| This dissertation examines representations of pregnancy and childbirth in avant-garde cinema and home movies, with a look at how the imagination of the domestic sphere by artists and amateurs has shifted over the past fifty years. I situate this on-going cycle of experimental and amateur cinema as a feminist (re)visioning of procreation that aims to enable birthing women's empowerment within a familial context. The inauguration of this filmic dialogue begins with experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage whose Window Water Baby Moving (1959) was initially deemed pornographic by the film laboratory and under constant threat of confiscation at film screenings. Brakhage provoked filmic responses and feminist critiques that indicated important aesthetic/political battles in the young American avant-garde's understanding of itself, the gendered politics of vision, and notions of art. This significant but under-discussed corpus of work asserts the homebirthing body as a legitimate visual subject, and includes experimental homebirth films, contemporary amateur homebirth advocacy on the Internet, and pregnancy in popular culture. I draw on film, feminist, and gender theory, avant-garde practices, cultural studies, archival research and interviews with filmmakers in order to examine the implications of this work both in and out of the art world. I posit an aesthetic trajectory that moves from (1) conscious aestheticization of form, demonstrated by Brakhage's spectacularization of corporeal filmmaking in which he applies his theories and experiences of untutored vision onto all aspects of the domestic sphere, including childbirth, and (2) aestheticization of content, demonstrated by feminist, experimental homebirth films in which the subject of birth tends to dictate the form, to (3) functional aesthetics according to the short Web video genre, which is primarily caught up in the documentary urge as opposed to an intentionally artistic one. I propose a dialogical relationship between aesthetics, politics, the artist, and the amateur, and argue that these representations extend beyond the pathologization-romanticization spectrum of representation. Indicative of personal and visual struggles against and with patriarchy and mainstream modes of representation, this aesthetic and cultural history offers insight into issues of vision, visibility, and vision making for women as mothers, artists and amateurs. |
