A beautiful tragedy : witnessing the pregnant body in contemporary Hollywood films.

• Main Author: Ong, Isabel Tze Wei.
• Other Authors: Brian Keith Bergen-Aurand
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: DRNTU::Social sciences::Mass media::Broadcasting::Motion pictures and films::Film theory and criticism
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/15188
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

"Everyone at school is always grabbing at my belly," says sixteen-year-old Juno MacGuff in Jason Reitman's explosive and critically acclaimed film Juno (2007). The film's central character goes on to describe herself as the "Cautionary Whale", a moniker that both situates her as a warning for other teenage girls and paints her as a grotesquely ballooning caricature of pregnancy. Juno is not alone in revealing such perceptions of the pregnant body - terms such as "monstrous", "undersirable" and "feminine excess" have frequently been employed to describe the pregnant body. Jane M. Ussher in Managing the Monstrous Feminine reveals how 'pregnancy represents feminine excess at its most extreme, the boundless, bulging body standing as the epitome of unruly fecundity"(161). The pregnant body is seen as uncontrollable in its supposedly "extreme" state of fertility and productivity.