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State University of New York Press - Lynn O'Brien Hallstein

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140 pages

English

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Winner of the 2016 Outstanding Book Award presented by the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender (OSCLG)

The requirements of "good" motherhood used to primarily involve the care of children, but now contemporary mothers are also pressured to become bikini-ready immediately postpartum. Lynn O'Brien Hallstein analyzes celebrity mom profiles to determine the various ways that they encourage all mothers to engage in body work as the energizing solution to solve any work-life balance struggles they might experience. Bikini-Ready Moms also considers the ways that maternal body work erases any evidence of mothers' contributions both at home and in professional contexts. O'Brien Hallstein theorizes possible ways to fuel a necessary mothers' revolution, while also pointing to initial strategies of resistance.
Acknowledgments

Introduction: New and Changing Celebrity Mom Profiles: Theoretical Grounding and Interdisciplinary Rhetorical Approach and Method

1. Contemporary Motherhood at the Epicenter of Intersecting Cultural Changes: The Neoliberal and Post-Second Wave Turns

2. Step One—Becoming First-Time Mothers: Slender-Pregnant Celebrity Mom Profiles

3. Step Two—Being Bikini-Ready Moms: Postpartum Celebrity Mom Profiles

4. Consequences, Rules, and Conclusions about Bikini-Ready Moms

5. Resisting Being Bikini-Ready Moms: Five Strategies of Resistance

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

Media studies

Gender studies

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Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	16 juillet 2015
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781438459028
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1648€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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BIKINI-READY MOMS
SUNY series in Feminist Criticism and Theory
Michelle A. Massé, editor
BIKINI-READY MOMS
Celebrity Profiles, Motherhood, and the Body
LYNN O’BRIEN HALLSTEIN
Cover art: Bikini © Shutterstock.com/Boykung
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2015 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Diane Ganeles
Marketing, Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hallstein, Lynn O’Brien.
Bikini-ready moms : celebrity profiles, motherhood, and the body / Lynn O’Brien Hallstein.
pages cm. — (SUNY series in feminist criticism and theory)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5900-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4384-5901-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4384-5902-8 (e-book) 1. Motherhood. 2. Celebrities. 3. Body image. 4. Women—Identity. I. Title.
HQ759.H1866 2015
306.874'3—dc23
2015001461
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my family—Michel, Jean-Philipp, and Joshua—but most especially for Michel for working hard—sometimes with good cheer and sometimes only because he is trying to enact what he says he believes—to resist creating our own neotraditional family.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: New and Changing Celebrity Mom Profiles: Theoretical Grounding and Interdisciplinary Rhetorical Approach and Method
1. Contemporary Motherhood at the Epicenter of Intersecting Cultural Changes: The Neoliberal and Post-Second Wave Turns
2. Step One—Becoming First-Time Mothers: Slender-Pregnant Celebrity Mom Profiles
3. Step Two—Being Bikini-Ready Moms: Postpartum Celebrity Mom Profiles
4. Consequences, Rules, and Conclusions about Bikini-Ready Moms
5. Resisting Being Bikini-Ready Moms: Five Strategies of Resistance
Notes
Works Cited
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T his is an original manuscript. However, my initial work on celebrity mom profiles appeared in my 2011 essay titled, “She Gives Birth, She’s Wearing a Bikini: Mobilizing the Post-Pregnant Celebrity Mom Body to Manage the Post-Second Wave Crisis in Femininity,” Women’s Studies in Communication 34.2 (November 2011): 1–27. An updated and revised version of that essay appears in chapter 3 . My initial thinking about contemporary motherhood at the epicenter of the post-second wave and neoliberal turns appeared in my 2014 book chapter “When Neoliberalism Intersects with Post-Second Wave Mothering: Reinforcing Neo-traditional American Family Configurations and Exacerbating the Post-Second Wave Crisis in Femininity,” Mothering in the Age of Neoliberalism , edited by Melinda Vandenbeld Giles, Toronto: Demeter Press, 2014: 297–314. A small section of that essay has been integrated in chapter 1 of this manuscript.
I acknowledge and thank Boston University and the College of General Studies for granting me a sabbatical to work on this book. I also acknowledge and thank the Waad family for a research grant that allowed me to work with Allyson English as my undergraduate research assistant. I will forever be in debt to Allyson for her enthusiasm for this project and her excellent research work. Even more important, however, is the fact that, when I was literally on my back recovering from a serious leg injury, her energy and enthusiasm for this project reenergized me and helped me sit up and just do the work to complete the manuscript, leg brace and all. I will be forever grateful for “catching” her excitement when I needed it most.
Introduction
New and Changing Celebrity Mom Profiles: Theoretical Grounding and Interdisciplinary Rhetorical Approach and Method
The celebrity mom profile was probably the most influential media form to sell the new momism, and where its key features were refined, reinforced and romanticized.
—Susan J. Douglas and Meredith Michaels, 113
There is no question about it – celebrity baby stories sell. But recently post-baby body reveals have become such a big magazine staple, they’ll stop at nothing to scoop the story.
—Amber James Popeater.com par. 2
Beyonce opines, “You can have your child, and you can still have fun, and still be sexy, and still have dreams, and still live for yourself.”
—Quoted in Lauren Shutte, “Beyonce Reveals” par. 6
A fter months of speculation about whether or not she was pregnant with her third child, in January 2014, singer and celebrity Gwen Stefani finally confirmed her third pregnancy with an Instagram selfie. In the selfie, Stefani is clad in an all-black, form-fitting long shirt, miniskirt, tights, and black stilettos. First and foremost, the photo highlighted Stefani’s slender pregnancy: pregnant only in her belly and slender everywhere else, still. Noting the new convention of celebrity moms as pregnant in “bump only,” a January 22, 2014, USA Today online headline about the photo reads, “Gwen Stefani ‘bumps it’ in stilettos,” which is accompanied with a reprint of the selfie Stefani posted on Instagram the day before (Oldenburg). Slender pregnancy is not the only requirement for celebrity moms today; indeed, quickly slender, even bikini-ready, postpartum bodies are also the new norm. Three days postpartum and posing in a bra and underwear reminiscent of a bikini, which highlighted her already-flat six-pack abs three days after giving birth, Norwegian celebrity Caroline Berg Eriksen, a blogger who is married to a professional Norwegian soccer player, also posted a selfie on Instagram. The picture engendered much controversy, including an online article by Beth Greenfield about Eriksen that begins with the following question: “Is the postpregnancy body the new weapon of choice among superfit women?” (par. 1). In a follow-up interview about her posting, Eriksen explained, “People kept telling me that my body would never be the same,” Eriksen told ABC News (“New Mom’s”). In another report about the controversy and the notion that her postpartum body would never be the same, Eriksen also said, “I wanted to show everyone that’s not entirely true. Right after birth—like three minutes after—I felt like myself again” (quoted in Greenfield pars. 15–16). Feeling like herself again, or returning to her prepregnant self postpartum, as if pregnancy was just a small bump in the road, Beyonce also opines about her life and postpartum body after becoming a first-time mother, “You can have your child, and you can still have fun, and still be sexy, and still have dreams, and still live for yourself” (“Beyonce Reveals” Schutte par. 6).
In Bikini-Ready Moms: Celebrity Profiles, Motherhood, and the Body , I argue that celebrity moms Stefani, Eriksen, and Beyonce all understand the mothering rules and norms embedded and promoted in these new and second iteration of celebrity mom images and profiles. These images and profiles make the case that mothers can “have it all”: contemporary mothers can now slip in and out of pregnancy and motherhood without losing their body—sometimes even improving the postpartum body—as if pregnancy is just a “small bump in the road” in their newfound gender-equitable place in the workplace and public sphere, while also suggesting that mothers can still have fun, be sexy, have their own dreams, and live for themselves after becoming mothers, as long as they continue to be “good” even-more intensive mothers, mothering within neotraditional family configurations. Moreover, I also show that this is the case because celebrity images and profiles work rhetorically to erase the difference that maternity makes in women’s lives by encouraging mothers to engage in a third shift of body work; and this third shift is also now a new fourth core principle in the contemporary ideology of good mothering and is the energizing solution to ensure that mothers remain primarily responsible for childrearing and family-life management. Thus, and finally, I conclude that celebrity mom profiles now suggest that, if mothers are having difficulty managing “having it all,” then rather than being the “weapon of choice” among women, the maternal body is also a new weapon of choice in the profiles to persuade mothers that maternal body work is the now-specific privatized solution and management tool to energize their ability both to have it all and “do it all” within neotraditional family structures in the private sphere.
Intellectual and Theoretical Foundations
Before I begin to lay out the intellectual and theoretical foundations that inform both my thinking about and analysis of celebrity mom profiles, it is crucial to acknowledge the various forms of privilege they reinforce and further entrench. Doing so is important because, if nothing else, intersectional theorists (Chávez and Griffin; Crenshaw; Hill Collins) have shown that women’s lives are shaped differently based on intersecting factors of