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Last spring, a sign at the entrance to the Whitney Museum
of American Art announced that no baby strollers were allowed
in the 2004 Biennial. But that does not mean that there were
no babies in attendance. On the contrary, when I went to the
show, there were babies everywhere. Riding on the front of
their parents in slings or snuglies or on their backs in baby-backpacks,
passed back and forth from one able-bodied adult to another,
babies, it appears, are this year’s hot, art world accessory.
This trend is not limited to the New York art community. The
covers of glossy magazines like Us, People,
and In Style routinely feature images of celebrity
mothers and their children, and popular shows such as Sex
and the City and Friends incorporated babies,
as well as infertility problems, into their well-publicized
final storylines. There was little mention of the actual hardships
faced by real-life single mothers on the shows or the often
devastating physical and economic effects of infertility treatments,
though. Rather, the babies on the shows acted primarily as
plot devices, ultimately aiding in the romantic reconciliation
of the parent characters in both series. But perhaps the most
extreme example of babies serving as accessories has been
the recent Gucci advertising campaign in which a series of
androgynous-looking models, wearing Gucci accessories and
often nothing else, each carry a naked baby.
In one Gucci image, a topless blonde woman, whose closely-cropped,
platinum hair brings to mind Annie Lennox in her prime, wears
elbow-length brown leather gloves, giant mirrored sunglasses,
and black leather pants. A large black leather bag with pronounced
gold accents is draped over one arm. Her naked torso is shielded
by the baby, whose sex is undisclosed and whose big blue eyes
look rather forlornly at the camera. In another ad, a black
woman, whose flat-top recalls Grace Jones circa 1986, wears
a black leather jacket, skin-tight black pants, and gold-studded,
black stiletto heels. A white leather bag, much like the one
in the previous ad but smaller, is slung over her shoulder.
Perched on her upper thigh is a small black child, again of
indiscriminate sex.
Another ad features a smiling white man
with dazzling white teeth wearing a grey turtleneck, a grey
military-style jacket with brass buttons, oversized grey sunglasses
and a grey fur hat. Cradled in his black leather-clad hands
is a blond baby, who rather anxiously bites its hands. Yet
another ad contains both the black and white women, dressed
in floor-length, red satin dresses. The white woman holds
the black child while the black woman holds its hand. Aside
from their proximity, there is little interaction between
the individuals in the images. In each case, only the baby’s
gaze meets ours, which suggests a sense of agency, yet, in
each case, the babies, like the gloves and handbags, act as
trimmings.
We all know that advertisements act as a form of fantasy wish
fulfillment. The babies’ role in these images underscores
this fact. The women’s bodies are not postpartum bodies.
They are slim, toned, and well groomed. Taken literally, there
is a sense of the absurd in every frame: the floor-length
couture gowns and the naked baby do not go well together.
Disaster, in the form of bodily fluids, is imminent. Likewise
wearing six-inch stiletto heels while carrying a baby is a
certain recipe for back problems. The naked baby in the arms
of the well-bundled man is similarly off putting. One is clearly
dressed inappropriately. But these images are not meant to
be read literally. They are meant to be ironic. Accessories
are supposed to fit, and the forlorn-looking babies in these
images clearly do not fit; yet their irony also betrays their
critique. The babies in the photos lack sexual organs and
are thus devoid of bodily functions, at least in the split
second when the final take was shot. Despite their gaze they
have no agency; they are merely props. But what are they selling?
There are many ways to read these advertisements: as prelapsarian
reminders of an Edenic state; as a call to wear Gucci or nothing
at all; as a commentary on the possibilities of color-blind
and gay parenting; as a form of post-punk nostalgia targeting
former CBGB’s-goers now wearing babies at the Whitney
Biennial exhibit. In the Gucci ads, the women’s bodies
as well as those of the babies, have been dematerialized -
there are no accidents, no stretch marks or leaky breasts
- and rematerialized as commodities. The babies as they
appear in the ads, without genitals or corporeal needs, are
indeed pure fantasy. They are not bodies; they are accessories.
While children have always been the site of what Thorstein
Veblen termed “vicarious consumption,” or satellite
vehicles for the family patriarch to display his wealth and
taste, today babies themselves have become the objects consumed.
Likewise, the women’s bodies have also become sites
of consumption in that their labor literally has been commodified.
The actual work of producing and caring for these children
has been concealed from public view, leading to the ultimate
form of commodity fetishism. In these images, female production,
or more accurately reproduction, has become a source of, as
well as a site for, the dissemination of consumer goods. Like
the Gucci gloves and handbags, the babies have become something
stylish to wear. The women are no longer the producers of
these babies - few would mistake the models in the ads
as the biological parents - but rather their consumers.
Both the women and the babies are simultaneously consuming
and being consumed. While these images seem to generate critique,
they also undercut the possibility of critique through their
heavy use of irony. Through their absurdity, these advertisements
challenge representations of the over-idealized mother-child
relationship fed to us repeatedly through print advertising;
but they also complicate the relationship between images and
desire, they blur the lines between the political, the personal,
and the economic and thus challenge our notions of what is
public and what is private.
The Gucci ads’ focus on women with children certainly
fits within the present historical moment. Issues surrounding
motherhood are regular and highly contested topics in the
popular media, from Oprah to 60 Minutes.
Recently, The New York Times Magazine, Time,
and Newsweek have all done cover stories on selected
motherhood choices - to work or to stay home, to adopt
or to undergo fertility treatments - and a number of
books extolling the virtues of maternal desire, as an essential
female trait, as well as a number of publications questioning
such desire as socially constructed, have also taken the market
by storm. Despite the language of manifold choice, the authors
of these tracts repeatedly present mothering options in either/or
terms. Foremost among these motherhood dichotomies are a “feminist”
and “non-” or even "anti-feminist”
division. These subject positions are almost always tied to
when and if the mother works outside of the home. For example,
Lisa Belkin begins her October 2003 New York Times Magazine
cover story, “The Opt Out Revolution,” by delimiting
such a feminist divide: "The scene in this cozy Atlanta living room would - at
first glance - warm an early feminist's heart. Gathered by the fireplace one recent
evening, sipping wine and nibbling cheese, are the members of a book
club, each of them a beneficiary of all that feminists of
30-odd years ago held dear. The eight women in the room have
each earned a degree from Princeton, which was a citadel of
everything male until the first co-educated class entered
in 1969. And after Princeton, the women of this book club
went on to do other things that women once were not expected
to do. They received law degrees from Harvard and Columbia.
They chose husbands who could keep up with them, not simply
support them. They waited to have children because work was
too exciting. They put on power suits and marched off to take
on the world."
While certainly one of affluence, the picture Belkin paints
of feminist success - Ivy League educations, successful
husbands, power suits and book clubs - is rather limiting
and defined almost exclusively in terms of these women’s
relationships to what we might call traditional sources of
female pleasure: husbands, children, novel reading, and wine
and cheese parties. What makes these women appear “feminist”
“at first glance” are their prestigious educations
and their six-figure salaries. Despite their deferral of child-bearing
for work, their lifestyle choices are ultimately still quite
conventional and rooted in the normative construct of the
upper-middle class, heterosexual family dynamic. But this
limited notion of feminist success quickly gives way to its
opposite as Belkin continues her story: "Yes, if an early feminist could peer into this scene, she
would feel triumphant about the future. Until, of course, any one of
these polished and purposeful women opened her mouth. 'I don't want to be
on the fast track leading to a partnership at a prestigious law firm,'
says Katherine Brokaw, who left that track in order to stay home with her
three children. 'Some people define that as success. I don't.''' Brokaw, like all of the women spotlighted in the article,
has left the corporate rat race for fulltime motherhood, and
this, according to Belkin’s either/or paradigm, is not
a feminist move.
In many ways, Belkin’s equation of feminism with a winning
lap on the career fast-track and non-feminism as the desire
to leave the race, is directly in line with notions of what
constitutes feminism coming from the right. Belkin’s
definitions ignore the important issues of race, class, gender,
and sexual identity that feminist theorists and activists
have spent the past “30-odd years” addressing.
Her limited definition of feminism, as measured solely in
terms of professional success in comparison to men, becomes
the proper object against which she measures all other lifestyle
choices. The desire for things outside of this correspondingly
becomes, in her equation, anti-feminist and in most cases,
normalized. Indeed, defining feminism in relationship to an
opposite empties the concept of its radical as well as its
pragmatic potential. Distilling the complex relationships
between feminism, work, and motherhood into binary terms and
then coding these as either feminist or anti-feminist acts
as a reductive strategy: arbitrarily bringing together diverse
groups of people and force-fitting them into a predetermined
identity positions. In so doing, it closes the spaces for
dissent as well as for social change. Moreover, such moves
allow for the concept of feminism, as well as its uses, to
be essentialized and then dismissed. Through such formulations,
writers such as Belkin collapse the boundaries between public
and private life and in so doing, they present an upper-middle
class privilege as natural.
The lines between public and private have always been blurry.
As Michael Warner explains, “Because the contexts overlap,
most things are public in one sense and private in another.”
The blurring of these boundaries seems particularly acute
within contemporary representations of and debates over the
proper relationship between mothers and their children. Women’s
work in the domestic realm - as the civilizing anecdote
to the cruel world of the competitive marketplace and the
sullying effects of the political arena - traditionally
has been relegated to the private sphere and feminist scholars
have spent considerable energy delimiting and challenging
this balkanization. Yet the domestic sphere has also acted
as the location of privacy, which is becoming increasingly
important in delimiting spaces where the Law cannot reach.
Because of the right to privacy, however limited it might
be in contemporary America, the state cannot legally dictate
right and wrong in issues such as reproductive choice and
sexual practice.
However, as Lauren Berlant has compellingly argued, today,
more and more, we are seeing the emergence of what she calls
“an intimate public sphere,” where ostensibly
private choices, such as how to raise one’s children,
have become the source of wide-scale public debate. Rather
than see this bleeding of the private into public life as
a means of breaking down gender-freighted hierarchies and
power relations, Berlant warns “Something strange has
happened to citizenship…. In the process of collapsing
the political and the personal into a world of public intimacy,
a nation made for adult citizens has been replaced by one
imagined for fetuses and children.” Debates over seemingly
private issues, such as access to emergency contraception,
smoking during pregnancy, or breastfeeding past a certain
age, have moved to center stage, in some cases pushing graver
civil-rights issues to the periphery. And despite the continued
focus on fetuses and children, babies are often merely pawns
in this larger socio-political dialogue. As in the Gucci ads,
children assume a position of seeming agency within contemporary
culture. Once again the presence of children within these
larger political debates becomes almost devastatingly ironic
since for the first time in history more mothers work outside
the home than stay at home yet affordable childcare, government
subsidies to women and dependent children, educational programs
such as Head Start, and access to sustainable maternity benefits
are disappearing at an alarming rate. Instead of pointed critique
and political dialogue extending these issues beyond the arena
of upper-middle-class heterosexual privilege, we get the testimonies
of women like those profiled in Belkin’s piece who can
afford to “opt out.”
Despite Belkin’s claim to be asking feminist questions,
her presentation of feminism in “The Opt Out Revolution”
is closely in line with definitions of feminism coming from
the far right. It echoes the work of conservatives such as
Ann Coulter, Phyllis Schlafly, and Danielle Crittenden, for
whom feminism is the bête noir of American public life.
For example, in her recent book Feminist Fantasies,
the virulently anti-feminist Schlafly defines feminism thus:
"The ideology of feminism teaches that women have been mistreated
since time began and that even in America women are discriminated
against by a male dominated society. As a political movement,
feminism teaches that a just society must mandate identical treatment
for men and women in every phase of our lives, no matter how reasonable
it is to treat them differently and that gender must never be used
as the criteria for any decision."
Anyone even vaguely interested in feminist theory knows the
centrality of gender in recent - and not so recent -
scholarship in the field. Yet writers such as Belkin and Schlafly
have gained control of what feminism means in the popular
imagination. By defining it in relation to its negative through
assertions such as “feminists would be aghast”
and emptying it of the possibility of difference, they presume
a unified feminist stance and present a homogenous picture
of who feminists are and what they want by attempting to delineate
what they are not. Through their Manichean equations, they
have also reified ideals of motherhood and in so doing shifted
the boundaries between public and private desire, essentializing
and thus normalizing what should be individual private choices.
More specifically, they have presented the choice to have
children and stay home with them as anti-feminist and the
wish, or need, to leave them, feminist. Issues of class -
many mothers have to work for economic survival - as
well as other forms of what could be called non-biological
maternal desire - many mothers find satisfaction in
arenas that might take them away from their children, and
they may identify as something other than a mother for part
of their day - have fallen out of their scenarios and
thus out of the larger popular debate. By defining the relationship
between feminism and motherhood in stark black and white terms,
they flatten very personal and complicated decisions into
either/or scenarios and make it easier to pass moral judgments
on the types of choices women make regarding their children.
In so doing, they too make babies into a type of accessory
within their public discourses on work and feminism. Like
the Gucci advertisements, they give babies a seeming agency
while disembodying and flattening them to merely representations.
The images in the Belkin article further substantiate this
move but this time from the seemingly liberal media. The cover
photo for her story depicts a thirty-something woman with
long dark hair, olive skin and dark eyes, dressed in a crisp
white blouse, black pants and black boots. Diamond bands adorn
both hands and tasteful gold bracelets ring her left wrist.
Bathed in golden light, she sits cross-legged beneath a ladder
that reaches far out of the picture frame. She stares blankly
into space. On her lap, a small boy in denim overalls, who
bears a striking resemblance to the woman, looks directly
at the viewer. Identified as Tracey Liao Van Hooser, the woman
could be anyone: she is nondescript yet stylish, “ethnic”
looking yet Caucasian, hip yet non-threatening. As in the
Gucci ads, in this image only, the child’s gaze meets
ours. The woman is looking elsewhere, neither up the corporate
ladder nor at her child. She stares into a void. Like the
Mona Lisa, her face betrays little emotion. Her gaze,
and thus her desire, have been diverted. This cover of The
New York Times Magazine depicts having a baby in
one’s arms as desirable. Yet this image, and more significantly,
the accompanying text, omit the dark circles that come from
the three AM feedings, the varicose veins and stretch marks
of pregnancy, and the intense boredom and alienation that
can come with staying home all day with a child. Once again,
this is motherhood, and feminism, without organs.
Using pictures of women and children to sell something -
either a product or an ideology - is not a particularly
new strategy. Images of women with children have played a
central role in Western visual culture, from medieval depictions
of the Madonna and child to the contemporary photographs of
Sally Mann. Indeed, as art historian Anne Higonnet argues
in her book, Picturing Innocence, “Pictures
of children are at once the most common, the most sacred,
and the most controversial images of our time.” Furthermore,
she writes, “approximately half of all advertisement
photographs show children.” Analyzing these images within
their historical contexts have been key in the emergence of
a feminist art history. For example, in her 1973 essay, “Happy
Mothers and Other New Ideas in Eighteenth-century French Art,”
Carol Duncan makes compelling links between what she calls
images of the “happy family” in eighteenth century
French genre painting and the emergence of a modern bourgeois
culture which depended upon an essentialized notion of a woman’s
nature - as maternal, submissive, and attentive to the
needs of her husband and children - to predicate the
necessary separation of public and private life to allow for
the social and political conditions needed to sustain a capitalist
economy. Similarly, Higonnet identifies a thematic shift that
took place within the mid-nineteenth century art hierarchy
in which images of the Madonna and child became re-ranked
at the top. “The effect,” she writes, “was
double edged.” By secularizing the Madonna and universalizing
images of Motherhood, there was a shift in meaning “from
theology to bodies.” As a result, all mothers and all
children became sacred objects.
The works of American artist Mary Cassatt nicely exemplify
the nineteenth century attitude towards the sacrosanct mother-child
relationship. Paintings such as The Child’s Bath
(1893), for example, directly evoke images of the Virgin Mary
holding her son (as an infant, as well as in his last moments
as depicted in more canonical works such as Michelangelo’s
Pieta). In Cassatt’s paintings and drawings,
everyday interactions between mothers and children, such as
bathing, reading, and playing in the park, take on larger
sacred overtones. Despite the seemingly radical milieu in
which Cassatt herself lived, as a single American woman in
the male-dominated French Impressionist circle, she was acutely
aware of issues of social respectability and thus, surrounded
herself with suitable chaperones - her parents, her
siblings and their children - to protect her reputation.
Such family scenes became a favorite subject matter, and she
painted them regularly. As Harriet Chessman writes of Cassatt’s
paintings of mothers and children, they “seem to us
to have an air of the natural.” Indeed, she continues,
“The privacy of middle-class interiors, the intense
focus on the mother-child dyad, the quiet absorption of the
mother in her child, the appearance of effortlessness and
tranquility in the mother’s occupation, the Madonna
and child motif - all may suggest an idealization so familiar
to us as to be almost invisible.” Yet Chessman also
sees Cassatt’s mother-child paintings as a site for
the artist’s empowerment. She draws compelling parallels
between the subjects of Cassatt’s paintings and Cassatt’s
relationship to her own artistic labor. In these mother-child
works, Chessman writes, “Cassatt creates a situation
in which her subjects’ sexuality can be intimated within
a protective framework…. The child offers a safe figure
for the mother’s more hidden erotic life” and,
by extension, Cassatt’s as well.
The sacredness of mothers - at least certain types of
mothers - and children persists in the popular visual
imagination. Yet today, images referencing the Madonna and
child have given way to images of Madonna with her children.
Indeed, the often controversial pop star has very publicly
embraced her role as a mother; her most recent artistic endeavors
have not been albums or videos but rather children’s
books. Yet like Cassatt, Madonna simultaneously challenges
and reifies the ideal of sacred motherhood. She is repeatedly
photographed pushing her giant silver-cross pram though the
genteel streets of London (where she now makes her home -
no more raucous South Beach) or gamboling in a Central Park
playground with her husband and two children. While having
children gives her an aura of respectability, motherhood also
provides her with a new position to eroticize. Following the
birth of her second child, Madonna appeared on stage, buff
and toned, wearing a tight rhinestone studded shirt with "mother"
emblazoned on the front and "f----r" on the back.
While the Material Girl may be subverting the ideal of the
sacred mother, her mother f----r attitude has become increasingly
materialized and commodified in the process. Her version of
eroticized motherhood, like the stories of the Princeton mothers
detailed in Belkin’s piece, has become yet another model
narrative of maternal satisfaction within the public realm,
in this case tied to a celebrity body. Following the 1991
appearance of Demi Moore, naked and pregnant, on the cover
of Vanity Fair, celebrity bellies have become ubiquitous
and pushed the boundaries of what is acceptable in public.
In 1991 many were outraged by Moore’s naked belly and
demanded that the magazine be sold on newsstands inside an
opaque wrapper. Today, we see celebrity bellies - and
non-celebrity bellies - everywhere. But today, we also
see the babies. With Moore, we did not see the results of
her labor, she rarely appeared with her children in public;
rather the public focus has always been on her body. Her sculpted
form continues to be the site of her labor. For example, when
she appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair the following
year she was once again naked, but her curvaceous physique
was masked by a painted-on man’s suit; there were no
visible signs of her recent pregnancy - no flabby stomach
or children in sight.
Moore’s pregnant pose - as well as her flaunting
of her postpartum body - have become celebrity rites
of passage. A recent W magazine, for example, bearing
the headline “GWENYTH: Hollywood’s Hippest Leading
Lady on Movies, Marriage, and Motherhood,” features
a very pregnant Gwyneth Paltrow as a cover girl. Her pre-Raphaelitesque
locks cascade down her shoulders and a tight, groovy-looking
tank-top from San Francisco’s Chinatown stretches just
over the top of her swollen abdomen, nicely marrying images
of the nineteenth century muse to the hip mama of today. While
it may be tempting to see this celebration of the pregnant
body as progressive, even subversive, and the embrace of motherhood
as a sexy vocation as forward thinking, this is not always
the case. Like the Happy Family paintings of eighteenth century
France and the nineteenth century cult of ideal motherhood,
the hip mamas of the twenty-first century can also be read
within a larger socio-cultural moment - a moment in
which women and their labor are increasingly exploited, often
in the service of an encroaching conservative political culture
that denigrates the needs of working women and privileges
private choices within the public sphere.
Originally, the term “ hip mama” referred to both
a West-coast mothering zine published by the radical activist
Ariel Gore as well as to the website Hipmama.com founded in
1998 by the feminist writer Bee Lavender. For both Gore and
Lavender, hipness is not a style but rather a radical political
ideology. For them, being “hip” is not defined
by representations or “pleasure preferences.”
Rather, as a January 2004 post on the Hipmama.com website
defines it: "Whether you dress Goth or Goodwill, listen to the Clash or
classical, or whether you have a nose ring or a pearl ring… being
*hip* means tolerating all of these differences and understanding that
people make their own, private choices that they feel best suits them
and realizing that those choices may not always mesh with your own sensibilities.
Being
*hip* to me also means living with compassion. Obviously having
compassion for raising our children, but having compassion
for the poor and neglected, the environment, and the world. That how you
do things is more important than what you do. That teaching kids respect
for all othercreatures is paramount. So please, take your child to soccer
practice if
that's what he decides to do. Live compassionately and you
will always be*hip*."
Since founding the zine in 1997, Gore has written a number
of advice books and memoirs, among them The Mother Trip:
Hip Mama’s Guide to Staying Sane in the Chaos of Motherhood
and The Hip Mama’s Survival Guide. More irreverent
than most parenting advice books, The Mother Trip
includes chapters with titles such as “Learning to be
Unacceptable,” “It Takes a Heap of Loafing to
Raise a Kid,” and “If It’s All You Can Do
to Get Out of Bed in the Morning, Just Get Out of Bed.”
Yet Gore’s work transcends the merely humorous; it is
actively political in that it challenges the “right
or wrong” stance taken by so many parenting advice books.
Gore’s feminism is pragmatic. It defies binary divisions.
Unlike Belkin’s or Schlafly’s, her work is nuanced
and allows for multiple forms of difference. She treats private
decisions and personal lifestyle choices as private and personal.
Single parents, stay at home mothers, and mothers on welfare
are all welcome in her universe, and she sees all of these
positions, in all of their diversity, as potentially feminist.
Gore concludes The Mother Trip with a “Maternal
Feminist Agenda.” The radical nature of her manifesto
is rooted in acceptance of maternal desire in all of its forms:
"Motherhood is not what we thought it was, that’s true.
It’s more difficult, more heart-wrenching, and more delightful than we ever dreamed….
But I imagine that my children and perhaps even my children’s
children will be grown before we have completely reinvented family and society
so that they can serve women as well as children and men, so that
we can have kids, be swallowed in the mad-love of child rearing, but also
work, create, worship and love without feeling that we have to do these
things simultaneously, at a break-neck pace that doesn’t allow
us to savor any of it."
Despite its best intentions to do so, hip motherhood has not
spawned a feminist revolution; on the contrary, its popularity
corresponds to an increasingly hostile attitude towards feminism
in the popular media which ironically embraces hipness but
as a form of representation determined by the proper pleasure
preferences and accoutrements - foremost among them,
a pregnant belly or a young child. Despite the tolerant tone
of Gore’s books, many reviewers take issue with her
feminist politics of inclusion. Some readers applaud her utopian
vision, such as this one from Fairbanks, Alaska, who writes,
“With so much pressure today telling us that we can't
be young moms and hip feminists at the same time, I found
Gore's book empowering for our generation, and those to come.”
However, the majority of the posts reviewing the work on Amazon.com
take issue with Gore’s “feminist” viewpoint.
A reader from Arizona writes, “This is more of a feminist
book then[sic] a survival guide.” Another reader responds,
this “is mostly a feminist book. Her advice is shadowed
by this.” Yet another adds, “angry feminist author
in the guise of humor” and “This book provides
a few funny moments, but is not so much a humorous take on
parenting as an essay on feminist, ultra-liberal viewpoints.”
Regardless of its traditional subject matter, by including
the marginalized and often dispossessed in her accounts -
teenage mothers, mothers on welfare - Gore’s mother
and child relationships defy naturalization. Perhaps this
is why they are critiqued as too feminist. Her babies are
not accessories. Her women and children have organs that mystify,
repulse, and repeatedly fascinate them. Gore’s books
have sold well and are regularly carried in chain bookstores
such as Borders and Barnes & Noble. But, as it becomes
increasingly commodified, hip-ness has begun to lose its radical
nature - if one views tolerance and acceptance of difference
as radical. And, once again, as the history of the website
HipMama.com shows, “feminism” as defined by its
critics bears much of the fault.
According to founder Bee Lavender, who started the site in
1998, the goal of Hipmama.com was to “build a forum
for marginalized voices - teen mothers, poor mothers,
queer mothers, mamas of color, mamas with disabilities, urban
parents and activists.” Lavender wanted to provide “a
place to talk and meet other parents with similar interests.”
She hoped the site would inspire participants “to go
back to their own neighborhood or city and build local networks
of like-minded families.” “Aside from being explicitly
feminist,” she writes, the community did “not
adhere to one particular political ideology.” Like Gore’s
zine and subsequent books, there was room for a wide variety
of people with varying politics and belief systems on the
discussion boards and forums. But then Hipmama’s advertising
potential was discovered. According to Lavender, “We
were an exotic little nibble of youth culture, but we were
also mothers: a whole untapped online market.” Courted
by advertisers and web administrators, she and her partner
“were offered vast amounts of money,” but they
were also advised to be “more perky and less political…more
cute and less cutting edge.” Although the site did not
become more perky or less cutting edge, as a result of the
amplified advertising dollars and increased publicity, “an
influx of people arrived who did not share the project’s
radical politics.” Brutal attacks by “discussion-board
trolls” haranguing teen mothers, criticizing women who
had abortions, spinning homophobic tirades and spouting racist
insults, ultimately forced Lavender and the site’s volunteer
moderators to shut it down.
Today Hipmama.com is back online, but it now consists primarily
of individual blogs and calls to activism rather than heated
debate and community building. But this does not mean that
the hip-mother market has disappeared. On the contrary, it
has moved from the margins to the mainstream. Instead of being
defined by a shared feminist politics, hipness is more and
more rooted in static representations in which private choices
become loaded with intense public meaning. And, once again,
images in which babies appear as accessories attesting to
their mother’s style allow for the emergence of a prescriptive,
normalized narrative of what the mother-child relationship
should look like.
While I was writing this, I stumbled upon a “news documentary”
on the E Network entitled “Hollywood Baby Boom.”
Like the many celebrity newsmagazines on the supermarket checkout
shelf, the hour-long show was full of fawning celebrity profiles
of the many stars who have embraced motherhood in the past
few years. Images of the swelling abdomens of the rich and
famous, discussions of their designer maternity wear, prenatal
yoga classes and “special glow” skin-care products
filled frame after frame of the show. The piece concluded
with the assertion that “Mommy and Daddy are not just
roles to play anymore. Babies are here and they’re hip
and they’re hot…and they are just as decked out
as their celebrity parents.” Then images of Reese Witherspoon,
Kate Winslet, Annette Benning, Catherine Zeta Jones, and Kate
Hudson, to name just a few, with their newly re-toned bodies
and their splendidly attired children were intercut with images
of designer baby goods, as well as information on where to
purchase these products. As in the Gucci advertisements and
Belkin piece, the babies on the show were in large part accessories.
Like their mothers’ pregnant as well as postpartum bodies,
they became in large part representations, flattened to define
a trend - the hip Hollywood mother. The babies became
exhibits attesting to the idealized spaces of reproduction
in which real bodies don’t seem to matter. While these
narratives are seemingly all about bodies - maternal
bodies, newborn bodies, toddler bodies - their actual
corporeal needs are in large part hidden from public view.
Aside from a mention of the intense daily yoga Madonna did
to get back in shape after the birth of baby Rocco, the egg
white omelets Elizabeth Hurley ate to shed the sixty plus
pounds she gained over the course of her pregnancy, or the
grueling kickboxing workout Uma Thurman engaged in to streamline
her postpartum body for her role in Kill Bill volumes
I and II, the show gave little acknowledgement of the actual
work that these women do as actresses or as mothers. We did
not see the army of nannies, personal trainers, chefs, and
other assistants who make these mother-child fantasies possible.
As in the Gucci ads, the corporeal needs and desires of these
mothers and their children have been erased to allow for the
perfect shot. We did not see pictures of Reese Witherspoon
breastfeeding in her trailer on the set of Legally Blond
II or Kate Winslet throwing-up from morning sickness.
Nor was there any mention of the often non-traditional structure
of many of these celebrity families. The issues of Uma’s
divorce, Elizabeth Hurley’s paternity suit, the father
of Jodie Foster’s two sons were brushed aside, and instead
we saw only smiling mothers and adorable children. The diverse
realities of these babies’ lives, which might have been
used to forward the hipmama agenda of tolerance and inclusion,
as well as their mother’s actual labor was once again
hidden from view. As a result, the show normalized a particular
form of maternal desire, as essential and natural, and further
promoted the erotics of motherhood as the ultimate form of
commodity fetishism. Like Belkin’s article, it erased
the privilege of these women’s lives as it presented
a uniform picture of beautiful mothers toting their adorable
children and “having it all” as the ultimate form
of Hollywood success.
While this show might seem like just another brainless celebrity
lovefest, these movie-star mothers are selling something:
myths of idealized motherhood, dream narratives of hipness
within consumer conformity, and the false dichotomies that
have come to define contemporary feminism. As scholars interested
in the links between representation and desire, we must refuse
to see these images as banal Hollywood publicity and pay attention
instead to how they are working to promote an increasingly
conservative socio-political public culture in which motherhood
is held up as a sacred calling but in which mothers and children
who do not, or can not, replicate the sacrosanct mother-child
dyad are stigmatized. Instead of dismissing these celebrity
testimonies as silly or banal, we need to challenge the power
of their normalizing discourses to institute a more varied
and progressive notion of motherhood (and feminism) in the
popular media, one that allows for diverse and dynamic parenting
choices in which women and their labor are respected. We need
to applaud the efforts that go into balancing work and motherhood.
We need to acknowledge all the help these starlets get to
be working mothers and use it as a political tool to demand
help for non-privileged parents. We need to realize that no
matter how much yoga we do, we will never look like Madonna
or Gwyneth. Moreover, we need to demand that the public recognize
that many of these women are single parents and that many
of their children have different fathers and use this to our
political advantage to move towards the utopian future that
Gore sketches in her maternal feminist agenda. Instead of
seeing babies as accessories, we need to see them as the future
citizens of the world.
June 2005
From guest contributor A. Joan Saab, Assistant Professor of
Art History and Visual and Cultural Studies at the University
of Rochester
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