Still something else besides a mother? Negotiating celebrity motherhood in Sarah Jessica Parker's star story

Abstract

This essay examines media coverage of the rise of Sarah Jessica Parker, from jobbing movie actress to A-list television superstar and fashion icon, following her starring role as sex-columnist fashionista Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City (HBO, 1998–2004). Significantly, during this same period Parker also became a mother, giving birth to her son by actor Matthew Broderick in 2002. If motherhood in the twentieth century at least has conventionally been constructed as at odds with glamour, style and trend-setting, Parker's fortunes indicate a changing cultural landscape. Celebration of the “celebrity mom”, twinned with the emergence of the aspirational “yummy-mummy”, have become highly visible preoccupations widely evident across contemporary representations of motherhood, the ramifications of which are explored here. Examining interviews conducted with the star in women's magazines drawn largely from the United Kingdom and United States through 2002–2006, the essay explores Parker's role as a “celebrity mom” and how this coverage of her consistently adopts a confessional mode and intimate address in order to dispel any apparent conflict wrought to her prior celebrity by her new maternal status.

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