It's All in the Delivery: Pregnancy Tropes in American Film and TV

From Lucille Ball’s real-life pregnancy on I Love Lucy, to the abortion plot on Maude, some of the most groundbreaking moments in American film and TV comedy have centered on pregnancy. In the first ever book-length study of pregnancy in popular comedy, Victoria Sturtevant examines the evolution of tropes and shows how comedy cuts through the polite evasions and sentimentality that often shroud the topic. She further argues that comedy reveals the distortions and lies that treat pregnancy as simple and natural “women’s work,” misrepresentations that rest at the heart of attacks on reproductive rights in the US.

Victoria is an associate professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She specializes in scholarship on race, class, gender, and sexuality in American popular media, particularly in comedy. Her previous book was "Hysterical! Women in American Comedy," a survey of women comics published in 2017.

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