The image of a heavily pregnant woman, once considered ugly and indecent, is now common to Hollywood film. Kelly Oliver investigates this curious shift and its reflection of changing attitudes toward women's roles in reproduction and the family.
Kelly Oliver is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University and the author of Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us To Be Human; Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex and the Media; The Colonization of Psychic Space: Toward a Psychoanalytic Social Theory; Noir Anxiety: Race, Sex, and Maternity in Film Noir; Witnessing: Beyond Recognition; Subjectivity Without Subjects: From Abject Fathers to Desiring Mothers; Family Values: Subjects Between Nature and Culture; Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy's Relation to "the Feminine;" and Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-Bind.