It's All in the Delivery

Book excerpt: "Depictions of pregnancy on screen have varied wildly over the years, from Blondie's modest lack of a baby bump immediately before labor to JLo passing out into a friend's birthing pool while a placenta drifts by. Sturtevant examines the range between the various extremes in looking at the comic history of pregnancy in film and television. She argues that comedy provides an ideal framework to deal with the complexity and often hypocrisy of social attitudes toward the female body, which is often held up as saintly or familial with the wonderful blessing of bearing children, or alternately as profane or grotesque with the consequences of sex followed by the physical messiness of pregnancy and childbirth. She links the evolution of attitudes toward pregnancy in the US with representational strategies that transformed social discomforts into comedy. Comedy has provided the generic context for some of the most groundbreaking moments in pregnant representation in the United States, from the outrageous sextuplets of 1944's screwball comedy Miracle of Morgan's Creek to Lucille Ball's real-life pregnancy on I Love Lucy; Maude's abortion; Murphy Brown's controversial single motherhood; Arnold Schwarzenegger's medically improbable pregnancy in Junior; the use of abortion as a romantic comedy plot in Obvious Child; and the use of a stand-up comic's own pregnancy as a performance prop in Ali Wong's Baby Cobra routine. In each case, these breakthroughs were enabled by the "strengths" of comedy, which sanctions the violation of earlier, more restrictive norms of pregnant representation. Sturtevant examines how the history of pregnancy on screen provides a fascinating lens to understand how reproductive biology has defined women's roles across the American 20th century and into the present, beginning with studio-era prohibitions on using the word "pregnant" or showing a visible baby bump through the baby-boom-era fetishization of sentimental pregnancy. She then explores the sexual revolution and the birth control pill ushering in a new interest in non-marital pregnancy in the 1960s and '70s as well as the emphasis on biological clocks and infertility in the 1980s and '90s. She concludes with an examination of the millennial move toward more medically and socially candid representations of pregnancy. Throughout the book, she also examines the overwhelming whiteness of most of this history and the additional barriers and stigmas against non-white reproduction that have led to its shocking underrepresentation in popular media"--