15.

Primigravida

As a pregnant woman, you are identified only as this. Most people look and treat you like some delicate specimen, fragile and vulnerable. In many ways this generates a nice feeling, you walk down the street and you are recognised by the overbearing label you wear on your stomach.

A while ago I made a piece of work entitled Der Kamera (f), at the time I was playing about with control and attempting to disrupt the infamous male gaze. In doing this I experimented with pornographic imagery; projecting the frames onto my naked torso as I simultaneously tried to emulate the poses of the models. The piece is rather beautiful in form, slightly abstracted, the images of the women hi-light parts of my own as I move. I have since thought about recreating this piece now that by body has changed. I wanted to do it whilst I’m still carrying my child. I thought about how the images might distort over my contorted abdomen and about the symbolic difference the work may create. How would society react to this image of a sexualised maternal women? I believe its these ideas that teetered through my head as I took the previous black and white images in my bed.

A short while after that I was introduced to the labels ‘Gravidity’ and ‘Parity’ to refer to the number of times a woman has been pregnant (gravidity) and carried the pregnancies to a viable gestational age (parity). For example a ‘nulligravida’ is a women who has never been pregnant, whilst ‘primigravida’ (myself) refers to a woman who is pregnant for the first time, or been pregnant once. The labels go on to describe women who have had more that 3 children (multigravida), women who are over 35 and pregnant for the first time (elderly primigravida) and so with each woman, a code is constructed dependant on number of abortions, miscarriages, caesareans and vaginal births to make up parity. These labels struck me as alarming and had done for the mother who had introduced the terms to me, especially after a quick google search revealed that the same terms are used in agriculture to determine an animals milk production. Of course these are medical labels, perhaps necessary for our obstetric history. but I can’t shake the image of clinical specimen, now on a sterile conveyer belt, a machine for reproduction.

My initial idea was to share this information with other women, other mothers and see how they felt about such labels. I want to invite them to take images of themselves wearing their labels. I wonder if the images of other women will give me more of an idea of how the maternal woman is viewed. It will be certainly interesting to see how these women choose to wear their labels and take their portraits. For my own I want the label to represent that of a pageant sash, draped across my naked body. I imagine taking the images whilst still pregnant, and then again after with my child, both wearing our labelled sashes. I also wonder how society will react to images of my newborn, is it problematic to have her posed naked next to myself? Sally Mann, an influential american photographer has previously entered into this uncertain territory with her large black and white images of her children. The images are formally stunning, the children beautiful, but there is definitely something uneasy about looking at their young naked bodies.