Times for birth: chronic and kairotic mediated temporalities in TLC’s A Baby Story |
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Authors: | Emily Winderman |
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Institution: | Department of Communication, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA |
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Abstract: | Despite repeated acclaim within the television industry, feminist media scholars have argued that TLC’s long-running program, A Baby Story, disciplines women into selecting obstetrical intervention by offering a standard episodic structure for understanding a complex birth experience. This article thickens this line of inquiry by arguing that TLC uses a narrow, but decipherable, range of temporalities to leverage biomedicine’s claim to childbirth. Drawing on the rhetorical concepts of chronos as narrative duration-time and kairos as interruptive moments of possibility, I argue that episodes are structured by a chronic articulation of “family completion” and “hospital biomedical duration” that conditions women to expect a kairotic interruption of selected birth plans. I conclude with implications for studying birth temporalities and rhetorically crafting women-centered birth narratives. |
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Keywords: | Mediated birth stories temporality obstetrics chronos kairos rhetoric |
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