“Remember to breathe (but don’t make a sound!)”: constructions of childbirth in post-apocalyptic narratives

ABSTRACT

The United States continues to favor heavily medicalized childbirth, an approach that strips agency from birthing women and contains higher risks of complications and maternal death, especially for women of color. Mainstream popular culture has also misrepresented heavily medicalized birth as safer than deliveries with fewer interventions.

The rise of post-apocalyptic narratives has introduced a new lens on mediated birthing experiences. In dystopic realities, women deliver without the existence of functioning hospitals or practicing physicians. This paper uses a narrative analysis of pregnancy, labor, and birth on The Walking Dead (2010-) A Quiet Place (2018), and Bird Box (2018). Findings suggest that these texts reinforce a narrow image of pregnant women and present a distorted picture of the birthing process. Moreover, even in a dystopia, these constructions reinforce the medical model of childbirth. Overall, such [email protected]

KEYWORDS:

• Childbirth
• Childbirth Representations
• Childbirth In Popular Culture
• Breastfeeding In Popular Culture
• Dystopic Fiction

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katherine A. Foss

Dr. Katherine A. Foss professor in the School of Journalism & Strategic Media at Middle Tennessee University, is the author of Constructing the Outbreak: Epidemics in Media and Collective Memory, Breastfeeding and Media: Exploring Conflicting Discourses That Threaten Public Health, and Television and Health Responsibility in an Age of Individualism. She is the editor of The Graduate Student Guidebook: From Orientation to Tenure Track.