Motherhood, Sexuality, and Pregnant

Embodiment: Twenty-Five Years of

Gestation
KELLY OLIVER

My essay is framed by Hypatias first special issue on Motherhood and Sexuality at

one end, and by the most recent special issue (as of this writing) on the work of Iris
Young, whose work on pregnant embodiment has become canonical, at the other. The
questions driving this essay are: When we look back over the last twenty-five years,
what has changed in our conceptions of pregnancy and maternity, both in feminist
theory and in popular culture? What aspects of feminist debates from the 1970s and
1980s are still relevant today? And, how might what appear to be radical shifts in
popular perceptions of pregnancy actually continue traditional values that objectify
and abjectify the maternal body?
Here, I will focus on three central elements of the revaluation of pregnancy and
maternity as they show up in feminist philosophy and in popular culture: 1. The
relationship between pregnancy and sexuality, both in terms of pregnant sexuality and
in terms of the pregnant body as sexual object; 2. The choice to become a mother as
a feminist choice; 3. The temporality of pregnancy and birth as marking something
like womens time.

Patriarchy is founded on the border between motherhood and

sexuality.
Freedom for women involves dissolving this separation.
Iris Marion Young
A lot has changed since the first issues of Hypatia were published. Still, the
work of feminist philosophers is as important today as it was then. Indeed,
in spite of great technological advances and womens advances in politics,
business, philosophy, and so on, in some respects, it is surprising how little steHypatia vol. 25, no. 4 (Fall, 2010) r by Hypatia, Inc.

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reotypes of women have changed in twenty-five years. My essay is framed by

Hypatias first special issue on Motherhood and Sexuality at one end, and by the
most recent special issue (as of this writing) on the work of Iris Young, whose
work on pregnant embodiment has become canonical, at the other. The questions driving this essay are: When we look back over the last twenty-five years,
what has changed in our conceptions of pregnancy and maternity, both in
feminist theory and in popular culture? What aspects of feminist debates from
the 1970s and 1980s are still relevant today? And, how might what appear to be
radical shifts in popular perceptions of pregnancy actually continue traditional
values that objectify and abjectify the maternal body?
Here, I will focus on three central elements of the revaluation of pregnancy
and maternity as they show up in feminist philosophy and in popular culture: 1.
The relationship between pregnancy and sexuality, both in terms of pregnant
sexuality and in terms of the pregnant body as sexual object; 2. The choice
to become a mother as a feminist choice; 3. The temporality of pregnancy
and birth as marking something like womens time. In both feminist theory
and popular culture, the relationships among women, sexuality, pregnancy,
choice, and time are vexed, contested, conflicted, and changing. My strategy is
to move among feminist theories of pregnant sexuality, choice, and womens
time, and cultural representations of them, particularly in Hollywood films. By
looking to recent Hollywood films and popular culture, we see what appears on
the surface to be a valorization and eroticization of the pregnant body. We see
what appears to be the dissolution of the separation between maternity and
sexuality that Iris Young proclaimed as the dissolution of patriarchy. Yet patriarchy has not dissolved and neither have many of the traditional stereotypes of
pregnancy and maternity, even as they have been transformed and transmuted
to conform to contemporary cultures seeming openness toward sex.

A GLANCE BACK
The topic of Hypatias first special issue, Motherhood and Sexuality, edited by
Ann Ferguson and published in Fall 1986 (the final issue of the first full year
of publication as an autonomous journal), sets the stage for this essay. This issue
takes up the so-called sexuality debates over feminists positions on pornography and the expression of feminine sexuality. It also takes up motherhood
debates and feminists positions on whether and how women should be mothers. The guiding principle was that of Simone de Beauvoir, that women cannot
have it all; and having independence meant giving up motherhood. These
debates over motherhood raise questions of womens relationship to reproduction and mothering, the relationship between mothering and sexuality, and the
relationship between reproduction and sexuality.

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A glance back at articles published in Hypatia in the 1980s and early 90s reminds us of the centrality of debates over reproduction and motherhood as
essential, or not, to womens identity and experience. For example, early
reception of so-called French feminism in the United States challenged theories
of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva in particular for their apparent essentialism on
questions of feminine sexuality and maternity. Many North American feminists
objected that these French thinkers perpetuated patriarchal stereotypes by identifying the essence of womanhood or femininity with maternity. They saw in a
revaluation of maternity and the pregnant body echoes of patriarchal notions of
womens value reduced to their role in reproduction. The 1989 special issue of
Hypatia on French Feminist Philosophy edited by Nancy Fraser and Sandra Bartky led the charge with seminal essays by Andrea Nye, Diana Fuss, and Judith
Butler. Nye argues that Irigaray is essentialist on feminine sexuality, Fuss claims
Irigarays is a strategic essentialism, and Butler challenges Kristevas focus on the
maternal body as conservative insofar as it presumes a maternal instinct. She
says, Kristeva understands the desire to give birth as a species-desire, part of a
collective and archaic female libidinal drive that makes pregnancy and motherhood the telos of all womens lives (Butler 1989, 114).
In her introduction to this special issue, Nancy Fraser summarizes the impetus of all of the essays as expressing an opposition to essentialist definitions of
women as mothers (Fraser 1989, 8). She concludes, At a time when women
in North America (and elsewhere) are being bombarded with a barrage of neomaternalistic images and rhetorics, and when reproductive freedoms are once
again under open attack, it is heartening to encounter such a wide range of
feminist ripostes (8). Today, these hopeful words written twenty years ago are
both encouraging and worrying insofar as they are just as relevant, which makes
us wonder whether so little has changed.
These philosophers rejection of the reduction of women to maternity continues feminist debates over Beauvoirs rejection of motherhood, debates that
anchored many of the essays in the original special issue on Motherhood and
Sexuality, and that still continue in recent literature on Beauvoir. Beauvoirs
The Second Sex cautions women against assuming the role of mother and getting caught in the trap of reproducing the species at the expense of other
projects. She goes so far as to say, the conflict between species and individual,
which sometimes assumes dramatic force at childbirth, endows the feminine
body with a disturbing frailty . . . and it is true that they [women] have within
them a hostile elementit is the species gnawing at their vitals (Beauvoir
1949, 30). Feminists like Shulamith Firestone (1970), Claudia Card (1996),
and in some sense Judith Butler (1989, 1990) and Elizabeth Grosz (1989, 1994)
follow her path. By the time of the special issue of Hypatia on French Feminist
Philosophy, however, in an interview with Peg Simons, Beauvoir softens her
stand on motherhood as a valid choice for women (cf. Fraser 1989, 2). There,

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and in passages in The Second Sex, Beauvoir suggests that if women can move
beyond patriarchal stereotypes and restrictions, they can make maternity and
child-rearing projects that they chose instead of a burden determined by their
biological make-up.
Many articles published in Hypatia since then have attempted to theorize
motherhood outside of traditional patriarchal stereotypes that make it an
oppressive choice for women (including Simons 1984, Diquinzio 1993, Michaels 1996, Oliver 2000, and more recently Guenther 2006, Mullin 2006,
Park 2006, and Mann 2007). Rather than accept that motherhood renders
women docile, merely reproducing the species, in various ways these feminists
argue that maternity is an activity that can be a creative project. Some of them
do so by insisting that the mother is neither asexual nor animal but rather a
speaking, desiring subject, and that the maternal body with its other-within not
only challenges traditional theories of personal identity, but also can be taken
up as the beginning of a new ethics of difference. For example, in Conflicted
Love, I argue that we can exploit contradictory impulses in patriarchal ideals
of both maternity and paternity to formulate conceptions of both as embodied
and social (Oliver 2000; see also Oliver 1997). And, in Womanizing Nietzsche:
Philosophys Relation to the Feminine, in a section entitled Save the Mother,
I not only problematize the reduction of women and femininity to maternity,
but also suggest how the relationship among the maternal body, the fetus, and
the placenta can be taken as a metaphor or model of subjectivity and a new
ethics (Oliver 1995).
The work of Iris Marion Young was a turning point in feminist theories of
pregnancy and motherhood. In an early essay in Hypatia, published while it was
still Womens Studies International Forum, Young attempted to articulate a balance between what she called the Humanist Feminism of Beauvoir and the
Gynocentric Feminism of Irigaray, Kristeva, and others (Young 1985). There
she embraced what she called gynocentric feminisms revaluation of motherhood and femininity, but warned of its political limitations in reaching parity
for women in the workplace or in society more generally. She argued that like
the moral motherhood movement of the nineteenth century, finding positive
value in pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood could be used to justify
womens exile to the private domestic sphere. Although Young carefully
delineates the importance and advantages of both humanist and gynocentric
feminisms, as I have argued elsewhere, the French feminists whom she invokes
to make her case cannot be so easily reduced to this view (see Oliver 1993a, b).
DESIRING PREGNANCY
Following Irigaray and Kristeva, Young proposed an active and resexualized
conception of maternity that restores desire and subjectivity to the maternal

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body. Although Young suggested that the desexualization of the pregnant body
can open a space for self-love through a release from the sexually objectifying gaze that alienates her, as we have seen, she also insisted that
[p]atriarchy is founded on the border between motherhood and sexuality. . . .
Freedom for women involves dissolving this separation (Young 1990, 166).
From our vantage point, seeing nude and bikini-clad pregnant bodies on magazine covers at the grocery store, Youngs proclamation seems prophetic. For,
just one year after the publication of her influential book of essays, which
includes Pregnant Embodiment and Breasted Experience, Demi Moore
made history posing nude and heavily pregnant for the cover of Vanity Fair
magazine in 1991. Moores glistening tanned body, an outrage to many, transformed the pregnant body from desexualized and shameful into something
glamorous, even sexy.
Pregnancy is no longer in the shadows. But many of the emotions and stigmas attached to it still exist, sometimes in more subterranean forms. Moreover,
the way that pregnancy has become a hot image for Hollywood and the tabloids continues a long tradition of objectifying and sexualizing womens bodies.
Iris Young and other feminists writing in the 1970s and 80s may not have been
able to predict what would happen when maternity and sexuality came
together to create a sexy pregnancy, what one website calls knocked-up
knock-outs. Reversal of the traditional separation between maternity and sex
has exploded onto the scene in recent years as media is full of hot mamas,
MILFs (mothers Id like to fuck), yummy mummies, knocked-up
knock-outs, and baby mamas. An MTV program 16 and Pregnant features pregnant teenagers, and a new reality television show is searching for
momshells. It is noteworthy that momshell is a play on the notion of sexy
women as bombshells, which suggests that female sexuality, like a bomb, is
dangerous; maternity becomes associated with a deadly weapon. Moreover,
momshell also connotes the idea that the maternal body is a shell, a container.
MILF is an obvious sexual reference used in popular parlance by men about
mothers who are hot. There are even t-shirts and onesies that say My Mother
is a MILFwhat would Freud have to say about that!
Hollywood is giving birth to new images of sexy, cute, and desirable pregnancies off-screen and on. The last few years have seen a spate of pregnancy
films, particularly romantic comedies in which the pregnancy is a vehicle for
hetero-coupling, including Look Whos Talking (1989), Junior (1994), Home
Fries (1997), Fools Rush In (1997), Saved! (2004), Juno (2007), Knocked Up
(2007), Miss Conception (2008), and Labor Pains (2009). In addition, tabloid
magazines feature scantily clad pregnant women in poses usually reserved for
bikini models. Baby bumps have become a chic fashion accessory among
celebrities. Pregnancy, it seems, has become revalued to such an extent
that teenage girls want to get pregnant, evidenced by what was called the

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Pregnancy Pact in Massachusetts. Whether or not the girls made a pact to get
pregnant, it became clear that some girls wanted to get pregnant. There was
widespread speculation that magazines featuring cute and sexy pictures of pregnant teen celebrities such as Jamie Lynn Spears and Bristol Palin, along with
films such as Juno and Knocked Up, contributed to these girls desire to be pregnant. At least in one segment of our society, pregnancy has become cool, even
for unwed teenage girls.
The young, unwed protagonist of Labor Pains (Lindsay Lohan) says that she
is better pregnant and that she has never gotten so much positive attention
before in her life. Although her pregnancy is a hoax, she wants to remain
pregnant because it gives her status and recognition. Of course, pregnancy,
childbirth, and child-rearing have traditionally been the ways that women
could gain recognition, such as it is, from a patriarchal culture that values them
only insofar as they reproduce future citizens. The seemingly contradictory cultural valuation of pregnancy and motherhood as good and proper for women
and the abjection and debasement of the maternal body have gone handin-hand. Now, however, in addition to these tendencies, we have the eroticization of the pregnant body as a sex object. The pregnant body can be sexual,
but usually it is portrayed as sexy in very traditional ways that make womens
bodies the object of the gaze in Hollywood films. That is to say, their bodies and
their desires are imagined for others, for men, for the viewing audience, and not
for themselves or as women themselves experience their own sexuality or desires. This is not to suppose that there is some desire in itself that women
experience, but rather to point to the ways in which women as pregnant in
these films are objectified in very traditional ways. Rarely are they the agents or
subjects of their own sexual desires, particularly once they become pregnant.
Indeed, many of these films trade on stereotypes about pregnant women out
of control of their own bodies. The pregnant body is at once seen as sex object
but also abject, gross, and even funny. The awkwardness of the pregnant body
is often the source of the comedy. In most of these films, the pregnant woman
has strange cravings, mood swings, and misjudges the size of her body. Even
morning sickness is made into a gross joke in films like Looks Whos Talking,
which begins with the main character retching; Baby Mama, in which Amy
Poehlers character, faking pregnancy, makes barfing sounds while dumping
pea-soup into the toilet; and Juno, where the leading lady pukes blue-slushy
into her stepmothers vase. The tension between the awkwardness of the pregnant body and sex also is played for laughs. For example, in Look Whos Talking,
John Travoltas character makes sexual innuendoes about the babys relationship to the breast; in Knocked Up, the male characters make sexual jokes when
one of them sees the protagonist giving birth; even the more progressive indie
film Away We Go makes jokes about whether or not the male protagonist is
going to get laid now that his wife is pregnant. In all of these instances, sexual

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desire is imagined from the mans point of view. So, although the pregnant
body is figured as both gross and a sex object, rarely is the womans sexuality
explored in these popular images.
In addition to being depicted as funny, pregnancy is also a means through
which both the male and female characters grow and mature as individuals, and
become suitable partners and parents by dealing with what is usually an accidental pregnancy. Pregnancy has become the vehicle for romance in this new
subgenre of Romantic Comedy. In some of these filmsSaved! (2004), Waitress
(2007), and Juno (2007; Jennifer Garners character)the baby is the solution to
the womans problems. In Saved! and Waitress, although the woman (or teenager
in Saved!) doesnt want to have a baby, upon its birth she falls in love with it. In
Saved! the baby resolves the protagonists crisis of faith and proves the existence
of God; while in Waitress (along with her inheritance from her friend) the baby
gives her a new love relationship that allows her to leave both her abusive husband
and her doctor-lover. These happy endings in which the baby is the answer are not
far from Freuds seemingly outdated ideas that a woman needs a baby for fulfillment
and to resolve what he calls penis-envy (even a successful career is not enough
for characters like Jennifer Garners in Juno or Tina Feys in Baby Mama).
At the same time, however, that these films perpetuate conservative notions
of women needing babies to complete them, they also begin to suggest a sensuous side to maternal desire that speaks to the issue of women as desiring
subjects rather than merely desired objects. Waitress in particular ends with
Keri Russells character breaking up with both her husband and her lover
immediately after her baby is born; and she and her baby are made the center of
the universe while all of the other characters visually fade into the background.
She is smitten with her daughter and no longer needs sex or a man in her life.
Her relationship with her daughter displaces her sexual relationships. The indie
film Manny & Lo (1996) ends with a family of women and girls, brought
together by the pregnancy and birth of Los baby. Saved! (2004) ends with an
extended alternative family that includes the protagonists mother, her
mothers boyfriend, her boyfriend, and the father of her child and his gay lover,
all of whom come together around the new baby. So, even as they reify conservative notions of family values and womens primary value as tied to
reproduction, some of these films complicate notions of family and notions of
womens choices to have babies.
ACCIDENTAL PREGNANCY AND CHOICE
Although in most of these films women become pregnant by accident, and
many of them do not want babies (yet), none of them seriously consider abortion. Juno has a brief comic visit to the abortion clinic. But, once her
schoolmate tells her that her fetus already has fingernails, she cant go through

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with it. For all of its candor and gross-out humor, Knocked Up cant even say the
word abortion; instead, one of Bens (Seth Rogen) friends asks why they
dont get a shumushorshon. Abortion never comes up in Saved! or Waitress,
even though these girls and women do not want to be pregnant. Although it
has become more open about pregnancy, Hollywood remains relatively mute
on the issue of abortion.
Most films that do seriously raise the issue of abortion have a scary dimension
that makes them feel more like morality tales or cautionary warnings than prochoice alternatives. For example, the HBO film If These Walls Could Talk (1996),
begins with a montage of womens rights activists and pro-choice marches. But,
even as it is framed by these feminist images, it tells a tragic tale of three women
who find themselves pregnant and must choose whether or not to have their babies. The first woman (Demi Moore), whose husband was killed in World War II,
has an illegal abortion and apparently dies as a result; the second woman (Sissy
Spacek) is married, already has children, and even though she didnt plan to have
another, decides to have her baby; the third woman (Anne Heche) doesnt want
to give up her chance to finish college and have a career, so she has an abortion;
but just after the doctor (Cher) finishes the procedure, an abortion protester bursts
in and guns her down, leaving our protagonist traumatized and covered in blood.
This supposedly feminist film explicitly connects abortion and death both visually
and in terms of its narrative. Only the woman (Sissy Spacek) who decides to have
her baby is safe. Although the quirky Citizen Ruth (1996) does deal with abortion
rights head-on, and makes fun of abortion protesters, in the end, Ruth (Laura
Dern) has a miscarriage and not an abortion.
In the Romanian film 4 months, 3 weeks, and 2 Days (2007)which I mention even though my focus is on Hollywood because it was widely touted as a
feminist filmthe camera lingers on a close-up of the face of the aborted
fetus lying on the bathroom floor, while it refuses to show the pregnant body
the protagonists flat stomach, supposedly nearly five months pregnant, looks
anorexic if anything. Furthermore, the young womans college roommate suggests that she may quit having sex with her boyfriend rather than face
pregnancy or abortion (of course, in large part the story is about what happens
when abortion is illegal). Finally, the film is named after the aborted fetus, suggesting that it is the true protagonist. The Hollywood hit Revolutionary Road
(2008) ends with Kate Winslets character bleeding and dying from an at-home
abortion, after her husband (Leonardo DiCaprio) suggests that not only is she
an unfit mother but also an abomination for even considering an abortion. The
British film Vera Drake (2004) is a notable exception to the trend of connecting abortion to death, although the films protagonist ends up in prison.
Although abortion is the elephant in the room in many mainstream
Hollywood films, the issue of choice is central. It is fascinating that the language of choice used by the pro-choice movement is co-opted in these films and

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put in the service of justifying the womans right to choose to have her baby
in spite of what others may think, although the conception was the result of a
one-night stand with a stranger (Fools Rush In, Knocked Up). Even Arnold
Swarzeneggers character in Junior uses pro-choice rhetoricmy body, my
choicewhen defending his right to have his baby, which started as merely
an experiment. In Fools Rush In, when Isabel (Selma Hayek) returns a month
after her one-night stand with Alex (Matthew Perry) to tell him she is pregnant, he assures her that he is in favor of a womans right to choose
(obviously suggesting abortion), but she replies good because I choose to have
this baby. In many of the other films (Saved!, Bella, Waitress, Knocked Up)
there is a choice after the fact, which seems to reassure us that although pregnancy may be an accident, babies are chosen. An interesting side effect of
pro-choice rhetoric, then, is that if a woman does not choose abortion, then
she has chosen pregnancy.
Hollywoods anxiety about choice is multifaceted. Seeing these women turn
accidental pregnancies into chosen babies reassures us that we were not accidents because we were chosen by our mothers, a reassuring fantasy to be sure.
This speaks to an existential anxiety about the very notion of choice and being
chosen, since pregnancy (like most things), as I argue elsewhere, is never something we can control (Oliver 2010). Certainly, anxieties about womens
reproductive choice can also be seen as a response to the womens movement
and the language of pro-choice essential to it. In addition, these anxieties may
be a response to the fact that although career women have made tremendous
advances in recent years, it is still difficult for women to juggle family and
career. Yet, despite all odds (perimenopausal women miraculously getting pregnant as in Miss Conception and Baby Mama), Hollywood preserves the myth
that women can have it all; indeed, the theme of some recent films is career
women putting off having families until their biological clocks run out, which
leaves them longing for a baby. Obviously, insofar as these films show women
choosing to have babies, which leads to heterosexual coupling, they perpetuate
a conservative notion of family values in the face of the fact that most children
grow up in mother-headed households and more women than ever are choosing not to have children. Moreover, it is not a coincidence that these films
show primarily middle-class white women having babies, since in the United
States, birth rates for middle-class white women have declined. Middle-class
white women choosing to have babies rather than abortions, then, can be interpreted as a racist anxiety over the browning of America (cf. Sundstrom
2008). Elsewhere I discuss films such as The Solomon Brothers (2007), Palindromes (2004), and Precious (2010) that explicitly display race and pregnancy
together (Oliver forthcoming).
In the first issue of Hypatia (while it was still being published as Womens Studies International Forum), Margaret Simons offered a defense of a womans choice

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not to have or to have children, and her conclusion about the complexity of
this choice within a patriarchal culture still rings true: few women in our
society experience motherhood as a real choice because so many women do
not have other opportunities for personal development while others feel that
by becoming a mother they must sacrifice other opportunities (Simons 1984,
357). Womens choices are restricted by cultural and social expectations.
Critically engaging Iris Youngs phenomenology of chosen pregnancy, in an
article published just last year in the special Hypatia issue on Young, Caroline
Lundquist develops a phenomenology of rejected and denied pregnancies, which
further complicates the notion of choice. She concludes, although the choice to
carry an unintended pregnancy to term may always be socially conditioned, such
conditioning doesnt necessarily imply a lack of freedom; a constrained choice may
yet be a morally significant one. Even so, to assume the autonomy of such decisions
would ignore the powerful social forces, many of them internalized, that condition
reproductive choices (Lundquist 2008, 152). She argues that reproductive choice
is not like other types of choice since there is always an element of passivity that
cannot be controlled by subjective agency. In addition, she points out that even
when unwanted pregnancies become chosen, we should not underestimate the
socially overdetermined, potentially heart-wrenching process by which an
unwanted pregnancy comes to be positively accepted (151).
Although recent Hollywood films show us the difficulties of choice, they
usually end with resolutions that cover over if not openly disavow the ambiguities of womens desires and freedoms. For the most part, they do not engage
the complexities of reproductive freedom in a culture where womens value is
still seen in terms of having and raising babies. Although the terms of the
debates over motherhood and feminism have changed, the culture that inspires
them has not changed as dramatically as we might think. Sacrifices are made
and women are still expected to bear primary responsibility for them. Although
the myth of having it all is still alive and wellas evidenced by some of these
Hollywood films in which career women get babies and families and apparently
live happily ever afterreal women continue to grapple with how to juggle
career and family in the face of ever shrinking social services and support. Of
course, this choice between career and family already points to class differences that leave many women without any such choice, given that most of the
people living in poverty in the United States and the world are women and
children; these women do not have the choice of careers, let alone jobs that
give them a decent standard of living for themselves and their children.
PREGNANT TIME AND DESIRE
As the pregnant body has gone from asexual, even abject, to sexual object, its
commodification has produced changing rhetoric about time and desire. More

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middle-class women put off having babies until they have established their
careers; in vitro fertilization (IVF) is increasing dramatically as women race
against their so-called biological clocks. Within the popular imaginary, IVF
extends womens choice not only to postpone having babies but also to what
babies they will have. As more women turn to IVF and sperm banks, and as
genetic engineering becomes a real possibility, the language of choice becomes
the fantasy of planning, controlling, and eliminating chance from reproduction. (Elsewhere I discuss the use of the rhetoric of choice in debates over
genetic engineering; see Oliver 2010). Women choose sperm based on the
profiles of donors. And genetic engineering promises designer babies. In
addition, IVF seems to turn back the clock and give women more time to choose.
Seemingly no longer limiting women to natural cycles of fertility, reproductive
technologies appear to give them more choices and more control. Leaving for
another context the question of how these new technologies also bring with
them new disciplinary regimes and challenges for women, what interests me here
is the sense of time and desire at work in fantasies generated by them.
Unlike the era of just a couple decades ago when Iris Young and others
argued that dissociating pregnancy from sex made women into passive containers for reproduction, now the dissociation of pregnancy and sex threatens
to make sex unnecessary for reproduction. Whereas Beauvoir argued that
women need to be free from reproduction (perhaps she would embrace new
technologies that eventually could make reproduction possible without pregnancy), and Young argued that womens liberation depends upon sexualizing
pregnancy through an identification of reproduction with sex, recent Hollywood films manifest an anxiety over this separation, but for very different
reasons. It is not that pregnancy cant be sexy or that womens role in reproduction is imagined as passive. To the contrary, in some of these films, women
are actively seeking reproduction as a means of fulfillment to complement career success and other achievements. New technologies bring new anxieties
about both men and women becoming irrelevant for reproduction, and more
anxieties about the dissociation between heterosexual sex and reproduction.
For example, Baby Mama and Miss Conception resolve anxieties about new
reproductive technologies by assuring us that despite the odds against it, good
old-fashioned heterosexual sex is at the origin of life. In Baby Mama, both
Kate and Angie get pregnant through heterosexual sex, even though Angie was
supposed to have been artificially inseminated to act as Kates surrogate, and
Kate is menopausal. And, in Miss Conception, Mia (Heather Graham), unbeknownst to her, is already pregnant from sex with her boyfriend. Judging from
pre-release plot descriptions, the forthcoming film The Switch (formerly The
Baster) will recuperate the biological nuclear family even though Jennifer
Anistons character believes she has used sperm from an anonymous donor.
These films reassure us that men have not become obsolete in reproduction and

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that the nuclear family is still the ideal family. In addition, romance trumps
technology as babies are conceived from passion, even as accidents, rather
than scheduled medical procedures. These films assuage fears raised by new
technologies about the possibility of reproduction without sex. They idealize
heterosexual sex at the origins of life. Once again, the issue of the separation of
reproduction and sex or sexuality is at the center of our notions of gender and
family.
Whereas Young and others questioned the separation of sex and reproduction on the grounds of womens desire, these films implicitly challenge the
separation of sex and reproduction out of anxieties over the possibility of
reproduction without heterosexual sex or sexual desire. In other words, the desire for babies can be separated from sexual desire insofar as new reproductive
technologies make it possible to conceive without sex. Yet these films reassure
us that babies are not products of technology but rather of passion, and that
sexual desire is necessary to fulfill the desire for babies. In films such as Baby
Mama and Miss Conception, women work through their instrumental attitudes
toward
relationships with men and sexthat is to say, wanting sex with men in order
to get pregnant. And, their so-called baby hunger is satisfied only insofar as it
coincides with sexual desire. Womens desire for babies and sexual desire are
brought together to give us a more romantic ideal of both heterosexual relationships and the family.
In Baby Hunger: The New Battle for Motherhood, Sylvia Ann Hewlett argues
against the empty promise of high-tech reproduction and in favor of nuclear
families and younger mothers (2002). Hewletts book is a cautionary tale about
women waiting until it is too late and their biological clocks have run out.
She describes the creeping nonchoice that career women face when they
dont have children in time. Hewlett sets out a timeline for young women:
find a man (give urgent priority to finding a partner. This project is extremely
time sensitive and deserves special attention in your twenties), have babies
(Have your first child before 35, do not wait . . . even if you manage to get one
child under the wire you may fail to have a second), then focus on your career
(Choose a career that will give you the gift of time) (Hewlett 2002, 261).
Although indicative of the difficult choices women face when balancing careers and family, Hewletts book also recuperates and updates long-standing
notions of womens bodies as threatening. She figures womens biological
clocks as ticking time bombs about to explode and leave women childless
and unhappy. She imagines women racing against time and an empty future
that results from poor choices by young women and false advertising by the
medical establishment. Her conclusion is even more retrograde in that she
claims that young, middle-class, college-educated women have a duty to themselves and to their nation to have children while they can rather than risk

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trying to have a family under the wire after focusing on a career (266). This
argument echoes nineteenth- and early twentieth-century eugenics proposals
that encouraged middle-class white women to reproduce because they supposedly would pass on the best genes and thereby ensure the evolution of the
human race.
I bring up Baby Hunger in order to juxtapose it with Iris Youngs and Julia
Kristevas suggestions about womens time, particularly in relation to pregnancy
and childbirth. If Hewlett gives us a nightmare of time bombs, racing against
time, and babies under the wire, Young and Kristeva imagine a radically different experience of the temporality of female embodiment. If the time of
pregnancy and childbirth figured by Hewlett is compressed into the urgency
of now, Young and Kristeva describe an expansive sense of time that stretches
into the past and the future. Whereas the time of baby hunger is driven by
anxieties about modern technology and careers leading to an empty future, the
time of pregnant embodiment imagined by these feminist philosophers a couple
of decades ago conjures a temporality at once subjective and natural. Hewletts
pragmatic, if frantic, outline of a linear time-line for the successful woman butts
up against these feminist figurations of pregnant time in ways that both disturb
and illuminate.
Returning to the seminal work of Iris Young, we can trace a radically different notion of the time of pregnancy, or what Kristeva calls womens time,
opposed to the ticking time-bomb of a womans biological clock. In a series
of essays in Throwing Like a Girl, Young developed a phenomenology of pregnant embodiment that not only challenged traditional theories of subjectivity
but also articulated the subjectivity of pregnancy as unique and purposeful
(Young 1990). She argued that pregnant embodiment enables a unique relationship to past and future, and to space and time:
The pregnant subject, I suggest, is decentered, split, or doubled
in several ways. She experiences her body as herself and not
herself. Its inner movements belong to another being, yet they
are not other, because her body boundaries shift and because her
bodily self-location is focused on her trunk in addition to
her head. This split subject appears in the eroticism of pregnancy,
in which the woman can experience an innocent narcissism fed
by recollection of her repressed experience of her own mothers
body. Pregnant existence entails, finally, a unique temporality of
process and growth in which the woman can experience herself
as split between past and future. (Young 1990, 160)
Pregnancy opens the body to otherness in ways that make the experience porous physically and mentally. This porosity, Young suggested, can be a model
for more open relationships with others and a more porous notion of subjec-

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tivity than philosophers typically provide. Rather than threatening, Young

imagines womens bodies as pregnant with the future. Of course, pregnant embodiments futurity may just highlight the empty promise of a future that, for
whatever reasonand there are manydoes not lead to childbirth. Or, as
Lundquist suggests, it may point to a dreaded future that the pregnant woman
experiences as constricting if not outright oppressive. Or, as Lundquist argues,
it may recall a traumatic past of rape and assault that does not provide the continuity or comfort that Young imagines (Lundquist 2008).
Youngs discussion of the split between past and future as a temporality that
arches between the pregnant womans repressed bodily relation with her own
mother and the anticipation of her relation to her future child is indebted to
Kristevas discussions of pregnancy in Stabat Mater and perhaps Kristevas most
famous essay, Womens Time (in Kristeva 2002). In Womens Time, Kristeva
proposes that womens bodies give them a cyclical and monumental temporality
that interrupts linear time. A stark counterpoint to Hewletts invocation of clocks
running out and racing toward a family, Kristeva figures womens time as other
than clock time, as repetitive cycles, punctuated by monumental moments
like the onset of menses, childbirth, and perhaps menopause. If Hewlett is right
about the experience of many middle-class women in the United States, then
Kristevas account of womens time is either a thing of the past, a romantic idealization, or, as she often suggests, a reminder that the temporality of bodies is
repetitive, cyclical, and monumental rather than linear and teleological. In other
words, despite the dangers of essentializing the menstruating, child-bearing maternal body that Kristevas theory evokes, her reminder that bodily time cannot be
reduced to clock time may help to diagnose Hewletts ticking time bomb as a
symptom of anxieties or fears about the body that take us back to what Kristeva
describes as the abjection of the female body, particularly insofar as it is (or is not,
as the case may be) a maternal body (Kristeva 1980).
In Stabat Mater, Kristeva maintains that the experience of pregnancy,
birth, and motherhood puts a woman back in touch with her own relationship to her mother, not only in terms of an identification with her experience
as mother but also in terms of her repressed or bodily memories of her
own intimate relationship with her mothers body. In other words, there is
an (unconscious) erotic, or at least sensuous, dimension to the bond
between daughter and mother that is reawakened in pregnancy, birth, and
motherhood. Kristeva emphasizes this sensuous, even incestuous and homoerotic, dimension of a womans experience of pregnancy. In addition, in
Stabat Mater, she muses on the mothers bodily and sensuous relation with
her newborn baby (in Kristeva 2002). Kristeva concludes by calling for an
ethicsherethicsthat is based on this bodily experience, which has been
repressed within patriarchal cultures. Moreover, in some of her latest work
on female genius, she argues that mothers might be our only hope against the

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automation of human life precisely because they are more attuned to the
sensuous dimension of experience.
Because each motherchild relation is singular and unique, Kristeva says,
mothers might represent our only safeguard against the wholesale automation
of human beings (Kristeva 2002 402). Insofar as we still have not found a way
to gestate and give birth to babies without womens wombs, and insofar as child
care cannot be automated or performed by machines, women continue to carry
the burden, or labor of love, of introducing children to language and sociality.
Yet this very special innovation, what Kristeva calls genius, has not been seen
as such by our culture, a culture that reduces mothers to fetal containers. Only
by valuing the genius of women and mothers in relation to future personsor
as Kristeva insists, in relation to the continuation of the speciescan we talk
about reproductive freedom that values womens experience and choices, with
all of its ambiguities. As we have seen, recent Hollywood films both display and
cover over or resolve these ambiguities and thereby fall back into conservative
ideals of motherhood and family.
In a chapter of Hatred and Forgiveness entitled The Passion according to
Motherhood, Kristeva says, allow me to take the mothers side and proceeds
to describe the extraneousness of the pregnant woman as the narcissistic
withdrawal wherein the future mother becomes an object of desire, pleasure
and aversion for herself (Kristeva 2010). In this state, which Kristeva claims
is not unlike possession, the pregnant woman is completely absorbed by
emotions invested in her own body as the hollow habitation of a future loveobject that she will have to allow to become a subject. Kristeva recounts a
maternal progression toward what she calls the miracle of love. It is a progression that twists and returns, not a linear progression, but rather one of
repetitions of psychic attachments and detachments that allows the woman to
love her child and yet to wean it and let it go. Kristeva describes this move from
self-absorption, to love of the child, and then eventually to release or weaning
of the child as the miracle of maternal passion; the mother embodies both
passion and dispassion, or passion and working through passion.
On Kristevas account, it is not primarily passion that is uniquely human but
rather dispassion or the sublimation of passion that is essential to maternal
passion as successful mothering. Provocatively, she insists that insofar as it is
sublimation, maternal passion is not only a model for all human passion but
also the furthest from its biological foundation (Kristeva 2010). Maternity,
then, cannot be reduced to biology, a biological clock, or merely the cyclical
rhythms of the body. Clearly, this claim is antithetical to traditional views of
womens role in reproduction, which, as we know, has been and continues to
be seen as a matter of biology, even animality. In this way, Kristeva applies
Beauvoirs lesson, that one is not born but rather becomes a woman, to motherhood. Whereas Beauvoir suggests that in motherhood women are reduced to

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their biological, reproductive function, Kristeva complicates any straightforward connection between maternity and biology. Although Kristevas
insistence on the mothers passion as negativity is akin to Beauvoirs suggestion in The Second Sex that human females are more pained by their relation to
reproduction than female animals because they can reflect on the experience,
Kristeva, unlike Beauvoir, valorizes maternity.
Yet, Kristeva claims that she is not pro-birth because she emphasizes what
she calls the structure of motherhood, which she also sees in analysis, writing,
and art. Like childbirth, analysis (and writing, art, and mysticism) can bring a
time of new beginnings and rebirths and a certain serenity (Kristeva 2010).
Yet this time of rebirth is possible only through the repetition of death, linear
time, and language, through which the mother articulates the meaning of her
sensuous experience in relation to her child. In this way, Kristeva argues that
motherhood and psychoanalysis share the same goal, which is to turn passion
into dispassion through sublimation. Leaving aside her troubling reliance
on the actuality of pregnancy and the activity of mothering, Kristeva suggests
that the structure of motherhood, like the structure of writing, art, and analysis,
is not primarily about giving birth but about rebirth and the cyclical time of
flowering and dying off necessary for life.
Kristevas recent discussions of maternal passion as the psychic repetition of
attachment and detachment, passion and dispassion, unique to, and definitive
of, humanity not only elevate the maternal body and motherhood to the transcendent status Beauvoir denied it, but also propose maternity as a model for an
ethics of ambiguities and ambivalences that goes some distance to advance
ongoing feminist discussions of motherhood, sexuality, and pregnant embodiment. In spite of her insistence that it is not, Kristevas revaluation of maternity
could be read as an endorsement of motherhood. But it can also be read as a
corrective to the devaluation of maternity within patriarchal cultures and
within Western intellectual history. Moreover, insofar as her recent revaluation of maternity turns on accepting, if not embracing, negativity
and ambiguity, it addresses some of the most problematic aspects of motherhood and sexuality in the debates of that first special issue of Hypatia on
Motherhood and Sexuality.
Twenty-five years ago, the contributors to that issue struggled with the
apparent either/or choices women faced in terms of both motherhood and sexuality. They asked: Should feminists be mothers, or not? Should feminists be
heterosexual, or not? Should feminists propose an ethics of either maternity or
sexuality, or not? Although the debates continue, today these questions are no
longer necessarily simple either/or choices. Beyond the myth of having it all,
(middle-class) women are trying to figure out how to have both/and. And in
spite of their tendency to simplify and resolve the ambiguities and ambivalences of womens choices about issues of motherhood, sexuality, and

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pregnancy, recent Hollywood films also show us characters struggling with

them. Recent pregnancy films show us women refusing the either/or of traditions that make them choose career or family and relationships. Even as they
perpetuate the myth of having it all, they also display deep-seated anxieties
about womens reproductive choices in an age of changing technologies. Furthermore, although the pregnant body is still the butt of the joke, it is also the
object of attraction and desire, and occasionally even a subject of its own
desires. Yet, though a lot has changed over the last twenty-five years, one lesson
we learn from tracing changes through popular culture and feminist theory
from the early days of Hypatia to the present in terms of motherhood, sexuality,
and pregnancy is that feminist analysis is as needed and relevant now as it was
then. For, although the border between motherhood and sexuality is breaking
down, and this may signal advances for women, it may also reinforce stereotypes of women and pregnancy that are restrictive for women. Feminists must
continue to diagnose the ways in which changing popular images and figurations of motherhood, sexuality, and pregnant embodiment enhance freedoms
for women even while at the same time they discipline, constrict, and limit
womens freedom.

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