Abstract
Despite repeated acclaim within the television industry, feminist media scholars have argued that TLC’s long-running program, A Baby Story, disciplines women into selecting obstetrical intervention by offering a standard episodic structure for understanding a complex birth experience. This article thickens this line of inquiry by arguing that TLC uses a narrow, but decipherable, range of temporalities to leverage biomedicine’s claim to childbirth. Drawing on the rhetorical concepts of chronos as narrative duration-time and kairos as interruptive moments of possibility, I argue that episodes are structured by a chronic articulation of “family completion” and “hospital biomedical duration” that conditions women to expect a kairotic interruption of selected birth plans. I conclude with implications for studying birth temporalities and rhetorically crafting women-centered birth narratives.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 347-361 |
Number of pages | 15 |
Journal | Feminist Media Studies |
Volume | 17 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - May 4 2017 |
Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Keywords
- Mediated birth stories
- chronos
- kairos
- obstetrics
- rhetoric
- temporality