Sociology

This article explores informants' negotiations around the performance of pregnancy “fitness” and “good” mothering through exercise. Although exercise has been discussed as a way to “empower” middle-class women, I suggest that this position is problematic in its co-optation of the language of “feminism” and also in its lived experience. For my pregnant informants, “liberation” through exercise was clearly contradictory. In this article, I argue that pregnant women are encouraged to embody a “fit” pregnancy. Findings suggest that there is no time in a woman's life when she is “free” to be inactive; she must constantly engage in a high-level of physical activity to maintain an appropriately feminine body and to prove her “self” “publicly” as capable.

Every morning, as I sit in my study on my faded blue office chair, my rosewood desk wedge with the shiny black and gold plated "Dr. Meredith Nash", stares me down. Received as a graduation gift from my mother, she made a point in recounting the delicate process of selecting the ' ...

In this article, I consider the distinctly classed places/spaces in which affluent Australian pregnant women physically maintain their bodies through aerobics. The case study described is drawn from data obtained between 2006 and 2008 in a longitudinal study examining feelings about body image and ‘fatness’ in a sample of pregnant women in Melbourne, Australia. The ways in which pregnant bodies are disciplined within gym spaces are discussed through a case study of a prenatal fitness centre, FitForTwo, and drawing on narrative data of pregnant informants. FitForTwo is described as a primary site for the performance of ‘fit’ pregnancy and underscored by bodies that can be shaped, trained, moulded and modified. This case study is analysed against a backdrop of a growing Australian moral panics about ‘fighting’ maternal obesity. It adds to a body of feminist geographical and qualitative studies of pregnancy, bringing both a more sustained, longitudinal analysis than previously offered, and an Australian context that offers rich comparative material.

As a tutor for many years, the impetus for this guidebook comes from my realisation of the challenging nature of interdisciplinary teaching to undergraduate students at the University of Melbourne. It is no easy feat to help students to learn one new and specialised disciplinary way of thinking; learning and
synthesising two or more disciplinary discourses poses an even greater test of one’s teaching abilities.

Given the inherent complexity of disciplinarity, integrating the
insights of a range of academic disciplines can be a hurdle for even the most motivated and bright students. Tutors confronted with interdisciplinary teaching for the first time might feel as anxious as I did in helping students to achieve this goal. Given that it is often the tutors (of any university staff) who spend the most time with undergraduate students, my own experiences and those of my peers compelled me to write the first resource guide written for small group interdisciplinary teaching.

This paper accounts for the rise of a monolithic contemporary post-feminist pregnant bridal identity that is upheld and sold as the “ultimate” pleasure of femininity in Australia, the US, and the UK. I shall critically analyse the enfranchisement of the contemporary pregnant bride as a “new” consumer identity using the purchase of a maternity wedding dress as a key example. I argue that as pregnancy is already an experience deeply embedded in the marketplace, with this comes the added pressure for pregnant women to use bridal maternity clothing to conform to normative feminine bodily ideals. This claim is supported by interviews with a sample of Australian pregnant brides as part of a longitudinal qualitative study of pregnancy and body image. I conclude that as much as the pregnant bride challenges convention, in many ways, paradigms of femininity, in this context, remain ultimately unchanged and unchallenged.

Feminist scholars have comprehensively examined why women suffer from body image woes (see Bordo, 1993). On the surface, it seems strange to think that pregnant women fear ‘fat’. After all, pregnancy is a time when women are supposed to gain weight. This article draws on longitudinal narrative data to examine experiences of weight gain and ‘fatness’ in early periods of pregnancy among women in Melbourne, Australia. Informants’ accounts demonstrate that they constantly feared that their pregnant corporealities would be ‘misread’ when they were not unambiguously ‘pregnant’. The concept of ‘in-betweenness’ is critical in challenging socio-cultural and biomedical representations of maternal weight gain and for understanding how women feel about their bodies over the duration of pregnancy. Narratives highlight the need for multiple pregnant corporealities.

This article doubles as a reflection piece and a primer in thinking about how to negotiate teaching gender in an evolving institutional climate. I argue that teaching gender in sociology sits at odds with the increasing neoliberal and postfeminist discourses, attitudes, and economics that currently structure Australian universities. First, I locate the context in which teachers of gender in sociology find themselves in Australia with an emphasis on how neoliberal and postfeminist discourses challenge students in developing a sociological imagination. Next, I examine the utility of feminist pedagogies based on my own experiences as a teacher. Specifically, I explore two strategies that I have employed in one gender-focused unit that I teach to address the challenges posed by neoliberal and postfeminist orthodoxy.