Art & Photography Books:

It's All in the Delivery

Pregnancy in American Film and Television Comedy
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Hardback
$179.00
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  • 10-17 December using International Courier

Description

How changing depictions of pregnancy in comedy from the start of the twentieth century to the present show an evolution in attitudes toward women’s reproductive roles and rights. Pregnancy and the politics surrounding it are serious matters, but humor has been a revealing and transformative means of engaging the subject. Victoria Sturtevant examines productions from I Love Lucy to Junior, Jane the Virgin to Murphy Brown, finding that comedic films and television programs have articulated and altered public anxieties, expectations, and hypocrisies concerning reproduction. Evolving—and sometimes stubborn—attitudes toward pregnancy owe much to representational strategies that turn the social discomforts of childbirth into something we can laugh at. On-screen comedy offers a fascinating lens on the role of pregnancy in defining American womanhood, as studio-era censorship gave way to fetishization of sentimental childbirth in the 1950s; the pill and legalized abortion spiked media interest in nonmarital pregnancy; the patriarchal entrenchment of the 1980s and ’90s turned attention to biological clocks; and more recent film and television shows have moved toward medically and socially candid depictions of pregnancy. It's All in the Delivery argues that representational breakthroughs were enabled by comedy’s capacity to violate restrictive norms, introducing greater candor, courage, and critique into popular notions of the embodiment of pregnancy on-screen.

Author Biography:

Victoria Sturtevant is an associate professor of film and media studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of A Great Big Girl Like Me: The Films of Marie Dressler and co-editor of Hysterical! Women in American Comedy.
Release date NZ
December 3rd, 2024
Pages
248
Audience
  • Professional & Vocational
Illustrations
50 b&w photos
ISBN-13
9781477330432
Product ID
38655150

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