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Technology Knows Best: The Cultural Work of Hospital Birth in 21<sup xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">st</sup> Century Film

2011; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/lm.2011.0307

1080-6571

Jennifer Ellis West,

Music History and Culture

Technology Knows Best: The Cultural Work of Hospital Birth in 21st Century Film Jennifer Ellis West (bio) In 2007, three films that each received some measure of critical and box-office success drew their narrative drive from the events surrounding unexpected pregnancy. Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody’s indie-turned-major release Juno, which won an Academy Award in 2008 for Best Original Screenplay, focuses on a teenage girl and her decision to give her baby up for adoption; Judd Apatow’s mainstream box office hit, Knocked Up, explores unexpected parenthood for an unlikely pair in their twenties, largely from the father’s point of view; and Adrienne Shelly’s less popular but widely reviewed independent film, Waitress, follows an unhappily married woman through an unwanted pregnancy in the small-town South. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the same year these films were released, more babies were born to American women than ever before, the first time the birth rate had exceeded the baby boom, which peaked in 1957. The data from that report generated considerable media attention. Two of the most reported statistics include the 31.8 percent of women who gave birth by cesarean section, the highest percentage ever, and the continued increase in birth rates for teens and unmarried women in their twenties and thirties.1 The connection between the latter statistics and media representations of unplanned pregnancy—not just in these films, but also in the celebrity narratives of Jamie Lyn Spears and Bristol Palin, television series like The Secret Life of the American Teenager, and the news coverage of the so-called “pregnancy pact” at a high school in Massachusetts—made its circuit around the mainstream media and the blogosphere. Thanks to a series of related news stories speculating on this connection, one can now find a Wikipedia entry for the “Juno Effect.”2 What has gone virtually undiscussed, and what I will take up in this article, is the [End Page 104] relationship between these on-screen representations of pregnancy and the implications of the first statistic: the increasing reliance on medical technology in childbirth. Cultural studies scholars, of course, have been arguing for decades that popular representation has a weighty effect on material life. Stuart Hall has called this process the “cultural circuit.” He writes that representation, especially through mass media, is one way meanings are produced in a culture, and through the interpretation and consumption of such representations, “our material interests and our bodies can be called to account, and differently implicated, depending on how meaning is given and taken, constructed and interpreted in different situations.”3 Teasing out how this process operates is especially important for those working to critique and intervene in debates about science and medicine; not only does much of what the public learns about those disciplines come in the form of popular media, but as a number of scholars in science and medicine studies have argued, the institutions of science and medicine themselves are also being shaped by mainstream representation. Leslie J. Reagan, Nancy Tomes, and Paula A. Treichler’s recent collection, Medicine’s Moving Pictures, for instance, is based on the simple notion that the public has always learned about health, bodies, disease, and medicine from watching television and films. They contend that a “symbiotic relationship” between medicine and mass media enables such representations to exert a significant influence on “health-related public debates and controversies.”4 Susan Merrill Squier, in her work on reproductive technologies, has also argued that fictional representations of science and medicine serve an epistemological function, as they are shaped by scientific knowledge, and in turn, are shaping what we know and what is possible to know. In fact, for Squier, literature and science are always working together to produce knowledge: “Whenever we see literature (culturally scripted as the domain of subjectivity), we should expect that there’s also science (the culturally accepted home of objectivity). For literature and science operate together in culture and society to produce subjects and objects.”5 The kind of literary text I’m focusing on here is the visual narrative of film, but what interests me in Squier’s reciprocal...