What Are You Expecting to See? On Childbirth in Visual Culture

Representations of childbirth and pregnancy have been particularly prominent over the past decade, especially on social media and reality television (Cummins, Miracles and Home Births: The Importance of Media Representations of Birth. Critical Studies in Media Communication 37 (1): 85–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2019.1704037, 2019; Yam, Birth Images on Instagram: The Disruptive Visuality of Birthing Bodies. Women’s Studies in Communication 42 (1): 80–100. https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2018.1561564, 2019; Das, Mediated Subjectivities of the Maternal: A Critique of Childbirth Videos on Youtube. The Communication Review 21 (1): 66–84. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714421.2017.1416807, 2018; Mack 2016; Tyler and Baraitser, Private View, Public Birth: Making Feminist Sense of the New Visual Culture of Childbirth. Studies in the Maternal 5 (2). https://doi.org/10.16995/sim.18, 2013). Increasing celebration and dignity has been afforded to images of pregnancy and childbirth on social media especially, demonstrating that pregnancy and childbirth are no longer a visual taboo in many national contexts (Tyler and Baraitser, Private View, Public Birth: Making Feminist Sense of the New Visual Culture of Childbirth. Studies in the Maternal 5 (2). https://doi.org/10.16995/sim.18, 2013). Social media can be distinguished from traditional mediums like cinema by its rapidity and widespread distribution, as well as its participatory convergence (Jenkins 2014; Khamis, Self-Branding, ‘Micro-Celebrity’ and the Rise of Social Media Influencers. Celebrity studies 8 (2): 191–208. https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2016.1218292, 2017). However, this chapter will show a shared, if contradictory, tendency between cinema and social media in their interest in creating social change through representation. Bringing the study of cinema into dialogue with the study of social media, this conclusion will argue that any celebration of these images should not overdetermine the effect of representation nor unproblematically subscribe to the belief that visual culture induces measurable change.