Visioning Reproductive Labour in Experimental and Artist Film Representations of Gestation and Birth

This practice-informed essay contextualizes a short film by the author through historical and contemporary representations of birthing and infant care in experimental and artist film, drawing on considerations of reproductive labour, critiques of the nuclear family form, and spectacle. Feminist responses to Stan Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving (1959) opened up a discussion of the gender politics of representing birth, especially in contrast to Marjorie Keller’s Misconception (1977). Critical responses have generally excluded the voice of Jane Brakhage, as well as birth-centric films made in a similar time frame by Gunvor Nelson. Realism, pleasure and pain, and attitudes towards the medicalization of birth are key questions regarding these films, addressed by relating documentary aesthetics, feminist epistemologies, and examinations of reproductive labour’s central role in capitalism to experimental film practice. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s conception of the virtual speculum to consider how gestation and birth are visualized, this essay goes on to consider birth, visuality, and spectacle, and whether experimental non-fiction techniques can address the spectacularization of birth. More recent films focused on the work of gestation by women, non-binary, and transgender filmmakers are considered alongside Sophie Lewis’ radical reconception of the reproductive imaginary.