Pregnant Pictures

Sandra Matthews, Laura Wexler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2000
• eBook ISBN: 9781136766220
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In this dazzling collection of over 200 photos of pregnant women taken from art libraries, childbirth manuals, maternity ads, contemporary art, and personal albums, the authors explore the paradox between image and reality. The photos illuminate how society creates feminine roles through the institution of pregnancy-and how women resist such roles.

I) THE SUBJECT OF PREGNANCY

The library card catalogue contains dozens of entries under the heading “pregnancy”: clinical treatises detailing signs of morbidity; volumes cataloging studies of foetal development, with elaborate drawings; or popular manuals in which physicians and others give advice on diet and exercise for the pregnant woman. … Except perhaps for one insignificant diary, no card appears listing a work which, as Kristeva puts it (1980, p. 237), is “concerned with the subject, the mother as the site of her proceedings.”

—Iris Marion Young

WHY PREGNANT PICTURES?

What has photography, apotheosis of the visible, to do with pregnancy, the very archetype of the hidden? Why a book about images of a temporary state of the body, the very mention of which is apt to be awkward, if not actually aversive? Pregnancy currently occupies a marginalized and devalued discursive space even while, as a fashionable topic, “the body” and “the new reproductive technologies” gain ever-increasing glamour. Popular notions of pregnancy are carnal, often sentimental; sometimes they are even grotesque. The physical productions of the pregnant body are indiscreet—a subject for the doctor's office, the bedroom and the private talk of women. The swollen womb is an atavistic protuberance of body fluid, blood and tissue. Camera work, on the other hand, is tasteful, an appropriate topic for the dinner table conversation, the museum symposium, the chic magazine. The photograph is a sleek and glossy surface, a weightless skin. What is the impulse that would seek to implicate these two so firmly with one another and then to dwell on their conjunction? Why the subject of pregnant pictures?

Our initial concern was to recover traces of the pregnant subject herself, that is, the pregnant woman as an individual. We were astonished at the shortage of visual images of a bodily event as fundamental and important as pregnancy. There were very few images of pregnant women in public visual culture, such as art books and galleries, newspapers, magazines, posters and advertisements. When public photographs of pregnant women could be found, the pregnancy had often been dealt with in an extremely limited, idealized and dehistoricized way. The images themselves had usually been highly stylized and sequestered into specialized viewing arenas such as medical textbooks or maternity clothing catalogues. Clearly, the public representation of pregnancy was a site of cultural anxiety, and pregnant women saw not only very few, but also very constricted reflections of themselves. We wanted to supply a broader and more meaningful collection of pictures.

At the same time, the question—how can society reflect more probingly upon the meaning of pregnancy in the context of a rapidly changing biological foundation?—grew increasingly important to our project. Socially specific and historically contextualized representations do exist, but they reach very limited groups of viewers. This is important because just as the pregnant woman as an individual constructs her sense of self in part from images of herself, so does our society derive a sense of collectivity from the images it constructs and circulates. The ways that photographs of pregnancy have appeared and changed over time reveal pregnant pictures as social pictures—representations not only of a dramatic change in the state of the female body itself, but of important changes in the social institutions that contextualize and give meaning to that body, such as medicine, law and education.

It rapidly became clear that an historical narrative was vital not only to connect individuals with images of pregnancy, but images of pregnancy with the social changes that give them meaning. How and why do photographs of pregnancy circulate in public visual space? Historically, three principal factors have curtailed photographic representation of pregnant women: pregnancy's complicated relation to subjectivity, to sexuality, and to the social struggle for control over reproduction—in simple terms, language, sex and politics. In each case, absence of the images of pregnancy suppresses the complexity of these factors.

PREGNANT SUBJECTS

Most women must deal at some point in their lives with the possibility, impossibility, or fact of becoming pregnant. Pregnancy can be a longed-for or feared event, it can be planned or accidental, the fruit of a loving relationship or a violent rape. Once a clear indication of sexual activity, pregnancy is now quite commonly initiated a-sexually. Even a desired, “natural” pregnancy is a complicated physical, psychological and social passage, both intensely private and unavoidably public. A lost or feared or technologically enhanced pregnancy thrusts the woman into a variety of roles that she may never have imagined. Pregnancy links the most intimate aspects of a woman's body with ideas about the well being of the social body.

Yet, what can be said about the pregnant woman as subject? What is written often has a curiously muffled and saccharine or even punitive character. Pregnancy has long been seen as an exemplary instance of the analogy between women and nature that anthropologist Sherry Ortner proposed, in her essay “Is Woman to Man as Nature is to Culture?” (1974), as the justification for “cultural language and imagery [to] continue to purvey a relatively devalued view of women.”¹ Alternately she has been identified as a sociopath whose insistence upon drinking, smoking, taking drugs and having unprotected sex forces the government to discipline her on behalf of the civil rights of her fetus, charging to “women's expense” the “costs of fetal rights,” as both Rachel Roth and Cynthia Daniels have argued.² Recently, the pregnant woman also has been featured as the occasion for a tremendous burst of scientific knowledge, and portrayed as a grateful consumer, passively pleased with the options presented by the new reproductive technologies.

But establishing and maintaining a pregnancy most often takes consciousness and work. Maria Mies points out that throughout history women “did not simply breed children like cows, but they appropriated their own generative and productive forces, they analyzed and reflected upon their own and former experiences and passed them on to their daughters. This means that they were not helpless victims of their bodies’ generative forces, but learned to influence them, including the number of children they wanted to have.”³ The erasure of this history of conscious work in pregnancy undermines women's knowledge of themselves as pregnant subjects, and underplays their agency as central figures in the changing cultural drama of reproduction.

Selfhood and Alienation

Some feminist writers have tried to enhance appreciation of the work of pregnancy even though they have feared essentializing women's biological role and equating it with her social prospects. In the late nineteenth century a large number of advocates for women's rights were drawn to the cause of “voluntary motherhood,” meaning planned and wanted pregnancies. Voluntary motherhood was, as Linda Gordon sees it, “a political statement about the nature of involuntary motherhood and childrearing.”⁴ These activists wanted not so much to limit pregnancy as to make it more comfortable and respected within the structures of conventional marriage and family.

In the early twentieth century Margaret Sanger's humanitarian activism was an expression of women's drive further to represent their own needs and desires concerning pregnancy within the family, especially its economic impact. This required, in turn, a much broader (and at the time illegal) social distribution of knowledge about reproduction and contraception among the poor. But Sanger also feared immigrant population growth, which made pregnancy to her a social concern more than an issue of subjectivity.

A generation and more later, in 1949 and 1970, Simone de Beauvoir and Shulamith Firestone articulated changed meanings of pregnancy in the context of second-wave feminism. They came to largely negative conclusions about the impact of pregnancy and the institution of family upon women. If women are ever to be active in the world, pregnancy seemed to these writers an almost insurmountable barrier. Both assumed that the pregnant woman fundamentally had no chance for autonomous subjectivity. Beauvoir felt that pregnancy obliterated transcendence in bodily servitude to the family and the species. Fertility was bad enough. “Woman is adapted to the needs of the egg, rather than to her own requirements,” Beauvoir asserted. “It is during her periods that she feels her body most painfully as an obscure, alien thing; it is, indeed, the prey of a stubborn and foreign life that each month constructs and then tears down a cradle within it; each month all things are made ready for a child and then aborted in the crimson flow”⁵ Conception only made things worse:

Woman experiences a more profound alienation when fertilization has occurred and the divided egg passes down into the uterus and proceeds to develop there. True enough, pregnancy is a normal process, which, if it takes places under normal conditions of health and nutrition, is not harmful to the mother; certain interactions between her and the fetus become established which are even beneficial to her. In spite of an optimistic view having all too obvious social utility, however, gestation is a fatiguing task of no individual benefit to the woman but on the contrary demanding heavy sacrifices. It is often associated in the first months with loss of appetite and vomiting, which are not observed in any female domesticated animal and which signalize the revolt of the organism against the invading species.⁶

Beauvoir's conclusion to this rather frightening train of thought was that “woman, like man, is her body; but her body is something other than herself.”⁷

Firestone was not content simply to describe the physical and psychological burdens of pregnancy. “Pregnancy is barbaric,” she declared, and called for the “freeing of women from the tyranny of their reproductive biology by every means available” as the “first demand for any alternative [i.e., socialist] system.”⁸ Firestone envisioned a time when the “potentials of modern embryology, that is, artificial reproduction,” would contribute to the “diffusion of the childbearing and child-rearing role to the society as a whole.”⁹ And although this possibility seemed “so frightening that [it is] seldom discussed seriously,” Firestone was willing to consider these “new alternatives” to a “fundamentally oppressive biological condition that we only now have the skill to correct.”¹⁰ In her positive valuation of the liberatory possibilities of the new reproductive technologies she was prescient, although perhaps too sanguine about the “elimination of sexual classes” that would necessarily follow women's “seizure of control of reproduction” and destruction not just of “male privilege but of sex distinction itself.”¹¹

In fact, in their negativity toward pregnancy within the patriarchal family, both Beauvoir and Firestone made courageous and important contributions toward opening up a fuller, more differentiated discourse on women's social agency in childbearing, or lack of it. But they tended to mistrust that women could ever truly construct an active political role that would include pregnancy. They spoke not as, but on behalf of, pregnant women.

A Voice of Her Own

In the 1970s, French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva and American poet and social activist Adrienne Rich began to explore the character of pregnant subjectivity with greater passion for the condition and with greater interest in how it might be manifested in language. This was the beginning of a feminist conceptualization of a speaking role for pregnant women themselves.

The pregnant subject's speech was highly problematic. For Kristeva, meditating on the subject in “Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini” (1975), the voice of the pregnant woman was present and specific, but it was also virtually inaccessible. In Kristeva's understanding, as in her memory of her own experience of pregnancy, the pregnant woman as a subject was deeply and primally split within herself.

Cells fuse, split, and proliferate: volumes grow, tissues stretch, and body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. Within the body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is another. And no one is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify what is going on. “It happens, but I'm not there.” “I cannot realize it, but it goes on.” Motherhood's impossible syllogism.¹²

By virtue of the growing fetus, Kristeva's pregnant woman enters what Kristeva termed an “enceinte,” a separate psychological space, a walled-in enclosure or a beltway on the very border of language. This liminal space functions as an instinctual preserve at the supposed threshold where nature joins culture. An “I” is present, but only in so far as it recognizes its own erasure: ‘“It happens, but I'm not there.’” This “ I ” has no control over what is happening within her body, which fuses, splits, proliferates, grows, stretches, changes rhythm, speeds up and slows down presumably without her active participation. She knows only that “it goes on.”

However, out of this self-division, as Susan Stewart interprets Kristeva in her book, On Longing—while pointing out that one of the meanings of the word longing is “the fanciful cravings incident to women during pregnancy”—the “subject is generated, both created and separated from what it is not.” Such separation from self is literally pregnant with the possibility of meaning. Unlike Beauvoir and Firestone, for Kristeva, Stewart writes, the “initial separation/joining has a reproductive capacity that is the basis for the reproductive capacity of all signifiers.” In other words, in that “place of margin between the biological ‘reality’ of splitting cells and the cultural ‘reality’ of the beginning of the symbolic,” not only pregnant speech, but all speech is born.¹³

Nevertheless, full-fledged political speech remains inconceivable for Kristeva's desiring pregnant subject, for what she speaks is a private language. Kristeva was rare among mid-twentieth-century psychoanalysts for the time and thought she spent on the subjectivity of pregnancy. Adrienne Rich was almost unique among the feminist poets and political theorists of her generation for doing the same. In Of Woman Born (1976), Rich also described pregnancy as an experience of doubleness, but differently. Where Kristeva was moved to see in the pregnant figure reflections of symbolic and universal motherhood, revealing a romantic bent in her evocations of the pregnant “I,” Rich was a realist, and a pragmatist. “The child that I carry for nine months can be defined neither as me or as not-me,” she wrote, cutting through Kristeva's equivocations. “Far from existing in the mode of ‘inner space,’ women are powerfully and vulnerably attuned both to ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ because for us the two are continuous, not polar.”¹⁴ Rich's analysis of pregnant subjectivity emphasized the connections rather than the separation of the polarities that coexist within a pregnant woman, and sought the political rather than the psychoanalytic implications of her bodily condition. Pregnant speech is generated and claimed, for Rich, through the enunciation of the place and position of pregnancy, not their renunciation.

Addressing the social dimensions of reproduction, Rich assigned a quite different interpretation to the pregnant subject's enclosure and apparent lack of voice than did Kristeva. According to Rich, what it is that “happens” or “goes on” in pregnancy that guarantees that the pregnant woman “cannot realize it” is not a symbolic aphasia at all, but the silently insidious removal of the woman from authority over her own body:

As the means of reproduction without which cities and colonies could not expand, without which a family would die out and its prosperity pass into the hands of strangers, she has found herself at the center of purposes not hers, which she has often incorporated and made her own. The woman in labor might perceive herself as bringing forth a new soldier to fight for the tribe or nation-state, a new head of the rising yeoman or bourgeois family, a new priest or rabbi for her father's faith, or a new mother to take up the renewal of life. Given this patriarchal purpose she could obliterate herself in fertility as her body swelled year after year.¹⁵

Taken together, in the 1970s Kristeva and Rich mapped for the first time a pregnant subject whose duality forms the basis for a recombination of concepts previously thought to be binary opposites: self and other, inner and outer, private and public, silence and speech, past and future, physical and spiritual. They also clarified what are still the boundaries of contemporary thought about pregnant subjectivity. On one extreme, the pregnant woman appears in a meditative, half-conscious state of imminence. Her separate selfhood is precarious, and her speech needs translation. On the other, pregnant subjectivity appears as a field for the woman's active and deliberate world making, if not always her successful control, and her ability to signify requires both molding and restraint.

The Mirror Stage

It is ins...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Subject of Pregnancy
• 2 The Labors of Art
• 3 Family Photographs and the Pregnant Pose
• 4 Medical Imaging, Pregnancy and the Social Body
• 5 Promoting Pregnancy: Instruction, Advertising and Public Policy
• 6 From Fetal Icon to Pregnant Icon: Demi Moore and Clones
• Epilogue: Pregnant Pictures in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction
• Notes
• Permissions
• Index