"A lot of these more recent texts are concerned with that, part of the problem of the surprise pregnancy is that women aren’t sure how they’re going to be able to negotiate motherhood and maintain a career."
ILLUSION REAL PLAY PREGNANT PROFESSIONAL
"In Homeland, a show that very much reveals the tensions between the professional and the personal, Carrie can’t do her job with a baby," Waters says. The modern-day surprise comes intertwined with anxieties women have about becoming mothers.
That position flipped, as Betty Friedan might have expected, as women moved away from their role as a June Clever-style housewife. Producers have been using the pregnancy storylineas far back as the '50s, she points out, though men like I Love Lucy's Ricky Ricardo and Bewitched's Darrin Stephens were more likely to be the surprised party. “It reflects and shapes wider discussions about women, reproductive rights, work and childcare.” “It acts as a lightning rod for debates about reproductive politics,” she says. It also serves to challenge social norms, says Melanie Waters, a senior lecturer at Northumbria University and co-author of Feminism and Popular Culture: Investigating the Postfeminist Mystique. The problem, of course, is that this plot device relies on the assumption that motherhood is a necessary role for women to not to be a mother is to be incomplete, immature, and selfish." "It works as a plot device because it’s a quick and easy way to provoke an existential crisis that forces the women to confront their reluctance to face real adult responsibilities. "Both Rory’s and Hannah’s recent pregnancies function as a shorthand for the end of their extended Millennial adolescence-suddenly the irresponsibility that marked their young adulthood must end as they transition into motherhood," she says. "I like to think Lena Dunham would do something a little more sophisticated, keep Hannah kind of a self-centered idiot," says Amy Peloff, a lecturer and affiliate faculty at the University of Washington. The illusion that Hannah, who has served as an embodiment of immature Millennial stereotypes, would finally grow up and become a mom was a jarring juxtaposition in the subsequent episode. In the episode prior to Hannah's shocking discovery, the meaning of consent is explored in perhaps one of the most thought-provoking ways depicted on TV. Which makes its outsized presence in Girls' final run a bit perplexing.įor five years, the show created by Lena Dunham and produced by Jenni Konner has provoked viewers with a litany of unconventional topics like selfishness, graphic sex and nudity. “Often times, the unplanned pregnancy is part of this stereotype, it's a well worn way of writing in a complication for a female character,” she says. In the an annual report for the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, Lauzen found that female characters are more likely than men to be identified by their marital status, and have goals such as caring for others or being in romantic relationships. Traditional gender stereotypes abound on TV, according to Martha M. Which begs the question: Has the plot device become the prime-time equivalent of a soap opera bout of amnesia? Or is there something more at play?
Mindy Lahiri didn’t anticipate her fertility on The Mindy Project, even though she’s an OB-GYN running her own fertility clinic.
Rachel didn’t intend to steal Monica’s thunder on Friends. Miranda thought having only one working ovary would inoculate her in Sex and the City. Carrie didn’t intend to get knocked up by a POW-turned-suicide-bomber in Homeland. Jane’s accidental insemination is the entire premise of Jane the Virgin. Rory left Lorelei and the world stunned with her grand reveal at the end of Gilmore Girls: Year in the Life.
ILLUSION REAL PLAY PREGNANT TV
With her unexpected news, Hannah joins a prodigious sorority of TV characters caught off-guard by a pregnancy. But the focus on such a ubiquitous storyline in the final season of the boundary-pushing HBO show Girls may be the real shocker. Hannah Horvath is pregnant, to the great surprise of everyone in her life, herself and the father included.
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