Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman

by Anne Helen Petersen

The pregnant woman has more “freedom” in the public sphere than ever before—and yet women are experiencing the largest war against their reproductive freedoms in more than fifty years. It’s contradictory, of course, but that’s the guiding structure of any ideology: no matter how emancipatory it might seem for the pregnant body to be visible, that visibility means subjugation to regimes of respectability and regulation under patriarchy. As Cramer points out, it was no coincidence that as audiences watched Kardashian’s preparations for labor, Wendy Davis was filibustering against anti-choice laws in the Texas state legislature. When the body becomes public property, as the pregnant body has indubitably become, it not only liberates the populace at large to comment and cast judgment on it, but the (male-dominated) legislature to institute legal controls over it.23