Sears & Godderis 2011 (excerpts)
What is the objective of the study?
reality TV shows—A Baby Story—to examine how this “record of reality” works to challenge and/or reinforce established norms related to gender, race, class, sexuality, and ability.
What are the main discourses in A Baby Story the authors identified for study?
analysis of 24 episodes, we identify four main discourses in A Baby Story related to women and childbirth: (1) The birthing woman; (2) The birthing story; (3) The role of medicine; and (4) Agency and resistance
What is the thesis of the authors of this article?
A Baby Story constructs a specific televisual narrative that supports established gender roles and dominant social norms in relation to the event of childbirth, rather than reflecting the diversity of women’s experiences. By presenting this televisual narrative as ordinary or common A Baby Story potentially acts as a powerful element of a larger electronic panopticon that serves to surveil and discipline women and their bodies.
What are the variables studied in this article?
KEYWORDS reality TV; childbirth; gender; agency; Foucault; surveillance
What are the authors’ categories of reality TV shows?
reality TV shows into three categories: (1) Crime-oriented or emergency-service based
reality TV shows including COPS, America’s Most Wanted and Rescue 911; (2) Intimacy surveillance shows that watch and surveil people in their intimate relationships including Average Joe and The Bachelor; and (3) Lifestyle surveillance shows that focus on documenting ordinary, day-to-day experiences and conventional life transitions, including A Baby Story and A Wedding Story.
What assumptions do the show and its viewers make?
Janet Megan Jones (2003) sees as a “new interactive surveillance space” (p. 404). Reality TV relies on “the willingness of ‘ordinary’ people to live their lives in front of television cameras” (Laurie Ouellette & Susan Murray 2004, p. 6). Through this new “surveillance space,” viewers are allegedly given full access to the private lives of the participants and viewers feel as though they can fully understand the situations as they are occurring, which often involve complicated moral dilemmas.
Why does reality TV not reflect reality?
Reality TV does not reflect reality but rather redefines reality into a narrative for programming purposes. Kilborn (1994) conveys this idea when he discusses the tendency
of reality TV programmes to “package the real.” He argues that, “all the emphasis is on
producing a style of programming which is light, easily digestible, and guaranteed to bring back viewers for further helpings in the weeks to come” (Kilborn 1994, p. 426).
What is the potential that the programming, e.g., Lifestyle, exploit?
Lifestyle programming has the potential to uphold a process of “selfsurveillance,
self-monitoring and self-discipline” (Rosalind Gill 2007, p. 155), which works to
influence how we act in our daily lives, particularly “by invoking, exposing, shaming and
instructing the bad subject” (Anita Biressi & Heather Nunn 2008, p. 16). Thus, lifestyle
programming advances the idea that it is us, as individuals, that direct our futures and, of
course, are to blame if we are not successful (Biressi & Nunn 2008).
What is the key finding about A Baby Story?
A key finding was that the discursive construction of the birthing woman in
A Baby Story consistently erased signs of diversity and difference. The representation of a single type of birthing woman concealed the sociopolitical contexts that deeply affect
women’s lives by obscuring marks of difference among women. As a result, A Baby Story performs the cultural work of reinforcing gender roles and dominant social norms by representing a woman who is primarily Caucasian, unquestionably heterosexual, and
undoubtedly married as the standard or “normal” birthing woman.
What are the limitations of its TV package shown to viewers?
Does not just provide the viewer with footage of a real life birth, it also constructs the perfect televisual package for narrative purposes, demonstrating that the show is more scripted than TLC’s slogan would suggest.
The show represented the birthing process as something that required a continual reliance on medical technology
We rarely saw women debating the merits of different forms of pain relief or discussing which birthing positions or birthing behaviours to engage in. Instead, we often saw that the medical staff and the primary medical authority—the physician—made these decisions.
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