Motherhood’s Opening Chapter: Birth Stories as Performance and Counter Performance Across Dueling Media Platforms

Abstract

Women in our culture are heavily exposed to both social media and reality television shows, tending to regard each as potential sources of information about birth. In this paper I examine the ways that birth stories are transmitted across these dueling media platforms asking what these vastly divergent portrayals of childbirth communicate to women about their birthing bodies. Extending Della Pollack’s theory of performance and counter performance as a theoretical framework for my discussion, I argue that mother-authored birth stories shared on pregnancy message boards can be understood as a collective textual performance revealing much about the ways in which women experience childbirth under our current maternity care system. In contrast, I identify the genre of childbirth reality television as a destructive counter performance of women’s lived experiences. These in turn inform public discourse about pregnancy and birth with broad implications in a range of ongoing debates over matters such as: Where should women be legally permitted to give birth? How should decisions be made during labor? And to what extent should institutions and governments be granted authority to regulate women’s choices during pregnancy and labor?