Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)
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At the Convent of San Marco, Looking at Fra Angelico’s Annunciation (or If Your Mother’s Name Is Also Mary)
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“Calling Bullshit on the Whole Thing”: Women, Health, Agency and Maternity in the Popular Film, What to Expect When You’re Expecting
Get PDFPopular culture is a significant site of discourse on maternity, in the maintenance of hegemonic ideologies and practices relating to maternity, and in the silencing of alternatives to commonly accepted norms of maternity. This essay examines the social and political issues of pregnancy and birth as presented in What to Expect When You’re Expecting (Jones) and engages in a critical feminist analysis of the film in terms of maternity and the Women’s Health Movement (whm). Gender-based oppression, authoritative medicine, and individualized and essentialized reproduction are discussed as they appear in the film and in women’s health discourse. This essay argues that the film supports dominant ideologies of maternity and even manipulates the terms of feminist health care to create the appearance of support for more alternative or even oppositional representations; thus, allowing the film to limit the progress of the whm while simultaneously appearing to support it. As the whm aims to reclaim women’s subjectivity, their agency, and their epistemic power, cultural studies can be employed to foster oppositional decodings of the film, encouraging viewers to question the content of the film and its support of hegemonic value
Mommy Bloggers as Rebels and Community Builders: A Generic Description
No full textOne site of female activism is mommy blogs, an emerging form of communication in which women can address the constraints and affordances of motherhood. However, female bloggers often face a lack of legitimacy. Generic criticism is one way to recognize female bloggers and address concerns of claiming “professionalism.” Viewing mommy bloggers as a genre reveals substantive and stylistic features that work toward organizing principles, which allow us to see mommy bloggers as a justifiable influence in our culture and in professional communication. This article specifically examines the genre of mommy blogging through the characteristics of the top ten mommy blogs in 2012. These characteristics reveal the two organizing principles of rebellion and community, which are rhetorical choices meant to strengthen the network of bloggers and to extend support to the audience. Mommy blogs offer support, particularly emotional, based on generic constraints in the mothering experience, take into account the context of a situation, act as a community to address the guilt and ambivalence in motherhood, and serve as reports of work, validating the home as a workplace and women’s issues as worthy of discussion and organization. Mommy bloggers engage in feminine rhetoric, finding similarities and engaging in a community-level consciousness raising
