White pregnant bodies on the Australian beach: a visual discourse analysis of family photographs

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss a group of photographs that feature a place intrinsically related with Australian women’s photographic memories of pregnancy – the beach. Building on feminist interdisciplinary studies of family photography, I argue that family photographs of pregnancy contribute to alternative ways of knowing and interpreting the Australian beach landscape and the entangled social relations and interactions within these spaces. Data are drawn from a set of 34 pregnancy photographs that were taken at the beach in [Tasmania] between 1945 and 2013 and collected as part of a larger, ongoing mixed methods research project involving the analysis of 236 Australian family photographs of pregnancy. In this paper, I conduct a visual discourse analysis of three categories of beach pregnancy images including (1) the family holiday photograph, (2) the bikini photograph and (3) the ‘natural’ pregnant body/landscape photograph to enable a more precise account of how personal and cultural memories of the Australian beach intersect. In the concluding discussion, I suggest that the beach is a critical site for deepening sociological and feminist understandings of the production and expression of pregnant identities and Australian national identity.

Keywords:

• Embodiment
• feminism
• maternity
• snapshot photography
• whiteness

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge the women who generously shared their photographs for this research.

Notes

1. Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Aboriginal women’s sexuality was policed and contained and white women were intimately involved in the removal of ‘half-caste’ indigenous children from their families as part of national ‘assimilation’ policies (Moreton-Robinson, 2000). Aboriginal women were positioned as being ‘unfit’ for motherhood and up until the 1950s, many were sent away to work on missions or in domestic service. Thus beach-going for Australian women is a racialized and gendered ontological experience.