Plan B: Single Women, Romantic Love and the Making of Babies in The Back-Up Plan and The Switch

Abstract

This chapter examines two romantic comedies, The Back-Up Plan and The Switch, both from 2010 and both featuring single women who use insemination to become pregnant. While the traditional heterosexual romance remains a powerful Hollywood narrative, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen new variations on this tale, connected to the increasing availability of assisted reproductive technologies. The analysis explores how the employment of reproductive technologies as plot elements activate and engage with current cultural discourses on family, focusing specifically on the historically and socially contingent conception of family as naturally and necessarily predicated on romantic love. Single motherhood, despite its planned and voluntary character, comes across as a state to overcome rather than a valid form of family life.