Yummy Mummies, baby bumps and body image : shaping 'Postmodern' pregnancy in Melbourne, Australia

This thesis is based on a longitudinal study exploring feelings about body image and `fatness' in a sample of 38 pregnant women living in Melbourne. Framed within discourses of social surveillance, biomedicine, and celebrity, the thesis argues that the most important articulations of body image were located in `private' and `public' readings of informants' bodies and anxieties surrounding the maintenance of an appropriate feminine `self . Focusing primarily on dressing, eating, exercise and discourses of `risk', the study suggests that embodied conceptions of selfhood were essential in demonstrating how fraught with difficulties pregnant `body projects' were for informants. One particular aim of this thesis is to destabilise monolithic representations of the pregnant `body'. Informants' lived experiences are used as evidence for a multiplicity of ways of `performing', `doing' and `living' pregnancy, both physically and culturally. Throughout this thesis, pregnant corporeality is argued to be dynamic and constantly shifting. Women's narratives of their embodied experiences of pregnancy are seen as an alternative and important tool for the scholar to understand contemporary pregnancy. An articulation of `in-betweenness' is argued to be critical in challenging `public' representations of pregnant bellies and for understanding how women feel about their bodies over the duration of pregnancy. Methodological issues concerning power relationships between research participants and the researcher and reflexivity are also the focus of critical attention. This thesis aims to represent pregnant women as `subjects' and to invite new possibilities for thinking about pregnancy. The picture of pregnant body image(s) that emerged from this research is one of ambivalence, uncertainty, and ongoing embodied negotiation. Specifically, my informants' accounts demonstrate that how women feel is significantly different from the ways in which pregnancy is popularly represented. As in periods of non-pregnancy, pregnant women were always at risk of `failing' at femininity. An important finding was that my informants' desires to control their pregnant bodies became entwined in the nexus of their previous body-focused practices. Informants felt enormous pressure to conform to contemporary models of Australian femininity emphasising slimness and `fitness'. Women were engaged in an ongoing reconfiguration of `fat' that was not special to pregnancy but magnified by it. Feelings of `fatness' were articulated through `fat talk', both as a frame for pregnant embodiment(s) and a conceptual tool for coping with deviations from hegemonic, gendered bodily performance. To conclude, the extent to which the contradictory versions of Australian `postmodern' pregnancy and pregnant embodiment discussed in this thesis may be read as `post-feminist' is discussed.

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Melbourne

Year dc:date.issued

2008

Author dc:creator

• Nash, Meredith Burke.

• Body image in women
• Feminine beauty (Aesthetics) Pregnancy -- Social aspects
• Pregnant women -- Australia -- Melbourne (Vic.) Pregnant women -- Public opinion
• Pregnant women -- Attitudes
• Postmodernism -- Social aspects
• Women in mass media.

Statement dc:rights

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Language dc:language

English

Identifier

THSS_b3271399-00001

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:jupiter.its.unimelb.edu.au:11343/340669