Knock Me Up, Knock Me Down: Images of Pregnancy in Hollywood Films

Abstract

In recent years, pregnancy and motherhood have become increasingly visible in popular culture, thanks in part to advances in artificial reproductive technologies and a greater social acceptance of (certain types of) pregnant bodies, perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the intense scrutiny of pre- and postnatal celebrity bodies in the popular press. This in turn has led to a renewal of feminist media scholarship on discourses of motherhood and the maternal, to which Kelly Oliver's Knock Me Up, Knock Me Down: Images of Pregnancy in Hollywood Films makes a welcome and unique addition. Oliver's book explores a slightly less theorized area, namely filmic portrayals of pregnancy rather than the motherhood that follows. The aim of the book is to interrogate shifting representations of pregnancy in contemporary popular film, using these complex and often contradictory depictions to explore Hollywood's anxieties over developments in women's reproductive choices at a specific cultural moment. As Oliver persuasively argues, ‘In these films the pregnant body has become a screen onto which various desires and fears are projected’ (p. 7). At the same time, the book seeks to explore ‘how [these representations] are shaped through complex interrelations between feminism, popular culture, medicine, science and filmic discourses’ (p. 7).