Do pregnant celebrities make real mums feel fat?
Media Release, Monday 29 May 2006
A University of Melbourne researcher is studying how the media focus on celebrity pregnancies impacts on real women’s body image during and after pregnancy.
A University of Melbourne researcher is studying how the media focus on celebrity pregnancies impacts on real women’s body image during and after pregnancy.
Meredith Nash, a PhD candidate in the Gender Studies Program at the University of Melbourne, is seeking pregnant women to join a longitudinal study into how women view themselves when pregnant, and how the public views pregnant bodies.
She is exploring how media focus on visibly pregnant women’s ‘baby-bumps’ has opened the door to thinking about the fetus as a separate person, and therefore as public property.
“Only 20 years ago, pregnancy was a taboo subject in public,” explains Ms Nash. “My study looks at how that has changed to become an everyday topic in the media and in public conversation”.
“In what feels like an increasingly ‘Hollywood-ised’ Australian culture, speculation and discussion of the pregnancies and post-partum bodies of celebrities like Angelina Jolie, Britney Spears and Katie Holmes is commonplace.”
But Ms Nash says most Australian women don’t have wide access to the personal trainers, nannies and nutritionists that allow celebrities to have such control over their post-natal bodies.
“Photographs of tight and polished postpartum celebrity bodies are most likely influencing the diet and fitness regimes of the average Australian woman trying to lose her ‘baby weight’”, she says, “and are probably influencing women’s self-image.”
“I would like women to tell me how they see themselves when they are pregnant; how their pregnant body image differs from their non-pregnant body image. In a society focused on representing female bodies as thin, how Australian women respond to internal and external changes in their bodies is important for contemporary feminist research.”
Ms Nash would like to hear from women between 12-16 weeks pregnant, who agree to be interviewed three times during their pregnancy and once after the birth of their baby. Interviews of about one hour will consist of questions regarding pregnant bodies, motherhood and experiences in public while pregnant.
In addition, partners, family and friends in the lives of women involved in the study are invited to participate and would be interviewed once during the pregnancy and once after the birth.
More information is available on the Baby-Bump Project website at:
babybumpproject.tripod.com/index.html
Potential participants can find out more or volunteer by email to:
babybumpproject@yahoo.com.au
Contact for interview:
Meredith Nash
PhD Researcher
Gender Studies Program, History Department
University of Melbourne
Phone: 0423 303 524
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