Buying up baby

Abstract

Knocked Up, Waitress, and Juno celebrate as models young, white, American-born women who choose to reproduce despite their stated desire not to. These films participate in the depoliticizing processes of a US postfeminist culture that negotiates the power of female consumers in a post-9/11, neoliberal global marketplace demanding new forms of consumption, labor, and citizenship. This essay analyzes specifically how, through commodifying motherhood, these popular dramedies construct supposedly authentic modern feminine subjectivity and repudiate feminism, especially reproductive justice politics. The extent to which postfeminist discourse displaces political subjectivity through commercialized motherhood is revealed further when the US films are put in dialogue with the Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. The essay responds to calls for new methods in feminist media studies and transnational feminist studies that expand rather than compartmentalize scholarship's focus and dialogue.

Keywords:

• reproductive justice
• choice
• postfeminism
• feminist media studies
• transnational feminist studies

Notes

1. Differential citizenship is produced through the processes and policies that “exclude some citizen members from full participation in the social polity” (Fujiwara 2008, p. 24).

2. See Cronin (2000) for an important discussion of the limitations for women and other marginalized groups in consumerist constructions of the individual feminine self. See Grewal (2005) for discussion of the uses of “choice” in transnational neoliberal consumer practices and feminisms, and for discussion of the consumer as female in contemporary constructions of “America.”

3. Douglas and Michaels (2004) similarly describe “the new momism,” a backlash ideology that overlaps with postfeminism in that consumerism and conspicuous consumption are central tenets, though McRobbie (2009) is careful to distinguish postfeminism from backlash ideology. See Thompson (2006), who suggests that some forms of third wave motherhood share consumerist tenets with the new momism and postfeminism, and whose term, “choice-making mothers,” I build upon. On “good” and “bad” celebrity motherhood in postfeminist cultures, see Cobb (2008). See also Flanagan (2004).

4. Since the 1990s, debates over modern citizenship have inspired feminist critiques of the limits of rights and the conception of the individual in liberal democracy and political theory. See Nicholson and Seidman (1995).

5. I am not advocating abortion as a birth control method or a way to manage women's fertility. My analysis concerns how these films contribute to an increasingly powerful ideology of racist nativism in the US and to increasingly limited and coercive reproductive policies within neoliberalism.

6. See also Ahmed for discussion on transnational feminism's need for “a politics based on specific engagement with others and with the other's culture(s)” (2002, p. 568).

7. The May 31, 2009 murder of Dr. George Tiller indicates how precarious access to reproductive healthcare and particularly abortion is in the United States. Some observers are connecting the murder and the antiabortion movement to extreme right-wing white supremacy and militia movements. In the blogosphere, feminist debate and critique are rigorous, calling for action, reframing the discourse, and demanding more direct confrontation of the violence as “political assassination,” “antiabortion crime,” and “domestic terrorism” (Seltzer 2009).

8. Quiverfull refers both to an identity and to a Fundamentalist Christian pro-natalist, anti-birth-control movement in which believers reject all forms of birth control and allow God to determine the number of children they have (Joyce 2009).