Buying up baby

Abstract

Knocked Up, Waitress, and Juno celebrate as models young, white, American-born women who choose to reproduce despite their stated desire not to. These films participate in the depoliticizing processes of a US postfeminist culture that negotiates the power of female consumers in a post-9/11, neoliberal global marketplace demanding new forms of consumption, labor, and citizenship. This essay analyzes specifically how, through commodifying motherhood, these popular dramedies construct supposedly authentic modern feminine subjectivity and repudiate feminism, especially reproductive justice politics. The extent to which postfeminist discourse displaces political subjectivity through commercialized motherhood is revealed further when the US films are put in dialogue with the Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. The essay responds to calls for new methods in feminist media studies and transnational feminist studies that expand rather than compartmentalize scholarship's focus and dialogue.

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