- Title
- You can visit Hotel Mommy : maternal bodies as browsing/consuming biotourists
- Creator
- Goriss-Hunter, Anitra
- Date
- 2016
- Type
- Text; Journal article
- Identifier
- http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/99900
- Identifier
- vital:10442
- Identifier
-
https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2014.916201
- Identifier
- ISSN:0958-9236
- Abstract
- The technologically charged public domain of cyber(cultural)space, often constructed in opposition to women, femininity, and maternity, can also be a contested scholarly space with the potential to question dominant discourses of gender, race, class, sexuality, and maternity. The cyber-realm has also interconnections to webs of commercialism and the commodification of female and maternal bodies. In order to investigate this topic's interconnections in this paper, I turn to an examination of cybermaternity in the commercial maternity web pages of the Internet. In summary, I argue that mainstream and commercialized maternity websites are domains of paradox, with the possibility of overturning the previously mentioned dominant discourses even as they are saturated in commerce, desire to render maternal bodies completely knowable and conventional tropes of maternity. To further this investigation, I turn to Kim Sawchuk's theory of biotourism to examine discourses of medico-technology and the desire to observe the inner workings of the pregnant body. I argue that this biotouristic desire is enabled by the immediacy of the websites and delivered in the jocular tone of mainstream maternity magazines. In order to further examine possible manifestations of biotourism, I also make use of Jay David Bolter's and Richard Grusin's concept of remediation: the tendency of particular media to represent and refashion other media in response to general Western cultural desires for immediacy. © 2014 Taylor & Francis.
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Relation
- Journal of Gender Studies Vol. 25, no. 1 (2016), p. 85-98
- Rights
- Copyright © 2014 Taylor & Francis.
- Rights
- This metadata is freely available under a CCO license
- Subject
- 1608 Sociology; Biotourism; Cyberfeminist; Cyberspace; Maternity; Remediation; Technology; Internet
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