The Exoticisation of Motherhood: The Body Politics of Pregnant Femininity through the Lens of Celebrity Motherhood

Abstract

At a time when parenthood seems to have become almost mandatory regardless of sexual orientation, and children serve as fashionable props on Instagram profiles and in lifestyle magazines, this article examines the way in which pregnant femininity and maternity is engulfed by neoliberal discourses of aestheticisation and disciplining of the body. It offers a cultural discourse analysis of the body politics of pregnant femininity through the lens of exoticised celebrity motherhood. In order to understand present day celebrity pregnancies, it draws upon the new ‘cult of motherhood’ and revolves around Kim Kardashian and Beyonce Knowles as case studies in exoticised celebrity motherhood, through a discursive analysis of the publicity surrounding both women’s pregnancies. It sees them as being part of a larger narrative that racializes and exoticises shapely (non-white) bodies, while disciplining both women – yet to varying degrees-within the contemporary Anglo-European norms of beauty. Given the educational and pedagogical role of celebrities and their construction of a ‘public-private self’ (Marshall 2010), global celebrity figures Kim Kardashian and Beyonce Knowles-Carter are seen offering a ‘grammar of conduct’ (Skeggs and Wood, 2011) around which the moral, and the maternal, self is being articulated and gauged.