The post-nuclear family and the depoliticization of unplanned pregnancy in Knocked Up, Juno, and Waitress

Communication and Critical/ Cultural Studies

Volumn 7, Issue 4, 2010, Pages 360-380

  Hoerl, Kristen ^a   Kelly, Casey Ryan ^a  

^a BUTLER UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Choice; Film; Post nuclear family; Postfeminism; Reproduction

Indexed keywords

EID: 79960472222     PISSN: 14791420     EISSN: 14794233     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/14791420.2010.523432     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. Michelle Bernard, Transcript: Analyzing Palin's Convention Speech.
2. More Heavy Weather Crossing the Atlantic, CNN American Morning, September 4, 2008, Lexis-Nexis (090402CN. V74).
3. Dahlia Lithwick, "Republicans and the Illusion of Reproductive Choice", Newsweek, September 8, 2008, http://www.newsweek.com/id/157909/ (accessed February 10, 2009).
4. ABC News, "Why Abortions are Down in American*But Why?", 17 January 2008, http:// abcnews.go.com/Health/Story?id_4151508&page_1 (accessed 27 August 2008). The Guttmacher report actually attributes the decline in abortion rates to the increasing availability of sex education and contraception, particularly emergency contraception such as the morning after pill.
5. ABC News, "Why Abortions."
6. Bonnie J. Dow, Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the Women's Movement Since 1970. (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).
7. Vicki Coppock, The Illusion of Post-Feminism: New Women, Old Myths (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995).
8. Julie D'Acci, Defining Women: Television and the Case of Cagney & Lacey (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
9. Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, eds., Interrogating Post-Feminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
10. Ann Brooks, Post-Feminisms: Feminism, Cultural Theory and Cultural Forms (London: Routledge, 1997).
11. Mary Douglas Vavrus, "Opting Out Moms in the News: Selling New Traditionalism in the New Millennium", Feminist Media Studies 7 (2007): 52.
12. See Coppock, The Illusion of Post-Feminism.
13. Judith Stacey, "The New Conservative Feminism", Feminist Studies 9 (1983): 559-83.
14. Deborah Rosenfelt and Judith Stacey, "Review: Second Thoughts on the Second Wave", Feminist Studies 13 (1987): 341-61.
15. Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992/2000).
16. Elspeth Probyn, "New Traditionalism and Post-Feminism: TV Does the Home", Screen 31 (1990): 147-59. Also see Sarah Projansky, Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2001).
17. Judith Stacey, Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late Twentieth Century America (New York: Basic Books, 1990).
18. Judith Stacey, In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in the Postmodern Age (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1996), 7.
19. Juno grossed over $140 million in box office sales. Later that year, the Academy of Motion Pictures awarded Diablo Cody an Oscar for writing the screenplay and nominated the film for four other awards, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Ellen Page's performance as the film's main character. The film also received recognition from other film societies, including a Critics Choice award for Best Comedy from the Broadcast Film Critics Association, Independent Spirit Awards for Best Feature Film, Best Female Lead, and Best Screenplay, and an MTV Movie Award for Ellen Page. Knocked Up shared box office success with Juno, grossing over $148 million. It won a People's Choice Award for Favorite Movie Comedy in 2008 and a Teen's Choice Award for Best Comedy. The movie received other nods as well, including nominations for best comedy from the Broadcast Film Critics Association Awards.
20. and acting award nominations for Seth Rogen's and Katherine Heigl's performances from MTV Movie Awards. Waitress grossed $19 million at the box office in 2007. After it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, Waitress received an award in 2007 for the Best Performance by an Ensemble Cast from the Chlotrudis Society for Independent Film, and was nominated for an Independent Spirit award for Best Screenplay and a Humanities prize by the Lilly Foundation for encouraging positive human values. This information is archived at http://www.imdb.com (accessed August 31, 2008).
21. Shelly's death is a stark example of gendered violence in Western society. Although the intimate partner violence that Waitress's main character Jenna experiences is less extreme, a comparison of Shelly's murder and the narrative in Waitress highlights the connection between mediated depictions of gendered violence and real life violence against women.
22. Dana L. Cloud, "The Limits of Interpretation: Ambivalence and the Stereotype in Spencer: For Hire", Critical Studies in Mass Communication 9 (1992): 311-24.
23. and Celeste Michelle Condit, "The Rhetorical Limits of Polysemy", Critical Studies in Mass Communication 6 (1989): 103-22.
24. Dow, Prime-Time Feminism, 8.
25. Helene A. Shugart, "Reinventing Privilege: The New 'Gay' Man in Contemporary Popular Media", Critical Studies in Media Communication 20 (2003): 67-91.
26. See Coontz, The Way We Never Were, 8-10.
27. Coontz describes the nuclear family model as a man and a woman waiting until after marriage to have a family and according primary child raising responsibilities to the mother. For a discussion of contemporary media messages that depict motherhood as central to women's lives see Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels, The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How it Has Undermined Women (New York: The Free Press, 2004), 4.
28. Sharon Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
29. Barbara Welter, "The Cult of TrueWomanhood: 1820_1860", American Quarterly 18 (1966): 151-74.
30. Douglas, Mommy Myth, 86-7.
31. Bonnie J. Dow, "The Traffic in Men and the Fatal Attraction of Post-feminist Masculinity", Women's Studies in Communication 29 (2006): 113-31.
32. Bonnie J. Dow, "The Traffic in Men and the Fatal Attraction of Post-feminist Masculinity", Women's Studies in Communication 29 (2006), 114.
33. Jane Arthurs, "Sex and the City and Consumer Culture: Remediating Post-Feminist Drama", Feminist Media Studies 3 (2003): 83-98.
34. Jane Arthurs, "Sex and the City and Consumer Culture: Remediating Post-Feminist Drama", Feminist Media Studies 3 (2003), 85.
35. See Projanksy, Watching Rape, 180. In her study of film and television programs depicting deracialized portrayals of rape, Projansky observes what she calls "postfeminism's pervasive whiteness. " She argues that postfeminist discourses make no distinctions between the cultural and social experiences of women and mistakenly praise the middle-class, heterosexual women's relative economic success as that of all women. Whiteness can also be understood as what Thomas Nakayama and Robert Krizek call a "strategic rhetoric" in which "the experiences and communication patterns of Whites are taken as the norm from which Others are marked" (293). As we have noted, other feminist scholars such as Ruth Frankenberg work from a definition similar to that of Nakayama and Krizek, that whiteness also functions through marking the racial difference of Others while constructing white identity as non-racial or racially neutral.
36. See also, Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek, "Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric", Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 291-309.
37. and Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
38. Projansky, Watching Rape, 78-9.
39. Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, Abortion and Woman's Choice: Questions for Feminism (New York: Verso Books, 1996).
40. See Dow, Prime-Time Feminism.
41. and Rosenfelt and Stacey, "Review. "
42. See Rachel Dubrofsky, "Ally McBeal as Post-Feminist Icon: The Aestheticizing and Fetishizing of the Independent Working Woman", Communication Review 5 (2002): 265-84.
43. Elspeth Probyn, "Choosing Choice: Images of Sexuality and 'Choiceoisie' in Popular Culture", in Negotiating at the Margins: The Gendered Discourses of Power and Resistance, ed. Sue Fisher and Katy Davis (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 278-94.
44. Dow, Prime-Time Feminism, 95.
45. Ann Crittenden, The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001), 234, 237.
46. Peter Travers, "Knocked-Up", Rolling Stone, 30 May 2007, http://www.rollingstone.com/ reviews (accessed August 31, 2008).
47. Robert Wilonsky, "Knocked Up: Judd Apatow Delivers Another Spot-on-Geek-Fantasy-Come-True", Houston Press, May 31, 2007, http://www. houstonpress.com/2007-05-31/film/knocked-up/ (accessed August 31, 2008).
48. See Peter Travers, "Juno", Rolling Stone, December 13, 2007, http://www.rollingstone.com/ reviews (accessed August 31, 2008).
49. Shugart, "Reinventing. "
50. For more on portrayals of transcendent love in mass-mediated texts see Tania Modleski, Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a Post-Feminist Age (London: Routledge, 1991).
51. Stephen Rodrick, "Judd Apatow's Family Values", New York Times Magazine, May 27, 2007, 37.
52. Bob Longino, "Knocked Up Delivers the Laughs", The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, June 1, 2007, 1E.
53. Jack Mathews, "Oh How Cute! Knocked Up Delivers Big Laughs as Baby Makes Glee", Daily News, June, 1 2007, 41.
54. See Hays, Contradictions and Welter, "Cult. "
55. Dow, Prime-Time Feminism.
56. Stacey, "New Conservative".
57. and Rosenfelt and Stacey, "Review. "
58. Rosenfelt and Stacey, "Review", 346.
59. In 2008, the Census Bureau revealed that women were waiting longer to have children or choosing not to have children than in any earlier period in the United States. For more see Katie Zezima, "More Women than Ever are Childless, Census Finds", New York Times, August 19, 2008, A12.
60. See Stephanie Ventura and Christine A. Bachrach, "Nonmarital Childbearing in the United States, 1940_1999", US Department of Health and Human Services, National Vital Statistics Reports 48 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2001).
61. Dorthy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage, 1998).
62. Rickie Sollinger, Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002).
63. Sollinger, Beggars, 7.
64. Sollinger, Beggars, 224.
65. Sollinger, Beggars, 189.
66. Crittenden, Motherhood, 95.
67. Crittenden, Motherhood, 94, 95. Crittenden notes that "The pay gap between mothers and nonmothers under age thirty-five is now larger than the wage gap between young men and women", and that "in 1991, thirty-year-old American women without children were making 90 percent of men's wages. While comparable women with children were making only 70 percent. "