only daughters can make improvements on the second wave. While the show insists on pregnancy as a distinctly female ofice, and on motherhood as something that is

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often constrained and determined by a still-patriarchal society, it refuses to circle its wagons around a distinctly female model of mothering. Alex, for example, seems naturally gifted at caring for infants and young people. George can quiet a baby instantly (“Babies just like me”)51 and acts as an advocate for two young patients when no one else will. George defends the rights of a toddler in surgery even though it means crossing a deeply entrenched professional line when he rightly accuses the anaesthetist of being drunk.52 In another episode, he treats a pre-teen hermaphrodite patient and defends her (she is primarily deined as a girl) right to know about her condition, despite the patient’s parents’ vehement desire to keep her in the dark.53 In contrast, Meredith, Izzie, and Cristina (who, along with George and Alex, make up the same group of residents) have much fewer, if any, profoundly sympathetic connections with young patients. Alex makes such connections with even more patients: a teenaged girl whose religious beliefs prohibit a surgery, a teenaged boy with an abusive father, a teenaged girl in a wheelchair who is living a sheltered life, and a foster girl immune to pain.54 These young patients are in addition to the many babies Alex treats with determination and an unmatched level of personal care.55 When Izzie treats a pregnant teen, she too keenly and personally connects with her patient in a way it seems no one else can, but in this case her understanding of her patient is ascribed to her own history as a pregnant teen,56 and she therefore lacks the kind of agency with kids en masse that is accorded to Alex and, to a lesser extent, George. Through Alex and George, Grey’s Anatomy challenges the ideological notion that women are “uniquely suited” for creating a nurturing public environment,57 and thereby opens up a space for men to share in a professional nurturing role. Richard, the chief of surgery and prototypical male surgeon (a workaholic who has neglected his family), recognizes his mistakes and attempts to remedy them by encouraging his surgeons and interns to nurture their personal relationships and by reconciling with his estranged wife. I wonder if we can conclude, then, that while Grey’s Anatomy goes to fair lengths to emphasize the pregnant body as a distinctly female body, it also frees social nurturing from a strictly feminized domain. Perhaps this is Grey’s Anatomy’s most progressive contribution to televisual representations of women in prime-time TV. Its focus on pregnancy and motherhood serves to politicize the gendered nature of reproduction – the risks and burdens taken on by women rather than men – by drawing it into a range of complex stories that locate pregnancy in both personal and social

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constructs. But more signiicant than that is its insistence that the essential qualities of child rearing – support and nurturing – be moved into the public sphere via both women and men. The inclusion of public life and men in its conception of “mothering” is a position that merits considerable attention in postfeminist and/or third wave appraisals of the representational progress achieved in contemporary prime-time television’s female characters. After Grey’s Anatomy’s third season its creator and executive producer, Shonda Rhimes, focused her attention on a new Grey’s Anatomy spinoff called Private Practice (Addison leaves to work as an ob-gyn in a California “boutique” ofice), and Grey’s Anatomy saw a marked decline in the kinds of stories and representations I’ve discussed here. Seasons four, ive, and six were preoccupied with the arrival of Meredith’s halfsister Lexie; George’s death; changes in Callie Torres’s sexual identity; a hospital merger; Izzie’s cancer diagnosis, marriage, and divorce; Richard’s relapse into alcoholism and Derek’s rise to chief of surgery; and an evermultiplying number of troubled romantic relationships (Lexie and Mark Sloane, Lexie and Alex, Alex and Rebecca-the-pregnant-amnesiac, Meredith and Derek, Derek and Rose-the-nurse, Cristina and Owen-thearmy-surgeon, Owen and Teddy-the-other-army-surgeon, Callie and Arizona-the-pediatric-surgeon, etc.). Certainly, there were storylines that implicated mothers, babies, and pregnant women, but they had very little of the acute exploration of the maternal as heritage, burden, tradition, catastrophe, blessing, patriarchal construct, and/or professional complication. In the irst episode of the fourth season, for example, when a single pregnant woman loses her arm in a car accident, her story is used primarily to demonstrate Mark and George’s heroic surgical talents, as Mark reattaches her arm while George delivers her baby. For almost three years I was left with the uneasy suspicion that the stories and representations of the irst three seasons that I had responded to so strongly (while I had my second and third children and struggled to maintain some kind of professional identity) rested largely on the presence of Addison and the complete creative attention of Shonda Rhimes, which would have been an indication of tenuous third-wave feminist progress indeed. However, if the early seasons often liberated the pregnant body from so many of its misconceptions and misappropriations, then the end of the sixth season marked a brief but welcome return to that type of representational growth. Three storylines resonated with me because they all seemed to express a frustrating lack of choice concerning not

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just motherhood, but parenting. In the irst, the hospital playboy Mark Sloane realizes that his sudden and overwhelming desire to be a father to his grandson has placed him in a helpless position; his daughter gives up her baby for adoption, despite Mark’s fervent wish. In the second, partners Callie and Arizona ind that they have starkly opposing positions on whether to have children or not – positions that threaten to end their relationship. And in the third, Meredith, married and newly pregnant, has a miscarriage at work while desperately trying to handle a violent emergency. These four characters seem to have broken through various barriers and arrived at a place where each can realistically consider the possibility of parenthood outside the traditional nuclear structure, be they single (slightly reformed) playboy, lesbian couple, or, in Meredith’s words, “dark and twisty” female surgeon.58 And yet the going is still not smooth; barriers and stumbling blocks abound. The locus of pregnancy becomes an idea, or feeling – a debate, a desire, a loss – that further challenges the traditional dictates of the maternal and the pregnant body by pushing against the dominant understanding of what kind of people want to have a baby and nurture that baby. Moreover, the show treats all these characters, regardless of their gender, sexuality, lifestyles, and careers, with such sensitivity and sympathy that the overwhelming sense is that these people would all make very good nurturers. Whatever its empowering, challenging qualities may be – and I think it has had many – the true measure of its transformative signiicance cannot be taken until other series have joined in the types of discourses I have examined in this chapter. As long as Shonda Rhimes and Grey’s Anatomy remain singular in the televisual landscape (which they do, a full six years after their arrival), their importance from a feminist perspective will only be proven if other series emerge and engage in the same kind of narrative challenges and explorations. It has been more than ive years since I discovered Grey’s Anatomy, and I’m now the mother of four. I’m still waiting.

NOTES

1 Together, these shows illustrated motherhood in different forms: working class to professional elite; teenaged to geriatric; stay-at-home to go-to-work; and divorced to married (happily and unhappily). There was, however and as ever, little racial or sexual diversity.

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2 Coach, ABC, 1989–97; American Dreamer, NBC, 1990–91; Flesh ’n Blood, NBC, 1990; The Family Man, CBS, 1990–91; Uncle Buck, CBS, 1990–91; Blossom, NBC, 1991–95; Davis Rules, ABC, 1991, CBS, 1992; Drexell’s Class, Fox, 1991–92; I’ll Fly Away, NBC, 1991–92; Top of the Heap, Fox, 1991; Crossroads, ABC, 1992–93; Covington Cross, CBS, 1992; Scorch, CBS, 1992; Daddy Dearest, Fox, 1993; Dudley, CBS, 1993; Frasier, NBC, 1993–2004; It Had to Be You, CBS, 1993; Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, CBS, 1993–99; The Sinbad Show, Fox, 1993; Byrds of Paradise, ABC, 1994; Daddy’s Girls, CBS, 1994; McKenna, ABC, 1994; Charlie Grace, ABC, 1995; Hudson Street, ABC 1995–96; Under One Roof, CBS, 1995; Meego, CBS, 1997; Soul Man, ABC, 1997–98; The Gregory Hines Show, CBS, 1997; The Tom Show, WB, 1997–98; The Tony Danza Show, NBC, 1997; My Brother’s Keeper, ABC, 1998–99; Two of a Kind, ABC, 1998–99; Holding the Baby, Fox, 1999; Oh Grow Up, ABC, 1999; Gideon’s Crossing, ABC, 2000; Madigan Men, ABC, 2000; The Fighting Fitzgeralds, NBC, 2001; Raising Dad, WB, 2001–02; Citizen Baines, CBS, 2001; Danny, CBS, 2001; Bram & Alice, CBS, 2002; Everwood, WB, 2002–06; Family Affair, WB, 2002; All About the Andersons, WB, 2003; Regular Joe, ABC, 2003; Run of the House, WB, 2003; Two and a Half Men, CBS 2003– Present; Veritas: The Quest, ABC, 2003; Complete Savages, ABC, 2004–05. 3 Once and Again chronicled Lily and Rick, two divorced parents who attempt to juggle their own evolving relationship in a world crowded with ex-spouses, kids, extended family, and changing careers. Judging Amy focussed on a thirty-four-year-old divorced lawyer who moves home with her daughter to live with her mother and start work as a family court judge. In, Providence, Sidney leaves her job as a California plastic surgeon to return to her Rhode Island family and family home after her mother dies. In Gilmour Girls, Lorelai, having given birth to her daughter Rory at age sixteen, hasn’t seen her wealthy mother and father for ifteen years, but resurrects her relationship with them largely for the beneit of Rory. 4 According to Jim (2001–present), American Dad (2005–present), Come to Papa (2004), Everybody Loves Raymond (1996–2005), Family Guy (1999–present), Frasier (1993–2004), King of the Hill (1997–present), My Wife and Kids (2001–05), The Bernie Mac Show (2001–06), and The Tracy Morgan Show (2003–04). 5 Dow, Prime-Time Feminism, 189. 6 Ibid., 196. 7 Lotz, Redesigning Women, 118. 8 Episode 8, season 1, Grey’s Anatomy. 9 Episode 7, 8, and 9, season 1.

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10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

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Episode 2, season 1. Episode 7, season 1. Episode 3, season 2. Episode 3, season 2. Episode 25, season 2. Episode 16, season 3. Episode 10, season 2; Episode 24, season 2. Episode 1, season 2; Episode 15, season 2; Episode 6, season 3; Episode 11, season 3. Episode 6, season 3. Episode 17, season 2. Episode 8, season 2. Episode 2, season 2. Episode 7, season 2. Episode 13, season 2. Episode 6, season 1. Episode 7, season 1. Episode 3, season 2. Episode 23, season 2. Episode 12, season 2. Episode 1, season 3. Episode 5, season 3. Episode 20 and 22, season 2. Episode 5, season 3. The “Opt-Out Revolution” is a term irst coined by Lisa Belkin in an October 2003 New York Times piece that generated signiicant response and debate about the tensions surrounding work and motherhood. Since then, Maureen Dowd and Louise Story have caused similar stirs with New York Times articles on the so-called opt-out revolution and the general hubbub has manifested in several books on the subject. The following are a sample published in 2007 alone: Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success; Lesliee Bennetts, The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much?; Pamela Stone, Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home; Mary Ann Mason and Eve Mason Ekman, Mothers on the Fast Track; Leslie Morgan Steiner, Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families. See, for example, Caryl Rivers, Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women and Mary Douglas Vavrus, “Opting-Out Moms in the News:

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35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49 50 51 52 53 54 55

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Selling New Traditionalism in the New Millennium,” Feminist Media Studies 7, no.1 (2007): 47–63. Episode 18, season 3. Episode 10, season 3. Episode 12, season 3. Episode 13, season 2. Dow, Prime-time Feminism, 198. Ibid., 187. Episode 23, season 2. Episode 8, season 1. Episode 4, season 2. Episode 19, season 3. Episode 11, season 2. Episode 14, season 3. Episode 17, season 3. This debate has been comprehensively deined by Rachel Moseley and Jacinda Read, who, in their article “‘Having it Ally’: Popular Television (Post-)Feminism,” respond to a variety of postfeminist critiques, including arguments put forth by Lotz and Dow, in an attempt to demonstrate how British postfeminist critique (unlike its American counterpart) has “understood the relationship between feminism and popular culture to be more complex and contradictory than a simple mapping of theoretical positions (equated with ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ feminism) on to popular texts” (235). Essentially, Moseley and Read argue that British postfeminism is far less pessimistic that American postfeminism, which can be divided into two dismal camps: the neoliberal camp that is glad feminism is over, and the liberal camp that is dismayed that feminism has been betrayed and left for dead. In “Popularity Contests: The Meanings of Popular Feminism,” Joanne Hollows and Rachel Moseley elaborate on the possibilities and promises of a third wave (rather than a postfeminism) that tries to “‘create new social categories’” (9) from the slippages between feminism and femininity, the locus of which is perpetually pop cultural. Episode 10, season 3. Lotz, Redesigning Women, 167. Episode 20, season 2. Episode 7, season 1. Episode 14, season 2. Episode 8, season 1; Episode 2, season 2; Episode 7, season 2; Episode 3, season 3. Episode 2, season 24; Episode 1, season 3; Episode 6, season 3.

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56 Episode 15, season 2. 57 Dow, Prime-time Feminism, 196. 58 Episode 1, season 3. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dow, Bonnie J. Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the Women’s Movement since 1970. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Hollows, Joanne, and Rachel Moseley. “Popularity Contests: The Meanings of Popular Feminism.” In Feminism in Popular Culture, edited by Joanne Hollows and Rachel Moseley. 1–22. Oxford: Berg, 2006. Grey’s Anatomy. Season 1. Created by Shonda Rhimes. 2005. Burbank, CA: Buena Vista, 2006. DVD. Grey’s Anatomy. Season 2. 2005–06. Burbank, CA: Buena Vista, 2006. DVD. Grey’s Anatomy. Season 3. 2006–07. Burbank, CA: Buena Vista, 2007. DVD. Grey’s Anatomy. Season 6. 2009–10. Burbank, CA: Buena Vista, 2011. DVD. Lotz, Amanda D. Redesigning Women: Television After the Network Era. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Moseley, Rachel, and Jacinda Read. “‘Having it Ally’: Popular Television (Post-)Feminism.” Feminist Media Studies 2, no. 2 (2002): 231–49.

18 TOM VS . BROOKE

Or Postpartum Depression as Bad Mothering in Popular Culture Jocelyn Fenton Stitt

In June 2005, on the American morning television show Today, Tom Cruise looked pale and intense. Under ire for criticizing actor Brooke Shields for her use of antidepressants to treat her postpartum depression, Cruise was clearly rattled by host Matt Lauer’s questions about psychiatry and psychotropic drugs. “Might not Brooke Shields be an example of someone who beneited from some of those drugs?” asked Matt Lauer.1 “Psychiatry is a pseudo science,” Cruise stated. He repeated the phrase, “All it does is mask the problem” three times during the interview, explaining that using drugs to treat mental illness does not get to the root of the problem that is essentially emotional, not physical: “you’re not getting to the reason why,” Cruise said, “there’s no such thing as a chemical imbalance.” As the interview continued, Cruise became less and less articulate. In response to Lauer’s question about whether depression is just “gobbledygook,” Cruise stuttered out, “No. Those are two different issues … There’s ways of vitamins, and through exercise and various things. I’m not saying that that isn’t real.” After repeated viewing of this infamous interview, I interpret Cruise’s larger point to be that symptoms of mental illness are real, but that treating these symptoms with drugs does nothing to address the underlying issues. Cruise’s critique of psychiatry and psychotropic drugs would turn out to be a grave mistake for him. Following Cruise’s outbursts in May and June of 2005, people around the world dismissed Cruise as out of touch with prevailing cultural norms that advocate medical help for mental illness. As Diana commented in May 2005 on a blog, “Its [sic] people

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such as Tom Cruise who take the most amazing advance in clinical depressions [sic] and turn it into a farce. I am sure Tom has never had the ‘privledge’ [sic] to sink into the depths of a major depressive episode … Ignore this man and pray for his enlightenment in matters as grave as depression.”2 Women who had suffered from postpartum depression were outraged at Cruise’s presumption in judging Shields. In a blog discussion about Tom Cruise, a comment posted by Robbin in May 2007 exempliies women’s continued anger several years past the original event, as well as the way many women took Cruise’s comments personally: “I think what he did regarding this situation was HORRIBLE and he had no right, but Brooke didn’t seem to hold a grudge, (I know she certainly seemed to hold less of a grudge than I did and it was directly against her!) and I really admire that she was able to do that.”3 Given Cruise’s erratic behavior from 2005 to 2008, it might be easy to dismiss his attack on Shields for her use of antidepressants to treat postpartum depression as another example of his celebrity megalomania.4 In 2007, for example, the editors of Entertainment Weekly named “Tom Takes On Psychiatry!” as number eleven of their top twenty-ive celebrity scandals of the past quarter century.5 Their readers chose Cruise’s argument with Matt Lauer on the Today show as “Tom Cruise’s most scandalous moment ever.” Fifty-seven per cent of Entertainment Weekly readers taking this poll chose Cruise’s appearance on the Today show in comparison with 32 per cent who chose his jumping on a couch to profess his love for Katie Holmes during his interview with Oprah Winfrey. Further public relations salvos include Cruise’s reappearance on the The Oprah Winfrey Show in May 2008 in an attempt to repair his damaged public persona.6 Cruise reiterated his apology to Brooke Shields, saying to Oprah: “I mean, what I regret is that it just came out wrong … What I regret is that even discussing Brooke in any way.”7 His appearance and repeated apology demonstrates Cruise’s belief that the public had still not forgiven him for his Today show rant three years earlier. I suggest here, however, that a deeper look into the uproar over Cruise’s comments reveals a schism in the North American psyche about how we expect women to experience motherhood. Rather than seeing the media hype over this spat as so much Hollywood gossip, I locate these discourses as part of a referendum on the status of mothering. The tension between a medicalized explanation for postpartum depression (Shields’s position) and a social explanation (Cruise’s position) tells us a great deal about the trap of perfect motherhood many women still experience. Using Shields’s memoir Down Came the Rain (2005), transcripts of

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interviews, celebrity magazine articles, and archived blogs and chatrooms as evidence, I argue that attempts to deine postpartum depression as a social rather than a medical issue became a lightening rod for many mothers’ anger. While the medicalization of women’s biological experiences has been understood in feminist theory as oppressive, the contemporary medicalization of negative reactions to early motherhood as “postpartum depression” has served to let women defend themselves against accusations of being bad and uncaring mothers. This chapter posits a different way to understand postpartum depression by acknowledging that social factors as much as biological ones play a role in women’s experiences, and that by listening to women’s own accounts of their experiences, we might begin to reframe media and popular culture representations of mothers as either saints or demons. On 3 May 2005, Shields published Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression. Down Came the Rain covers a twoyear period in Shields’s life: her use of assisted reproductive technologies to achieve pregnancy, her miscarriage, getting pregnant again, the traumatic birth of her daughter, and her subsequent severe postpartum depression. I read Shields’s memoir with interest when it was irst published. I too had suffered postpartum depression following the birth of my daughter. Like Shields, my postpartum depression was partly attributable to a negative reaction to having an emergency Caesarean section. I was intrigued by Down Came the Rain, not least of all for its potential usefulness as a text for a course I have taught several times: “Good Mother/Bad Mother: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Mothers in Popular Culture.” I irst taught a version of this course in 1999, and most recently taught it in 2008. As an academic who has spent many years studying popular culture representations of mothers, I appreciated Shields’s willingness to depict herself negatively in her memoir, writing as she does about wanting to kill herself and her child. Shields courageously breaks major taboos about the mothering experience when she writes that her child felt like a stranger and that nurturing did not come easily to her. Another popular culture ixture, Vicki Iovine’s The Girlfriends’ Guide to Surviving the First Year of Motherhood, describes the social dificulties in acknowledging postpartum depression: “People unfamiliar with this condition usually fail to understand that loving your baby and loathing your life can be done simultaneously by new moms.”8 Even Iovine’s sympathetic depiction of postpartum depression portrays a state where mothers are miserable but still love their children. This exonerates women from one of the

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main ways women are thought to be bad mothers – when they do not unconditionally love their child. Shields opens herself to such criticism, since Down Came the Rain refuses to sugarcoat her early relationship with her daughter, Rowan. In a chapter titled, “Why Am I Crying More Than My Baby,” Shields tells of being surprised that she could not stand the sight or smell of Rowan.9 Judging herself to be a bad mother, Shields notes, “I was failing at things that, according to popular belief, were supposed to be the most natural in a woman’s life.” Shields recognizes that cultural narratives about motherhood as the pinnacle of women’s fulillment do not describe her actual experience: “Here I was, inally the mother of a beautiful baby girl I had worked so hard to have, and I felt like my life was over. Where was the bliss? Where was the happiness that I had expected to feel by becoming a mother?”10 When Down Came the Rain was irst published, it debuted at number six on the New York Times best seller list. Shields was featured on the cover of Good Housekeeping in May of 2005 and had excerpts published from her book in People magazine that same month. Down Came the Rain its into several popular book categories: the celebrity autobiography, and the increasingly popular genres of the “momoir” (mothering memoir) and “mom lit.”11 However, Shields’s narrative of postpartum depression was hardly an international media sensation when it was irst published. That all changed when Cruise spoke out against Shields’s use of antidepressants.12 As the tempest raged about Cruise’s remarks, I began to ask myself why the exchange between Cruise and Shields touched a nerve with so many people. My initial reaction to Cruise’s comments mirrors those I have found on blogs and chat rooms: Why was he weighing in on Shields’s medical condition? What made him qualiied, as neither a doctor nor a woman who had suffered postpartum depression, to judge Shields? Currently, postpartum depression (PPD) is deined as the onset of a major depression following the birth of a child, usually within the irst year.13 Statistics vary as to the frequency of postpartum depression, but researchers estimate that between 10 to 19 per cent of women experience a postpartum mood disorder. There is evidence that PPD occurs globally, even in cultures where women receive more family support and rest than in the United States. The cross-cultural prevalence of PPD suggests that there may indeed be biological factors. For example, women experienced similar rates of PPD in the UK (18 per cent) and Taiwan (19 per cent), despite the fact that Taiwanese mothers usually receive more familial support and rest after the birth of their children than British women do.14

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Furthermore, PPD is usually explained to women within a biomedical model of pregnancy and childbirth as an illness caused by biological factors that can be treated with medication. Jonathan Metzl and Joni Angel analyzed popular understandings of the use of psychotropic drugs in women during the years 1987 to 2000. Metzl and Angel suggest that “white, middle-aged women[’s] … problems with marriage, motherhood, or menstruation replaced DSM-derived terms as indicators of the need for psychopharmaceuticals.”15 The article concludes that for both physicians and patients alike, “disappointed expectations of performance in marriage, motherhood, work, sex, or sports are symptoms of psychiatric disease, and psychotropic medications provide the cure.”16 These indings imply that physicians are likely to medicalize dificulties with female roles such as motherhood when they are experienced by privileged women like Brooke Shields. The Afterword of Down Came the Rain contains further readings and resources for women with PPD. One of the suggested websites responds to the question of “Why do women get postpartum depression?” in this way: “The exact cause isn’t known. Hormone levels change during pregnancy and right after childbirth. Those hormone changes may produce chemical changes in the brain that play a part in causing depression.”17 Why some women would become depressed because of “hormone changes” that all biological mothers experience after delivery remains unclear.18 What is clear is that the medical establishment and popular culture discourses understand PPD as a biological illness that needs medical intervention. In examining the discourses surrounding the debate between Cruise and Shields, I was surprised to ind that, for many of Cruise’s critics, the crucial issue was fault: if postpartum depression is a “disease,” then Shields and women like her are not guilty of being bad mothers. This understanding of PPD as a medical problem led one blogger to conclude that more education could prevent tragedies such as the case of Andrea Yates, a woman who killed her ive children while suffering from postpartum psychosis: “Brooke Shields should be commended for going public with her struggles with PPD. She could be helping thousands of women out there realize that they are not crazy, that there is help for them. Maybe if women and men were more educated about PPD and not made to feel like lepers there would be less cases like Andrea Yates.”19 Yates is understood by this blogger as suffering from the same medical condition as Shields, not as a terrible mother who killed her children.20

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Shields deploys this same rhetoric of PPD as illness. In a New York Times editorial rebutting Cruise’s statements, Shields explains, “In a strange way, it was comforting to me when my obstetrician told me that my feelings of extreme despair and my suicidal thoughts were directly tied to a biochemical shift in my body. Once we admit that postpartum is a serious medical condition, then the treatment becomes more available and socially acceptable.”21 Popular culture representations of PPD, including Down Came the Rain, repeatedly emphasize that because they have a medical condition, women should not be ashamed that they are unhappy as new mothers. The website Online PPD Support Group advises, “Many women ind it frightening to seek treatment, or feel a sense of shame at needing help. Remember that the brain is an organ in the body, just like any other part of your body. Understand that there is no more shame in seeking treatment for a brain disorder than there is when seeking treatment for any other ailment.”22 This website makes a comparison between diabetes and mental illness, further underlining their understanding of PPD as medical in nature. This medical model I have just outlined can help us understand some of the root causes of the Cruise/Shields controversy. Cruise’s comments were so explosive precisely because he threatened to dislodge postpartum depression’s status as a biologically induced medical condition. Cruise’s statements to the media, while at times incoherent and disjointed, point to an understanding of postpartum depression as an emotional experience, rather than a disease as such: “When you talk about postpartum, you can take people today, women, and what you do is you use vitamins. There is a hormonal thing that is going on, scientiically, you can prove that. But when you talk about emotional, chemical imbalances in people, there is no science behind that. You can use vitamins to help a woman through those things.”23 Cruise does not dispute the pain experienced by women suffering from PPD, but he does challenge the medical model, stating that “chemical imbalances” are not scientiically proven. The medicalization of women’s biological experiences has been understood in feminist theory as oppressive. Medicalization is deined, broadly, as a process whereby human experiences and actions are theorized in terms of illness and are thus in need of medical intervention.24 The roots of the medicalization of women’s bodies and experiences go deep into Western culture, pathologizing female bodily experiences such as menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, and menopause. Tracing the history of this phenomenon, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg notes that medical explanations for women’s mental illness as stemming from physical or hormonal

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sources have existed “since classical antiquity. Between 1840 and 1890, however, physicians, relecting a growing physiological sophistication generally … were able to present a far more elaborate explanation of women’s peculiar femininity – and hence a rationale for her role as wife and mother” by arguing that women were ruled by their ovaries.25 Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, in For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women, provide evidence of the connection between nineteenth-century medicalizing discourses and doctors’ proit motives. Noting the large body of scholarly work produced on medicalization since the 1970s, Heather Hartley and Leonore Tiefer sum up the feminist theoretical position as one where “feminists have argued that medicalization has both created misinformation and distracted attention from social and cultural variables, which account for a larger share of women’s experiences and problems.”26 Most of these analyses emphasize the medical profession’s role in creating and deining illness in order to consolidate their own power, to increase proits, as well as to control women’s behavior. An important exception to the model of women as passive patients is Catherine Kohler Riessman’s work. Riessman argues, “scholars [have not] always noted the fact that women actively participated in the construction of the new medical deinitions, nor discussed the reasons that led to their participation.”27 Elite women from the nineteenth century to the present have colluded with physicians in the medicalization process when it suited their own interests, such as in the creation of premenstrual syndrome as a means to “allow women to be angry and say what is on their minds at a certain time each month.”28 Riessman, however, does not discuss PPD, and she wrote before the Internet revolutionized how people in the global north researched and exchanged information about illnesses. Nevertheless, her reminder that women can ind agency in medicalization is important for my purposes. My discussion here, then, differs from many accounts of the medicalization of women’s bodily and emotional experiences in that I see mothers as participatory agents in deining their depression following childbirth as biological in nature, rather than as passive recipients of a diagnosis by the medical establishment. The medicalization of negative reactions to motherhood as “postpartum depression” has served to let women defend themselves against accusations of being bad and uncaring mothers. Illness rather than personal failing is responsible for feelings of resentment or detachment from one’s child. One of the main themes of Down Came the Rain is Shields’s attempt to understand the

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source of her PPD, which she repeatedly attributes to biological causes: “Although there doesn’t seem to be a consensus as to what causes postpartum depression, many believe that the rapid change in hormones at delivery may be signiicant enough to cause a mood shift”; “Evidently what we think of as postpartum depression is a group of illnesses”; and “Now I understand that my severe unhappiness stemmed from a medical condition.”29 In the afterword to the book, Shields urges readers to remember, “postpartum depression is beyond your control … Having it does not mean you are not a good mother or that you are crazy. Above all it does not mean that you don’t love your child.”30 Shields is careful throughout the narrative to emphasize the medical nature of PPD, using that as a basis to reassure herself and her readers, “Baby blues, my ass! That should be the name of a Saturday morning cartoon. What we were all experiencing was full-ledged postpartum depression.” She advises other mothers that they need not feel “ashamed,” “embarrassed or guilty.”31 However, medicalizing postpartum depression continues to trap mothers into normative expectations about the experience of childbirth and mothering. I propose that Cruise’s comments wounded and angered some women when he unwittingly opened up the possibility that postpartum depression has a cultural and personal component. If social or emotional issues might cause postpartum depression, this raises the possibility that the social expectation of motherhood as completely joyous is incorrect. I will return to the issue of maternal ambivalence later, but for now I want to point out that the iction of complete maternal fulillment is one that women themselves often take pains to reify in order, I believe, to live up to the socially sanctioned identity of the good mother. Although Shields stresses the medical nature of her post-birth experience in Down Came the Rain and in other writings and interviews, a careful reading of her memoir suggests a more complex reality.32 While the narrative takes great care to stress the medicalized nature of PPD, it also reveals several key social and cultural issues that might be equally responsible for Shields’s feelings of helplessness, anger, and suicidal wishes, including unresolved personal losses, popular culture’s unrealistic representations of mothering, and American culture’s failure to adequately support new mothers. Shields experienced several personal losses in year before she became pregnant, including the suicide of a close friend, a miscarriage, and dificult infertility treatments. Shields’s father died soon before she gave birth, and as she acknowledges in her narrative, the timing of his death did not allow her to process it properly or to grieve. The narrative itself decenters

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this loss, since Shields relates incidents to the reader as she perceived them at the time. While she mentions that her father has been diagnosed with “late stage prostate cancer,” it is only in the context of being admitted to the hospital while in labour that she reveals that her father died three weeks earlier.33 More than ifty pages later, Shields inally reveals the circumstances of her father’s death, stating that because of her advanced pregnancy she wasn’t “allowed” to have a inal visit with her father.34 Immediately after being informed of her father’s death, Shields lew to New York (allowed, apparently, because this is where she planned to give birth). Upon arrival, she attended a baby shower in her honour: “We made it a celebration of life, and in my mind, I pretended my father was simply in Palm Beach.”35 This iction of her father’s survival cannot sustain itself, however, once Shields returns home following Rowan’s birth: “It was a sad homecoming for these irst time parents and their baby … I was quickly reminded of that fateful day three weeks earlier.”36 This passage suggests that Shields’s inability to say goodbye to her father, attend his funeral, or even allow herself to grieve may have contributed to her depression, as much as biological factors following childbirth. Although her suppressed grief over her father’s sudden death may have been a factor in her depression, I would argue that an even greater factor was Shields’s idealization of motherhood. While Shields writes of her experiences in terms of a frightening medical illness, an alternative explanation might be that cultural representations of the postpartum period as blissful are wildly unrealistic. Shields analyzes her own normative notions of mothering as stemming from popular culture: “Together my child and I would epitomize the image I had internalized from watching all those happy families on TV in my youth, with a dose of Norman Rockwell thrown in for good measure.”37 One of the notable aspects of Down Came the Rain is that Shields is not just a consumer of popular culture but a producer of these images as well. Referring to her dificulties in breastfeeding, Shields relects, “Though I didn’t realize it, I was guarding as sacred an idealized version of mother and child. I had even done a movie called The Blue Lagoon in which, after my character has a baby, the infant intuitively inds his way to my breast and starts to suck while I look on, smiling.”38 This memory epitomizes the conceptual gap between mothering as “natural” and individualistic as presented in popular culture and Shields’s lived experience of mothering as requiring social support and the knowledge of other women. Shields and her husband, Chris Henchy, had great dificulty taking care of a newborn with little outside help. “We chose not to have a baby

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nurse,” Shields writes, “because not only did we not want a stranger in our home, but we igured we could handle it ourselves until our relatives came to stay. We couldn’t have been more wrong … and because we were alone, we were overwhelmed.”39 Shields’s anger and depression during this period might be interpreted as rational rather than pathological. Shields survived an emergency Caesarean section (where she was told that she might lose her life), was sent home ive days after surgery, experienced dificulties caring for a newborn who needed a leg and body harness to correct a joint problem, and found herself socially isolated following her daughter’s birth. Indeed, if Shields had been able to connect with other mothers who had experienced Caesarean sections, she might have been reassured to know that her reactions were not singular. Discussing negative aspects of motherhood bears a heavy social stigma, as Susan Maushart notes. When women are asked about their experiences, as researcher Tina Miller documents, they often are eager to share their perceptions of the shifts in their subjectivities and identity postpartum as well as their feelings of inadequacy in coping with a newborn.40 Indeed, the theme of “breaking silence” over maternal ambivalence is a prominent theme in many mothering autobiographies published around the same time, such as Andrea Buchanan’s Mother Shock: Loving Every (Other) Minute of It and Faulker Fox’s Dispatches from a Not-SoPerfect Life: Or How I Learned to Love the House, the Man, the Child as well as popular blogs such as Finslippy and Dooce. These writers’ normative status as older, white, middle-class, heterosexual mothers makes such disclosures possible, given that they are not necessarily prejudged by their audience as “bad” mothers, as are some younger, working-class, lesbian, or racialized mothers.41 When Shields describes her profound postpartum emotional dislocation and physical exhaustion as “like being in the Twilight Zone, and I kept waiting for someone to turn off the TV,”42 I hear echoes of Anne Lamott’s well-known momoir, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year. “It feels like I’m babysitting in the Twilight Zone. I keep waiting for the parents to show up because we are out of chips and Diet Cokes,” Lamott jokes.43 Lamott’s and Shields’s writing share with other “momoirs” the trope of otherwise accomplished and competent adults being completely unprepared for the demands of a newborn infant. Lamott goes on to compare her mental state to representations of torture: “The exhaustion, the sleep deprivation, make me feel like I’m in the bamboo cage under cold water in The Deer Hunter … It is a little like PMS on mild psychedelics.”44 Shields describes her feelings similarly: “If PMS

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made me introspective or melancholy … this was a sadness of a shockingly different magnitude.”45 Shields’s narrative, then, belongs to a larger group of women’s writing about motherhood, or “momoirs,” even if Shields herself was isolated as a new mother. One gets a sense of the complete lack of postpartum preparation and support received by Shields when her husband leaves her alone with the baby in New York so that he can return to work in Los Angeles. It is only at this point that Shields inally hires a baby nurse, justifying her need for help in this way: “I realized that many of the women I had known had extended families who actively helped. Or they were part of cultures in which mothers were allowed to heal and rest before assuming full parental responsibility.”46 The narrative never actively casts blame on Shields’s family, in-laws, friends, or husband for their failure to take care of her. One friend who does visit bursts into tears at Shields’s appearance and feeds her because apparently no one else was taking care of the new mother.47 Gemma, the Filipina baby nurse hired by Shields, actively mothers her, giving her time to rest and feeding her: “In the daytime she encouraged me to eat, and gave me big bowls of yogurt and cereal and hot liquids to help with my milk production. Somehow I had missed the part where the baby books talked about needing to eat and drink a lot in order to produce a suficient quantity of milk.”48 I have quoted this at length because it represents the way in which Shields’s family were so focused on the symbolic and consumer aspects of having a new baby, such as shopping and taking pictures, that they failed to nurture the baby’s mother. In turn, Shields found herself depleted, frightened, and unable to connect with or care for her child. In addition to receiving little concrete support from family, Shields also runs headlong into societal expectations of work and motherhood. She struggles to deine herself after becoming a mother, asking several times in the narrative, “who am I?” She asks, “Was I supposed to be deined solely as a mother now that I had a baby? I truly wanted to feel like, and be considered, a mother, but that wasn’t all I wanted to be.”49 Down Came the Rain elaborates on the tension Shields experiences as she tries to negotiate continuing with her acting career: “Since I was considered the primary caregiver, I had to ind a way to navigate my work around caring for our child. I wasn’t mad about this as much as I was fascinated by the fact that even though we considered ourselves a modern couple, Chris and I weren’t far from the conventional parents of a generation or two ago. He did a generous share of the daily baby care, but it was never questioned that his chief role was to work and support

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his family while I was Mom. I appeared to be the only one questioning the whole dynamic.”50 This passage explains much of why Shields may have experienced deep levels of anxiety, frustration, repressed anger, and helplessness following the birth of her daughter while her husband did not. As a mother, Shields’s identity, both personal and public, is expected to reorient itself around her daughter. If a mother’s feelings about her child are in any way ambivalent or even resentful because of a dificult birth, postpartum pain, fatigue, lack of social support, or desire to be something other than a mother, this throws into crisis the whole notion of absolute devotion to one’s child as the norm. Down Came the Rain speaks the unspeakable. More than thirty years ago Ellen Moers wrote that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein “seems to be distinctly a woman’s mythmaking on the subject of birth precisely because its emphasis is not upon what precedes birth, not upon birth itself, but upon what follows birth: the trauma of the afterbirth.”51 Shields, like Shelley before her, writes a woman’s narrative of the afterbirth from within a culture where “fear and guilt, depression and anxiety are commonplace reactions to the birth of a baby, and well within the normal range of experience. But more deeply rooted in our cultural mythology, and certainly in our literature, are the happy maternal reactions.”52 Barbara Johnson also reads Frankenstein as a narrative of postpartum depression: “The idea that a mother can loathe, fear, and reject her baby has until recently been one of the most repressed of psychological insights.”53 Johnson was writing in 1982. Shields’s narrative testiies to the fact that the “insight” of maternal ambivalence remains to this day so frightening, so taboo, that it must be rejected at all costs and labeled as a psychological disorder. Here is where I part company with the agenda of Down Came the Rain. Shields had an opportunity to talk about the costs of becoming a mother, seen through the prism of our society’s lack of support both materially and culturally for women. If Shields, a inancially independent, Princeton-educated, white woman in her thirties could not cope with new motherhood, she could have used her experiences as a platform for advocating for those who do not have her privileges. In claiming to be “fascinated” rather than “mad” at the expectations of her as a new mother, Shields turns away from the feminist realizations she makes about the gendered inequalities in becoming a mother, to insist on the individual nature of PPD as a mental illness.54 Is it too much to ask that a Hollywood actor call for an economic and social revolution in our thinking about motherhood? Probably. I do not

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want to completely dismiss Shields’s work in raising awareness of PPD, or her often funny and spirited responses to Cruise. Ultimately, I see Cruise’s comments that medication only masks the “problem” as touching off a cultural irestorm where women’s complicated feelings about the demands of maternity are still as unspeakable as in 1963 when Betty Friedan wrote about “the problem that has no name” or as in 1982 when Barbara Johnson wrote of the “primitive terrors” mothers’ rejection of their children provokes.55 However, by reading the Tom Cruise and Brooke Shields scandal as precipitated through anxieties about the biological nature of PPD, I hope that this research joins other feminist acts that violate cultural norms declaring maternal ambivalence as unmentionable. My reading of Down Came the Rain proposes an alternative way to view negative post-birth experiences and maternal ambivalence. Shields’s narrative suggests that her grief over her father’s death, her experiences of being left alone to care for a newborn while recovering from major abdominal surgery, and uncertainty about her ability to combine work and mothering triggered her depression as much as biological factors. It is possible to view postpartum depression (fear, anxiety, feelings of worthlessness, resentment of one’s partner and baby) as a rational response to the social inequalities and isolation experienced by many mothers. Although Down Came the Rain is not a call for broad social change, Shields’s narrative reveals the high personal cost of cultural expectations that nurturing is “natural” for women, and that being a mother should be women’s sole identity.

NOTES

I would like to thank Carroll Smith-Rosenberg for her excellent example of feminist scholarship on medicalization, Pegeen Reichert Powell and Pallavi Rastogi for insightful readings of drafts of this essay, and Christal Lustig and Kim Burrow for research assistance. 1 “Crazy Ole’ Tom Cruise,” YouTube, uploaded 13 January 2007, http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=cc_wjp262RY. 2 Diana, Comment on “Brooke Shields Takes Postpartum Depression Message to Congress,” Celebrity Baby Blog, Celebritybabies.people.com, 14 May 2007, http://celebritybabies.people.com/2007/05/13/brooke_shields__3/. 3 Robbin, Comment on “Tom Cruise and Brooke Shields,” Psychosurgery.org (blog), 26 May 2005, http://www.psychosurgery.org/2005/05/tom-cruiseand-brooke-sheilds/.

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4 A brief timeline of the period covered by this chapter (2005–08) may be helpful here. Shields published Down Came the Rain on 3 May 2005. Cruise irst criticized Shields’s use of antidepressants on 26 May 2005 during an Access Hollywood interview with Billy Bush. Cruise’s interview on the Today show took place on 24 June 2005. Shields published a rebuttal to Cruise in July of 2005 in the New York Times. Cruise then apologized to Shields in August of 2006, and later that year Shields attended his wedding. On 22 August 2006, Paramount refused to renew Cruise’s contract because of his behavior. Cruise’s ability to be seen as a credible ilm actor was put in jeopardy by this controversy. Speaking before 3,900 Hollywood writers, screenwriter William Goldman stated that, while watching Cruise’s ilm War of the Worlds, “I didn’t think for a second that Tom Cruise was a guy working on the docks in New Jersey. I thought he was a nut Scientologist who insulted Brooke Shields and yelled at Matt Lauer.” Cohen, “Biz’s Blurry Vision Blasted,” Variety. Film efforts by Cruise during this period either performed poorly at the box ofice (Lions for Lambs, 2007) or were marked by controversy (Valkyrie, 2008). (See “A Star,” 10). In January 2008, a Church of Scientology video featuring Cruise making implausible claims about Scientology’s powers was leaked to the media. This video was widely seen and parodied, leading to further diminishment of public respect for Cruise. Andrew Adam Newman, “Scientology Writes, Gawker Rises,” New York Times, 28 January 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/ 2008/01/28/business/ media/28cruise; html?scp=3&sq=tom+cruise+scientol ogy&st=nyt. There is still signiicant media interest in the “Tom vs. Brooke” debate, as evidenced by the widely linked discussion of the details of his apology to Shields in Health magazine in June 2009. Amy Spencer, “Brooke Shields on Beauty, Marriage, and Self-Esteem,” Health.com, last updated 16 May 2009, http://www.health.com/health/article/0,, 20411700,00.html. 5 “Tom Takes on Psychiatry!” Entertainment Weekly, 951, 31 August 2007, 10. 6 Alessandra Stanley, “Tom Cruise on ‘Oprah,’ Without Gymnastics,” New York Times, 3 May 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/03/arts/ television/ 03watc.html?_ r=1&scp=23&sq=tom%20cruise&st=cse. 7 Ibid. 8 Iovine, The Girlfriend’s Guide, 76. 9 Shields, Down Came the Rain, 66. 10 Shields, Down Came, 66, 69. 11 Niesslein and Wilkinson, “Tales from the (Mother)Hood,” 25. 12 Searchable databases such as Wilson Mega Omniile, Academic Search Premier, Lexis Nexis Academic, and Reader’s Guide to Periodicals reveal

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13

14 15 16 17

18

19

20 21 22 23

24

that before the Tom Cruise controversy, Down Came the Rain received a predictable amount of attention in women’s magazines such as Redbook and Good Housekeeping, as well as in celebrity magazines such Biography (A&E) and People. These same databases show that after June of 2005 there was an explosion of newspaper, magazine, and web-based articles on Shields, her book, and Tom Cruise’s remarks. For example, ProQuest Newspapers showed seventy-ive entries for “Brooke Shields” in ive months leading up to the book’s publication for between 1 January and 23 May 2005, but 200 entries for the next seven months. http://proquest.umi.com. See Nylen et al., “Maternal Depression,” 329–30, for an overview of current North American deinitions of postpartum depression as well as assessments of current treatment practices. Huang and Mathers, “Postpartum Depression – Biological or Cultural?,” 285. Metzel and Angel, “Assessing the Impact,” 582. Ibid., 583. American Academy of Family Physicians, “Postpartum Depression,” updated August 2010, http://familydoctor.org/online/famdocen/home/ women/pregnancy/ppd/general/379.html. See Oudshoorn, Beyond the Natural Body, for a discussion of how “hormones” came to be associated with masculinity and femininity in the early twentieth century. Gulli and Mallory in “Postpartum Depression,” 774, discuss research that shows that women with PPD do not have different hormone levels than women without PPD, but that there is a difference in “a brain chemical that controls the release of cortisol.” Lisa Mulvey, “And Yet Another Reason I Hate Tom Cruise,” Celebrity Obsession (blog), 8 June 2005, http://www.lisamulvey.com/archives/ celebrity_obsession/index.php. See Coodley, “Commentary on Andrea Yates,” 300. In 2006 Yates was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and was committed to a state mental hospital. Brooke Shields, “War of Words,” New York Times, 1 July 2005, http:// www.nytimes.com/2005/07/01/opinion/ 01shields.html. Online PPD Support Group, “Welcome to the Online PPD Support Group,” accessed 19 October 2007, http://www.ppdsupportpage.com/index.html. Lloyd Grove and Morgan Hudson, “Tom to Brooke: Don’t be a Woman of Substance,” New York Daily News, 22 May 2005, http://www. nydailynews.com/ archives/gossip/2005/05/23/2005-0523_tom_to_ brooke__don_t_be_woma.html. See Riessman, “Women and Medicalization,” for an overview of deinitions of medicalization and its impact on a variety of women’s experiences such as childbirth, abortion, and menstruation.

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25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

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Smith-Rosenberg, “Puberty to Menopause,” 59. Hartley and Tiefer, “Taking a Biological Turn,” 44. Riessman, “Women and Medicalization,” 3. Ibid., 11. I do not see the same class-based afiliations that Riessman does in women identifying as having PPD based on the blogs and chatrooms I have visited, suggesting that non-elite women can now participate in shaping and discussing illnesses through websites and blogs. Readers should note, however, that my interpretation of online commentators as coming from a variety of backgrounds, classes, and educational levels is based on their language use, spelling, and grammar, not through a sociological survey. Shields, Down Came, 138, 142, 220. Ibid., 224. Ibid., 142, 223, 224. This analysis is not meant to invalidate Shields’s own naming of her experience. Instead, it might suggest that she uses our society’s current term for women’s negative experiences following childbirth (postpartum depression) rather than another term that might attribute more cultural factors to her experience, not simply biological ones. Marjorie L. DeVault notes, “Most members of a society learn to interpret their experiences in terms of dominant language and meanings: thus women themselves (researchers included) often have trouble seeing and talking clearly about their experiences” (232). Shields, Down Came, 10. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 64. Ibid. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 95. Ibid., 62. Miller, Making Sense of Motherhood. Stitt and Powell, “Introduction: Delivering Mothering Studies,” 3. Shields, Down Came, 61. Lamott, Operating Instructions, 48. Ibid., 64. Shields, Down Came, 65. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 78. Ibid., 105. While it is outside of the scope of this essay to discuss Down Came the Rain’s use of the colonialist/racist motif of the woman of colour who performs motherly duties for a wealthy white woman who seemingly has everything except genuine human connections, I want to at least note this issue in passing.

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49 50 51 52 53 54

Ibid., 99. Ibid., 176. Moers, “Female Gothic,” 218. Ibid. Johnson, “My Monster/Myself,” 6. Brooke Shields continues to have a public presence in raising awareness about PPD, which she is always careful to discuss in medicalized terms. In May 2007 Shields testiied before Congress in support of The Melanie Blocker Stokes MOTHERS Act (S 324). This bill supports research and education about PPD, arguing that PPD is a perinatal mood disorder needing medical attention and treatment. S 324 was signed into law in May 2010 as part of the Health Care Reform bill. Shields is featured on the website of Senator Robert Mendendez who sponsored the bill. “Mothers Day,” http:// menendez.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/?id=69162 539-fd2b-4804-9f0b-c296cd7efe52. 55 Friedan, “The Problem,” 40; Johnson, 6. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bradley, Alice. Finslippy: Wading in the Shallow End Since 2004. www. inslippy.com. Buchanan, Andrea. Mother Shock: Loving Every (Other) Minute of It. New York: Avalon, 2003. Cohen, David S. “Biz’s Blurry Vision Blasted.” Variety, 13 November 2005. http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117932893.tml?categoryid=1236&cs=1 &query=brooke+shields. Coodley, Lauren. “Commentary on Andrea Yates: Postpartum Depression: Voice from a Historian.” Pediatric Nursing 28, no. 3 (2002): 300. “Crazy Ole’ Tom Cruise on the Today Show.” YouTube. http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=cc_wjp262RY. DeVault, Marjorie. “Talking and Listening from Women’s Standpoint: Feminist Strategies for Interviewing and Analysis.” In Feminist Perspectives on Social Research, edited by Sharlene Hesse-Biber and Michelle Yaeiser, 227–50. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women. New York: Anchor, 1989. Fox, Falkner. Dispatches from a Not-So-Perfect Life: Or How I Learned to Love the House, the Man, the Child. New York: Crown Publishing, 2004. Friedan, Betty. 1963. “The Problem that Has No Name.” In Women Images and Realities: A Multicultural Anthology, edited by Amy Kesselman, Lily D.

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McNair, and Nancy Schniedewind, 40–3. Mountain View California: Mayield Publishing Company, 1995. Gulli, Laith Farid, and Nicole Mallory. s.v. “Postpartum Depression.” In The Gale Encyclopedia of Mental Disorders. Vol. 2, edited by Ellen Thackery and Madeline Harris, 774–6. Detroit: Gale, 2002. Hamilton, Heather. Dooce. www.dooce.com. Hartley, Heather, and Leonore Tiefer. “Taking a Biological Turn: The Push of a ‘Female Viagra’ and the Medicalization of Women’s Sexual Problems.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 31, no.1/2 (2003): 42–54. Huang, Yu-Chu, and Nigel Mathers. “Postnatal Depression – Biological or Cultural? A Comparative Study of Postnatal Women in the UK and Taiwan.” Journal of Advanced Nursing 33, no. 3 (2001): 279–87. Hunter, Paul J., ed. Frankenstein: Contexts, Nineteenth-Century Responses, Criticism. New York: Norton, 1996. Johnson, Barbara. “My Monster/Myself.” Diacritics 12, no.2 (1982): 2–10. Iovine, Vicki. The Girlfriends’ Guide to Surviving the First Year of Motherhood. New York: Perigree, 1997. Lamott, Anne. Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year. New York: Ballantine, 1993. Maushart, Susan. The Mask of Motherhood: How Becoming a Mother Changes our Lives and Why We Never Talk About It. New York: Penguin, 1999. Metzl, Jonathan M., and Joni Angel. “Assessing the Impact of SSRI Antidepressants on Popular Notions of Women’s Depressive Illness.” Social Science & Medicine 58 (2004): 577–84. Miller, Tina. Making Sense of Motherhood: A Narrative Approach. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005. Moers, Ellen. “Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother.” In Frankenstein: Contexts, Nineteenth-Century Responses, Criticism, edited by Paul Hunter, 214–24. New York: Norton, 1996. Niesslein, Jennifer, and Stephanie Wilkinson. “Tales from the (Mother)Hood: The Rise and Fall of the ‘Momoir’ and other Publishing Trends.” Brain Child Spring (2005): 25–33. Nylen, Kimberly J., Tracy E. Moran, Christina L. Franklin, and Michael O’Hara. “Maternal Depression: A Review of Relevant Treatment Approaches for Mothers and Infants.” Infant Mental Health 27, no. 4 (2006): 327–43. Oudshoorn, Nelly. Beyond the Natural Body: An Archeology of Sex Hormones. New York: Routledge, 1994.

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Riessman, Catherine Kohler. “Women and Medicalization: A New Perspective.” Social Policy 14, no.1 (1983): 3–18. Shields, Brooke. Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression. New York: Christa, 2005. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. “Puberty to Menopause: The Cycle of Femininity in Nineteenth- Century America.” Feminist Studies 1, no.3/4 (1973): 58–72. “A Star is Reborn?” Entertainment Weekly, 991. 16 May 2008, 10. Stitt, Jocelyn Fenton, and Pegeen Reichert Powell. “Introduction: Delivering Mothering Studies.” In Mothers Who Deliver: Feminist Interventions in Interpersonal and Public Discourse, edited by Jocelyn Fenton Stitt and Pegeen Reichert Powell, 1–18. New York, SUNY Press, 2010. “Tom Takes on Psychiatry!” Entertainment Weekly, 951. 31 August 2007, 28.

19 OTHER MOTHERS

Looking at Maternal Desire in The L Word Lenora Perry-Samaniego

There’s no one to hear You might as well scream They never woke up From the American dream And they don’t understand What they don’t see And they look through you And they look past me Oh, you and I dancing slow And we got nowhere to go. Melissa Etheridge, “Nowhere to Go,” Your Little Secret

Melissa Etheridge, a rock star and out lesbian, made history when she and her (then) partner, ilmmaker Julie Cypher, went public with their decision to become parents. When Etheridge and Cypher visited their good friends, music legend David Crosby and his wife, Jan Dance in Hawaii not long after the birth of Crosby and Dance’s irst child, Jango, Etheridge and Cypher mentioned their own desires to have a child. Dance came up with an idea: “I was fortunate enough to get pregnant and have a baby ... And I was holding [Jango] in my arms when I heard them [Etheridge and Cypher] talking. And it fell out of my lips. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t even ask him irst. And I was kind of surprised I said it, too … I believe I said ‘What about David?’”1 Both couples took an informal approach to the project of making a baby; and when the irst attempt resulted in daughter Bailey Jean and the

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couple decided to have another child, Etheridge and Cypher looked again to their friends for help.2 Public curiosity about the children’s birthfather led the two couples to pose for a family photo that appears on the February 2000 cover of Rolling Stone magazine.3 The photo speaks volumes as it proclaims Etheridge, Cypher, Crosby, and Dance as the “new American family,” with both couples and the two children in an Edenic tableau. Cypher is the quintessential earth mother, the Lady Madonna, lacking only the baby at her breast to complete the image. She is reclining in the center; a garland of lowers on her head, while Crosby sits barefoot and smiling on Cypher’s other side, his casual prominence rounding out this pastoral scene. Sharing his professional and personal legacy is Etheridge, carrying the igurative “torch” on her hip – their older daughter Bailey Jean. Beckett, their second child, looks at the camera while casually taking a toy from Dance, making a symbolic connection between the two couples, completing the circle. When the world found out about Etheridge and Cypher’s decision to become parents, it was no surprise that paternity was the irst question on everyone’s mind. The couple carefully guarded the donor’s name until inally they gave up their secret in the interview with Rolling Stone. Perhaps the best thing about the magazine’s cover photo and story is that it provokes questions about basic, though socially constructed, norms regarding gender, sex, motherhood, and family. Lesbian motherhood, especially in the age of technologically assisted reproduction, blurs the line of gender normativity for obvious reasons. Two-mother households are becoming commonplace in many communities simply because lesbians are experiencing a baby boom (or “gay-by” boom). Lesbian couples are choosing to have families, and they have many creative alternatives from which to choose when deciding how to begin the process. These alternatives have the potential to drive ruptures along the binary categories of male/female, queer/straight, mother/father, and dominant/subaltern, ultimately changing the way we view motherhood. The outcome represents a hybrid identity for women who are seen as both the outsider/lesbian and the insider/mother. Motherhood is connected to femininity; therefore, women’s gender identity is reinforced by mothering. Especially since the nineteenth century, motherhood has been socially acknowledged as the primary identity for most adult women in Western culture. That is, womanhood and motherhood are often outwardly synonymous identities. Mainstream literature, ilm, and other cultural representations portray and reinforce romanticized notions of motherhood, and almost never depict lesbian

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motherhood in a multidimensional way. Arguably, there is only one popular program that has opened cultural ruptures, and where the lesbians have center stage: Showtime’s The L Word. PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW

Ilene Chaiken’s popular Showtime series, The L Word, vividly portrays a group of women engaged in life and love in Los Angeles. The storylines are compelling, dramatic, and sexually provocative. In general, The L Word received critical acclaim for Chaiken and staff’s progressive and confrontational scripts and the well-rounded ensemble of characters embodying a small segment of West Hollywood’s upwardly mobile, beautiful, mostly femme lesbians.4 These women represent several “irsts” in television, ranging from images of lesbian desire and love to maternal sexuality, provoking heteronormative taboos, and challenging religious and patriarchal images of motherhood. Historically, popular images of lesbian representation have connected solely to sexuality. In her 2004 article, “Lesbian ‘Making-of’ Documentaries and the Production of Lesbian Sex,” scholar Kelly Hankin remarks on the lack of anything connecting the genre of lesbian ilm, except a very deliberate inclusion of female sexual imagery. She states, “Indeed, the feature ilms directed by ‘out’ lesbians … are so disparate in scope … that there seems little to bind them together as lesbian ilmmaking projects other than the obvious.”5 With perhaps the exception of a few TV programs, mainstream media has been slow to depict a serious lesbian relationship, especially one that includes the decision to have children. Hannah Rubenstein’s 2005 article, “lesbian chic,” notes the then “boom” in lesbian-centered and lesbianfriendly programs that owed their success largely to the groundbreaking programming of the 1990s. Rubenstein writes that while TV programs such as Picket Fences (1993), Roseanne (1994), and Friends (1996) made inroads in mainstreaming lesbian images, they revealed little about lesbian identity. Most of the mainstream depictions were and still are of straight women experimenting with the novelty of same-sex kissing, though in fairness, Friends created a subplot that opened discourse about alternative families. However, when real lesbians began frequenting primetime, the femme fantasy of most plotlines did not exactly match the reality of what Rubenstein describes as “middle-aged-in their mid-thirties to early fortiesprimarily non-sexualized, not particularly chic, and butch” women like Rosie O’Donnell and Ellen DeGeneres. She states, “The depictions of lesbians on television were essentially standardized: frumpy, anti-male, often

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angry, desexualized women – a stereotype that clearly marginalizes the diversity of the lesbian community.”6 Even into the late 1990s, television audiences experienced same-sex relationships as subtext. Anna McCarthy comments on Ellen as a “failure” as the irst lesbian sitcom: “Gay and lesbian characters were certainly part of the supposed liberalization of the sitcom … however, they were not generally part of the formal shift from one-off, static reiterations of the basic comic setup to full-ledged seriality. Indeed, narrative development in sitcoms was arguably a hetero privilege.”7 One Showtime series, Queer as Folk (2000), managed to queer the family dynamic by having one of its central male characters participate in inseminating the show’s only lesbian couple, but the storyline took a back seat to the predominantly male relationships. Unfortunately, keeping the focus on women’s issues has been dificult. Speciically, the subject of lesbian love has held a titillating, yet tenuous place in literature from Sappho’s poetry to Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), and in cinema from Marlene Dietrich’s smoldering performance in Morocco (1930) to Charlize Theron’s wretched character in Monster (2004). For the most part, lesbians merely haunt the periphery of human stories. On screen, she is often relegated to a cameo role or to that of the “monster.” Her insubstantial condition has made it impossible for her to tell her own stories of love and life. Though lesbians are getting more attention, they have just begun to ind their place in literature, ilm, and television. ALL THE RAGE

While lesbians have enjoyed more visibility, it has not necessarily culminated in a better understanding of lesbian culture.8 Suzanna Danuta Walters writes, “Surely, times are better, but I believe there are ways in which this new visibility creates new forms of homophobia. We may be seen, now, but I’m not sure we are known.”9 Walters believes that most people mistake our current visibility in the media as a mainstreaming that will ultimately lead toward acceptance. Yet, she contends that while lesbians are more visible, the visible lesbian has been heterosexualized to be more palatable for the straight viewer. This is particularly true for lesbian mothers, whom the writers and producers of mainstream media often exploit for their connection to straight mothers. Sadly, most of the GLBTQ community has been grateful to see any representation at all, since most of our past representation is little more than ethereal.

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According to Terry Castle in The Apparitional Lesbian, the past held the image of the “ghostly” lesbian, prevalent in literature and ilm.10 Renee Hoogland’s Lesbian Conigurations (1997) concurs that the lesbian ghost pervades cultural and literary representations with marginal incarnation; her visibility is “contingent upon her disappearance,” which means that, even if she is leshed out as a three-dimensional character, she must be erased so that heterosexual harmony may be restored. Hoogland argues that the lesbian’s textual absence is not merely an oversight, but rather intentional. She states that it is “precisely the kind of over-determined ideological effect described by [Marilyn] Frye as ‘a scurrying to erase, to divert the eye, the attention, the mind.’”11 Historically, our abject, on-screen presence haunts such ilms as Basic Instinct, Personal Best, The Children’s Hour, and The Fox. As the movie and television industry has proliferated and become more complex over time, viewing audiences have become much more sophisticated, more educated about gay and lesbian issues, and more open to the possibility of the lesbian getting and keeping the girl. The issue here is if lesbians are inally visible, does this mean that heterosociety is ready to see us beyond the sexual? In popular culture, lesbian sexuality has gained visibility, somewhat because of straight male desire, usually involving a “straight-looking” woman who is merely experimenting. In her review of The Queer Movie Poster Book, Malinda Lo remarks upon some of the earlier (1960s) “dykesploitation” ilms: “Many of these movies featured a ‘real’ lesbian who had an affair with a temporarily [lesbian] (or bi-curious) woman, who typically went back to heterosexuality by the end of the movie.”12 Male fantasies have changed little since the 1960s, if the ads for the Girls Gone Wild video collection are any measure. Men I know tell me that they like the prospect of seeing two women make love because they imagine themselves in the midst, or that it is aesthetically pleasing. Make no mistake: this type of sexist representation has little or nothing to do with actual lesbian love or relationships. But The L Word’s popularity admittedly has something to do with its representation of aesthetically femme women. I would like to think that the popularity of The L Word represents a paradigm shift in our sexual culture; if so, it is not likely because of a liberal movement in Western thinking, but rather, it is likely a result of a collective movement based in nostalgia. Passionate and spontaneous lovemaking without having to worry about safe sex takes viewers back to the days before AIDS. In such a context, “lesbian” no longer represents a lack of the male, but rather the symbol of unlimited desire, a safe zone.13 Penelope J. Engelbrecht describes lesbian desire as interminable: “In common parlance, ‘desire’ refers to a physiological condition, an affective state, a bodily urge; however, our desires are not

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simply sensual ... This Brossardian – not quite Lacanian – Desire paradoxically does (not) anticipate failure in its perpetual inconclusiveness, even as it animates jouissance. In other words, my lesbian Desire does not anticipate exhaustion.”14 The idea of unending sexual performance not only signals a longing for the past, but is also a reminder of male sexual exhaustibility. The combination of interminable lesbian desire to the exclusion of male participation, and the lesbian who conceives a child without male participation, represents transgressive examples of woman and mother. Monique Wittig’s “Paradigm” states, “heterosexuality is a cultural construct designed to justify the whole system of social domination based on the obligatory reproductive function of women and the appropriation of that reproduction.”15 In this context, the lesbian mother deies all cultural constructs for gender and sexuality. The L Word deals with all of these issues, while maintaining multiple factors of entertainment, politics, and culture. The writers managed to portray lesbians in a fairly authentic manner (albeit not always physically so); but their portrayal of lesbian motherhood is by far one of the most radical and groundbreaking to date. In any case, people tuned in season after season. Both lesbian and straight viewers tuned in, evidenced by an informal poll among my friends, colleagues, and numerous websites dedicated to L Word fans. Though the show ended in 2009 after a six-season run, the L Word left an indelible print upon television history. Each season seemed to break sexual or social ground for the queer community; yet, the second season pinpoints the aforementioned images of motherhood and begs further discourse. Not since Lucille Ball’s decision to appear very obviously pregnant in a 1952 episode of I Love Lucy has there been a more publicly disruptive view of impending motherhood. One of The L Word’s central characters, Tina Kennard is a young urban professional, pregnant by artiicial insemination and expecting the baby she intended to co-parent with her partner, Bette. Bette has an affair with another woman, leaving Tina unsure of her feelings for Bette and challenging their relationship at the beginning of season two. In true soap opera fashion, this also coincides with the onset of Tina’s pregnancy, allowing opportunity for Tina to ind herself in unconventional circumstances. MOTHERS , MOTHERS EVER YWHERE

Laurel Holloman, who plays the part of Tina, was actually pregnant during the ilming of the second season, so the writers accommodated her expanding waistline to it the script. The storyline is contemporary

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and timely; yet, what makes this storyline unique is that during her pregnancy, Tina remains visibly sexual with more than one partner. From the irst season until this point, Tina has been committed to Bette, even setting aside her own career to concentrate on fertility issues and being a stay-at-home mom. Tina’s frustration peaks when she inds out that Bette has had an affair; however, the relationship suffers mainly from Bette’s blindness, a self-imposed inability to notice the people who love and support her. Many times, she has the opportunity to see what is in front of her, but refuses. Everyone else – friends, the viewing audience, and Helena, a new competitor for Tina’s affection – sees that Tina is pregnant. Bette, who has been away from Tina for a few weeks, has not noticed her expanding waistline, nor has Tina given her much opportunity to get close. It might seem that Bette’s narcissism has brought her to this point, so she is easy to fool. A few loose sweaters and some wellplaced bubbles in the bathtub hide Tina’s secret from Bette. Bette represents the dominant culture in that she refuses to see what she cannot comprehend. In terms of queer discourse, Tina symbolizes the disappearing lesbian, lamented for decades of invisibility in cinema. Yet, The L Word reclaims the disappearing lesbian in several ways. First, the ensemble cast of femme women deconstructs femininity in such a way that the viewer can no longer equate feminine with heterosexual. Since the viewer may no longer trust the visible determinants of sexuality, other symbolic paradigms become blurred as well. This ambiguity is the crux of anxiety for heteronormative culture; femme lesbians, and lesbian mothers in particular, represent an unseen, dangerous simulacrum that pervades the most private and vital aspect of normative identity. Madeline Davis describes “women who look and act like girls and who desire girls” as “the queerest of the queers.”16 Much like covert operations, their identity takes them on the front lines of the sex and gender wars daily. These queer heroes iniltrate and confuse straight minds by their oxymoronic being. Tina, as the maternal subject, dismantles the traditional, silent virgin-as-mother because she embodies what Julia Kristeva labels a “herethics” discourse on maternity and motherhood, one based on the sexually situated experience of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood.17 The following excerpt is the irst private dialogue between Tina and Helena, one that focuses upon Helena seeing Tina’s state of pregnancy. HELENA: When’s your baby due? TINA : (smiling hesitantly) I’m at fourteen weeks.

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HELENA: Are you having twins? TINA: (Cradling her abdomen) Uh. HELENA : Well, you’re beautiful! I didn’t want to make you uncom-

fortable. TINA : That’s okay, I’m just starting to get used to showing. HELENA : I ind it quite sexy, actually.18 The scene sets Helena’s introduction into Tina’s personal life, one in which each woman pictures herself and the other as a single mother – Tina, because she has left Bette, and Helena because her ex-partner Winnie left with their two children. However, Tina and Helena’s circumstances could not be more different. Helena’s attraction to Tina is an aggressive move, based upon her fetish for pregnant women. We may think of Helena in Lacanian terms because her relationship to women may be based upon the lack in her relationship to her own mother, Peggy, who seems to have devoted her entire life to philanthropy rather than her role as mother.19 The loss of her mother’s love and physical presence is replaced by a “fetish which is a displacement of the bodily disposition that constitutes the castration the girl suffers.”20 This is articulated in Helena’s desire for the fecund woman, one who is either fertile or already pregnant. Her territoriality with her children from a previous relationship is an extension of her fetish. Her children live with their birth mother, one who describes Helena as not just a seductress, but as a “colonizer.” winnie: Do you know she’s coming on to your board of directors? BETTE: Yeah, she’s everywhere, I can’t seem to get away from her! WINNIE: That’s how she deals, she colonizes. BETTE: She fucking plunders and pillages.21 In this sense, The L Word’s conquering mother echoes her powerful historical predecessor, Constantine’s mother, St Helena who was responsible for the spread of Christianity. Like St Helena, this woman’s wealth and power establish her as a conqueror, pillager, and colonizer. She enters Tina’s life with an entourage it for royalty, ready to sweep Tina away with money. Laurel Hollomon states in an interview that before she taped the irst sexual encounter with Rachel Shelley (Helena), she asked Ilene Chaiken (creator, director, and writer) to give her motivation for irst having sex with a woman she hardly knows; and second, why she undresses in a public place while pregnant – a time when other mothers-to-be often feel uncomfortable about their bodies.

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It was the irst love scene with Helena – it was a seduction where Helena seduces Tina by the pool … I went to Ilene [Chaiken] and said, “Why do I sleep with this woman?” … I told Ilene the story I knew of a friend who was pregnant and did not feel very sexy at the time, and her partner went over all the points of her body that were beautiful, her belly, her breasts. It was very seductive, and that stayed in my head – the celebration of her pregnant body – and then we incorporated that into the scene because Tina feels really insecure like, “Why are you interested?” As she looks down at her body, and Helena says, “This is what is so beautiful, this is what’s so sexy,” and she sort of rubs Tina’s belly, and then it all makes sense.22 Before Tina may emerge as a queer symbol of the maternal or as a member of the familial community of lesbians, she undertakes Kristeva’s mission of individual experience, measured through her sexuality. The result is that the viewer sees the sexual mother as a powerful paradigm that deconstructs both mother and woman. Possibly the most confrontational imagery frames Tina house hunting in her second trimester, and in sexual ecstasy.23 From behind the couple, the viewer sees the realtor as he walks in on Helena, who is between Tina’s legs, and Tina, on a marble table oblivious to all but her pleasure. When they are interrupted, Tina scoots off the table and smoothes her suit, managing a slight blush, yet seeming to already have become accustomed to the openness of Helena’s sexuality. Further complicating matters by removing sex from the private, Helena seeks numerous public venues to make love to Tina, including the swimming pool at the Chateau Marmônt, the balcony of her hotel suite, in the aforementioned house-for-sale, and nearly in front of Helena’s two children from a previous relationship. Helena is aggressive rather than seductive; and her actions belie more the hunter/father/protector than co-mother. Like a capitalist consumer, Helena seems to be the antithesis to the community that the main characters have built. She believes she can “shop” for the ready-made family; and much like a commodities trader, she is interested in immediate gratiication fueled by a desire to win. The danger of public display, while meant to be titillating, touches upon public vs. private discourse, private lives, and public property. Helena’s desire to stake a claim into the ready-made family represents the menace of heteronormative power and its ability to conquer even the most intimate parts of queer lives, including our bodies.

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SLAYING THE DRAGON

In Western culture, pregnancy has often been associated with a liminal time of potential “danger” for both mother and child. In A Cultural History of Pregnancy: Pregnancy, Medicine and Culture, 1750–2000, Clare Hanson reveals cultural inluences that have shaped the human experience of pregnancy, as well as the history leading up to its medicalization. Hanson details the evolution of the relationship between mother and fetus, which was viewed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in terms of harmony (one entity working unison) but which has of late come to be viewed in terms of conlict (i.e., baby vs. mother).24 This idea, not coincidently, intersects with Western culture’s interest in science and the beginnings of medical scopophilia. The irst medical endeavors stemmed from a variety of developments, especially what Michel Foucault criticized as the “totalising” theories that claimed to offer the “truth” through “scientiic” explanations.25 In “Embryonic Individuals: The Rhetoric of Seventeenth-Century Embryology and the Construction of Early-Modern Identity,” Eve Keller looks at the relationship between the scopophilia of this period and identity: “In the seventeenth century, the whole process of generation – from conception to birth – was … a secret terrain that had adamantly resisted reduction to mechanical explanation. But it was there that the self was materially formed, and so it was there that fantasies and anxieties about origins could be inscribed and assuaged.”26 The nineteenth and twentieth centuries marked a signiicant transformation of pregnancy and childbirth from midwife to (mostly male) doctors. Technological appropriation of pregnancy and birth has distanced women from the natural process of childbirth with often devastating results.27 Technological intervention tends to objectify the process of birth as well as the mother, who functions as merely the vessel or container. It is no surprise, then, that the pregnant woman herself becomes the object of pornography, her belly fetishized as a sign of her sexuality. Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981) includes a brief description of the pregnant woman as whore, that lends poignant commentary upon the sexual mother as viewed from the male sexual system. Dworkin writes, “the pregnant woman is a particular sexual object: she shows her sexuality through her pregnancy. The display marks her as a whore. Her belly is her sex. Her belly is proof that she has been used. Her belly is his phallic triumph.”28 Dworkin refers to pornographic magazines like Mom: Big Bellied Mamas, which fetishize the

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maternal body, particularly the woman’s belly, breasts, and vagina.29 The textual commentary appropriates the circumstances of the “single, pregnant mother,” deining her as wonton and “sick” and focusing on the list of medical problems she has or could have during pregnancy. Dworkin recognizes the right-wing “obsession” with the woman’s body, and the rigid cultural system of beliefs that support the public consumption of motherhood. She states, “Even in pregnancy, the possibility of death is the excitement of sex.”30 Dworkin’s analysis represents second wave feminists’ revulsion toward pornography because of its male-centered view of women’s bodies and a suspicion of the male-dominated ield of medicine. Rebecca Huntley notes the similarity between the arguments made by both sides: “To some extent, the Right’s fear is also the radical feminist fear, but with a signiicant twist. Pornographic material … (is) the ultimate manifestation of the madonna/whore dichotomy.”31 There develops an inescapable binary for pregnant women whereby any sexual activity becomes unnecessary and, in the extreme, perverse or monstrous. Arguably, visions of the pregnant lesbian experiencing sexual pleasure disrupt our gaze on several levels: irst, her sexual orientation disrupts the maternal connection; second, her maternal embodiment disrupts her sexuality and sexual orientation; third, her visibility affects traditional ideas about motherhood and sexuality. Though there may be more to interrogate about the visibly pregnant lesbian, her excess of sexuality resists both extreme views of motherhood. The connection between lesbian motherhood and monstrosity is an area that warrants more analysis. The melding of maternity and technology also surfaces in dominant discourse under the category of monstrosity. The idea of the “monstrous maternal” developed from a fear of the unknown and the fear of loss connected to the birth process. Pregnancy continues to be haunted by monsters in the Western visual imagination. Our popular culture holds many examples of the fear associated with technology’s impact. The movies Alien 2, Rosemary’s Baby, Frankenstein, and Edward Scissorhands are just a few examples of cultural anxiety surrounding “unnatural” birth. Like monstrosity, queerness rejects what straightness sees as normal and natural in favour of the unnatural/abnormal. Popular culture’s message about the monstrous maternal emerges also in its message about gender and sexual identity. Michèle Aina Barale explores the internal and external impact of the queer gaze: “For all of us … the price of admission is that a degree of self alienation is demanded of us. If we are to gain the beneit of tutelage in valor, we must also experience ourselves pitted against ourselves, saved from a horror, which is as much a part of us as it

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is a threat to us.”32 One advantage is that our long relationship with the “monstrous” has helped us slip through dominant discourse; therefore, those of us familiar with society’s margins have no fear of technology or testing heretofore untried cultural formations. In dominant discourse, the word queer means “strange,” “grotesque,” “abnormal,” or “sick”; and as such is used as an insult for gays and lesbians. Yet, we have always had the ability to embrace the shadows and overcome our fear. This complex situation plays itself out daily as more and more lesbians are deciding to become parents. If Bette and Tina were legally married, then at least some of the public boundaries would be clearer; and yet, the question of maternity becomes blurred again when we consider the parental role each mother takes. Tina, Bette, and Helena (respectively the biological mother, the other mother, and the consuming mother) may provide the necessary impetus for discourse on the fetus as public property, at least for now. Artiicial insemination has made motherhood a viable option for lesbians who want children. The medical process itself is routine; however, the controversy arises when getting pregnant turns into redeining familial social constructs. The question of maternity has been eclipsed historically by questions of paternity, but lately, even in situations where straight couples ind it dificult to conceive, there is often more than one mother involved. Multiple mothers resist the clear-cut formulation of the traditional mother, opening up what theorist Chela Sandoval deines as a sort of “third space.”33 This rupture signals a new way of seeing motherhood and family; but as with all paradigm shifts, there is resistance. KEEPING A CLOSE EYE ON MOM

The director, Chaiken, reveals Tina’s obviously pregnant belly through a sexually provocative lens, thrusting both Tina’s unborn baby and Tina’s lovers into a performative, erogenous space, while effectively interrogating the womb as private domain. The intimate proximity of Tina’s new lover, Helena, to the fetus seems almost intrusive and consumptive, especially considering that their sexual performance is or has the potential to become public. Considering the short time they know each other before their irst sexual encounter, Tina invites a virtual stranger to come into close contact with her genital and abdominal area, and into close contact with her womb. This scenario represents an aspect of cultural anxiety about female sexual activity, particularly pregnant females as property of one male only. Penetrating the maternal zone presents certain dificulties complicated by the Western world’s disparate ideas about sexuality and

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motherhood. Materializing the anxiety around this idea, Chaiken gets up close and personal by combining the maternal and sexual body. One of the dificulties we experience as spectators is trying to imagine what category of embodied experience these images belong to – just what kind of response they do evoke, or should they evoke? Should we be horriied by the sexual embodiment of the maternal, or is it the combination of lesbianism and pregnancy that makes these images so brazen? In “Optical Allusions: Hysterical Memories and the Screening of Pregnant Sites,” Karen Carr comments on the function of ultrasound as a tool that marginalizes the maternal subject, and explains that when we pair sex with maternity it invokes, “a cultural history in which the pregnant female body is a sight of both idolization and embarrassment.”34 Traditionally, the pregnant body is perhaps the most visible marker of heterosexual sexuality, so the lesbian portion of the viewing audience engages with lesbian discourse complicated by heterosexual signs. What queers the images, besides the lesbian sex, is that Chaiken pushes the gap between performance and material embodiment in a way that is uncomfortable for the viewer to encounter, mostly because of societal mores that conine women to their hegemonically proscribed roles. The seduction and shamelessness of the orgasmic pregnant lesbian not only disturbs categories of sexual and maternal identity, but Chaiken’s coniguration of the body itself also disrupts heteronormative understanding of what women can or should be. In a sense, no audience member is exempt from the visually queer – even lesbians. These images are also a disturbing reminder of the constant threat of public surveillance. Carr expounds: The reproductive (pregnant) body exists as spectacle – it is always a profoundly sighted body that doesn’t exist apart from being seen. There is the external sense of people looking, but with technologies such as ultrasound, there is also the internal sense that the fetus itself is, somehow, looking.… When this technique works, it is a means of setting up internal surveillance for the woman who is pregnant. Not only is the state watching but so is the human-like fetus itself. The pregnant body then is circumscribed by a visual line that is both in and out, private and public.35 Technological advances have allowed us greater access inside of the womb, another step toward total public spectacle, reminding women of their “ultimate” role in society. Paradoxically, mothers receive the message that they must refrain from being seen too much, lest they fall subject to public disapproval or the evil eye. Strangers will often accost a pregnant

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woman in public assuming that it is okay to touch her baby bump or ask her personal questions. Perhaps this signiies our culture’s interest in the high stakes of a pregnancy carried to full term. CONCLUSION

The L Word has seen its last season, evoking a disappointment felt by lesbians all over the world. It has, in its short life, received acclaim and notoriety from various sources in and out of the lesbian community because, like all good programming, it shows us the truth. As representatives of motherhood on television, Tina, Bette, and Helena tell us something about our ideas on women, sexuality, and motherhood, and the possibilities for change. Our global future has its very basis in the way we treat mothers and children, beginning with the way we view pregnancy and sexuality. In learning to live in a complex world, all of us – queer and straight – must try to build alliances rather than gaps. It is within this context that I refer back to “the new American family,” reiterating the importance of being able to establish motherhood on our own terms, according to shifting paradigms. Chicana lesbian author Cherrie Moraga’s autobiographical account of pregnancy and birth offers insight. There is no accounting for … what inally makes a family, except love. I remain awed by this mystery of how love and blood and home and history and desire coalesce and collide to construct a child’s sense of self and family. I know blood quantum does not determine parenthood any more than it determines culture. Still, I know blood matters. It just does not matter more than love.36 Popular culture walks a ine line in the representation of our growing segment of the population. Lesbian parenting may just be emerging on the pop culture radar; but for those of us living this life, we live the paradox of how we deviate from, and at the same time reinforce, cultural norms. Above all, I try to think of our families as having the potential for truly positive parenting, each and all based upon love.

NOTES

1 “Etheridge and Crosby Talk: Bailey and Beckett Have Two Mommies,” CBS News, 60 Minutes II, 30 June 2000, accessed 29 September 2008, http:// www.cbsnews.com/stories/2000/01/17/60II/main150369.shtml.

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2 Ibid. 3 Seliger, “The New American Family: Melissa Etheridge and David Crosby,” Rolling Stone, February 2000, cover. 4 I refer to “femme” within the context of butch/femme gender identities. Butch/femme identities were thought to be mimicry of heteronormative gender roles; however, the butch/femme binary actually exposes traditional roles as constructs with a speciic agenda. For an examination of lesbian identity in the twentieth century, see Carter’s “On Mother-Love: History, Queer Theory, and Nonlesbian Identity.” Carter looks at The L-Word’s focus on femme lesbians “to underscore the prominence of conventionally feminine gendering in some current lesbian identities and cultures” (110). 5 Hankin, “Lesbian ‘Making-of’ Documentaries,” 33. 6 Rubenstein “lesbian chic,” 48.  7 McCarthy, “Ellen: Making Queer Television History,” 598–9. 8 My understanding of queer and lesbian theory has been inluenced by numerous theorists and scholars, including Gloria Anzaldúa, Nicole Brossard, Judith Butler, Pat Caliia, Teresa de Lauretis, Lillian Faderman, Diana Fuss, Judith Halberstam, Audre Lorde, Elizabeth Meese, Joan Nestle, Emma Pérez, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Adrienne Rich, Chela Sandoval, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. 9 Walters, All the Rage, 10. 10 Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian, 4. 11 Hoogland, Lesbian Conigurations, 113. 12 Lo, “Feast Your Eyes,” 40. 13 This is not to suggest that lesbians are immune from sexually transmitted diseases. Statistically, the community has managed to avert the problems of the gay male and heterosexual populations concerning STDs. The reality is, however, that lesbians are less likely to protect themselves or pursue routine medical care in connection to sexually transmitted disease. See Susan Jo Roberts, “Health Care Recommendations for Lesbian Women,” 587. 14 Engelbrecht, “Bodily Mut(il)ation,” 3. 15 Wittig, “Paradigm,” 115. 16 Davis, “Epilogue, Nine Years Later,” 270. 17 Kristeva, “Tales of Love,” 308–30. Kristeva coined the term “herethics” to describe an ethical theory and practice based on its discourse of the maternal and the feminine. It also plays with the word “heretics” in the sense that it combines “her” and “ethics” to combat an overly religious view of the secular. 18 “Labyrinth,” The L Word, directed by Burr Steers, (2005; Hollywood: Paramount, 2005), DVD.

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19 The “mirror stage” as deined by Jacques Lacan is a developmental stage that occurs between six and eighteen months of age. It is at this stage when a child begins to misrecognize herself in a (metaphorical) mirror as her ego forms. Following this theory, one possible outcome could be that the femme lesbian who identiies with the loss of the mother’s body may displace her desire for the maternal in a fetishistic manner. I would also like to acknowledge, however, that a feminist approach to psychoanalysis questions the paternal approach to both Freud and Lacan; and that several brilliant feminist scholars like Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray have emphasized the maternal function in its relation to human subjectivity. In This Sex Which Is Not One, Irigaray points out that Lacan’s master signiier of the Symbolic order, the Phallus, is relevant to only the male body. The female merely “lacks” the phallus, and spends her life in pursuit of it. Irigaray argues that Lacan fails to recognize Freud’s error; and like Freud, he sees humankind in terms of a “one-sex” model of sexuality. In this sense, she argues persuasively that both Freud and Lacan are working within lawed paradigms. 20 Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 165. 21 “Loyal,” The L Word, directed by Alison Mclean, (2005; Hollywood: Paramount, 2005), DVD. 22 Angela Knight, “The L Event – London,” Laurel Holloman Online, November 2005, http://www.laurelhollomanonline.com/media/interviews / leventinterview.html. 23 “Loyal,” The L Word, DVD. 24 Hanson, A Cultural History of Pregnancy, 8–9. 25 Foucault claimed that the goal of the various European societies was to produce disciplined subjects. Numerous feminist scholars have commented upon and revised his oversight in theorizing the gendered body. 26 Keller, “Embryonic Individuals,” 323. 27 Davis-Floyd, Birth as an American Rite of Passage, 288–9. 28 Dworkin, Pornography, 222. 29 Ibid., 218. Although Dworkin does not give a bibliographic reference for Mom: Big Bellied Mamas, it seems to be representative of this genre of fetish pornography. In 2011, an Internet search using the term “pregnant porn,” for example, yields over two million hits. For a more contemporary exploration of this issue, see Huntley, “Sexing the Belly,” and Longhurst, “A Pornography of Birth.” 30 Ibid., 223. 31 Huntley, Sexing the Belly, 358. 32 Barale, “When Lambs and Aliens Meet,” 104.

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33 Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed, 83–4. Chela Sandoval reveals the hegemony of many theorists in regards to postmodern resistance and consciousness. What emerges from her methodology in terms of subjectivity materializes as one that is evolving. In this case, we may view paradigm shifts in motherhood through a queer lens, speciically in terms of what Gloria Anzaldúa deines as a “mestiza consciousness.” The path to conscientization refers to the transformation and evolution; and while it is a complex process, it is marked also by adapting, fracturing, and reconnecting in new ways rather than staying a ixed-self. This describes the queer as well as straight subject, making the inevitable integral connections between communities. 34 Carr, “Optical Allusions,” 5. 35 Ibid. 36 Moraga, Waiting in the Wings, 125. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barale, Michéle Aina, “When Lambs and Aliens Meet: Girlfaggots and Boydykes go to the Movies.” In Cross-Purposes: Lesbians, Feminists, and the Limits of Alliance, edited by Dana Heller, 95–106, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997. Carr, Karen. “Optical Allusions: Hysterical Memories and the Screening of Pregnant Sites.” Postmodern Culture 5 no. 2 (1995): 1–14. Carter, Julian. “On Mother-Love: History, Queer Theory, and Nonlesbian Identity.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, no. 1 (2005): 107–38. Castle, Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Davis, Madeline. “Epilogue, Nine Years Later.” In The Persistent Desire: A Femme/Butch Reader, edited by Joan Nestle, 270–1. New York: Alyson Books, 1992. Davis-Floyd, Robbie. Birth as an American Rite of Passage. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Dworkin, Andrea. Pornography: Men Possessing Women. New York: Plume, 1991. Engelbrecht, Penelope J. “Bodily Mut(il)ation: Enscribing Lesbian Desire.” Postmodern Culture 7, no. 2 (1997): 1–17. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Hankin, Kelly. “Lesbian ‘Making-of’ Documentaries and the Production of Lesbian Sex.” The Velvet Light Trap 53 (Spring 2004): 26–39.

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Hanson, Clare. A Cultural History of Pregnancy: Pregnancy, Medicine and Culture, 1750-2000. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2004. Hoogland, Renee C. Lesbian Conigurations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Huntley, Rebecca. “Sexing the Belly: An Exploration of Sex and the Pregnant Body.” Sexualities 3, no. 3 (2000): 347–62. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Keller, Eve. “Embryonic Individuals: The Rhetoric of Seventeenth-Century Embryology and the Construction of Early-Modern Identity.” EighteenthCentury Studies 33, no. 3 (2000): 321–48. Kristeva, Julia. “Tales of Love.” In The Portable Kristeva, edited by Kelly Oliver, 308–30. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. The L Word. Season 2. Hollywood: Paramount, 2005. DVD. Lo, Malinda. “Feast Your Eyes,” The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide 12, no. 1 (2005): 40–1. Longhurst, Robyn. “A Pornography of Birth: Crossing Moral Boundaries.” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 5, no. 2 (2006): 209–29. http://www.acme-journal.org/vol5/RLo.pdf. McCarthy, Anna. “Ellen: Making Queer Television History.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7, no. 4 (2001): 598–99. Moraga, Cherrie. Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood. Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1997. Roberts, Susan Jo. “Health Care Recommendations for Lesbian Women.” Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic, and Neonatal Nursing 35, no. 5 (2006): 583–91. Rubenstein, Hannah. “lesbian chic.” Iris no. 51 (October 2005): 48–53. Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed: Theory Out of Bounds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2000. Seliger, Mark. “The New American Family: Melissa Etheridge and David Crosby,” Rolling Stone 833, February 2000, cover. Walters, Suzanna Danuta. All the Rage: The Story of Gay Visibility in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Wittig, Monique. “Paradigm.” In Homosexualities and French Literature, edited by George Stambolian and Elaine Marks, 114–23. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979.

20 COMING TO TERMS

Ethics, Motherhood, and the Cultural Science Fiction of the Gene Stuart J. Murray

I went in search of my roots and had my DNA tested and I am a Zulu.  Oprah Winfrey1 Within the DNA is written not only our histories as individuals but the whole history of the human race. With the aid of recent advances in genetic technology, this history is now being revealed. We are at last able to begin to decipher the messages from the past. Our DNA does not fade like an ancient parchment; it does not rust in the ground like the sword of a warrior long dead. It is not eroded by wind or rain, nor reduced to ruin by ire and earthquake. It is the traveller from an antique land who lives within us all. Bryan Sykes, The Seven Daughters of Eve

INTRODUCTION

I begin this chapter with a public statement by Oprah Winfrey and a passage from the irst page of Bryan Sykes’s international bestseller The Seven Daughters of Eve (2001). Both demonstrate the tremendous extent to which our popular understanding of kinship – and motherhood in particular – has become “genetic,” mediated by discourses on the gene and genetic technologies. In what follows, I address the ethical implications of this new understanding of motherhood. I argue that mainstream “genetic” discourses, exempliied by Winfrey and Sykes, have come to frame what it means to be a good mother. These discourses offer a

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moralizing vocabulary that masquerades as Science and Truth. While they provide a ready-made vocabulary for a woman to “come to terms” with motherhood in its increasingly genetic and technological dimensions, I argue that these terms ultimately instrumentalize the maternal relation, reducing what should be an ethical relation to one that is procedural, calculative, and ostensibly the domain of science. The “science” of the gene, and the ways that it is deployed as a moral discourse on motherhood, should best be acknowledged as a cultural science iction. In what follows, I demonstrate irst how the cultural science iction of the gene is leading toward the geneticization and technologization of motherhood and the maternal relation. I argue that this idea of motherhood is fast becoming the paradigm of the ethically good mother – the mother whose relation to her child is mediated by genetic terminology and who submits to genetic technologies, experts, and tests as a preparental duty. I will suggest that this paradigm limits the ways a mother can conceive of her relation to her own body and to her child. I demonstrate this through the deceptive ways that Bryan Sykes depicts motherhood as genetic in his popular book, The Seven Daughters of Eve. Next, I discuss the work of two well-known bioethicists, Margaret Somerville and Leon R. Kass, both of whom appeal to “science” and “nature” to make their claims about ethical motherhood. Ultimately, what they really offer, again, is a cultural science iction, naturalized categories that severely delimit the terms of motherhood and the maternal relation. In response, in the inal pages of this chapter, I turn briely to the work of Adriana Cavarero, a feminist philosopher, who allows us to imagine motherhood as an ethical relation that is not mediated by the gene and genetic technologies – locating ethics in the “scene of infancy,” a deeply embodied and sonorous bond that joins mother and child.2 WEIRD SCIENCE

Reading from the opening page of Sykes’s book, above, we ind a broad array of metaphors meant to instruct the average reader in the “science” of DNA. We are told that genes are a kind of “writing,” a historical record of sorts, at once personal and political, situating the individual within the vast history of the human race itself. In these lines we are called, rhetorically, to assume responsibility not just for ourselves, but also as actors who must look both backwards and forwards in time, and whose actions form part of a vital link in those histories that were and that will be. But if our genes are a form of “writing” that is historical and

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historicizing – a “book of life”3 – then reading the presumably unbroken “message” in this text is more complicated than these metaphors might suggest. “Writing” must be “deciphered,” as Sykes says.4 But by whom? While our genetic code predates us and will outlast those of us who have children, only the expert can read it, and the expert’s interpretation relies on “advances in genetic technology.” So if genes carry ethical implications, it is unclear where that ethical responsibility lies. If it is my responsibility, “I” am nevertheless beholden to a science and technology that exceeds me and that offers alien terms for the self; perhaps I have no personal expertise in genetics, no familiarity with genetic technologies, and so on. I am armed only with metaphors. And if, in some sense, it can be said that I am my genes, where then is the locus of my responsibility with respect to my genes and to who I am? Moreover, in what terms shall I assume responsibility for my children as the historical genetic expression of my genes and of me? Sykes does not hesitate to personify the gene, calling it a “traveller from an antique land who lives within us all.”5 For some, such as those carrying genetic markers for certain diseases, this traveller must seem like an uninvited and unwelcome guest. From an ethical perspective, the metaphor of the traveller points to a conundrum that has emerged with the mapping of the human genome and burgeoning genetic technologies in reproductive medicine: the gene begs the question of ethical agency in novel ways. Traditionally, biomedical ethics is founded on and presumes personal agency, an individual’s capacity to act and to decide for herself, autonomously. In the Western tradition, autonomy harks back to Enlightenment principles of human reason; as a political right, achieving this recognition has been a long and dificult battle for women, who, until recently, have not been considered as fully autonomous, rational, or even as the rightful owners of their bodies by men and by a paternalistic medical establishment. If we now admit, however, that our genes enjoy a kind of “agency,” that they act in us and on us, according to their own logical code, then the traditional principle of autonomous, rational agency – that being I call “I,” that self for whom I am answerable, ethically – is displaced onto or into my genes. If, by these lights, a woman’s genes can be said to have rights, will a woman still have a right to choose? This is a weird science, indeed. I have argued elsewhere that bioethics has yet to address the challenges of technological advances,6 but what interests me here are the wider cultural effects of genetic discourses, and in particular, the cultural forms in and through which a mother’s ethical responsibility is mediated

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and experienced. I will claim that the cultural effects of these discourses have become naturalized in such as way as to conceal the crisis in bioethics. After all, if genetic and other molecular sciences demonstrate that human behaviour must refer to our genes rather than to a rational and autonomous “self” or “person,” then we can no longer presume that this self or person is the unequivocal source of her own agency, reason, or freedom. The repercussions are legion, not just for reproductive medicine, but for Western culture in general, including our legal-juridical complex, the institution of democratic governance, and capitalist economies, to name just a few cultural forms that presume an autonomous and rational subject. If such a subject is shown to be a myth, these institutions will ind themselves without substance. But acknowledging that selfhood or personhood is a cultural form, as I do here, does not in itself abrogate us of ethical responsibility, despite what some critics of postmodernism might think. On the contrary, I argue that it is only by acknowledging these cultural formations as such that we might resist the dangerous naturalization of these forms – a naturalization that opens the door to social and political abuses in the name of Science and Nature. In other words, I argue that as “genetic” discourses circulate culturally and produce cultural effects, in some instances these effects are conceived and promoted as “natural,” and therefore beyond cultural criticism. This ideological move is dangerous because it provides a platform for troubling conservative sociopolitical agendas while rhetorically immunizing them from critique. Instead, I will suggest that the ethical mother ought to resist the naturalizing effects of genetic discourses and engage in the ongoing practice of cultural critique. GENETIC

“ HERITAGE ”

Sykes’s book exempliies the ways cultural forms become naturalized. And Sykes writes with the backing of institutional authority: he is a geneticist at Oxford University. His book claims that through analysis of mitochondrial DNA, which is passed on intact through maternal descent, modern Europeans can be traced back to a total of only seven women or “clan mothers” from the distant past. Sykes tells the story of the Iceman, whose 5,000-year-old corpse was discovered frozen in the Italian Alps in 1991. Remarkably, the Iceman’s DNA was tested, cross-referenced with databases of recent DNA samples, and found to be a match with one Marie Moseley, an Irishwoman living in Dorset, England. In some sense, this story is as much about Moseley as it is about the Iceman; it is a story

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about kinship relations in the genetic age, how we are coming to relate to our own genetic material – an unprecedented, new form of family relation. Moseley’s name was released to the press and she became a celebrity overnight. But what is most fascinating is how Moseley experienced what some might call an ethical relation to her distant and hitherto unknown ancestor. Sykes writes, “One of the strangest and, at irst, surprising things about this story … is that Marie began to feel something for the Iceman. She had seen pictures of him being shunted around from glacier to freezer to post-mortem room, poked and prodded, opened up, bits cut off. To her, he was no longer just the anonymous curiosity whose picture had appeared in the papers and on television. She had started to think of him as a real person and as a relative.”7 Sykes admits he is fascinated by the way Moseley began to sense a kinship with the Iceman, but his initial surprise soon yields to the suggestion that her feelings are only “natural.” In his book, Sykes traces his own line of descent back to one of the seven primordial clan women, whom he has named “Tara”: “I know that I am a descendant of Tara, and I want to know about her and her life. I feel I have something in common with her, more so than I do with the others.”8 Sykes moves between “knowing” and “feeling” with apparent ease, though it is unclear how his “knowledge” relates to his “feelings,” whether or how they stand in a causal relation, or what these feelings might actually mean. Instead, he offers an elaborate narrative of what life must have been like for “Tara.” He writes, “The streams held small trout and crayish, which helped Tara to raise her family and held the pangs of hunger at bay when the menfolk failed to kill a deer or wild boar.”9 Indeed, his book devotes a full chapter to each of the seven “clan mothers,” a historical iction worked up from archaeological knowledge of the time and place that each is imagined to have lived. And while he will not win any literary prizes, his stories are not bad. His reader is swept up into narratives that solicit an active identiication. The narrative structures implicitly suggest that we each possess a genetic knowledge of our distant forebears, and that the desire to know them and the desire to personify them are as natural as DNA itself. Sykes’s book concludes with the dizzying image of himself connected to his original clan mother, “Tara,” in an unbroken genetic lineage made visible and marked by extreme pathos: I am on a stage … I have in my hand the end of the thread which connects me to my ancestral mother way at the back. I pull on the

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thread and one woman’s face in every generation, feeling the tug, looks up at me … They are my ancestors … I want to ask them each in turn about their lives, their hopes and their disappointments, their joys and their sacriices. I speak, but they cannot hear. Yet I feel a strong connection. These are all my mothers who passed this precious messenger from one to another through a thousand births, a thousand screams, a thousand embraces of a thousand new-born babies. The thread becomes an umbilical cord.10 The “messenger” here is mitochondrial DNA that has a similar genetic sequence, but Sykes’s imaginative description recasts this molecular reality as a “strong connection,” a heartstring, or even love – a moment of hysteria that the reader must raise up and take on faith. Can we reject his image – “all my mothers” – without committing matricide? I believe we must. For Sykes, DNA has unproblematically become social, the embodiment of a desire, a moment of revelation and truth. Stranger still, he thinks that this ancient genetic heritage also inluences and guides our social relations today: “When two people ind out that they are in the same clan they often experience this feeling of connection. Very few can put it into words, but it is most deinitely there.”11 While Sykes admits at the end of his book that DNA does not exactly cause such feelings of kinship, and that DNA merely “traces the links” that presumably are already there and shared among “clan members,” we might think back to Moseley, whose feelings are in fact wholly attributable to the cultural signiicance of genes because her feelings for the Iceman did not predate her knowledge of their genetic similarity. If DNA is, as Sykes eventually claims, “a token or a symbol of the shared ancestry it reveals,”12 he is nevertheless unable to offer a scientiic account for any “feelings” of kinship, and thus he contributes to a “genetic” discourse in which DNA becomes the site at which such feelings are at once produced and naturalized – not because the gene is a mere “token” or “symbol,” but because it has great cultural signiicance, is thought to hold a tremendous power of explanation and revelation, and is interwoven with seductive narratives of origin as warm and comfortable as an old pair of fuzzy slippers. I have argued thus far that Sykes’s story effectively naturalizes what should best be described as the cultural values and interpretations of the gene that enjoy wide circulation, a cultural science iction. While Sykes places great emphasis on the power of genetic technologies to trace our ancestry, and while we might grant that his more scientiic work makes

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an important contribution to genetics, the substance of his popular book is a question of culture. His narrative does not hesitate to assign a greater cultural – indeed, quasi-religious – meaning to genes, and he posits that our feelings and gut reactions are natural and normal, rather than generated through cultural discourses, such as his own and others like it. It is not that science should not tell a good story; it should, but without losing sight of veriiable evidence. Sykes’s almost Pentecostal speculations on the community of spirit shared by “clan members” and on the purportedly “natural” feelings associated with these kinship relations – all delivered anecdotally, without a shred of scientiic evidence – should have no place alongside serious scientiic work, which falsely lends a kind of scientiic credence to mere opinion and fantasy. Indeed, one can see why racists have seized on Sykes’s theory, since it supports an essentialist understanding of races or “clans,” and justiies feelings of racial difference, if not racial “preference,” in the name of “science.”13 I have discussed Sykes at length because his book is a bestseller with wide popular appeal. And it helps us to understand how genetic discourse enters the mainstream; like a good song or religious text, the story of the gene is malleable enough to serve all manner of cultural needs. Certainly, the desire to narrativize one’s own history and pre-history is strong in our culture. Oprah Winfrey has capitalized on and further popularized genetic discourses through the public search for her own genetic “heritage.” But belonging to the Zulu tribe, enjoying that identity, and being part of that rich history and culture, is irreducible to a genetic sequence in one’s mitochondrial DNA – much more complex than Winfrey’s identity claim. My contention here is that wider cultural norms and discourses affect the presentation and uptake of discourses that are ostensibly scientiic. We must therefore exercise a critical vigilance in assessing scientiic claims. In this view, ethics cannot simply be an extension of scientiic indings, as if these indings were somehow natural, as if they were evidentially pure and immediately true, or as if they presented propositions that asked only for rejection or consent based on “feelings.” Ethics is a more troublesome beast. To be ethical means that we must also take responsibility for the cultural norms and conditions that inform our scientiic indings and our feelings alike. It is not enough to say that a nature/culture binary operates here because the ultimate meaning of natural science is always, at some level, cultural: science is signiicant and meaningful because it bears upon the human lifeworld, because its indings have cultural implications, and more generally, because culture itself provides the ultimate frame within which science will be understood – the terms and language within which

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anything at all can appear. This is not to deny the material existence of the gene; of course there are bodies and diseases, a material basis for genetic realities and their effects. But how these igure for us, their signiicance and meaning, will depend on the cultural conventions in and through which they are represented. Our ethical responsibility thus extends beyond individual bodies, beyond those “facts” presumed to be “natural,” and beyond discrete disciplinary discourses that each deine them in their own way – from genomic science to the Oprah Winfrey Show. Ethical responsibility extends in space and time, from the cultural presentation and uptake of science to the historical dimensions within which both science and culture are formed and reformed. GENETIC

“ ORPHANS ”

I would like to turn now to the work of Margaret Somerville, which, like Sykes’s, conlates scientiic and cultural discourses in complex and dangerous ways. Somerville is the founding director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics, and Law at McGill University. She is described as a renowned ethicist and is the recipient of many honorary doctorates and awards. Her work receives tremendous publicity and support through the popular media. Consider a recent article written for the Ottawa Citizen, titled “A Natural Fear.” Here Somerville argues that our popular feelings of fear and disgust are natural and should form the basis for ethical decision-making. In a nutshell, “we should heed our ‘yuck’ reaction,”14 a feeling she describes as a “moral intuition” that we ought not in any way to repress. This view seems indisputable and perhaps even prudent in the context of a small ield of genetic research that proposes the combination of human and non-human DNA. Her article focuses on this marginal research. The point is driven home visually, too, since the article contains a photograph of a lab rat with a human ear growing on its back. The image is enough to make any reasonable person shudder, and lends rhetorical support to a position that argues for the “naturalness” of feelings, the human “yuck factor.” But the “yuck factor” that Somerville extols seems uncertain when we apply it to less extreme cases. Much of Somerville’s work argues that new reproductive technologies are unethical on just this “natural” ground. For example, she argues that the creation of children through sperm or ovum donation is unethical. And she has campaigned tirelessly against same-sex marriage because, in her view, it legitimates unnatural forms of reproduction – those outside the bounds of procreative heterosexual sex within the

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traditional institution of marriage. She writes, “it is inherently wrong to transmit life, intending that a child should result, other than by sexual reproduction though the union of the natural ovum from one identiied, living, adult woman and the natural sperm from one identiied, living, adult man.”15 However, not all of us feel a natural disgust when we think of new reproductive procedures or the myriad kinship relations with which they might be associated. Indeed, as she herself states (in alarmist tones), the latest Canadian census shows that “married Canadians are in the minority and the number of common-law and same-sex partners, including those with children, and single parents have increased.”16 These numbers alone suggest the extent to which social mores have changed in Canadian culture. But Somerville laments the loss of the nuclear family, arguing in favour of this institution from the viewpoint of the child, which she imaginatively occupies. She refers to children born outside the sanctity of heterosexual matrimony as “genetic orphans.” She claims that a child is born with a “biological,” “genetic,” and “natural” right both to know his or her biological parents and to be raised by them.17 But it is unclear how seamlessly the language of rights maps onto biology, since rights are typically understood in sociopolitical terms. The link is not made. While Somerville claims that “genetic relationship goes to our deepest roots of who we are and to whom we bond,”18 it is questionable the extent to which our personal identity, kinship bonds, or political rights are, at their root, genetic. Somerville’s discourse is, then, a counterpart to Sykes’s: where he exploits feelings of belonging as a sign of genetic “heritage,” Somerville exploits feelings of alienation or abandonment as a sign of genetic “orphanage.” By calling such children “genetic orphans,” Somerville recasts a cultural category as “scientiic” and mobilizes our feelings surrounding “orphans” as something ostensibly “natural.” Although she does not mention him, the work of the American bioethicist Leon R. Kass certainly informs Somerville’s position. Kass is a medical doctor and an academic who served as chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics from 2001 through 2005. To understand what is at stake in “feeling” arguments such as Sykes’s and Somerville’s, it is worth looking at Kass’s (1997) seminal article, “The Wisdom of Repugnance.” In a nutshell, Kass claims that when we think of emerging reproductive technologies, we feel a natural and immediate repugnance. His other words are: “offensive,” “grotesque,” “revolting,” “repulsive.” Some, like Somerville, have called this the “yuck factor.” Kass writes that it is precisely in such an emotional response that “we intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of

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things that we rightfully hold dear.”19 Capitalizing on a culture of antiintellectualism, he claims that “repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity.”20 Kass is interested in establishing a universally true morality, and he inds in repugnance “the deep ethical norms and intuitions of the human community.”21 Critics have responded to Kass, stating that emotion alone cannot and ought not to be the basis for morality. Martha Nussbaum, for example, correctly points out that, historically, such spurious reasoning has supported all manner of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia.22 Here we might think of the racist’s repugnance in the face of mixed-race marriage; the racist would claim that his strong emotional reaction is “natural,” and hence justiied as a universal norm. But philosophers and scientists alike oppose this view, understanding that emotions are dialogical, social, and historical. While Kass sees such emotions as “natural,” and while we might indeed have come to experience them as “natural,” “intuitively correct,” and “immediate,” emotions should best be understood as culturally mediated, a sort of “second nature,” perhaps, that ought to be subject to cultural critique. We must be held responsible for our emotions precisely because they are not wholly natural. And who, we must ask, is this “human community” – this “we” – that is unproblematically presumed by Kass and Somerville? It is unlikely that there is a common “we” who shares their particular intuitions and feelings. Our multiethnic and multifaith society does not guarantee Kass or Somerville their premise, which calls into question what will count as a shared or universal sense of “the natural.” In an essay titled “The End of Courtship,” Kass expresses deep regret that birth control technologies rob women of their “destiny,” which he sees as motherhood: “Thanks to technology a woman could declare herself free from the teleological meaning of her sexuality – as free as a man appears to be from his. Her menstrual cycle, since puberty a regular reminder of her natural maternal destiny, is now anovulatory and directed instead by her will and her medications, serving goals only of pleasure and convenience … She has, wittingly or not, begun to redeine the meaning of her own womanliness.”23 Such a statement might seem extraordinary from a man who was, for many years, arguably the most powerful bioethicist in the USA, responsible for public policy, and shaping public opinion. Feminists have worked for decades to challenge this biology-as-destiny model of “womanliness”; and these challenges have included not just a critique of “natural” versus “artiicial,” but subtler analyses of who is authorized to speak on behalf of women everywhere.

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In a more recent publication, Kass demonstrates with particular clarity how his view of “nature” is, I would say, nothing but a guise to further his own neoconservative political agenda. The text in question is a 700page study on the Book of Genesis in which Kass argues for a supposedly “unmediated reading” of Genesis. Now wearing his theologian’s hat, he seeks to ind in this Old Testament book a single and harmonious message that would morally guide humanity, which ultimately demonstrates that his view of bioethics, while ostensibly “natural,” is no more than a matter of faith or superstition. ALLEGORIES OF

“ THE

NATURAL ”

To offer one example of how “the natural” can categorically justify all manner of abuse, consider Kass’s comments on the practice of routine infant (male) circumcision. I ind his position to be shocking and unethical in the extreme. And I mention it here because in North America, the decision whether to circumcise her baby boy might be the irst – but lasting – ethical decision that a mother makes in relation to her newborn infant’s body. Kass writes that circumcision is “a taming of maleness, putting men into the service of the (more traditionally womanly) work of child rearing.”24 But what exactly is “natural” here? Is the human body natural, or is it natural to mutilate and “tame” this body in the service of fatherhood and “clan” or “family values”? It is impossible to retrace the moral argument back to nature; rather, it is Kass’s interpretation of a religious text that is “naturalized.” Elsewhere Kass concedes that circumcision is “conventional” and “artiicial” because it is a religious sign of God’s covenant, but amazingly he maintains that it is also “natural”: “It is [irst] the memorial of an agreement that deems it necessary (hence, conventional); [second] it must be made by man (hence, artiicial); yet [third] it is marked in the organ of generation (hence, also natural).”25 How, one wonders, is something “natural” just because it is done to natural sex organs? This logic would sanctify rape! Kass’s contradiction can only be explained as a personal cultural view that he goes to great lengths to justify and naturalize. To those like me who feel a repugnance toward Kass’s view, his answer might be that our repugnance is perverse, unnatural, and thus not a true expression of moral wisdom. He is authorized, presumably, to police our feelings and desires, silencing us before we can speak. This posture of moral authority won Kass the dubious title, “the ethics cop,” by CNN and Time magazine.26

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In Canada, Somerville deserves to be awarded a similar title for her crusade. In her CBC Massey Lectures, published as The Ethical Imagination (2006), she takes aim at critics like me who, she imagines, represent “an increasingly prevalent, postmodern, politically correct approach that neutralizes language to abolish difference.”27 Her grasp of postmodern theory is weak and confused, stating that these positions hold that “natural differences between the sexes and in gender don’t exist,” and that “they are just constructs.”28 Ironically, Somerville’s gesture itself “neutralizes language,” ignoring a wide body of literature that distinguishes sex from gender in important ways. Some of this literature suggests the importance of understanding gender as distinct from sex, particularly in the ways that gender is lived and experienced, lent social and cultural signiication. Gender is not “constructed” out of thin air or simply invented; there is no such freedom. Discrimination and violations of the gendered body are all too real. Thus, it is unfair to characterize these critiques as “anything goes.” Even the category of “sex” – ostensibly a biological or natural category distinct from the cultural – must be understood in some sense as meaningful only within its social and historical contexts. Feminists and postmodernists, for the most part, do not argue that sex is simply “constructed,” as if bodies did not matter; on the contrary, these theorists often demonstrate precisely that the way these bodies do matter – in scientiic as well as cultural discourses – means that we must attend to the social and historical signiicance of sex and sexual difference.29 Somerville’s deinition of “the natural” seems, on the surface, to take account of these sociohistorical dimensions. She claims that “the natural” is neither “purely biological” nor “purely a cultural construct,” but “involves a combination of biology and culture.”30 But this more encompassing view of the natural is the ruse by which she will argue for the “naturalness” of only those cultural formations she herself endorses, calling them the “secular sacred”: “Some of these elements are biological, and some are a combination of biology and culture. It is their totality that makes up the natural in human nature.”31 But it soon becomes clear that by “natural” Somerville means “normal,” that is, adhering to her cultural norms. Unlike Kass, she does not seek recourse in the Old Testament, though she veers in this direction when she claims that procreative norms must be sanctiied by normative heterosexual marriage. When these norms are transgressed, we (“normally”) are supposed to feel an “innate repugnance.” “It is possible,” she even suggests, “that repugnance could be genetically based.”32 She states that the ethical approach is a “basic presumption,” “a presumption in favour of respect

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for the natural.”33 This move “protects traditional values and wisdom” and “places the burden of proof of justiication on those intervening to change the natural.”34 The sleight of hand here is both that “the natural” encompasses normative cultural phenomena and that “the person relying on a basic presumption does not have to prove their case.”35 Thus the default ethical position is that all traditional values are good because they are traditional, and that we must err on the side of protecting them, rather than critiquing them. She writes, “in situations of equal doubt, the position of the person who is favoured by the basic presumption prevails.”36 My view is diametrically opposed to Somerville’s. Ethics is nothing if it is not the assiduous effort to call such norms into question, to err on the side of their critique, rather than to maintain the status quo. And there are good ethical reasons for doing so. First, “situations” are never truly “of equal doubt,” that is, all things are never equal. Prevalent positions or “basic presumptions” are usually supported by powerful institutions, practices, and beliefs, many of which might well be discriminatory, hateful, prejudicial. We must be mindful of the ways that race, class, gender, sexual orientation – to name just a few – operate to disable criticism and to limit the very terms by which one might formulate a critique in the irst place, the coming to terms of ethics. Somerville’s position is remarkably naïve and ahistorical in this regard. She must believe that everyone is equal, that everyone has equal access to the resources – intellectual, material, and otherwise – that would help them to mount a critique, to satisfy the “burden of proof.” And here we must ask, who will decide when this “burden of proof” has been satisied? Surely it will be those in power, those who control the terms of the discourse, the media apparatus, education, economic resources, and so on. Discriminatory practices require a vast machinery to operate. Somerville is either ignorant of or indifferent to these workings. Indeed, Somerville is part of this machinery that shuts down ethical discourse in the name of the Natural and the Good. When she speaks of “genetic orphans,” she is part of a system that mobilizes and condones particular emotions, which she then dubs as “natural.” While I do not deny that children experience the desire to know their biological families, to understand this desire we should also take account of wider cultural discourses and the importance they place on our conceptions of “genetic heritage.” Rather than essentializing these desires as “biological” or “genetic,” an ethical approach might try to understand how kinship relations come to be signiied and made signiicant. Certainly, as more children come into the world outside the normative bonds of holy heterosexual matrimony, perhaps it is time to re-think – and to honour

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– the many forms of family life that we ind in our society. In fact, everywhere we look we seem to ind a growing number of “genetic orphans” who should resent such a moniker. This includes children brought into the world through new reproductive technologies, children who have two moms or two dads, children of separated or divorced parents, adopted children raised by non-biological parents, and so on. How is the adoptive mother who loves and cares for her child any less a mother? And even in those traditional nuclear families that Somerville favours, the DNA tests tell a different story. Consider the number of fathers who unknowingly raise another man’s (biological) child. According to one UK report, “estimates suggest that 5 per cent of the population may have a different father to the one they think they are related to.”37 I should note that these indings were accidental, from DNA tests where paternity was not at issue (e.g., testing for congenital diseases). A Canadian report from the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto gives an even higher igure: “It’s now widely accepted among those who work in genetics that roughly 10 per cent of us are not fathered by the man we believe to be dad.”38 These statistics raise many legal and ethical questions, but they demonstrate that fatherhood is irreducible to DNA; these men experienced themselves as dads and their children recognized them as such, at least until the results of the DNA test were announced. CONCLUSION : RESISTING NATURALIZING GENETIC DISCOURSES

I have argued that scientists like Sykes, Somerville, and Kass act unethically insofar as they make claims about Nature and then maintain that they possess some kind of immediate access to scientiic Truth. I have not argued that “anything goes” or that nature is no more than a “social construction,” as Somerville puts it. Instead, I contend that our ethics must extend beyond the gene, that we have a deep ethical responsibility for the effects of wider cultural discourses that circulate, and for the kind of cultural scientiic signiicance we attach to genetics as we wrestle with the changing realities of kinship. This both expands the idea of ethical responsibility and shifts its locus towards relationality, away from the normative individualism of the Western tradition. I believe our reproductive technologies have advanced faster than our ability as a culture to come to terms with them and their effects. Certainly, we experience a kind of ethical vertigo as we look out onto this new terrain. We are unsure how to navigate. But this does not mean that our ethical discourse ought to capitulate to scientists and to a scientiic lexicon, to ind

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in these people and their terms the whole truth of ethical parenthood. Rather, today more than ever, we need different perspectives. Genetic terminology can be reductive and essentializing; it encourages a woman to marshal her DNA as a kind of commodity and it responsibilizes her to avail herself of every latest genetic test. She begins to think of herself as a genetic subject and of her child as a genetic extension of herself. Such an approach eradicates difference and neutralizes the language within which ethical relations ind their home. How, then, might we foster a genuine respect for difference in a language that creates, rather than collapses, meaning? And how might we, at the same time, remain vigilant in the face of those forces that seek to advance their conservative social and political agendas in the guise of Nature, Science, and Truth? Certainly, mothers occupy a privileged place in the life of a child, teaching that child the meaning of relationship long before he understands the logic of DNA. This relation is non-instrumentalizable, both independent of and unable to be reduced to genetic codes. Here I would like briely to mention the work of the Italian feminist philosopher, Adriana Cavarero, whose book For More Than One Voice (2005) might offer us one way forward. In this book, Cavarero discusses the productive power of the maternal voice in relation to the infant. Characterized as a “la-la melody,” as a “wordless language,” or as a “duet,” the sonorous, vocalic exchange between a mother and her infant stands in stark contrast to the logical, signifying language of the Western philosophical tradition. The exchange between a mother and her child is meaningful in quite another way; it is material, resonant, rhythmic. As Cavarero writes, it is a “reciprocal invocation” between mother and child, “the condition of every communication.”39 In other words, this embodied vocalic exchange is the condition of possibility for any logical thought because such thought always already presumes a pre-semantic relation between self and other, an ethical relation irst forged in the maternal relation, in a “scene of infancy” that is prior to the institution of language proper. It is the formative ethical moment of being-with-another. Cavarero’s is a critique of logocentrism and of Western metaphysics in general, a critique of the ways that women’s voices have been construed by this philosophical tradition as illogical. Her project recuperates the material, embodied aspect of the voice to demonstrate that it inaugurates an ethical relation because it is an address that asks “who are you?” rather than “what are you?” While Western metaphysics is poised to answer the question “what are you?” by illing in some logical content (“I am a Zulu”), asking “who are you?” invites a narrative response, a

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self-questioning, and an open-ended to-and-fro relation between the interlocutors. “Who are you?” asks an existential question, and in doing so, opens a relation that promises to sustain our inability to provide an immediate and meaningful answer. The vocalic cadence of demand and response communicates the uniqueness of the speaker and the one to whom she speaks, without signifying the content of her speech in abstract logical terms. Although Cavarero does not mention it, I would suggest that genetic code is the ultimate expression of logocentrism and Western metaphysical thought, providing a “teleological meaning” to woman’s sex and casting reproduction as a natural “destiny,” to use Kass’s freighted term. From a feminist perspective, one might say that dna inally realizes the phallocentric dream of bringing reason and order to the realm of chance and chaos at the site of the female/maternal body. The “map” of the human genome is one means by which the body is colonized by medicine, rendered legible, or made to “speak” in particular ways – presumably revealing the secrets of human identity and life itself. Despite our deep desire to know who we are and where we come from, and despite the religious rhetoric in which it is frequently framed, dna cannot answer these existential questions, nor can it make sense of the human relations that make such questions possible in the irst place. I am suggesting, then, that we read in Cavarero’s “scene of infancy” a metaphor for ethical motherhood. The vocalic exchange between mother and infant, which “precedes, generates, and exceeds verbal communication,”40 is the site of an ethical relation that opens onto a proliferation of meanings and metaphors, fostering difference in a language that brings the ethical relation to term(s). In these terms, the mother does more than provide a genetic code; she works to ensure that her child’s life is meaningful, that it has existential signiicance, caring for the child by teaching that child how to care for himself. This is the way that ethical motherhood is mediated. It is this creative ethical dimension that we must explore as we strive to develop forms of cultural life that will adequately respond to the challenges raised by genetic technologies. This will not preclude a genetic understanding of the mother’s relation to her child, but it will help to ensure that these relations remain vigilant to the naturalizing effects of “genetic” discourses.

NOTES

1 “U.S. Chat Show Host Could be a Zulu,” BBC News online, 15 June 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4096706.stm.

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2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

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Cavarero, For More Than One Voice. Keller, The Century of the Gene, 54. Sykes, Seven Daughters of Eve, 1. Ibid., 1. See Murray, “Care and the Self.” Sykes, Seven Daughters of Eve, 7–8. Ibid., 9. Ibid. Ibid., 289. Ibid., 290. Ibid.

See, for instance, James Meek, “In Search of Eve’s Daughters.” Guardian UK , 11 June 2001, http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/ medicalscience/story/0,,505080,00.html. 14 Margaret Somerville, “A Natural Fear,” Ottawa Citizen, 5 November 2007, http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story. html?id=e77cef2d-0d83-47c8-b6b2-9ce733d56919. 15 Somerville, Ethical Imagination, 140. 16 Margaret Somerville, “Dispossessed and Forgotten,” Mercator.net. 18 September 2007, http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/ dispossessed_and_forgotten_the_new_class_of_genetic_orphans/. 17 Somerville, “What About the Children?,” 63–78. 18 Somerville, “Dispossessed and Forgotten.” 19 Kass, “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” 20. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 25. 22 See Nussbaum, “Emotions and Law,” in Hiding From Humanity, 19–70. 23 Kass, “The End of Courtship,” 45–6. 24 Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom, quoted in Phyllis Trible, “Of Man’s First Disobedience, and So On,” New York Times, Books Section, 19 October 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/19/books/ofman-s-irst-disobedience-and-so-on.html. 25 Kass, “Educating Father Abraham.” 26 See Orecklin, “Leon Kass: The Ethics Cop” and “Inside Politics,” CNN News online, 20 August 2001, http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/ time/2001/08/20/leon.html. 27 Somerville, Ethical Imagination, 96. 28 Ibid. 29 See, for instance, Butler, Bodies That Matter. 30 Somerville, Ethical Imagination, 96. 31 Ibid., 99.

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32 33 34 35 36 37

Ibid., 104. Ibid., 115. Ibid. Ibid., 107. Ibid. BBC News UK , “Who’s the Daddy?,” 16 May 2003, http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3023513.stm.

38 Carolyn Abraham, “Mommy’s Little Secret,” Globe and Mail.

14 December 2002, F1. 39 Cavarero, For More than One Voice, 29. 40 Ibid., 29–30. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. Cavarero, Adriana. For More than One Voice. Translated by Paul A. Kottman. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Kass, Leon R. “Educating Father Abraham: The Meaning of Fatherhood.” First Things 40 (December 1994), http://www.irstthings.com/article. php3?id_article=4523. – “The End of Courtship.” The Public Interest 126 (Winter 1997), 39–63. – “The Wisdom of Repugnance.” New Republic 216, no. 22 (1997): 17–26. – The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis. New York: Free Press, 2003. Keller, Evelyn Fox. The Century of the Gene. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2000. Murray, Stuart J. “Care and the Self: Biotechnology, Ethics, and the Good Life.” Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 2, no. 6 (2007). http://www.peh-med.com/content/2/1/6. Nussbaum, Martha. Hiding From Humanity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Orecklin, Michele. “Leon Kass: The Ethics Cop.” Time Magazine, 20 August 2001. 23. Somerville, Margaret. The Ethical Imagination: Journeys of the Human Spirit. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2006. – “What About the Children? Same-Sex Marriage.” In Divorcing Marriage: Unveiling the Dangers in Canada’s New Social Experiment, edited by Daniel Cere and Douglas Farrow, 63–78. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004. Sykes, Bryan. The Seven Daughters of Eve. New York: Norton, 2001.

Contributors

Jennifer Bell has a PhD in English and Film Studies from the University of Alberta. Her work explores historical and contemporary political communication and its relationship with the cultural construction and production of the politician in Canada. Her research is rooted in political life writing and auto/ biographical practices, but extends to a variety of genres and mediums of political communication.  She also  takes a special interest in women’s place in Canada’s political culture and electoral system. H. Louise Davis earned her PhD in American Studies from Michigan State University in 2008. She is currently an assistant professor of American Studies and the director of the Bachelor of Integrative Studies Program at Miami University, Ohio. Her scholarship focuses on compassionate consumer movements, charity studies, issues of sustainability, and gender and human rights. She has published articles on celebrity activism, beneit concerts, and representation of the Other in contemporary media and charity texts. Irene Gammel holds a Canada Research Chair in Modern Literature and Culture at Ryerson University in Toronto, where she is professor of English and director of the Modern Literature and Culture Research Center. She is the author and editor of many scholarly articles and twelve books on modernist and avantgarde women’s culture, including Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity (MIT Press, 2002), The Intimate Life of L.M. Montgomery (University of Toronto Press, 2005), and Looking for Anne of Green Gables: The Story of L.M. Montgomery and her Literary Classic (St Martin’s Press, 2008). Most recently, she has coedited (with Suzanne Zelazo) Crystal Flowers: The Poetry of Florine Stettheimer (BookThug, 2010) and Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (MIT Press, 2011).

396 Contributors

Nicola Goc (PhD) is a senior lecturer and head of Journalism, Media, and Communications at the University of Tasmania. She has written widely on mothers and the media, particularly the media’s representation of the “deviant” mother. Her current research project is entitled “Snapshot Photography and the Female Sense of ‘Self.’” Fiona Joy Green (PhD) is associate professor and chair, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg. She is the author of Feminist Mothering in Theory and Practice (Mellen, 2009) and Practicing Feminist Mothering (Arbeiter, forthcoming), and the co-editor of Maternal Pedagogies: In and Outside the Classroom (Demeter Press, 2011). Her analysis of depictions of mothers in reality TV can be found in Storytelling: A Critical Journal of Popular Narrative. Latham Hunter has taught for several years at the post-secondary level in Ontario in a range of subjects, including women’s writing, contemporary Canadian literature, Canadian culture, masculinity, cultural theory, visual culture, youth culture, and Hollywood ilm, among others. Her writing has appeared in mass media print, scholarly journals, and anthologies, and she is also frequently engaged as a public speaker to students and professionals about key subjects in cultural studies, gender and pop culture chief among them. In 2007 she was a semi-inalist in the TVOntario “Best Lecturer” competition. Jo Johnson is a graduate of animation from the International Film School Wales, University of Wales, Newport, UK. She has written articles specializsing in the representation of gender and sexuality within the animated sitcom. Her published essays include “‘We’ll Have a Gay Old Time!’: Queer Representation in American Prime-Time Animation from the Cartoon Short to the Family Sitcom” in Queers in American Popular Culture Volume 1: Film and Television, ed. Jim Elledge (Praeger, 2010). Hosu Kim is an assistant professor of sociology at the City University of New York – College of Staten Island in New York City and a contributing performance artist for Still Present Pasts: Korean Americans and the Forgotten War. She is currently working on a book manuscript, “Virtual Mothering: Korean Birthmothers’ Loss and Longing for Unclaimed Motherhood in Transnational Adoption.” Beginning with a critical analysis of the igure of the birthmothers in South Korea, she engages various sources, such as the Internet, personal journals, and interviews, to explore birthmothers’ lifelong struggles around adoption as well as their precarious relationships to their adopted children.

Contributors 397

Debra Langan is an assistant professor in the Criminology Program at Wilfrid Laurier University, Brantford, Ontario, and the mother of Dylan (17) and Katie (15). Her research areas include discourse analyses of various forms of violence in intimate relations, and the police, media, and social service responses to these; and community policing. Dr Langan is the recipient of the 2008 UniversityWide Teaching Award for Full Time Faculty, awarded by the York University Senate Committee on Teaching and Learning. Sally Mennill is a PhD candidate in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is broadly interested in women’s health history, Canadian history, and social constructions of reproduction. Her dissertation examines Caesarean sections in the post-WWII era in Canada in social, technological, and professional contexts. Sally is an active labour and postpartum doula in Vancouver as well as a faculty member in the History department at Douglas College. Stuart J. Murray is associate professor and Canada Research Chair in Rhetoric and Ethics in the Department of English Language and Literature at Carleton University. He holds a concurrent appointment in Social and Behavioural Health Science in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. His work is concerned with the constitution of human subjectivity and the links between the rhetoric and ethics of “life,” in the multiple ways in which this term is deployed. He has published numerous essays and book chapters, as well as a collected volume edited with Dave Holmes, titled, Critical Interventions in the Ethics of Healthcare (Ashgate, 2009). He is working on a book-length project on the rhetorical dimensions of biopolitics and bioethics after Foucault, tentatively titled, “Thanatopolitics: The Living From The Dead.”  Beth O’Connor  is a senior policy advisor with the  Ontario  government, a proud feminist, and a former social worker and advocate. She spent the better part of four years working with, learning from, and writing about teen moms. Along the way, Beth was introduced to Yo’ Mama and the talented, ierce young women behind it, who inspired her to write the irst version of this piece as a term paper for her MA in Women’s Studies.  In addition to her MA, for which she also wrote a major research paper on social assistance policies and the moral regulation of teenage mothers, Beth holds an honours BA in English, Equity Studies, and Women’s Studies and an honours bachelor of social work.   Kathryn Pallister (PhD) is a professor of Communications Studies, Sociology, and Film at Red Deer College in Red Deer, Alberta,

398 Contributors

Canada.  Her research has always addressed issues of gender in various mass media and popular culture forms, and after becoming a mother in 2002, she focused her attention on maternal narratives in mass media. Writing articles on issues such as breastfeeding and maternal wellness following preterm delivery has allowed her to mesh her everyday lived experience as a mother with her constant scholarly need to research, analyze, and advocate. She lives in Lacombe, Alberta, with her husband and son. Maud Perrier was born in France but became a feminist scholar in the UK, completing her PhD at the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, University of Warwick in 2009. She is now a lecturer in sociology at the University of Bristol. Her principal area of research is the sociology of families, including motherhood and parenting speciically, but she has wide-ranging research interests including social class and issues of embodiment, morality and emotions in feminist theory. Her doctoral research was a study of how younger and older mothers negotiate dominant discourses of good mothering and speciically the idea that there is a “right” time for motherhood. Lenora Perry-Samaniego (PhD) teaches at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio Texas. While her research and writing focuses mainly on literatures of US Latina/o and gender studies, her recent work relects an interest in various textual connections with popular culture, including alternative perspectives on motherhood. Her foundational work addresses critical insight into multiple areas of literary history, including research in cross-cultural and historical aspects of women’s literature of Europe and the Americas. She is a guest editor for Texas State University’s Center for Multicultural and Gender Studies’ Journal of Research on Women and Gender, and is currently completing a book on performativity in Latina literary and historical representation. Dr Perry-Samaniego lives with her partner of twenty-one years, their three children, three dogs, and three cats in an old house that, while noisy, is full of love and great inspiration. Elizabeth Podnieks is an associate professor in the Department of English and the Graduate Program in Communication and Culture at Ryerson University, Toronto. She is the author of Daily Modernism: The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000). She has guest edited two special issues of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, and is the co-editor of Hayford Hall: Hangovers, Erotics, and Modernist Aesthetics (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005). Her publications on motherhood include a chapter on celebrity maternity blogs in Mothers and Blogging (Demeter Press, 2009) and entries in the Encyclopedia of Motherhood

Contributors 399

(Sage, 2010). She is the co-editor (with Andrea O’Reilly) of Textual Mothers, Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary Women’s Literatures (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009). Dominique Russell is the author of numerous articles on ilm sound and Spanish and Latin American cinema, including publications in Jumpcut, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, and Literature Film Quarterly. She is the editor of Rape in Art Cinema (Continuum, 2010). This chapter is part of a larger study of media representations of birth. Jocelyn Fenton Stitt is an associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Minnesota State University where she teaches courses on global feminism, postcolonial culture and theory, and feminist mothering. She is the editor, along with Pegeen Reichert Powell, of Mothers Who Deliver: Feminist Interventions in Public and Interpersonal Discourse (SUNY Press, 2010). She was a member of the Association for Research on Mothering (ARM) and is a current member of Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement. She is currently at work on a book project called “Atlantic Autobiographies: Women Writing the Global as Personal Narrative” that examines African diaspora, Caribbean, and British women’s writing. Her two children keep her laughing and busy. Stephanie Wardrop received a PhD in Literature with a certiicate in Women’s Studies from SUNY Stony Brook. She currently teaches at Western New England University and writes young adult iction. She has also taught at Colorado State University, the University of Northern Colorado, and the University of Nevada in Las Vegas.   Imelda Whelehan is a research professor in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Tasmania, Australia, a visiting professor at De Montfort University, UK. She has written a number of books on feminism, literature, popular culture and adaptations, including Modern Feminist Thought (1995), Overloaded: Popular Culture and the Future of Feminism (2000), Helen Fielding’s  Bridget  Jones’s Diary: A Reader’s Guide (2002), The Feminist Bestseller (2005), and Screen Adaptation (with D. Cartmell, 2010).

Index

abortion: and birth stories, 254; Ireland, 129, 132, 133, 134; in popular women’s iction, 149, 155, 157–8 Abraham, Nicholas, 294 adoption: and celebrity mothers, 92, 172, 178; as choice, 171; and “good”/“bad” mother dichotomy, 99, 178–9; international (see transnational adoption); as social duty, 178 African famine. See famine footage African tropes. See black Madonna Ahmed, Sara, 291 Aidoo, Ama Ata, 237, 238, 247 Ally McBeal, 321, 322 “alpha moms,” 35 Alter, Lisa, 149 alternative media. See media Ambert, Anne Marie, 277 Ambrose, Rona, 118 Amin, Mohammed, 237–42, 247, 248 Andrejevic, Mark, 70 Angel, Sara, 3 animated female: as childlike, 54. See also cartoon sitcom mothers; Disney heroines animated sitcom: female employment in, 63; misogynistic model, 63. See also nineties animated sitcom

animation: as subversive, 55; adult audience, 55. See also cartoon sitcom mothers; modern animated mothers Anne of Green Gables: adaptations of, 168; as Canadian cultural heritage, 168–9, 180; centennial, 168–70, 177, 180; cross-generational relationships in, 171, 174–6; as cross-generational women’s writing, 167, 169, 170–1, 180–1; developmental themes, 167, 174–7, 179, 180–1; as industry (kitsch), 167, 168, 170, 180; maternal romance, 175–7, 178–81; matriarchy, 171, 179; as mother-daughter tale, 167, 180–1; motherhood, 168, 171, 174–6, 178–80; mothering archetypes, 147–77, 179–81; in news media, 170; notions of progress, 171, 175; in popular culture, 167–8, 171–2; popularity, 167–8, 169–70, 180–1; sources, 168, 169, 172–5; subversion, 174–5. See also Anne Shirley; L.M. Montgomery Anne Shirley: adoption of, 171, 174; as Canadian icon, 180; as “daughter” of Montgomery, 170; intelligence, 170; maternal destiny, 171; as modern, 170. See also Anne of Green Gables; L.M. Montgomery

402 Index anthropology, 37, 38; and reality television, 70 Apparitional Lesbian, The, 362 Arnup, Katherine, 304, 305 Arthur, 42–4 Baby and Child Care, 153 “bad” mothers, 8, 11–12, 88, 151, 155; Angelina Jolie as, 98; Britney Spears as, 94–8; Courtney Love as, 97–8; deined, 15; and ideal motherhood, 89–90, 91, 96; and maternal ambivalence, 348; stereotypes, 89. See also women’s poplar iction “Bad” Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America, 11– 12, 89 Ballantyne, Sheila, 153 Barale, Michèle Aina, 368–9 Bartky, Sandra, 269 Bassin, Donna, 10, 79 BBC, 204, 210, 237, 248–9 Beatie, Thomas, 23 beauty, 272 Beck, Ulrich, 209 Belkin, Lisa, 37 Bell, Elizabeth, 54 Benjamin, Jessica, 45 “beta moms,” 35 biology (discipline), 37, 38 biomedical ethics, 378; crisis in, 378–9 Biressi, Anita, 255 Birth: Eight Women’s Stories, 262 birthing: and death, 257; holistic model, 255; “institutional violence” of, 253; as Lacanian Real, 257; medicalization of, 255, 256; obstetric power, 255, 256; technocratic model 255; women as managed in, 255, 256. See also birth stories birthing manuals. See parenting literature birthmothers. See adoption

Birth Stories 4; alternative narratives in, 253, 254, 258, 260, 263–4; audience, 257, 258; class in, 25; death excluded from, 257; desexualization in, 261–2; dialogue in, 262; as “docu-soap,” 254, 257, 261; domesticity, 257, 259; erasure of mother in, 259–60; formula of, 254, 258; “good mothering” reinforced by, 257; and inluence, 254–5; “moneyshot,” 261–2, 264; as nonheteronormative, 264; and oral form, 254, 264; self-representation and performance, 260–1; spirituality, 262, 263; style, 258, 260–3; successful outcomes, 257, 259, 260, 263; talking back, 253, 254, 264; technocratic model, 253–4, 259, 261, 263, 264; technocratic myths in, 256, 257; transformation focus of, 256, 261; unconscious ideology of, 254, 260, 263; voiceover, 258–9, 263, 264. See also birthing; birth stories; reality television birth stories: as initiation, 254; labour as central to, 256; to understand experience, 254; as “women’s speech genre,” 254. See also Birth Stories Bishop, Mardia J., 12 black Madonna: and “compassion fatigue,” 242, 250n15; deconstruction of, 248–9; as deserving poor, 238–9, 241–2, 244, 248; dichotomy to Christian igure, 237, 247; exculpation of Westerners by, 236–7, 239, 242, 247; familiarity of, 237–9, 247; and mother of dying child, 239–40, 241; in news media, 237–42; subversion of, 249; as Western ideological igure, 236–8, 246–7. See also The Constant Gardener; famine footage; holy mother; Madonna with Child; news media

Index 403 blogging. See media Boler, Megan, 269–70 Boorstin, Daniel, 90, 91 Bradford, Barbara Taylor, 155 Braided Lives, 148, 149 Brauman, Rony, 239 breastfeeding, 7, 20–1; advocacy, 223; in Blue Lagoon, 221, 347; Brooke Shields, 221, 347; in The Constant Gardener, 243–4; disapproval of, 221, 226, 231; as double bind, 221, 224, 230; drawbacks, 225–6, 230; factors in choice, 222, 223–4, 232; and “good”/“bad” mother dichotomy, 223–4; health beneits, 221–2; health campaigns, 221, 222, 223–4; as limited practice, 221, 222, 224; locations of, 221; Madonna/whore dichotomy, 230–1; media, 221–32; rates, 223; sexual context, 223, 224, 226; social beneits, 222. See also breastfeeding on television; Down Came the Rain; Madonna with Child breastfeeding on television: and audience identiication, 222, 226, 232; bottle-feeding bias, 221, 223, 225; and class, 225; Desperate Housewives, 226, 228–9; ER, 226, 229, 231; Friday Night Lights, 226, 229; Friends, 226, 228, 230, 232; as idealized, 225, 232; inluence, 222, 223, 224, 226, 231–2; The Ofice, 222, 226, 229–30, 231; as public health campaign, 222, 224, 225, 226, 230– 2; as realistic, 225–6, 227, 228–9, 230, 231; Sex and the City, 222, 226–7; sexual context, 226, 227, 228, 229–31; talking back, 230; Yes, Dear, 226, 227. See also breastfeeding Brody, Elaine M., 270 Buerk, Michael, 237–42, 247, 248 British Broadcast Corporation. See BBC

Brodie, Janine, 109, 110 Brooks, Carol, 101 Brown, Dan, 41 Brown, Rosemary, 110, 112, 115 Bryant, Dorothy, 154 Büskins, Petra, 97 Butler, Judith, 73, 74 Campagnolo, Iona, 111–12, 113, 114 Campbell, Kim, 117 caregiving, 49: to older adults, 270–1; and privilege, 271, 277; caretakers: biological theories, 38; of children, 38, 39; object relations theory, 39 Carney, Pat, 109, 118 Carr, Karen, 370 cartoons. See animation cartoon sitcom mothers, 53; 1950s model of, 54; characteristics, 53, 59, 66; domesticity, 59; gambling addiction of, 60–1; as holy mother, 57; husbands, 55, 63; limited development of, 58–9; pearl necklaces of, 56–7, 61; roles in workforce, 53, 55, 62; as satirical, 53; sexualized features, 55, 57, 60; as subversive, 53, 66; waistlines, 55, 56, 57; wardrobes, 56, 61, 63. See also Disney heroines; Disney Studios; modern animated mothers; nineties animated sitcom Cashmore, Ellis, 90; celebrity as Panopticon, 91; entertainment journalism inluence, 99–100; fan participation, 101; media power over celebrity, 96; tabloid popularity, 100 See also celebrity mothers Castle, Terry, 362 Cavarero, Adriana, 377, 390–1; critique of logocentrism, 390–1; maternal voice, 390–1; motherhood as ethical relation, 377, 390–1

404 Index Cavendish, Lucy, 160, 161 Celebrity/Culture, 90 “celebrity mom proile,” 90. See also celebrity mothers; entertainment journalism celebrity mothers, 87–9; and adoption, 172, 178; “celebruspawn,” 100–1; media complicity, 89; “good”/“bad” mother dichotomy, 89–91; implications for women, 100; Madonna, 177–8; maternal romance, 177; new momism, 90–1, 94; and reproductive technologies, 23; as role models, 93–4, 98. See also entertainment journalism “celebrity-industrial complex,” 88, 101. See also entertainment journalism Celeste, Reni, 88–9 Chaiken, Ilene, 360, 365–6, 369, 370 Cheng, Ann Anlin, 294 chick lit. See women’s popular iction child birthing literature. See parenting literature childcare: changes in expectations, 149. See also caretaking; child rearing manuals childhood development: Freudian theory, 38–9; object relations theory, 39–40 child rearing manuals: and “bad” mother, 151; consistency, 150; Dr Spock, 153. See also childcare; parenting literature child rearing memoirs: consistency, 150. See also childcare; parenting literature children: caregivers of, 49; caretakers of, 38, 39; psychological development, 38–40; relation to mother, 39; and television (see children’s television programs) children’s television programs: audience, 41; backlash against, 36, 41, 42, 43, 48; emulation of, 41, 49;

erasure of mother, 46–7, 48; fathers in, 43, 44, 45, 47; goals, 40; inluence, 41, 49; and labour force trends, 48; lesbian couple in, 41, 43; as “liberal,” 36, 42; magic mother in, 40, 44; motherhood in, 36, 42–6, 48, 49; mothers as symbols of home in, 45; stay-at-home mothers in, 42–3; as subversive 41, 48; working mothers in, 43–4; working women in, 47. See also television “child-woman,” 54; and masculine characters, 65. See also animated female Chodorow, Nancy, 38, 39, 40, 50n4, 171 “choice feminism,” 37, 48, 329 Clark, Christy, 26, 112 Coates, Norma, 97, 98 Constant Gardener, The, 236, 242–6, 247; breastfeeding, 243–4; erasure of African women in, 246; female bodies, 245–6; and patriarchy, 245; as postcolonial, 242; Madonna with Child, 242, 244, 247; surveillance of women in, 245; symbolic boundaries in, 244–5; synopsis, 243; Tessa as holy mother, 244; Tessa’s body as a map, 245–6; white male point of view, 243. See also black Madonna; famine footage Copps, Sheila, 108, 109, 112, 114, 120 Crash Test Mommy 69–70, 71–2, 75, 76–81, 82n2; casting bias, 71–2; consistency of script, 71; as effacing social inequalities, 80–1; “good”/“bad” mother dichotomy, 75, 78-81; narrative structure, 75, 77–80; surveillance, 76–81. See also reality television Crosby, David. See Melissa Etheridge Cruise/Shields controversy: challenge to PPD medical model, 339, 340, 344, 346, 351; critique of antidepressants,

Index 405 339, 340, 342; critique of psychiatry, 339–40; Cruise, 339–40, 344, 346, 351; cultural context of, 340–1, 344, 351; expectations of motherhood, 340, 346; The Oprah Winfrey Show, 340; public reaction, 339–40, 342, 343; Shields, 339–40, 344, 351; Shields’s New York Times editorial, 344; Today, 339; timeline of, 352n4. See also Down Came the Rain; postpartum depression Cruise, Tom. See Cruise/Shields controversy Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, The, 10–11, 72, 89 Cultural History of Pregnancy, A, 367 Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, 25 Curious George, 46, 47, 49 Cusk, Rachel, 150, 151, 163 Cypher, Julie. See Melissa Etheridge Dance, Jan. See Melissa Etheridge Davin, Anna, 304 Davis-Floyd, Robbie, 254, 255, 256, 306 Davis, Madeline, 364 daycare: media representation of, 36 Delamont, Sara, 59 Deleuze, Gilles, 288 Desperate Housewives, 226, 228–9. See also breastfeeding on television “desperate” housewives, 58, 275 Devereux, Cecily, 171 Diary of a Mad Housewife, 154 disciplinarity: female body, 269, 270; medical hegemony, 312 discourse analysis: of Rashbrook pregnancy, 204–5, 211, 215, 217n26; of self-care, 271 See also, discourses of self-care; Patricia Rashbrook discourse of the natural. See Patricia Rashbrook; postmenopausal pregnancy

discourses of the gene. See genetic discourses discourses of risk: and established inequalities, 209, 212, 214, 216; “good motherhood,” 204, 206, 207–9, 215– 16; in Grey’s Anatomy, 324, 326–7; neoliberalism, 206; postmenopausal pregnancy, 204–7, 211–16; pregnancy, 306–7, 308, 314; and scientiic expertise, 206, 207; “unnamed,” 206– 7. See also Patricia Rashbrook; postmenopausal pregnancy; pregnancy discourses of self-care: aimed at women, 268, 271, 277–8; beauty, 272–4; capitalist interests, 270, 275, 278–9; corporate advertising, 273–4, 275; deconstruction of, 269–70; demographics, 270; disciplinary practices, 269, 270; domestic labour, 276; examples, 268, 269; and feminist action, 278–9; and feminist theory, 269; and inancial issues, 276–7; and guilt, 269, 274–5, 277; health, 273, 274; as husband care, 272, 276; inluence, 269; neoliberalism, 277–8; new media, 278; parenting magazines, 268, 270, 271–8; power relations, 269, 276–7, 278; and privilege, 271, 277; responsibility for self-care, 268, 269–71, 276, 277–8; stress, 275. See also parenting magazines Disney evil stepmothers, 54, 61 Disney fairy godmothers, 54 Disney heroines 54; erasure of biological mother, 54; sexualized designs, 53, 54, 57; waistlines, 53, 54. See also animated females; animation; Disney Studios Disney mothers, 54. See also Disney heroines Disney Studios, 53, 54; domesticity of female characters, 54; as familial icon, 54; mainstream design traditions of,

406 Index 54, 63; underpaid female workforce of, 54; white male artistic team, 54. See also animated females; animation; Disney heroines Don’t Try this at Home, 148, 160, 162 dominant discourses: in media, 272, 274–5, 279; of monstrosity, 368–9; of teenage mothers, 186, 188, 192; “good” motherhood, 207–8, 215–16; of motherhood, 5–6, 10, 69, 81, 205, 279; self-care, 268, 269, 272, 274–5 Donzelot, Jacques, 91 Douglas, Susan J., 11, 12, 26. See also The Mommy Myth; new momism Dow, Bonnie, 321–2, 325, 329 Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression, 340; Afterword, 343; “bad” mothers, 342, 343, 344, 346; biomedical model, 343, 344, 345–6, 351; breastfeeding, 347; Caesarean section, 341, 348; candor, 341, 342, 350; Cruise/ Shields controversy, 342, 352–3n12; emotional factors of ppd, 346–50, 351; expectations of motherhood, 347, 349–50; genre, 242; maternal ambivalence, 346, 348, 350, 351; plot, 341; publication history, 342. See also Brooke Shields; postpartum depression Dragon Tales, 46 Dubinsky, Karen, 178 During, Simon, 8 Dworkin, Andrea, 367–8 Dyer, Richard, 12–13 Dymond, Greig, 167–8 Eappen, Matthew, 36–7, 49n3 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 345 Eisenberg, Arlene, 309n26–9, 310n31– 2, 311n33–4, 37, 312n38–9, 313n41–3, 314n45–6 elderly, the. See older adults

elected ofice. See political ofice Ella Price’s Journal, 148, 154–5 “Embryonic Individuals,” 367 “End of Courtship, The”: birth control, 385; naturalization of cultural discourses, 385–6; maternal destiny, 385. See also genetic discourses; Leon R. Kass Engelbrecht, Penelope J., 362–3 English, Deirdre, 345 entertainment journalism: audience critique, 101; cautionary tales, 100; “celebrity-industrial complex,” 88; “celebrity mom proile,” 90; “good”/“bad” mother dichotomy, 88–101; inluence on celebrity, 96, 99; “insiders” as policing mechanisms, 95–6, 99; motherhood, 90, 94; normative values, 100; online and social media, 88; the Panopticon, 100; rewarding celebrities, 99; surveillance, 88–9, 91; treatment of Britney Spears, 92, 96–7, 98, 99; women bloggers talk back to, 100–1. See also celebrity mothers ER, 226, 229, 231. See also breastfeeding on television Etheridge, Melissa: birthfather of children, 358–9; lesbian mother, 358–9; “new American family” of, 359; Rolling Stone, 359. See also lesbian parenting Ethical Imagination, The. See Margaret Somerville ethical mother, 379, 391 evolutionary-functionalism, 38 Fairclough, Ellen, 110 Family Guy, 53, 55, 60–2, 65 family: fragmentation and fracturing, 150, 180; pop culture ideal, 38; television, 41 “Family Attitudes Towards Television,” 41

Index 407 famine footage: African women in (see black Madonna); construction as event, 238; distancing effects, 237– 40; dying child in, 239–42; intention of, 237–40; pornographic gaze, 240. See also black Madonna; holy mother; Madonna with Child fathers: object relations theory, 39. See also children’s television programs Fear of Flying, 148, 149 Feldhahn, Shaunti, 115 Feminine Mystique, The, 148 feminism: “choice feminism,” 37, 48, 329; “opting out,” 35, 36, 48, 328 (see also “opt-out revolution”); “radical” feminism, 37, 50n7; women’s movement of the 1970s, 35 feminist activism, 9: on mothering, 278–9 feminist critiques: of biology-as-destiny, 385; of cultural narratives, 269; of medical profession, 307, 344–5, 368; of motherhood, 148, 151, 163, 209, 278–9 feminist iction: dominance of white voices in, 150. (See also women’s popular iction) fetus, 10. See also pregnancy Flintstones, The, 53, 54, 55 Flintstone, Wilma, 54; as holy mother, 57, 61; husband Fred, 54; pearl necklace, 61; sexualized features, 55, 61; as typical cartoon housewife, 55; waistline, 55, 57, 61. See also cartoon sitcom mothers; modern animated mothers For Her Own Good, 345 Foucault, Michel, 367 French, Marilyn, 149, 154, 159 Freud, Sigmund, 9, 38–9, 40 Friday Night Lights, 226, 229. See also breastfeeding on television Friedan, Betty, 148, 351

Friends: alternative families in, 360; breastfeeding in, 226, 228, 230, 232, 321 Frost, Jo, 75–6; as Mary Poppins, 78; 79–80. See also Supernanny Gavey, Nicola, 269 generational motherhood. See older mothers genetic discourses: autonomy problematized by, 378–9; biomedical ethics, 378–9, 383–6; cultural repercussions, 379; as cultural science iction, 377; essentialism of, 385, 388, 390; ethical critique of, 389–91; ethical responsibility, 378–9, 380, 382–3, 389; genome as map, 378, 391; “good” mother in, 376, 377; and ethical agency, 378; “heritage,” 379–83, 384, 388; kinship, 376, 380, 388; as logocentric, 391; naturalization of, 379, 380–2, 383–5, 389, 391; nature/culture, 382–5, 388; personiication of gene, 378; racism, 382; technology as expertise, 378; and “yuck factor,” 383–5. See also Leon R. Kass; Margaret Somerville; Brian Sykes Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, 37 Gilhool, Nick, 70–1 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 154 Gilmore Girls, 321, 322 Girlfriends’ Guide to Surviving the First Year of Motherhood, The, 341–2 Go Diego Go, 47 Goer, Henci, 256, 259, 264 Goldstein, Dana, 117 “good”/“bad” mother dichotomy, 15: “bad” mothers,” 89–90, 91–2, 96; and breastfeeding, 223–4; and celebrity moms, 91, 178–9; in entertainment journalism, 88–101; and “good mothering,” 204, 206, 207–10; and

408 Index intensive mothering, 89; Kerry Babies Case, 127, 134–8, 140; and media whims, 99; postpartum depression, 341, 346; in reality television 69–70, 74–81, 83n34; and teenage mothers, 188. See also “good motherhood”; postmenopausal pregnancy “good enough mother,” 35, 45, 46 “good” mother, 6, 8, 15, 24; celebrity mothers, 96, 97–8, 99; older mothers, 204, 213; popular women’s iction, 155; reality TV, 75, 76, 78–9, 80, 81; teenage mothers, 193 “good mothering”: in Birth Stories, 257; and discourses of risk, 204, 206, 207–9, 215–16; as ideologies, 207– 10; and intensive mothering, 207; older mothers, 207–8, 209, 215, 216; in parenting literature, 307; in popular women’s iction, 147–8; and PPD, 346. See also “bad” mother; “good”/“bad” mother dichotomy Gould, Lois, 152 Grey, Deb, 118–19 Grey’s Anatomy: abortion, 323, 329; dislocated mother in, 323, 328, 329, 330–1; disruption of femininity tropes, 322–3, 325–6, 327, 329, 331– 4; female authority, 327; feminist tensions in, 329–31, 333, 334, 337n48; medical interventionism, 325, 326; mother-daughter relationships, 330–1; nurturing men, 332–3; “opting out,” 328; parodic pregnancy, 326–7; patriarchy, 329–30; pregnancy as catastrophic, 324, 325, 334; pregnancy plot lines, 323–7, 328–9; pregnant body, 323–7, 332; risk and pregnancy, 324, 326–7; working mothers debate, 328–9. See also television Grifin, Lois, 55, 60–2, 65; as atypical cartoon housewife, 60, 62; degraded and devalued as a mother, 62; and

Disney stepmother, 61; egotistical rebellion, 61, 62; in Maxim, 60; new momism, 61, 62; and Peggy Hill, 65; phallic mother, 61; relationship with children, 61; sexuality of, 60, 62; sexualized features, 60, 61; sporadic employment, 62; subversive, 60; wardrobe, 61. See also cartoon sitcom mothers Grifin, Meg, 61, 62 Grifin, Peter, 60, 65 Grifin, Stewie, 61 Grosz, Elizabeth, 58 Guattari, Felix, 288 Hall, Ann C., 12 Hall, Pamela Courtenay, 73 Hall, Stuart, 81 Hankin, Kelly, 360 Hanson, Clare, 367 Haran, Maeve, 156 Hartley, Heather, 345 Hathaway, Sandee, 309n26–9, 310n31– 2, 311n33–4, 37, 312n38–9, 313n41–3, 314n45–6 Having it All, 148, 156, 159 Hays, Sharon, 10–11, 72, 79, 88–91, 305 Hayes, Joanne: book by, 129, 138, 139– 40; as emblematic of Irish womanhood, 139; fame, 125, 126, 128; libel case, 139–40. See also Kerry Babies Case Hayes, Tammy, 41 Hirschman, Linda R., 37 Hill, Hank, 63; as patriarch, 321; physical features, 63; sharing domestic workload, 64, 66; as talking back, 66 Hill, Peggy, 62–5, 66; as benchmark, 65; as empowered, 66; likeness to Lady Bird Johnson, 62; and Lois Grifin, 65; physical features, 62; progressive characterization, 65; as

Index 409 realizing own emancipation, 66; regular employment of, 63; selfidentiication as not feminist, 65; wardrobe, 63, 66, See also cartoon sitcom mothers; modern animated mothers Hollywood magazines. See entertainment journalism holy mother, 57, 61; Angelina Jolie, 93; The Constant Gardener, 244. See also black Madonna; Madonna with Child Honey, Margaret, 10, 79 Hoogland, Renee, 362 hooks, bell, 186–7, 195 Horwath, Andrea, 114 humiliation tv. See reality television Huntley, Rebecca, 368 “hysterical” housewives, 58 I Don’t Know How She Does It, 148, 156, 159, 163 image analysis, 12–13. See also Richard Dyer infanticide: as mental illness, 126. See also Kerry Babies Case infants. See children Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, The, 90 intensive mothering, 8; Angelina Jolie, 93–4; Britney Spears, 99; and celebrity “insiders,” 96; celebrity mothers, 88–9, 91, 63–94, 97, 99; and class, 97; as cultural mandate, 305; deined, 11, 57, 89; entertainment journalism, 88–9, 94, 96, 99; and “good mothering,” 207; inluence of, 26, 94, 101; Lois Grifin, 62; Marge Simpson, 57–8, 62; new momism, 72; policing of women, 113; reality TV, 80, 81; response to, 110. See also new momism international adoption. See transnational adoption

Internet. See media in vitro fertilization, 14, 18, 23, 204–5, 206. See also Patricia Rashbrook; postmenopausal pregnancy Iovine, Vicki, 341–2 It Takes a Family, 37 IVF. See in vitro fertilization Johnson, Barbara, 351 Jolie, Angelina, 88, 89, 91–4, 96, 98– 100; adoption of children, 92–3; and Britney Spears, 91–2, 96; criticized for globetrotting, 98–9; and elegance, 93; as holy mother, 93; humanitarianism as mothering 178; image of prior to motherhood, 92; “insiders” as policing mechanisms, 99; and intensive mothering, 93–4; maternal romance, 177–8, 179; as “Momgelina,” 89, 91– 2; and media backlash, 99; media treatment of, 92–4, 98–9; as mothering archetype, 179; and new momism 93–4; “popularity, 92–3, 100; as popularizing single motherhood, 92–3; as role-model, 93–4, 98; selfpromotion, 98; as supermom, 92; transformation of, 177–8. See also celebrity mothers; entertainment journalism Jones, Stacy H., 288–9 Jong, Erica, 149 Judge, Mike, 62, 63 Kaplan, E. Ann, 8–10, 13–14, 61 Kaplan, Meryl, 10, 79 Kass, Leon R., 377, 384–6; religion, 386, 389. See also “The End of Courtship”; “The Wisdom of Repugnance” Keller, Eve, 367 Kerry Babies Case: books on, 126, 126–7, 127; ilm adaptations, 125– 6, 127; and “good”/“bad” mother

410 Index dichotomy, 127, 134–7, 140; infanticide as mental illness, 126, 131, 138; internal police investigation, 133; media treatment, 127, 129, 131, 132, 132–3, 133–9; outcome, 137–8; police mishandling, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130–1, 131–2, 138; political context, 126, 128–9, 131, 132, 133, 138, 139; as proxy trial, 126–7, 136–7, 139; and public consciousness, 128, 138; television adaptations, 127; tribunal of inquiry, 129, 133, 137. See also Joanne Hayes Kinlicks, 148, 149 King of the Hill, 53, 55, 62–5, 66; character design, 63; patriarchy, 321; regular employment of married women, 63–4; and talking back, 66; and “traditional family values,” 64. See also Peggy Hill kinship, 376, 380 kinship families, 18 Korean birthmothers: and adoptive mothers, 284, 297–8; as central in adoptee narrative, 286; Internet community, 285, 287–90, 295–6; losses of, 287, 288–9, 293, 296–8; narratives of, 287, 288–91, 292–7; pain of, 290–3; psychology of loss, 294–5; skin autobiography, 289–91, 293–4, 296–7; stigmatization, 286–7, 289–3, 296–8; virtual babies, 291–2, 294, 297; virtual landscapes, 288; virtual mothering, 285, 286, 287–97; website nicknames, 292; wish postings, 295–6. See also transnational adoption Kristeva, Julia, 364, 366 Krull, Catherine, 277 Kukla, Rebecca, 223–4 L Word, The, 7: audience, 370, 371; deconstruction of femininity in, 364,

366; femme lesbians, 360, 362, 364, 372n4; as groundbreaking, 360, 363; heteronormative transgression, 363– 6, 369, 370; heterosexual male desire, 360, 362; Lacan, 365, 365n19; lesbian parenting in, 360, 363–4, 369; nostalgia, 362; popularity, 360, 362, 363, 371; pregnancy in, 363–6, 369; pregnancy fetish in, 365; public/ private, 366, 369; setting, 360; sexual mother, 363–6, 367, 369–70; as soap opera, 363; symbolism in, 364–6. See also lesbian; lesbian parenting Lacan, Jacques, 257, 365, 373n19 Ladd-Taylor, Molly, 11–12, 15, 88, 91, 96, 97 LaMarsh, Judy, 120 Lamott, Anne, 5, 348 Langellier, Kristin, 286, 287 lesbian: cultural representation of, 360– 2; “dykesploitation” ilms, 362; as “ghostly” in ilm and literature, 362; heteronormativity, 361–2; and heterosexual male desire, 361–2; as “monster” in ilm, 361; mothers (see lesbian parenting); pregnant, 368; tenuous place in literature, 361; as transgressive, 363, 368, 369. See also lesbian parenting; The L Word “lesbian chic,” 360 Lesbian Conigurations, 362 “Lesbian ‘Making-of’ Documentaries and the Production of Lesbian Sex,” 360 lesbian motherhood. See lesbian parenting lesbian parenting, 7, 9, 10; alternative families, 359, 360, 369; gender normativity, 359; Melissa Etheridge, 358–9; as monstrosity, 368–9; as rarely depicted, 359–60; rise in, 359, 369. See also lesbian; The L Word Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother, A, 150n6, 151n9

Index 411 Little Bear, 44–6 Lo, Malinda, 362 Lorde, Audre, 188, 194 Lotz, Amanda, 322, 331 Love, Courtney, 97–8 Lupton, Deborah, 307 MacCallum, Susan, 3 Macdonald, Myra, 57 Maclean’s, 185 MacLeod, Lisa, 111 Madonna/whore dichotomy, 9, 230–1, 368. See also “good”/“bad” mother dichotomy Madonna with Child, 236, 238, 241–2, 244, 249; See also The Constant Gardener; black Madonna; holy mother magazines. See entertainment journalism “magic mother,” 39–40, 44 maternal discourse: as normative, 13. See also motherhood maternal literary genres, 5. See also parenting literature; women’s popular iction maternity. See motherhood; pregnancy Mazzoni, Christina, 257 Marshall, Harriet, 306, 307, 311, 314 Martin, Don, 119 mass media 6; American, 36; bias, 118; breastfeeding, 222, 224, 229, 230, 232; construction of motherhood, 14, 36, 55, 72, 90, 112, 150; construction of political culture, 108; inluence of, 224, 232; “mommy wars,” 36, 62; politician mothers, 114; and popular culture, 108, 120; public mothers, 114; women politicians, 108, 111–12 See also media; news media Massumi, Brian, 288 maternal ambivalence, 346, 348, 350 maternal surveillance. See surveillance

maternity. See mothers; pregnancy maternity literature. See parenting literature Matter of Images: Essays on Representations, The, 12–13 Maushart, Susan, 13, 348 Max and Ruby, 46 McFarlene, Cameron, 6–8, 11 McKenna, Nancy Durrell, 262 McLeod, Lyn, 111 media: and alternative media, 140; criticism of Korean adoption practices, 285–6; critiques of, 278; and dominant discourses, 272, 274; “mommy wars,” 35–6; motherhood in, 87–101, 359–60; pregnancy, 3–4, 185–90; as preoccupied with mothers, 3–4; surveillance of mothers, 15; and teenage pregnancy, 185–90; as “training” mothers, 91; treatment of mothers suspected of crimes, 127–8; women’s bodies in, 20, 272–4; women’s health in, 273, 274–5; working mothers debate in, 328 See also entertainment journalism; mass media mediation, 6, 12–13, 26; of breastfeeding, 229; by cultural forms, 378– 9, 385; of ethical motherhood, 391; and genetic discourses, 376, 377; and reality TV, 255, 264; and risk, 215 medical intervention. See medicine medicalization: of birth, 255; collusion of women in, 345; of motherhood, 305, 307, 315, 343, 345; mothering manuals, 307; of pregnancy, 367; of women, 341, 344, 345. See also medicine; pregnancy medicine, 22–3; as biomedical technocracy, 306; feminist critiques of, 344– 5; as hegemony, 303, 307–8; as male-dominated profession, 325, 326; as paternalistic, 378; and postpartum depression, 341, 343–6

412 Index Meirelles, Fernando, 236, 242, 247 Melancholy of Race, The, 294 Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, 148, 153 Mesley, Wendy, 275 Michaels, Meredith W., 11, 12, 26. See also The Mommy Myth; new momism Mills, Nicolaus, 72, 75 modern animated mothers: new momism, 66; as subversive, 66; as talking back, 66. See also cartoon sitcom mothers; nineties animated sitcom Moeller, Susan, 242 Moers, Ellen, 350 Mommy Angst: Motherhood in American Popular Culture, 12 mommy blogs, 3–4, 26, 216. See also media mommy lit. See women’s popular iction The Mommy Myth, 11; inluence of media, 99–100; media mother role models, 94, 98; “mommy wars” (see “mommy wars”); mothering manuals, 150; Mother’s Day, 64; motherhood and media, 36, 55, 72, 90, 150; murdering mother, 127–8; new momism (see new momism); policing motherhood, 14, 91, 128; surveillance, 14 “mommy wars,” 42, 48; context, 36–40; media, 35-36; positions within, 37; reality TV, 69, 79–81; new momism, 74. See also The Mommy Myth “momoirs,” 242, 348. See also Down Came the Rain moms. See mothers Mondo Canuck: A Canadian Pop Culture Odyssey, 167–8 “monstrous maternal,” 368–9 Montgomery, L.M.: death, 177; depression of, 173, 177; and grandmother, 169, 172–4; maternal romance,

175–6, 177; as mother, 176–7; motherhood in pop culture of, 172– 4; mothering archetypes, 172, 176, 177–8, 179; motherlessness of, 173, 176; as symbolic mother, 169, 172–3. See also Anne of Green Gables; Anne Shirley Moraga, Cherrie, 371 Morse, Margaret, 288 “mother blaming,” 88, 304, 305. See also “bad mothers” motherhood: angst, 147–8, 151; as academic discipline, 8; as biological destiny, 385; breastfeeding, 224; in Canadian political culture, 108–20; as central to identity, 115, 117, 118, 120; children’s TV, 36, 42–6, 48, 49; and class, 304–5, 322, 350–1; cultural anxieties of, 12; as cultural maternity, 25–6; as discourse, 5–6, 10, 69, 72–4, 79–81, 82n2, 205, 207–9, 215–16; as ethical relation, 377, 390–1; evolutionary-functionalism, 38; expectations of, 340, 346, 348– 50; family breakdown, 150; feminist critiques of, 148, 151, 163, 209, 278– 9; gender identity, 359; generational (see older mothers); genetic discourses, 376–9, 385; “good”/“bad” mother dichotomy, 69–70, 83n34, 88; high modernist, 9; humanitarianism as, 177–8; as ideological, 7; imperial interests of, 304; as in/appropriate, 211–12; inluence on media, 12; as institution, 163–4, 304, 308; Korean ideology of, 287, 298–9; lesbianism, 359; master discourses of, 8–10, 13– 14; maternal ambivalence, 346, 348, 350; and media (see The Mommy Myth); medicalization of, 305, 307, 315, 343; modern discourse of, 53; and mother-blaming, 304; motherinfant relationship, 40; as mythology,

Index 413 74, 79–80, 90, 150, 151, 163; new forms of, 204, 215, 371; new media, 278; normative maternal discourses, 13; normative sexuality, 98; nuclear family, 8–9; object relations theory, 39, 46; as ordinary activity, 8; and personal ambition, 111, 112; policing of, 91, 128; political scrutiny of, 148; pop culture ideal of, 38; postmodern, 9–10; private/public, 21; as public consumption, 368; representational, 25–6; romanticized, 359–60; sexuality, 366, 367, 369–70; as single model, 148; on tv, 321–2; virtual mothering (see Korean birthmothers); and work, 48. See also mothers Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama, 8–10 mothering. See motherhood mothering manuals, 151, 164. See also child rearing manuals Mother in the Middle, 35 motherless women, 176 motherlore, 163. See also motherhood Mother Matters, 13 mothers: and academic disciplines, 37– 8; “alpha moms,” 35; associated lexicon, 4; “beta moms,” 35; breastfeeding as duty of, 224; cultural inluence of, 3; desires of, 40; dichotomized, 26; disappearance from TV, 320, 322; essentialized representations, 6, 11, 321–2; ethical mother, 379; inluenced by media, 93–4; lesbians, (see lesbian parenting); in the middle, 269–71, 275; monster, 9; normative gender, 40; online activism of, 4; in politics (see politician mothers); as psychological igure, 39; as public mothers, 114; relationship to infant, 39, 40; as saints/demons, 341; and self-care (see discourses of self-care);

sexual mother, 366, 367, 369–70; silencing of, 10; stay-at-home (see stay-at-home mothers); stigmatized, 26; surveillance of, 88; as swing voters, 116; universalizing norms, 6; and workforce, 35; working (see working mothers). See also celebrity mothers; motherhood Mother’s Day, 64, 66 mothers in politics. See politician mothers Mothers Movement Online, 73 mum lit. See women’s popular iction Murkoff, Heidi, 309n26–29, 310n31–2, 311n33–4, 37, 312n38–9, 313n41–3, 314n45–6 Murray, Susan, 70 Myths of Motherhood, The, 10 National Public Radio, 41 Nussbaum, Martha, 385 natural-intensive mothering, 113. See also intensive mothering new momism, 8, 26; Angelina Jolie, 93– 4; as anti-feminist, 90; cartoon sitcom mothers, 53, 56; and celebrity “insiders,” 96, 99; celebrity mothers, 90–1; and class, 97; deined, 11, 150–1, 159; entertainment journalism, 88, 90, 92, 96; “good”/“bad” mother dichotomy, 91; inluence of, 94; “intensive mothering, 72–3, 80, 81, 88; Lois Grifin, 61, 62; Marge Simpson, 57–9; media, 12, 26, 73, 88–91, 96; mommy wars,” 62, 74; normative sexual codes of, 98; Peggy Hill, 64, 66; popular culture, 74; reality tv, 79–81; as regulating celebrity, 94; response to, 101; surveillance of celebrities, 96, 99; talking back, 12, 26. See also intensive mothering; mommy wars news media: Africa in, 237–42, 247, 248–9; daycare in, 36; hype, 36; Patricia Rashbrook in, 204–16; and

414 Index postmenopausal pregnancy, 204–16; USA Today, 48. See also media; television Nick Jr, 36, 41, 47. See also Noggin Nickelodeon, 36, 42. See also Noggin nineties animated sitcom: anarchic, 65; sporadic employment of married females, 63; subversive, 55, 59. See also animated sitcom Noggin, 36, 41, 42, 46 Norma Jean the Termite Queen, 148, 153–4 Nunn, Heather, 255 object relations theory, 16, 35, 39–40, 45–6 “Octomom” (Nadya Suleman), 23 The Ofice, 222, 226, 229–30, 231. See also breastfeeding on television Oili, Chris, 249 Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, 171 Ogdon, Bethany, 71, 72 older adults, 270–1 older mothers, 18, 204, 207–9, 213, 215–16. See also older parents; postmenopausal pregnancy Oliver, Nicole, 71–2, 75, 76–8, 78–9, 79–80. See also Crash Test Mommies online debate. See Patricia Rashbrook; postmenopausal pregnancy online media. See media Online PPD Support Group, 344. See also postpartum depression Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year, 5, 348 “Optical Allusions,” 370 “opting out,” 35, 36, 48, 328. See also “choice” feminism; “opt-out revolution” Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home, 48

“opt-out revolution,” 36, 48, 336n33. See also “choice” feminism; “opting out” O’Reilly, Andrea, 13, 80–1, 113 Ouellette, Laurie, 70 Palin, Bristol, 186 Palin, Sarah, 115–16, 186 Parachutes and Kisses, 149 “Paradigm,” 363 parenting literature: biopower, 306–7; class themes in, 304–5; discursive regulation, 306–7; domesticity, 305; “good” mothering, 307; historical context, 304–5; race themes in, 304– 5; risk management, 306–7; social inequalities, 307; technocratic agenda, 304, 306; women’s passivity in, 304– 5. See also parenting magazines; “good mother”; medicine parenting magazines: absence of inancial issues in, 276; and aging, 273; and body beautiful, 272–4; consumerism, 272; corporate advertising, 272, 273–4, 275, 278; and health, 273, 274–5; husbands in, 272, 275, 276; “the look” in, 272–4; mothers in, 271– 5; neoliberalism, 277; plastic surgery in, 273; self-care in, 268, 270, 271–8; and stress, 275–7; and weight loss, 273. See also discourses of self-care; Parents; teenage mothers; Today’s Parent parenting manuals. See parenting literature Parents, 268, 271–3 Parkes, Jennifer, 212 patriarchal symbolic order, 58; of animation industry, 58–9 patriarchy. See patriarchal symbolic order PBS, 41, 42, 46, 47, 70; threats to funding, 41

Index 415 PBS Sprout, 36, 41 Pearls and Pearling Life, 57 Pearson, Allison, 156, 163 Pearson, Katie, 160, 162 “Performing Motherhood,” 176 Peskowitz, Miriam, 74 Pevere, Geoff, 167–8 phallic mother, 61, 65. See Lois Grifin Piercy, Marge, 149 Playboy, 60 Poe, K.L., 171 Policing of Families, The, 91 political ofice: childless or single women, 117–18; demands on family, 119–20; as hindrance to parenting skills, 111, 112; as improved by motherhood, 114–15, 116–17; as incompatible with motherhood, 109, 111, 118–20; “mommy card,” 115; parental accommodations, 109, 110; parenting challenges, 109–10; scrutiny faced by women in, 109, 110– 12, 117–18; socially determined constraints, 110–12; women potentially dissuaded from, 118. See also politician mothers; politicians politician mothers: constraints of, 110– 11, 120; dangers of idealizing motherhood, 116–17, 118–19; double standard faced by, 112; feelings of inadequacy, 112; gendered political identity, 116, 117; guilt faced by, 112–13; hostility faced by, 112; as inluence on motherhood, 120; leaving ofice for family, 119; life writing, 108, 111, 112–13, 114; media preoccupation with, 108, 111–12; “mommy card,” 115; overcoming idealization of motherhood by, 113; protecting self and children from scrutiny, 113–14, 119; as public mothers, 114, 116–17; public negotiation of motherhood, 108, 114–17,

120; public scrutiny, 109, 110–12, 113–14; self-representation, 108. See also politicians; motherhood; mothers politicians: bias against childless or single candidates, 117–18; as celebrityseeking, 108; as commodities, 108; surveillance of mothers, 15. See also politician mothers Pollock, Della, 254 Pope, Deborah, 79–80 popular culture: alternative families in, 359, 360; and Anne of Green Gables, 167; “Common,” 7–8; cultural criticism of, 8; and discourse of motherhood, 74, 109; ideal of family in, 38; ideal of motherhood in, 38; ideological role of, 7; and lesbian representation in, 361, 371; magic mother, 40; “monstrous maternal,” 368–9; mothering archetypes, 172; mothers in, 4–5; normative motherhood, 332, 347; “Prevalent,” 6; and social inequalities, 80–1; and teenage pregnancy, 185–90; “Well-received or -liked,” 6–7. See also mass media; television pop(ular) lit. See women’s popular iction popular media, 40. See also media; television; women’s popular iction pornography: second-wave feminism, 368; Madonna/whore dichotomy, 368; pregnancy fetish in, 367–8 Pornography: Men Possessing Women, 367–8 postfeminism, 329 postmenopausal pregnancy: and class, 204–5, 209–10; discourse of the natural, 205, 211–13, 215; discourses of risk, 204–7, 211–16; in vitro fertilization, 205, 206, 208; media coverage of, 204–16; normative gender, 209–10, 214, 215–16; online debate,

416 Index 204–5, 210–14; scientiic expertise, 206, 207. See also Patricia Rashbrook postmodernism, 9–10, 206, 379, 387 postpartum depression (PPD), 23; Andrea Yates, 343; “bad” mother, 154, 341–2, 343, 345; as biomedical model, 341, 343, 344–6, 351; challenges to biomedical model of, 339, 340, 344, 346, 350–51; deinition, 342; expectations of motherhood, 341–2, 343, 345, 346; and “good”/“bad” mother dichotomy, 341, 346; maternal ambivalence, 346, 348, 350; motherchild relationships, 341–2; social causes of ppd, 346, 350–1; social dificulties of, 341, 344; “The Yellow Wallpaper,” 154. See also Brooke Shields; Cruise/Shields controversy pregnancy: as danger, 367; fetishization of, 365, 367; Madonna/whore dichotomy, 367, 368; media obsession with, 3–4; medicalization of, 367; “monstrous maternal,” 368–9; pornography, 367–8; scopophilia, 367; surveillance, 370–1 pregnancy manuals. See mothering manuals; parenting literature pregnant bodies. See pregnancy Prettyman, Sandra Spickard, 191–2 Prime-Time Feminism, 321–2 Prosser, Jay, 289, 293, 295 psychoanalysis. See psychoanalytic theory psychoanalytic theory: Freudianism, 38–9, 40; object relations theory, 35, 39–40, 45, 46; theories of childhood development, 38–9; theories of motherhood, 38 psychology, 37, 38 Public Broadcasting Service. See PBS

Queer as Folk, 361 Quinn, Naiomi, 79–80 Raphael, Dennis, 274 Rashbrook, Patricia: class of, 204–5, 209–10, 213–16; discourse of the natural, 205, 211–13, 215; discourses of risk, 204–9, 211–16; family, 204, 207, 213, 214; in vitro fertilization, 204, 206, 208; media coverage, 204– 16; online debate, 204–5, 210–14; suitability for motherhood, 207–10, 211–16. See also postmenopausal pregnancy reality television: anthropological approach of, 70; Birth Stories, 254; casting bias in, 71–2; construction of subjects in, 70–1; and motherhood, 69–81, 82n2; as effacing social inequalities, 80–1; as genre, 70; and “good”/“bad” mother dichotomy, 69–70, 74–81, 83n34; humiliation as entertainment in, 72, 79; importance and inluence of, 70; and mommy wars, 69, 79–81; and new momism, 79–81; reality excluded from, 257; and stay-at-home mothers, 69; and surveillance, 74–8 “rebellious mom”: Roseanne, 57; Marge Simpson, 57 Redesigning Women: Television After the Network Era, 322 Representing Motherhood, 10 Reproduction of Mothering, The, 38 reproductive technologies, 10, 18, 22–3; and birth stories, 254; Brooke Shields, 341; and “ethical vertigo,” 389; “genetic orphans,” 389; postmenopausal pregnancy, 215; as unethical, 383, 384 Rich, Adrienne: conformity, 174; corporeality of motherhood, 175; motherhood as earned 151;

Index 417 motherhood as institution, 163–4, 171, 308; motherhood as learned, 177–8; motherlessness, 176 Riessman, Catherine Kohler, 345 risk. See discourses of risk Rock, Lindsey, 74 Roiphe, Anne Richardson, 152 Roosevelt, Theodore, 89–90 Rothwell, Erika, 171 Rubenstein, Hannah, 360 Santorum, Rick, 37, 38; on “radical” feminism, 37, 50n7 schadenfreude. See reality television second wave feminism, 151, 368. See also feminist iction; women’s movements self-care. See discourses of self-care self-help literature: dominance of white voices in, 150. See also women’s popular iction seniors. See older adults Setoodeh, Ramin, 170 Seven Daughters of Eve, The: author’s descent, 380; essentialism, 382; genes as “writing,” 377–8; kinship, 376, 380; knowledge/feelings, 380–1; metaphors in, 377, 378, 380–1; motherhood as genetic, 377; Marie Moseley, 379–80; and mothers, 380– 1; naturalization of cultural discourses, 380–82; racist interest in, 382; science as cultural, 380, 381–2, 383. See also Brian Sykes; genetic discourses Sex and the City, 222, 226–7. See also breastfeeding on television sexual mother, 366, 367, 369–70 Shaw, Deborah Lewis 35 Shields, Brooke: as “bad” mother, 342, 343, 346; breastfeeding, 347; candor of, 341, 342, 350; Cruise/Shields controversy, 339-40; emotional factors

of PPD, 346–50; idealization of motherhood, 347; medicalization of postpartum depression, 340, 346, 355n54; memoir, (see Down Came the Rain). See also Cruise/Shields controversy; “good” motherhood; postpartum depression Shell and the Kernel, The, 294 Shulman, Alix Kates, 153 Simpson, Marge, 56–9, 61, 66; characteristics, 56; children of, 56, 69, 63; employment, 62, 63; gambling addiction, 61; as holy mother, 57; husband, 56, 65; “hysterical” outbursts, 59; intensive mothering, 57–8, 62; new momism, 56, 58, 59; in men’s magazines, 60; as “rebellious mom,” 57; relationship with children, 59, 66; as role model, 58; self-denial, 59; self-sacriice, 56; spirituality and ethics, 56; symbolism of hair, 56; symbolism of necklace, 56–7; waistline, 56; wardrobe, 56. See also cartoon sitcom mothers; modern animated mothers Simpsons, The, 53, 55, 56–9, 60; break from family-friendly genre, 60; criticized in later seasons, 60; satire, 55; subversive elements, 56 single mothers, 10; Angelina Jolie, 92– 3; Britney Spears, 94; in chick lit, 147, 157, 158–9; Joanne Hayes, 128, 136, 138, 139; in The L Word, 365; and maternal romance, 177; politician mothers, 109, 114–15, 117, 118, 119; in Pogressive Era iction, 175; in pornography, 367–8; reality tv, 70–1, 80–1, 258, 264; on rise in Canada, 384; in Sex and the City, 226-27; The Simpsons, 63; as social disadvantage, 271, 277, 286–7; teenage mothers, 213–14; as transnational adoptive parents, 284; in

418 Index turn-of-the-century popular magazines, 172; Yo’Mama, 193. See also mothers; teenage mothers “Skin Memories,” 289 Slice (TV channel), 69, 75 “slummy mummy,” 4, 92. See also “yummy mummy” Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 344–5 social inequalities, 10, 25, 97, 225, 301; and motherhood, 322, 350–1; parenting literature, 304–5; postmenopausal pregnancy, 204–5, 209–10; and reality TV, 80–1 social media: construction of political culture in, 108; and popular culture, 108. See also media Somerville, Margaret, 24; critique of, 388–9; The Ethical Imagination, 387; genetic “orphans,” 384, 388, 389; on heterosexual marriage, 384; “innate repugnance,” 387–8; knowledge/feelings, 383–4; “moral intuition,” 383–4; naturalization of cultural discourses of, 383–4, 387–8; normativity of, 387; on nuclear family, 384; on postmodernism, 387; reproduction, 383– 4, 387; response to critics, 387; on same-sex marriage, 383–4; science/ culture, 383, 384; “secular sacred,” 387; on traditional values, 387–8; universalism, 385; “yuck factor,” 383–5. See also genetic discourses Sparkes, Andrew, 272 Spears, Britney, 87–9, 91–2, 94–8, 99– 100; “bad mother,” 94–5, 96; and Angelina Jolie, 91–2, 96; and Courtney Love, 97–8; and complicity in image, 98; cries of “help,” 95; and “innocent” sister, 186; “insiders” as policing mechanisms, 95–6; marriage and divorce, 94; media treatment, 96; popularity, 92, 94, 100; as provocative igure, 94; rehabilitated by

media, 99; transgression of class, 97; transgression of sexuality, 97–8; as “Unitney,” 89, 91–2. See also celebrity mothers; entertainment journalism Spears, Jamie Lynn, 87, 101; as bad inluence on girls, 186. See also Britney Spears Spock, Benjamin, 153, 305 stay-at-home mothers, 14, 35, 37, 41–3, 74, 364. See also mothers Stefler, Margaret, 176 Stempel Mumford, Laura, 255 Stone, Pamela, 48 Storey, John, 25 Storm in a Teacup, A, 148, 160–1 Streeter, Edwin, 57 Strinati, Dominic, 7 Stronach, Belinda, 114, 115 Such Good Friends, 148, 152 Suleiman, Susan, 176 Supernanny, 69–71, 74–6, 78–81; cancellation, 81; casting bias, 70–1, 83n38; as effacing social inequalities, 80–1; “family update,” 76; “good”/“bad” mother dichotomy, 75–6, 78–81; international success, 74–5, 82n2; narrative structure, 75– 80; surveillance, 75–6, 79–81; 82n2. See also reality television surrogates, 10, 23 surveillance 15–17; of celebrity mothers, 96, 99; in The Constant Gardener, 245; of media 88–9, 91; and new momism, 96; of mothers, 14, 88; reality TV, 74–81; of women’s reproduction, 205, 245, 370–1 Swigart, Jane, 80–1 Sykes, Brian, 376, 377, 379–82, 389. See also The Seven Daughters of Eve tabloid press. See entertainment journalism

Index 419 talking back, 12, 26, 53, 55; of African women, 248; in alternative media, 140; in Birth Stories, 253, 254, 264; bloggers, 100–1; breastfeeding on TV as, 230; celebrities, 100; Joanne Hayes, 139; reality TV, 69; Yo’ Mama, 187 technocracy. See medicine teenage mothers: absence from parenting magazines, 186–90; cultural obsession with, 185–90; as discursive igure, 185, 187–8, 191–3; “good”/“bad” mother dichotomy, 188; marginalization of 186–97, 213– 14, 216; prevention agenda, 186; silencing of, 185–6, 187–9; as warning, 186. See also parenting magazines; Today’s Parent; Yo’ Mama teenage pregnancy. See teenage mothers Today’s Parent: biases, 189–90, 191; erasure of teen mothers in, 188–90, 190–1; target audience, 188–90. See also teenage mothers; parenting magazines; Yo’ Mama television: audiences, 81; and breastfeeding (see breastfeeding on television); cartoons, 41; children’s trust in, 49; children’s TV (see children’s television programs); disappearance of mothers from, 320–1; domestic tropes, 322; educational programming, 41; and expectations of women to be mothers, 40; family programming, 42; lesbian stereotypes, 360–1; as modeling to family life, 41; networks, 36, 41; patriarchy, 321, 322; single-dad sitcoms, 320–1; social construction, 81 talk shows, 36. See also reality television Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary Women’s Literatures, 13

Tharp, Julie, 3 This Giving Birth: Pregnancy and Childbirth in American Women’s Writings, 3 Thurer, Shari L., 10, 111, 112, 113 Tiefer, Leonore, 345 Time, 241–2. See also black Madonna Timson, Judith, 3–4 Today’s Parent, 271–3 “Tom vs. Brooke” debate. See Cruise/ Shields controversy Torok, Maria, 294 transnational adoption: adoptee narratives of, 286; adoptive mothers, 284, 297–8; birthmothers, 286–7, 297–8; discourse of, 284, 288; as gendered violence, 297–8; Korean history of, 284, 285–6, 297–8; Korean motherhood ideology, 287, 298–9; losses in, 287, 297; neoliberalism, 286, 297; “overseas” Koreans, 286; as reproductive labour appropriation, 297–8. See also Korean birthmothers Tsao, Jinshi, 226 Tucker, Judith Stadtman, 73 Turner, Chris, 56, 58 Turner, Graeme, 101 TV. See television Umansky, Lauri, 11–12, 15, 88, 91, 96–7 Up the Sandbox!, 148, 154 virgin/whore dichotomy, 9. See also Madonna/whore dichotomy Virgin Mary, 245. See also holy mother; Madonna with Child Wall, Angela, 205 Walters, Suzanna Danuta, 361 Wasylycia-Leis, Judy, 113 Weber, Brenda, 170 Wells, Paul, 54, 55

420 Index “What Celebrity Worship Says About Us,” 101 What to Expect When You’re Expecting, 7; amendments to third edition, 308–9, 310, 311–12; as inspiring fear, 303–4, 307–8, 312–13; institution of Motherhood, 303; medical constructions of risk in, 308, 314; normalizing concern in, 308, 309, 310, 314; normativity of irst and second editions, 308–9; passivity of mothers in, 303–4, 307– 8, 310–15; as prescriptive literature, 303; technocratic agenda of, 303–4, 305, 306, 307, 309–15; universalization of pregnant body, 311, 314. See also parenting literature; medicine Whyer, Mary, 79–80 Winfrey, Oprah, 340, 376, 382, 383 Winnicott, D.W., 16, 35, 39, 40, 44, 45 “Wisdom of Repugnance, The”: knowledge/feelings, 384–5; “natural” repugnance, 384–5; naturalization of cultural discourses, 384–5; reproduction, 384; science as cultural, 384–5; universalism, 385. See also genetic discourses; Leon R. Kass Wittig, Monique, 363 Woman of Substance, A, 155 Women in the Middle: Their Parent Care Years, 270 women’s bodies: in media, 20, 272–4; plastic surgery, 20; lactating (see breastfeeding); pregnant, 21; rightwing obsession with, 368 women’s health in media, 273, 274–5 women’s movements: of 1970s, 35; and pornography, 368; and domestic labour, 163; white voices in, 150; women’s liberation, 54; women’s popular iction writers, 152. See also feminism

women’s popular iction: abortion, 149, 155, 157–8; “bonkbusters,” 155, 156; “bad” mothers, 147; chick lit as, 147, 155, 156–8, 159; competitive peers in, 150; as confessional, 148, 151, 152, 162; conlict with men in, 158; as consciousness-raising, 152, 162, 164; conservative sentiment in, 159; critiques of, 152; domesticity, 154, 155, 157, 161, 162; dominance of bourgeois women in, 150; dominance of heterosexual women in, 150; dominance of white voices in, 150, 165n22; feminist sentiment in, 155–6, 158, 160; gender politics in, 147, 148–9, 150, 151–2; home-based work in, 159–60, 161; love of children in, 151, 152–3, 154; mommy lit and mum lit as, 147, 150, 156, 159, 162–3, 164; motherhood angst, 147–8, 149–51, 152–6, 158; motherhood as cleansing, 159; motherhood as myth, 148, 152, 153, 156–7, 162–3; motherhood as resignation, 154, 158–9, 163; motherhood and romance, 154; motherhood as shared experience, 152, 162, 163, 165n22; motherhood as single model, 147–8; motherhood and working as incompatible, 153–4, 155, 156–7, 159–61, 162; mothers of mothers in, 148–9, 154, 158, 162; need for motherhood validation in, 163; parents of mothers in, 148–9, 150, 152; partners in, 148, 150, 151–5, 157, 159, 160–3; periods, 147; pregnancy as femininity, 158; reader response, 152; resentment of children, 152–3, 153–4; “yummy mummy,” 156, 161 see also “good”/“bad” mother dichotomy Women’s Room, The, 148, 149, 154, 159 Wood, Summer, 80

Index 421 Woodward, Louise, 36, 49n3 Woollett, Anne, 306, 307, 311, 314 workforce: in animated sitcoms, 62, 65; and mothers, 35; women entering, 9, 93–4; women exiting, 16 working mothers, 12, 14, 42, 48, 74; constraints faced by, 110–11; double standard faced by, 111; “mommy wars,” 35, 37; and notions of private/public roles, 110– 11, 112; as politicians (see politician mothers); private demands of, 110; and “private-versus-public role strain,” 110, 112–13. See also “mommy wars”; mothers; politician mothers Worth Fighting For, 109 “Yellow Wallpaper, The,” 154

Yes, Dear, 226, 227. See also breastfeeding on television Yo’ Mama: as alternative discursive space, 190–8; community building, 196–8; content, 192–8; distribution, 196–7; history, 190–1, 196; personal revelations, 194–7; readers’ poetry, 195–6, 198; as response to dominant discourse, 192–8; self-empowerment, 192–8; as talking back, 187, 197–8; teenage mothers as writers, 190–8; use of vernacular, 195, 198. See also parenting magazines; teenage mothers; Today’s Parent Yoest, Charmaine Crouse, 35 Young, Iris Marion, 117 young mothers, 18. See also teenage mothers “yummy mummy,” 4, 92, 98, 156, 161