Fabricating babies: reproduction as production in Storks and The Boss Baby

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we analyze two mainstream children’s films, Storks (2016), and The Boss Baby (2017), both of which answer the proverbial question, “Where do babies come from?” with “They come from corporate factories above the clouds.” We argue that these films bypass the gendered labor of reproduction, forwarding instead a politics of neoliberal multiculturalism in which the entrepreneurial spirit of masculinized reproductive industries appears to facilitate a post-racial utopia. These films tacitly reinstate traditional familial and heteronormative whiteness as the path toward the intertwined goals of capital accumulation and happiness. As such, they support the socialization of children into a policy landscape that increasingly devalues the physical, emotional, and economic labor of gestation, birth, and parenting, which in turn contributes to the conditions for disinvestment in the structures and policies that would ensure reproductive rights, health, and justice for marginalized groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Childbirth
• childhood
• animated film
• reproductive rights
• neoliberal multiculturalism

Acknowledgment

This research was supported by the Donna and Richard Esteves Fund for Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Health of Tulane University’s Newcomb Institute. The authors would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers and Feminist Media Studies editors for their generative feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This depiction of the comedic trials of masculinized baby-delivering storks is also found in the 2009 Pixar animated short Partly Cloudy..

2. Interestingly, the sequel to The Boss Baby, The Boss Baby: The Family Business (2021) seems to be predicated on the idea that Tim’s entire fantasy involving Baby Corp and his younger brother was indeed real.

3. These recent children’s films depict pregnancy and/or birth and/or the labor of motherhood mostly according to common tropes that shield children from the difficult and physical realities of childbirth and motherhood: Hotel Transylvania 2 (2015); Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009); Shrek the Third (2007); Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011); Sing (2016); How to Train Your Dragon (2010).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Clare Daniel

ClareDaniel is an administrative associate professor at Newcomb Institute of Tulane University, where she teaches in Communication, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Environmental Studies. She is the author of Mediating Morality: The Politics of Teen Pregnancy in the Post-Welfare Era (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017). Her work has also appeared in Signs, Frontiers, Present Tense, Ms., and elsewhere.

Tessa Baldwin

TessaBaldwin is an independent scholar who lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. She received her bachelor’s degree from Tulane University in psychology.