ABSTRACT
Despite a history of intense medical scrutiny and regulation, until recently the pregnant woman has been conspicuously absent from popular visual representation.1 This changed dramatically in August 1991, when Annie Leibovitz’s photograph of the naked and heavily pregnant Hollywood actress, Demi Moore, graced the front cover of the American style magazine, Vanity Fair, accompanied by the caption ‘More Demi Moore’ (Plate 4.1). Since the publication of this photograph, there has been a proliferation of similar images of pregnant celebrities in fashion and lifestyle magazines.2 These photographs have, in turn, been the catalyst for a new visibility of pregnant women across a range of different cultural media, a visibility which demands a reassessment of the supposed taboo surrounding the representation of the pregnant body in contemporary Western cultures. It is impossible to understand the extent of the widespread public response to the appearance of this photograph of Moore, without first recognising the power of the cultural taboo which previously regulated mainstream representations of pregnant women. Similarly, it is difficult to grasp the significance of the subsequent photographs of pregnant celebrities without an awareness of their reference to the Vanity Fair photograph.3 Yet, despite the fact that this could be argued to be one of the most significant photographs of its era, there has been no sustained close reading of it and its broader impact on definitions of the female body in contemporary visual cultures. This chapter offers such a reading in relation to the project of ‘thinking through the skin’. It asks: How has pregnant embodiment been figured within cultural theories of the subject? How might we read the Moore photograph in the context of the previous invisibility of the pregnant body? How does this photograph of pregnant embodiment relate to the history of foetal imagery?
