A Pornography of Birth: Crossing Moral Boundaries

Abstract

The aim of this article is to illustrate that the moral boundary between what is considered ‘normal’ and what is considered ‘perverse’ is constantly struggled over and is spatially specific. In order to illustrate this point I offer a critical reading of approximately 20 media reports published in October and November 2002 after a New Zealand 60 Minutes television documentary featured a pregnant woman, known as Nikki, who planned to be filmed giving birth for a pornographic movie. The article is informed by recent work on ‘moral geographies’, and Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection. The article concludes that Nikki troubles the purity and naturalness of birth by constructing the space of the birthing ward as explicitly sexual. By not complying with ‘taken for granted’, ‘common-sense’ understandings of birth and motherhood Nikki opens up for question what counts as moral and shows how this is infused with geographical notions of space, place, access and boundaries.