A Pornography of Birth: Crossing Moral Boundaries

A Pornography of Birth:
Crossing Moral Boundaries

Robyn Longhurst1
Department of Geography, Tourism and Environmental Planning
University of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, New Zealand
e-mail: robynl@waikato.ac.nz





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.

1 © Robyn Longhurst, 2006

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Key words: birth, gender, sex, pornographic film, moral boundaries
I. Introduction
Birth, in ‘the West’,2 has long been represented as a critical time in a
woman’s life when she needs to be introspective, focused completely on the labour
process and on ensuring her baby’s safe passage into the world. Birth is also widely
considered to be a private affair. Although health and medical professionals are
sometimes present to assist, the only other people who usually share the birth
process with mothers are their nearest and dearest. Occasionally friends (usually
women) are involved but birth is not considered to be a ‘spectator sport’. Birthing
women have long been expected to ‘perform’ (Butler, 1990) birth in particular
ways in particular contexts. The regulatory gender, social and cultural practices that
surround birth are established through repeated performances of expected
behaviors. Birth is widely understood to be an intimate and profound event. Shelia
Kitzinger (1989: 7), a well-known pregnancy and childbirth educator, writes of
birth “it is exciting, awe-inspiring and deeply satisfying”.
This article relays a story about a pregnant woman in Hamilton, New
Zealand,3 who is known by the media only as Nikki (her screen-name). Nikki
wanted her birth to be “exciting, awe-inspiring and deeply satisfying” but one
expects not quite in the manner imagined by Kitzinger. Nikki wanted be filmed
giving birth as a prompt for strangers’ sexual excitement and gratification - she
wanted the birth to be included in a pornographic movie. The story of Nikki aired
in July 2002 when a New Zealand 60 Minutes television documentary featured her
explaining that she planned to be filmed giving birth for a movie entitled Ripe. The
film is about a woman’s – Nikki’s – sex life during pregnancy and the final scene,
her giving birth, was to be the ‘climactic moment’. Immediately following the
television documentary a media furore erupted.

2 The phrase ‘the West’ is in quotation marks to problematise the cohesiveness or presumed
singularity of ‘the West’. ‘The West’ and ‘the East’ are not binary terms but often exist one within
the other.
3 Hamilton, located in the central North Island in New Zealand, has a population of 166 128
(Statistics New Zealand, 2003). It is New Zealand’s fourth largest city and contains the Waikato
Hospital which is a specialized 600 bed base hospital. The hospital has a staff of approximately
2500. It contains birthing facilities. Approximately 3000 women give birth at Waikato Hospital each
year (http://www.waikatodhb.govt.nz/WDHB/default.asp?content=9). Women in Hamilton can also
chose to give birth at the Waterford Birth Centre, a publicly funded, privately operated Birth Centre
for low risk births, or at home.

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The aim of this article is to draw on the story of Nikki and pornographic
film maker Steve Crow’s4 quest to have a birth filmed for a pornographic movie to
illustrate that certain sexual acts rouse anxieties and even disgust (see Church
Gibson, 2004 and Rodgerson and Wilson, 1991 on pornography, gender, and
feminism). The moral boundary between what is considered ‘normal’ and what is
considered ‘perverse’ is constantly struggled over and is temporally and spatially
specific. This pornography of birth shows that what counts as moral is tied up with
issues of gender, sexuality, class, race and so on, but also with “geographical
objects of space, place, landscape, territory, boundary and movement” (Cresswell,
2005, 128). Tim Cresswell (2005, 128) explains “a moral geography, simply put, is
the idea that certain people, things and practices belong in certain spaces, places
and landscapes and not in others”. This article shows how Nikki, through media
discourse, was constructed as a person who belonged in certain places and spaces
(brothels, strip clubs) but not in others (hospital birthing wards). The media
represented Nikki as immoral but this morality turns out to be based on a very
contingent set of societal rules and expectations.
The article is divided into five sections. The first section reviews briefly
recent research on moral geographies. My reading of this research on moral
geographies is filtered through a specific interest in Julia Kristeva’s notion of
abjection and a more general interest in feminist poststructuralist theorizing on
bodies. Second, the methodological process undertaken to conduct the research,
namely collecting and critically reading media reports, is discussed. In the third
section readers are introduced to Nikki and film-maker Steve Crow, then provided
with information about the unfolding of events surrounding the filming of the birth
of Nikki’s baby for inclusion in a pornographic film. Fourth, a critical reading of
media reports on Nikki and Crow’s plans to film is presented in order to argue that
the moral boundary between what is as considered ‘normal’ and what is considered
‘perverse’ is constantly struggled over. Unwritten rules and regulations govern
what is deemed (in)appropriate behavior for particular bodies in particular spaces
producing ‘a changing sexual landscape’ (Weeks, 1995; 2003) and constantly
shifting ‘moral geographies’ (Smith, 2000). The article concludes that Nikki
parodies the purity and naturalness of pregnancy, birth, and child-rearing by
constructing the space of the birthing ward as explicitly sexual. It is important to
open up to question what counts as moral and immoral and to show how morality is
infused with geographical notions of space, place, access and boundaries.

4 Crow is director of Vixen Direct, New Zealand’s largest pornography distribution
company, based in Auckland, New Zealand.

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II ‘Moral geographies’
Philip Hubbard (2000, 198), drawing on the work of David Smith (1997),
explains that the term ‘moral geographies’ has emerged over the past decade to
describe empirical research into those aspects of sociospatial ordering which
“invite a moral reading” (Smith, 1997, 587). (See Smith, 1997 for a useful review
of the emergence of ‘geography and ethics’ and ‘moral geographies’. Also see
Matless, 1994; Smith, 2000; Setton, 2004.) Smith (1997, 587) argues an important
role for geographers is to “take up where most philosophers leave off: to examine
the contextual thickening of moral concepts in the particular (local) circumstances
of differentiated human being[s]”.
A good example of this kind of research, and one that is particularly
relevant to this article, is Hubbard’s (1998) examination of a red-light district in
Birmingham, UK (also see Hart, 1995). Focusing on community protests against
prostitution in Birmingham, Hubbard highlights “the way that moral narratives and
discourses were deployed by protestors in their attempt to construct an idea of
community predicated on the exclusion of ‘immoral’ sex workers” (Hubbard, 1998,
55; also see Hubbard, 1997). Hubbard’s work usefully illustrates that
understanding sexualized acts and spaces is multifaceted and contradictory since
(hetero)sexuality does not stand alone but is entangled with gender, race, ethnicity,
social class, age and so on. Nikki is not a prostitute but she is involved in the sex
industry and does therefore, inhabit particular ‘moral landscapes’ (Setten, 2004) in
which a range of moral discourses about ‘appropriate’ gender, sexual, and class
behaviors apply.
Tim Cresswell (2005, 128) suggests that Felix Driver (1988) was the first to
use the term ‘moral geographies’ but its lineage can be traced through the work of
people such as Chris Philo (1987), David Sibley (1981; 1995) and indeed Cresswell
himself (1996; 1997). These works pay attention to the various ways in which
some people become constructed as outsiders and as ‘out of place’. Cresswell
(2005, 128) notes “They are out of place because they do not fit into an already
established (even if only temporarily) set of expectations about the link between
geographical ordering and behaviour.” People such as the disabled (Kitchin 1998),
children (Philo 1992; Valentine 1997), young people (Skelton and Valentine 1998),
gays, lesbians and bisexuals (Bell and Valentine 1995, Brown 2000), the homeless
(Daly, 1996), gypsies (Sibley, 1992), fat people (Longhurst, 2005), prostitutes
(Hubbard, 1998) and many Others are constituted as having no place within
‘normal’ society.

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Cresswell (2005) notes that the aforementioned geographical works on
moral boundaries, outsiders, and Others have often been variously informed by
Erving Goffman’s contributions on stigma (Goffman, 1968), Michel Foucault’s
research on ordering and discipline (Foucault, 1977; 1980), Pierre Bourdieu’s
investigations on ‘doxa’ and ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu, 1990), the Chicago School
sociologists’ earlier and later works on ‘moral orders’ and ‘deviance’ (Park and
Burgess, 1925) and psychoanalysts’ work on ‘object relations’ theory (Klein,
1990).
My reading of, and drawing on, contributions on ‘moral geographies’ has
been informed mainly by object relations theory which explores “relationships
between the self and the social and material world” (Sibley, 1995, 7). I’ve been
especially influenced by Julia Kristeva’s work on abjection (Kristeva, 1982), a
particular branch of object relations theory, which has helped further my
understanding of the some of the anxieties surrounding the boundaries between the
pure self and defiled other (see Sibley’s, 1995, 5-11 account of object relations
theory and abjection).
I have discussed the notion of abjection elsewhere (see Longhurst, 2001, 28-
32; also see Sibley, 1995, 8-9) but in short, abjection can be defined as meaning “to
expel, to cast out or away” (McClintock, 1995, 72). Kristeva uses the notion of
abjection in her book Powers of Horror (1982) to illustrate the significance of
various personalized bodily horrors for subjects (as they exist within particular
cultures) in relation to the boundaries and orifices of the body. Kristeva examines
the conditions under which the clean, decent, proper body is demarcated. The cost
of this body emerging is what she calls abjection.
Abjection is the affect or feeling of anxiety, loathing and disgust
that the subject has in encountering certain matter, images and
fantasies – the horrible – to which it can respond only with
aversion, nausea and distraction. Kristeva argues that the abject
provokes fear and disgust because it exposes the border between
self and other (Longhurst, 2001, 28; see also Grosz, 1994, 192).
Many of these insights on abjection are anchored by Mary Douglas’ work
on boundary rituals and dirt. Her now famous dictum that dirt is essentially
disorder, it is “matter out of place” (Douglas, 1966, 25) illustrates that nothing in
itself is dirty, rather dirt is that which does not belong. “The idea of dirt takes us
straight into the field of symbolism and promises a link-up with more obviously
symbolic systems of purity” (Douglas, 1966, 35). Nikki, as is illustrated in the
remainder of this article, is constructed through discourse as dirty, impure, and
dangerous. Her actions prompted, for some, feelings of fear and disgust and
abjection. One newspaper article is entitled ‘Repulsive sleaze’ (The Press, 21

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October 2002). The idea of filming Nikki’s birthing body engendered in doctors,
midwives, health board officials, Members of Parliament including the Minister of
Health, journalists, and the general public feelings of anxiety, loathing and disgust.
Consequently, there were numerous attempts by these people to reinstate Nikki’s
maternal body as clean and proper (this is discussed in more detail later in the
article).
Moral geographies, and “heretical or immoral geographies” (Cresswell,
2005, 129), that is, geographies concerned with social exclusion, ‘outsiders’,
Others, transgression and people who are said to be ‘out of place’, can be read
alongside social and cultural feminist work on embodiment, and in particular on
abjection. This work has informed the research. As I go on to illustrate, notions of
disgust, disorder, impurity and dirt are useful for thinking through Nikki’s ‘social
geography of birth’.

III A note on methods
I have been engaged in research on pregnancy for more than a decade.
During that time I have collected a small library of academic and ‘popular’
materials on pregnancy but also on birth. These include stories in lifestyle, health,
and women’s magazines, but also representation of birth on television, in
documentaries and film. I have not drawn specifically on these data in this article
but they did provide a broader context for the research.
The main data presented in this article are from two 60 Minutes television
documentaries on Nikki and newspaper articles. The first television documentary
screened in July 2002, the second (after the birth of Nikki’s daughter) on 14
November 2002. Copies of these programmes were requested and received from
New Zealand TV3 so that I could watch them a number of times. During this
period July – November 2002 I located 20 newspaper articles which appeared in
The Press, The Dominion Post, The New Zealand Herald and especially the
Waikato Times (the local newspaper in Hamilton, where Nikki was residing at the
time). Many of the articles were tracked through the website ‘nzoom.com news’. In
addition to watching the video and reading newspaper articles, I listened to several
talkback radio stations including Newztalk ZB to gauge the public’s reaction to the
story as it unfolded. While I do not draw specifically in the article on these data
from talkback radio, it was useful for gauging reactions to the story from at least
some members of the public.
I considered supplementing the data outlined above with data from
interviews. I wondered if it might be useful to talk to Nikki and/or Steve Crow,
director of Vixen Direct. However, both Nikki and Crow were claiming in media

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reports that they had been plagued by reporters. “Crow says he’s tired of all the
media attention” (Waikato Times, October 2002, 19). In the same newspaper article
the reporter writes:
The Times attempted to talk to Nikki at Waikato Hospital. She
covered her face with her hands when she saw a photographer and
reporter in the reception of ward 55 requesting a meeting. ‘I’m not
allowed to give any interviews,’ she said as she was led away by a
nurse (Holt, 19 October 2002).
Under the circumstances it seemed unlikely that I would be successful in
gaining an interview with either Nikki or Crow, nor did I want to add to the current
difficulties they were facing so I decided against attempting to interview them.
Also, in the final instance, I am most interested in the way in which Nikki and
Crow are discursively constructed through the media and the power relations
inherent within these constructions. I was not concerned with attempting to secure
the truth of the matter from the real people involved in the saga.
In analyzing the data I focused on issues on power, regimes of truth, and on
how moral narratives and discourses are deployed by various individuals and
institutions to (re)present certain images of women, birth and pornography. Stuart
Aitken’s (2005) work on textual analysis, especially on poststructural readings of
texts (248-49), is informative. Aitken argues that poststructural text analysis
involves treating texts (in this case, television and newspaper reports) as social
products and recognizing that each text refers in some way to another text. He
concludes:
At the level of textual representation, a post-structural perspective
questions not only what is known, but also how it comes to be
known. It is based upon the simple perspective that nothing in the
world is fixed or immutable, that things are grounded on moving
foundations. And perhaps most importantly, post-structuralism
questions the basis of any method that assumes a structure of
signification and understanding that is not politically based (Aitken,
2005, 248-49).
I took this approach to analyzing the data looking for the emergence of
particular themes in the re-presentations. One theme that emerged was moral
outrage. I also looked for complexities and complications that contradicted and
problematised this theme of moral outrage. I was interested in interrogating the
story-telling, but also audience responses, and my own responses to the stories.

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IV Birth rites: introducing Nikki
Tristan Taormino (2002) in New York’s The Village Voice comments on
pregnant Hollywood celebrates who she describes as ‘Hot Mamas’:
Did you see all the big bellies on TV a few weeks ago? Watching
this year’s Emmy Awards, I was struck by the number of gorgeous
pregnant women on the red carpet. From Malcolm in the Middle’s
Jane Kaczmarek to Sex and the City’s Cynthia Nixon, Hollywood
mommies-to-be were stunning and sultry. Not –oh-you’re glowing-
like-the Virgin Mary goddesses, but really hot-to-trot vixens.
(Taormino, 2002).
Taormino continues that positive portrayals of pregnant women as sexual is
“a good thing” because for too long, many people have treated pregnant women as
“utterly asexual, as fragile, [and] in ‘a delicate condition’”. While pregnancy in ‘the
West’ has undergone something of a make-over in the past decade (Longhurst,
2005) it seems that birthing has not. While some pregnant women are adopting
fashionable and sometimes revealing styles of dress as a way of resisting
constructions of the pregnant subject as modest, respectable, domestic, asexual, and
private re-presentations of birthing women do not seem to have changed as
radically.
Birth, still for the most part, tends to be seen as a special time in a woman’s
life when she needs to be focused wholly on the new life that she is about to bring
into the world. Birth is widely considered to be a personal journey. Although
midwives and medical practitioners may be present to assist the mother and baby
the only other people who tend to be present or involved are the birthing woman’s
nearest and dearest. There are societal expectations that birthing will be enacted in
particular ways. Regardless of whether it be a ‘natural’ birth, a pain-assisted birth,
a forceps delivery or a caesarean section the expectation is still that birthing women
ought to behave in culturally and gendered ‘appropriate’ ways. Nikki’s plan to be
filmed giving birth for a pornographic movie was not seen by most as an
‘appropriate’ way to birth.
Nikki worked ‘on and off’ as a stripper for several years (Holt, 24 October
2002). Her family lives in Northland, located in the upper North Island of New
Zealand, although Nikki is reported to be a former Huntly College student (Holt, 24
October 2002). Huntly is a small working class town with a population of
approximately 7,000 residents. It is located on State Highway 1, 35 kilometers
North of Hamilton. The landscape is dominated by a massive coal fired power
station (http://www.huntly.net.nz/). In the United States Nikki might disparagingly
be referred to as ‘white trash’ – she is an Other.

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Only one newspaper, the Waikato Times, in an extended weekend feature,
offered any background information on Steve Crow. He is described as holding an
honours degree in marine biology from Auckland University. Crow says:
he fell into the industry ‘quite by accident’. He was running a
computer company and, while on a business trip to Taiwan in 1993,
saw an opening to import porn-based computer games to New
Zealand. ‘It all went from there’ (Holt, 19 October 2002, 19).
The article on the saga includes a large (22cm x 25cm) colour photo of
Crow (from the waist up). He is standing, stern-faced, arms folded, in a room
walled with pornographic videos. Crow is wearing a brown collarless sweat shirt,
an earring in his left ear. He is of stocky build and has a bald/shaven head (Holt,
19 October 2002, 19). The caption under the photograph reads “STEVE CROW:
‘There was two hours of talkback this morning. They want me shot. Eveyone’s
missing the point. It’s a civil liberty issue’”.
A smaller (7cm x 6cm), head and shoulder photo of Nikki is included in the
same article. She has long brown hair, thin penciled eyebrows, dark eye-liner, dark
lip-liner, and is smiling. Her shoulders are bare except for a thin pink strap of a
halter-neck top. The caption under the photograph reads “CENTRE of attention,
Nikki”.
Nikki’s sexual/employment practices (making pornographic movies) cannot
be regarded simply as an explanatory variable for the moral outrage that ensured
during the salacious media frenzy about her birth plans. Her social class, the way
she speaks, her comportment, her ‘look’, her age (22 years), her and her family’s
place of residence, are also factors in the way her corporeality is read by the media
and the public. Notions of maternal morality can be seen to intersect with factors
such as gender, age, and social class.
After the documentary about Nikki screened the media promptly began to
debate appropriate behaviors for pregnant women and the rights of unborn children.
Nikki was dubbed the ‘porn mum’ by the media. Questions were raised as to
whether it was lawful to film the birth for a pornographic film. The case was taken
by Child, Youth and Family (CYF), a government department, to the High Court.
CYF’s sought to ascertain whether they should be given guardianship of the unborn
child and whether Nikki could be filmed giving birth for Ripe. Justice Heath
declined CYF’s application for wardship and instead appointed Nikki an agent of
the court. The filming could proceed but it was ruled that the film maker could not
use any scans of the unborn baby, or images of the newly born baby, in the movie.
This would breach the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child (which has been

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signed by New Zealand). Nor were any shots of hospital staff, patients, or visitors
to be included.
At this point, many individuals and institutions urged Nikki, for the sake of
her child, to abandon her plan for filming but she was adamant she wanted to
proceed. Government Health Minister Annette King entered the debate and used
her statutory powers to ban the filming on District Health Board Premises. King
directed the Waikato Board to say no to the filming. The Board had initially
refused to allow any filming, but changed its mind after the court ruling that
filming was lawful. Crow and Nikki began to talk to private health providers in an
effort to circumvent a ban on him using public hospitals for filming pornography.
Nikki was angry about the ban on cameras in the delivery suite saying this was
unfair because many other women take videos and photos of their birth for
sentimental reasons and to show family and friends. Nikki too claimed that she
wanted to show photos of the birth of the first grandchild to family who lived in
Northland.
During this period of legal battles, 35 week pregnant Nikki was admitted to
hospital with complications that possibly required the birth to take place in a
hospital with facilities for an emergency caesarean section. Crow announced on 30
October 2002 that “he was pulling out of the deal to film the birth” (Waikato
Times, 30 October 2002, 1) on account of Nikki’s health problems (it looked likely
that she would deliver by caesarian section). Crow’s decision to pull out may also
have been on account of the ongoing public outcry about the proposed movie. On
30 October various newspapers across the country announced “It’s a girl! Porn
actress now a mum” (Holt, 30 October 2002, 1). Following the birth of Nikki’s
daughter who was named Brianna, the media frenzy died down.

V Moral outrage: sullied spaces
At stake in the making and screening of pornographic films about pregnancy
and birth are questions about the conceptualization of pregnant, birthing, and
babies’ bodies. When birthing the borders of a woman’s body change rapidly - they
are not fixed – but rather have volatility (see Grosz, 1994, 79 on the ways in which
zones surrounding bodies change). Zones between bodies and spaces are
indeterminate both outside of bodies and inside bodies. Pregnant and birthing
bodies destabilize binaries between mother and infant, one and two, inside and
outside, self and other. Iris Young (1990, 163) explains “Pregnancy challenges the
integration of my body experience by rendering fluid the boundary between what is
within, myself, and what is outside, separate. I experience my insides as the space
of another, yet my own body.” Julia Kristeva (1981, 31 cited in Young 1990, 162)

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