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It is exciting to have the intellectual attention of two such thoughtful scholars. As all three of us seem to concur, there is a startling cultural trend “celebrating” pregnancy. Inevitably, we come to three differing conclusions about the emergence and potential functions of this trend and to what extent it signals something worrisome or is just part of a larger problem of a limitless free market mentality. This opportunity to respond to them allows me to use Lynne Zeavin's and Lynne Layton's (this issue) points to further expand and deepen my own ideas about the evolution of the cultural narrative of pregnancy and postpartum embodiment.
My paper was an analysis of media images and stories, and Zeavin and Layton each responded to it in a different way. Zeavin used an apt clinical example to further her own thoughts about the media obsession with pregnancy, whereas Layton responded from her own use of cultural theory. Here I focus first on some of the questions raised by Zeavin and then respond to Layton's alternative take on my observations about the media.
In her response Zeavin writes that she sees this neo cult of domesticity not as a way to deal with an uncertain future but as an attempt to avoid the present and to erase time itself. Certainly when I describe the culture's seeming obsession with pregnant celebrities, the constant blaring of terrorizing research studies about the risks of pregnancy, and the microscopic lens taken to women's bodies 2 weeks after delivery, I am highlighting what I see as a dangerous and quite ambivalent relationship to time but not an attempt to erase it. I think what is happening is that there is an attempt to control time's duration, the ways in which it unfolds.
Duration is a concept described by French philosopher Henri Bergson, who is a subject of Grosz's (2004) recent work on time. According to Grosz, “It is only the movement of time that ensures that not everything is given at once, that the universe is not over the moment it