Our “Baby” on YouTube: The Gendered Life Stories of the Unborn (original) (raw)
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Private View, Public Birth: Making Feminist Sense of the New Visual Culture of Childbirth
Studies in the Maternal, 5(2), 2013
In the last three decades, there has been a dramatic increase in media representations of childbirth across a range of platforms: cinema, reality television and television drama, online video-sharing platforms, pornographic film, and in fine art practice. As yet, however, there is little feminist scholarship on the implications of this new and varied visual culture of childbirth and its relationship to earlier feminist debates about the cultural taboo against the representation of birth. This paper focuses on two contemporary sites: the growing phenomenon of 'childbirth reality TV' and the birthrites collection, a unique art collection in the UK dedicated to the subject of childbirth. We explore the meanings and implications of this new visual culture of birth, and the ways its reception is challenging earlier feminist conceptualisations of motherhood and the birthing body. In particular, we argue that these new popular and artistic representations of birth trouble accounts of the birthing body as abject, and what could be described as the 'abject aesthetics' that has dominated the visual representation of birth. In place of abjection, we conclude by arguing for a more thoroughly social and political account of the place of birth in contemporary culture, based on forms of 'natal thinking', which we suggest that the birthrites collection proposes.
The Self-Made Mom: Neoliberalism and Masochistic Motherhood in Home-Birth Videos on YouTube
Women's Studies in Communication, 2016
This essay critically analyzes 22 of the most popular home-birth videos on YouTube (those with more than 1 million views). While these videos are purportedly designed to promote a positive alternative to the technocratic and medical model of maternity, they do so by framing home-birth stories as self-made, masochistic narratives: mythic journeys depicting hardworking individual actors enduring pain to transform self and circumstance. Examining how textual and paratextual elements of the videos narrativize the birthing process, I explore their role in cultivating a masochistic subjective posture that rationalizes self-governance and subordinates opportunities for feminist systemic critique in favor of celebration of individual autonomy. After detailing the functions of birth stories as self-made narratives that reinforce dominant discourses of masochistic mother- hood in a neoliberalist context that conditions mothers to self- renounce, self-deny, and sacrifice in order to be “good” citizens, I offer paths to a renewed structural critique with the potential to challenge dominant cultural logics of birth and mothering.
Is it realistic?" the portrayal of pregnancy and childbirth in the media
BMC pregnancy and childbirth, 2016
Considerable debate surrounds the influence media have on first-time pregnant women. Much of the academic literature discusses the influence of (reality) television, which often portrays birth as risky, dramatic and painful and there is evidence that this has a negative effect on childbirth in society, through the increasing anticipation of negative outcomes. It is suggested that women seek out such programmes to help understand what could happen during the birth because there is a cultural void. However the impact that has on normal birth has not been explored. A scoping review relating to the representation of childbirth in the mass media, particularly on television. Three key themes emerged: (a) medicalisation of childbirth; (b) women using media to learn about childbirth; and (c) birth as a missing everyday life event. Media appear to influence how women engage with childbirth. The dramatic television portrayal of birth may perpetuate the medicalisation of childbirth, and last, ...
2021
Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has brought on unprecedented changes, not only to our daily lives but also to our healthcare system The pandemic has particularly impacted pregnant women that must give birth with tight restrictions and significant uncertainties. Birth stories have frequently been used as a way for women to describe their experiences with the birthing process. In this uncertain time, birth stories can provide valuable insight into how pregnancy and birth stressors during a pandemic can impact the patient's overall experience. This study sought to describe and understand pregnant and new mothers' lived experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods Researchers extracted relevant YouTube birth stories using predetermined search terms and inclusion criteria. The mothers' birth stories were narrated in their second or third trimester or those who had recently given birth during the study period. Birth stories were analyzed using an inductive and deductiv...
Social media and the intrauterine device: a YouTube content analysis
The journal of family planning and reproductive health care, 2017
YouTube's online archive of video testimonials related to health information are more commonly viewed than those developed by clinicians and professional groups, suggesting the importance of the patient experience to viewers. We specifically sought to examine the accuracy of information on, and projected acceptability of, the intrauterine device (IUD) from these YouTube testimonials. We searched YouTube for videos about individual uploaders' IUD experiences, using the search terms 'intrauterine device', 'IUD', 'Mirena' and 'Paragard'. Given interest in user testimonials, we excluded professional and instructional videos belonging to commercial or non-profit entities. Two reviewers independently analysed the videos using a structured guide, with attention to inaccurate information. Of 86 identified videos, four videos featured clinicians and were excluded; 62 met inclusion criteria. Interrater agreement on IUD portrayal was good (K=0.73). Young...
Giving Birth the Posthuman Way. Technology, Disembodiment and Cyber-Progenies
EKPHRASIS. Images, cinema, theatre, media, 2/2014. Issue BODIES IN BETWEEN, pp. 131-141. PEER-REVIEW JOURNAL.
The paper sketches a possible history of cultural attitudes towards birth and gestation in the Western world, insisting on the growing empathy towards technologized bodies and technologized means of body generation. Exploring literary texts (from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or the myth of the Golem, as told by Gustav Meyrink, to Romanian texts on „the beauty without a body”) and filmic representations (Simone, Her), this study draws a connection between the deprecation of the idea of natural maternity and the raising appreciation of the idea of technologized gestation and generation, usually by a mothering father. In traditional paradigms, maternity was considered either a matter of sacred consecration, or close to a disease and so, consequently, the pregnant body was placed in a censored, disguised frame (heavy clothing, outfits fashioned to hide the changes in the body, etc.). The modernist triumphalist representations of pregnant celebrities did not actually change the attitude towards maternity, but rather short-circuited the image of the perfect feminine beauty and the idea that the pregnant body is still a beautiful form to be represented. Equally deceptive, the two valuations of natural maternity and birth found a counterpart in dreams of non-maternal generation of humans. Certain myths speak about the possibility to create a being without the help of a mother; works of literature take this phantasm of a motherless birth to interesting details. This way, posthuman ethics, cloning technologies, cyber-prosthetics, and disembodied entities figuring in popular movies are results of this constant cultural longing of cutting female physiology out of the generative picture.
Fetal images: the power of visual culture in the politics of reproduction
Feminist Studies, 1987
Now chimes the glass, a note of sweetest strength, It clouds, it clears, my utmost hope it proves, For there my longing eyes behold at length A dapper form, that lives and breathes and moves. Goethe, Faust (Ultimately) the world of "being" can function to the exclusion of the mother. No need for mother-provided that there is something of the maternal: and it is the father then who acts as-is-the mother. Either the woman is passive; or she doesn't exist. What is left is unthinkable, unthought of. She does not enter into the oppositions, she is not coupled with the father (who is coupled with the son). He1'ne Cixous, Sorties In the mid-1980s, with the United States Congress still deadlocked over the abortion issue and the Supreme Court having twice reaffirmed "a woman's right to choose,"' the political attack on abortion rights moved further into the terrain of mass culture and imagery. Not that the "prolife movement" has abandoned conventional political arenas; rather, its defeats there have hardened its commitment to a more long-term ideological struggle over the symbolic meanings of fetuses, dead or alive. Antiabortionists in both the United States and Britain have long applied the principle that a picture of a dead fetus is worth a thousand words. Chaste silhouettes of the fetal form, or voyeuristicnecrophilic photographs of its remains, litter the background of Feminist Studies 13, no. 2 (Summer 1987). ? 1987 by Rosalind Pollack Petchesky 263 264 Rosalind Pollack Petchesky any abortion talk. These still images float like spirits through the courtrooms, where lawyers argue that fetuses can claim tort liability; through the hospitals and clinics, where physicians welcome them as "patients"; and in front of all the abortion centers, legislative committees, bus terminals, and other places that "right-to-lifers" haunt. The strategy of antiabortionists to make fetal personhood a self-fulfilling prophecy by making the fetus a public presence addresses a visually oriented culture. Meanwhile, finding "positive" images and symbols of abortion hard to imagine, feminists and other prochoice advocates have all too readily ceded the visual terrain. Beginning with the 1984 presidential campaign, the neoconservative Reagan administration and the Christian Right accelerated their use of television and video imagery to capture political discourseand power.2 Along with a new series of "Ron and Nancy" commercials, the Reverend Pat Robertson's "700 Club" (a kind of right-wing talk show), and a resurgence of Good versus Evil kiddie cartoons, American television and video viewers were bombarded with the newest "prolife" propaganda piece, The Silent Scream. The Silent Scream marked a dramatic shift in the contest over abortion imagery. With formidable cunning, it translated the still and by-now stale images of fetus as "baby" into real-time video, thus (1) giving those images an immediate interface with the electronic media; (2) transforming antiabortion rhetoric from a mainly religious/mystical to a medical/technological mode; and (3) bringing the fetal image "to life." On major network television the fetus rose to instant stardom, as The Silent Scream and its impresario, Dr. Bernard Nathanson, were aired at least five different times in one month, and one well-known reporter, holding up a fetus in a jar before 10 million viewers, announced: "This thing being aborted, this potential person, sure looks like a baby!" This statement is more than just propaganda; it encapsulates the "politics of style" dominating late capitalist culture, transforming "surface impressions" into the "whole message."3 The cult of appearances not only is the defining characteristic of national politics in the United States, but it is also nourished by the language and techniques of photo/video imagery. Aware of cultural trends, the current leadership of the antiabortion movement has made a conscious strategic shift from religious discourses and authorities to medicotechnical ones, in its effort to win over the courts, the
Angels in the Clouds: Stillbirth and Virtual Cemeteries on 50 YouTube Videos
OMEGA - Journal of Death and Dying
Today every aspect of our life is published and shared online, including grief. The virtual cemeteries and social networks’ use could be considered as a new modern mortuary ritual. Starting from the keyword stillbirth, 50 videos published on YouTube since 2008 have been analyzed qualitatively. The videos, 70% published by the mother, with an average length of 5.52 minutes, a mean of 2,429,576 views and 2,563 of comments, follow a sort of script: the second part with black and white photos, background music, and religious references. Could the continuous access to the child’s technological grave encourage a complicated grief or be a support, given by the interaction with users, limiting the sense of isolation. The parent shows his or her own conceptions about death and, as a modern baptism, presents the child to the whole society. Videos keep child’s memory alive and fuel a process of personalization and tenderness in the user.
Quantitative insights into televised birth: a content analysis of One Born Every Minute
Critical Studies in Media Communication, 2018
This article explores birth representations through a content analysis of two seasons of the U.K. program, One Born Every Minute (OBEM) (Channel 4, 2010–). Reality television (RTV) has been a fertile ground for the mediation of birth, but has also stoked controversy among feminist critics and the birth community about how birth is represented and the impacts this might have for women and society. International research has explored problematic over- representation of white, heterosexual couples, as well as noting a predominance of medicalized birth experiences. However, this research is formed largely of qualitative studies that are necessarily based on small samples of episodes. To contribute to this literature, we apply a quantitative and interdisciplinary lens through a content analysis of two seasons of the U.K. version of OBEM. Paying attention to the geographical and temporal context of OBEM, this article confirms over-representation of white, heterosexual couples and medicalized birth on RTV birth shows while also providing novel insights into the ambiguous representation of birthplace and lead caregivers, the medicalization of birth through the routinization of supposedly minor birth interventions, and the absence of the representation of women’s choice over such interventions.