When I contemplate my body, particularly my curved and breasted body, my thoughts quickly turn to the symbolism and politics that are etched into my flesh.
Power, labor, sex, reproduction, and money all conspire to reinterpret my biology through social conventions. And while these forces are always there, they quickly leapt to the foreground during my pregnancy.
Pregnancy forces you to re-experience your body on scales both molecular and socio-political. Despite or perhaps because of its centrality to life, so much of the experience is a mystery. One morning I awoke with a line that had formed from my belly button to the top of my pubic bone. Another morning, I discovered a constellation of dark patches and acne in the mirror. Intense nausea followed me around the city. Even the smell of my spouse became unspeakably nauseating.
To cope I focused on understanding the physiological underpinnings of these transitions. I studied everything from obstetric textbooks (Williams Obstetrics, 25th Edition) to science fiction critiques (Brave New World, The Handmaid’s Tale). I filled my small apartment with anatomical maternity mannequins, feminist texts, photographs of birth and prints of placentas. I searched for meaning behind my body’s changes, but biology doesn’t offer tidy answers.
And while I was looking for stories to help rationalize the unknowability of life and its creation, digital culture bombarded me with its own narrative of my transition. “Mommy-to-be” specific media flooded my feeds.
Pregnancy is both immensely personal and thrusts your body into a sphere of public surveillance. I was simultaneously encouraged to embrace the “natural miracle of birth,” while discouraged from other naturally occurring phenomena. I was advertised stretch mark creams, anti-darkening serums, mood stabilizing supplements, and “figure flattering” pregnancy corsets. Later, the targeted messages incessantly advised me to build a registry—to prepare for the arrival of a baby by purchasing the right goods and services.
In looking at the objects being promoted to me, I became uneasy with their premises. For instance, the existence of skin lightening creams implies that it is preferable to have light skin. A corset implies that there is an ideal figure that is not yours.
The pregnancy products that surrounded me implied values such as: you should work as hard as you can to return to a “pre-pregnancy body,” you should be maternal but maintain the appropriate amount of sex appeal; you should have a “natural” pregnancy but not so natural as to exhibit any of the symptoms deemed unsightly; you should put the fetus’s needs before your own.
Frustrated with the many products that implied that there was a “right way” to have a pregnancy, I started creating the opposite in my studio. A series of products that described the processes of my body on a hormonal basis combined with my own personal narratives. It was my own escape from the algorithmic, consumerist machine that dictates how pregnant women should look, behave, and give birth.
Understanding my pregnancy through the knowledge of biological sciences helped me regain a sense of emotional control. Making art about it allowed me to make meaning in the societal context in which these conditions exist.
I started to list the experiences that were out of my control: mood swings, stretch marks, and fatigue. I created products for the experiences as if I were selling them. My experience with stretch marks became a cream labeled: “Causes stretch marks to appear on the skin. Signals ability to manage one’s own vanity to allow for the cohabitation of another body in your body.” I followed it with the associated hormones: “relaxin, estrogen, progesterone.”
Another product stimulated mammary leakage, labeled: “Causes nipples to swell painfully and leak milk. Transitions breasts from erotic to nurturing organs. Induces the body to become a food source. Can be tranquilizing. Hormones: Prolactin, Estrogen.”
There, in one palpable object were the molecules, symptoms, and my personal narrative to help make sense of the experience. I kept making these, one at a time, over the course of my pregnancy without knowing the goal. In the end, I had created a set of ritual devices and consumable products made to simulate the lived experience of my pregnancy.
Centered around experiences typically considered “inconvenient,” I now see that these speculative products were meant to investigate culture’s response to pregnancy. I hope they demonstrate just a few of the disturbing ways consumer culture treats pregnancy. But the truth is that digital consumerist culture is just another way that culture writ large has and probably always has imposed itself on the pregnant body.
One of my favorite sights during my pregnancy were the little glimpses of my growing fetus on the sonogram. Through the technological synesthesia of translating soundwaves into visual imagery, I was able to see tiny kicks and a fluttering heartbeat—a sight that always filled my own heart with emotion. When I showed these blurry pictures to my mother, she remarked that she didn’t have a single ultrasound her entire pregnancy with me, a result of being a new immigrant with no health insurance. Skeptical of the capitalist-medical industry, she often asked me if all the scans and tests might be getting in the way of my own instinctual maternal awareness.
But who’s to discern the instinctual from the cultural? Even science, which purports to have the research validated facts, has a marred history of patriarchal ideals and racist exploitation of female bodies. And so where does that leave the pregnant body? It left me contemplating my experience through these fictional anti-products.
Cite This Essay
Liu, Ani. “The Consumerist Pregnancy.” Biodesigned: Issue 3, 17 September, 2020. Accessed [month, day, year].