Postfeminist Celebrity and Motherhood

Brand Mom

Jorie Lagerwey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317265702
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi di genere

This book analyzes the intersections of celebrity, self-branding, and "mommy" culture. It examines how images of celebrity moms playing versions of themselves on reality television, social media, gossip sites, and self-branded retail outlets negotiate the complex demands of postfeminism and the current fashion for heroic, labor intensive parenting. The cultural regime of "new momism" insists that women be expert in both affective and economic labor, producing loving families, self-brands based on emotional connections with consumers, and lucrative saleable commodities. Successfully creating all three: a self-brand, a style of motherhood, and lucrative product sales, is represented as the only path to fulfilled adult womanhood and citizenship. The book interrogates the classed and racialized privilege inherent in those success stories and looks for ways that the versions of branded motherhood represented as failures might open a space for a more inclusive emergent feminism.

1 Branding Baby

Incorporating Conception and Pregnancy into the Self-Brand

In May 2015, Entertainment Weekly (EW) published its “2015 Baby Power List.”¹ Mimicking Forbes Magazine’s annual World’s Most Powerful People list or EW’s own annual ranking of celebrities with the most Hollywood clout, the Baby Power List ranked the top 10 celebri-babies of the year, with Prince George, son of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, playing the royalty card to edge out victory over the merely wildly famous North West, daughter of musician Kanye West and reality personality Kim Kardashian, who nabbed the second spot. This list may have been tongue in cheek, but contemporary popular culture is in the throes of mommy mania, and the most important accessory to the successful maternal subject is a gorgeous on-brand baby. Movie stars, TV stars major and minor, and, of course, mommy bloggers and every woman who wants to fit the dominant norms of complete and fulfilled middle- or upper-class womanhood in the 2000s, all have them. Rachel Zoe, for example, a celebrity stylist and star of the reality show that documented her businesses and family foibles, The Rachel Zoe Project (Bravo 2008−13), demonstrated her carefully branded bohemian style and professional skill in selecting clothes for her own pregnant frame throughout her show’s fourth season. Then, as her infant son Skylar grew into a toddler on season five, Zoe dressed him in elaborate, expensive, designer clothing, always impeccably accessorized. In essence, baby Skylar became a walking advertisement for his mom’s styling business, advertising luxury brand names in the adorable child package so amenable to mommy culture. This chapter analyzes reality celebrity pregnancies, specifically challenging pregnancies, often ones that follow infertility melodramas played out onscreen and in ancillary texts like gossip blogs and magazines. These infertility stories and pregnancies, as well as the resulting children, whether highly celebrated or notorious, are culturally and economically over-valued. By analyzing the shifts in women’s performance of self and cultivation of brand during and after difficult pregnancies, I elucidate the ways in which reality and tabloid celebrity pregnancies reveal that wealthy white women’s pregnancies are often rendered heroic, boosting the mom-stars’ presumed authenticity and often their brand as well. The valorization of this version of pregnancy and motherhood is only heightened in contrast to poor and minority women’s pregnancies circulating in the same media. Pregnancies on Teen Mom (MTV 2009−), or I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant (TLC 2008−), for example, which feature young, often poor or working class women, are devalued or pathologized in contrast to the celebrated children of the wealthy and famous.

Those images of pregnancy indicate the “correct” ways to be a fully realized postfeminist subject in a brand culture where feminism might be reemergent but is not yet realized. I will also examine the ways in which the pregnancies interact with the reality performers’ and other stars’ performances of authenticity and cultivation of self-brands defined as successful by their ability to spread across platforms. For the reality performers and tabloid celebrities in this chapter, motherhood is represented as not just the path to a complete self but also, in some sense, itself a new platform over which to spread a self-brand. The lengthy, often melodramatic narratives devoted to the emotional and physical work necessary to conceive and carry a difficult pregnancy to term imbue these mothers with an added level of heroism that can lend a brand gravitas and longevity, and paint a rather clear picture of which pregnancies are the most valuable and which the least.

By closely examining the hypervisibility of pregnant women in “quality reality” TV and accompanying tabloid gossip, this chapter explores why some pregnancies are represented as successful and natural, and others as unruly or alienated. In an era of increasingly harsh limitations on American women’s access to reproductive choice and health care, difficulty conceiving actually renders a woman a more gallant mother for enduring physical and emotional pain to indicate just how essential motherhood is to fulfilled womanhood, and how valuable certain modes of motherhood are in contemporary popular culture. All of these factors are dependent on and are rooted in the hypervisibility of pregnant bodies, which is a relatively recent development. The chapter begins by rooting the twenty-first century visibility of pregnant bodies in a brief historical and cultural context. After examining reality performers and their challenging pregnancies, the final section extends the idea of a self-brand to the idea of a national brand, comparing the simultaneous 2012−13 pregnancies of reality mogul Kim Kardashian and English princess Kate Middleton. The divergent representations of these two pregnancies, as well as the infants North West and Prince George, hint at nationalized images of idealized maternal citizens and the idealized future citizens they parent.

If You’ve Got It, Flaunt It: Pregnancy Becomes Public Spectacle

In 1952, US broadcast television saw its first “real” pregnancy when star Lucille Ball’s actual pregnancy was written into the storyline of her fictional alter ego Lucy Ricardo on I Love Lucy (CBS 1951−57). The word “pregnant,” evidently deemed too crass for broadcast, was replaced in all of the scripts with the more vague and apparently more palatable, “expecting.” The second season episode that announced Lucy’s pregnancy was titled “Lucy Is Enceinte,” and Lauren Berlant maintains that the French evokes something both exotic and sexualized, a marked contrast from the linguistic censorship and voluminous, body-hiding pregnancy fashions of the day. Berlant further notes that the show’s sponsor, tobacco company Philip Morris, had to be convinced to allow the star to incorporate her pregnancy on the show. Ball’s husband and producing partner Desi “Arnaz had to argue … that the pregnancy in the private domestic space of the Ricardo Family might actually increase consumer identification with the family, the show.”² From the first, then, onscreen pregnancy was linked to branding and Arnaz recognized the affective impact pregnancy could have on viewers’ bond with the show and the affiliated sponsor’s brand. When that brand shifts from a tobacco company to a performer’s self-brand, the connection between performer, (mediated) pregnancy, and viewer arguably only becomes more powerful. In the intervening sixty years since Arnaz’s battle with Philip Morris and the exotic use of French to describe Lucy’s condition, pregnant bellies have become hypervisible, and with that visibility have come distinct changes in their cultural status.

After Ball/Ricardo’s 1952 maternity sitcom, scholars seem to agree that the next benchmark in the history of media pregnancies is Demi Moore’s August 1991 Vanity Fair magazine cover.³ In the image, Moore, nude save for an enormous diamond ring and matching earrings, cradles her distended belly with one hand, covering her breasts with the other, and stares proudly into the camera. Standing against a black background and lit with coppery light, the actress seems to smolder off the page looking directly at the consumer. Jo Littler marks this cover photo as the beginning of the now widespread “yummy mummy” (or MILF, in the American) trope sexualizing pregnant and newly maternal women.⁴ Certainly, it serves as shorthand support for Kelly Oliver’s argument that pregnancy has gone from “abject” to “glam” in the space of just a few short decades. The baring of Moore’s pregnant belly is highly sexualized, but her nudity also makes her fecundity as visible as it could possibly be, making the pregnant belly literally a public commodity to sell magazines. This situation is entirely in keeping with Douglas and Michaels’ “new momism,” a cultural moment that mandates maternity and a mother’s utter devotion “physical, psychological, emotional, and intellectual,” to her child, but it also demonstrates the extraordinary breadth of the shift in cultural understandings of pregnancy from Lucy to Demi.⁵

Clare Hanson argues that pregnant bodies are “doubly mutable,” subject to physical change as well as shifting cultural interpretations, which she links to scientific, medical and national discourses that all work to make the womb more public and more visible.⁶ Tracing the cultural history of pregnancy from the mid-eighteenth century to 2000, she argues that as “a social function, reproduction is laden with social and economic meanings, and in this context, some pregnancies are always considered more valuable, both economically and ideologically, than others.”⁷ Before the widespread use of birth control, women were expected to bear about eight children in their lifetimes, which meant that the future of the family did not rely on any individual pregnancy or resulting child. So medical texts in the eighteenth century emphasized the health of the mother over that of the fetus, expecting that every family would lose at least one child in miscarriage or infant illness. Contraceptive knowledge became widespread at the beginning of the twentieth century, at a time when social commentators were also worried about declining overall birth rates. This combination, along with medical advances in maternity and neonatal care, led to a shift in emphasis to the health of the fetus over the health of the mother.⁸

Changes in the visibility and public meanings of pregnant bodies are also related to evolving media genres like reality TV and online gossip, as well as screen technologies themselves. Philosopher Rebecca Kukla argues that the publicizing of formerly personal ethical, religious, medical, financial, and simply practical decisions surrounding every stage of conception and pregnancy started to become public at the end of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth century because it was around that time when medical science determined the exact anatomy and precise functioning of women’s reproductive system. The idea of the “uterus as public theater,” she writes, was advanced with the invention of X-ray and ultrasound imaging that literally made visible the inside of a woman’s body. Reproduction was thus moved from the realm of the private and personal and made subject to the clinical, medical, and masculine public gaze.⁹ Notably, the X-ray and ultrasound technologies that facilitated this shift are early documentary screen technologies. They bear an indexical relationship to the real, which reality television certainly draws on in its claims (however negotiated) to authenticity in its representation of supposedly real people. Indeed, reality performers’ pregnancies are rendered more credible by the onscreen display of the very ultrasound technology that Kukla describes. It is commonplace in reality TV pregnancy storylines, just as in their fictional counterparts, to confirm pregnancy with an onscreen, tearful but joyous ultrasound procedure. In fact, thwarting that expectation by putting a woman trying to conceive in a medical environment and denying the expected image/resolution helps drive home the representation of infertile women’s bodies as unnatural, too old, unhealthy or otherwise tragic. Pregnant bodies and the fetuses they carry thus become, via this hypervisibility, essentially public entities to interpret politically, legally, and culturally. Furthermore, they blur the physical boundaries of a woman’s body, making the belly available even for physical touch and interpretation in public.

Once a woman’s body becomes pregnant, regardless of the woman’s personal feelings, the public at large seems to consider the belly public domain. Memoirist Rachel Cusk actually recounts the loss of her privacy as one of the most affecting results of her pregnancy.¹⁰ In the same vein, women’s magazines, mommy and parenting magazines and websites, and innumerable pregnancy blogs have addressed the issue of “Belly Etiquette: To Touch or Not to Touch?” (Verdict: Never touch without permission, even close friends can find this invasive).¹¹ This violation of privacy and transformation of bodies into public goods when they become visibly pregnant is one dimension of the ways in which fertile bodies are overburdened with public meaning.

The prioritization of maternal health versus fetal health and of individual privacy versus public visibility of fertile bodies has waxed and waned; however, in the 2000s, conservative domestic politics in the US have pushed hard against access to safe and legal abortion, clearly favoring fetal health over that of mothers. The strident anti-abortion rhetoric coming from conservative politicians who are overwhelmingly white and male and whose policies indisputably support wealthy constituents at the expense of others is difficult to separate from changing birth patterns. After the 2010 census, the US Census Bureau announced in 2012 that “non-Hispanic whites now account for a minority of births in the US for the first time.”¹² The links between contemporary demographic and political realities and popular culture representations are complex, multi-valent, and far from direct. Nonetheless, the contradictory impulses that emphasize the difficult pregnancies of wealthy white women on upmarket reality television, while pillorying ethnically marked or poor women’s pregnancies in tabloids or on lower-budget, less “quality” versions of reality shows, all seem to be responding or reacting to this same mix of cultural and political phenomena.¹³

Women’s reproductive bodies are consistently the terrain on which ideological battles are represented and fought. In writing about Homeland (Showtime, 2011−), Alex Bevan argues that women’s sexualized and reproductive bodies are the territory on which unrepresentable contemporary warfare, so often a matter of remote controlled weapons or digital tracking, is rendered visible.¹⁴ The same holds true for domestic political battles. Women’s fertile bodies become the way to render visible the invisible or politically unspeakable notions not just of which pregnancies should be supported or valued but also of racial and class-based hierarchies of what demographics of motherhood are framed as heroic, and which are unruly, undisciplined, or undesirable. Within the individualist, neoliberal, and brand-saturated culture described in the introduction, the most valued public pregnancies are those that fit into, or better yet, expand, a pre-existing self-brand.

The persistence and pervasiveness of mommy culture can sometimes mask the ways different pregnancies and motherhoods have different cultural meanings. The remainder of this chapter analyzes reality celebrities who have difficulty conceiving and, therefore, sink enormous resources of cash, time, and emotion into that process. It also examines famous women for whom pregnancy itself is uncomfortable, a health risk, or makes them the target of tabloid vitriol. By examining the representati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Brand Mom: Celebrity, Branding, and Postfeminist Mommy Culture
• 1 Branding Baby: Incorporating Conception and Pregnancy into the Self-Brand
• 2 Bravo Brand Motherhood: Negotiating the Impossibilities of Postfeminism
• 3 From Honest to GOOP: Lifestyle Brands and Celebrity Motherhood
• 4 TLC’s Religious Moms: Branding Motherhood with Faith
• 5 Looking Forward: Cracks in the Foundation of Postfeminism and Mommy Culture
• Bibliography
• Index