Miniseries and the Maternal Body: Race, Class, and Reproductive Governance on Television

• In Event: Mediating Affect Onscreen and Online

Abstract

Reproductive politics in American culture have reached a critical juncture, marked by the overturning of Roe v. Wade. This landmark decision, which affirmed the right to choose for nearly half a century and implicitly supported bodily autonomy, has now been dismantled. In the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, embryonic personhood laws have begun to threaten the use of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). At the same time, the Pope’s call for a universal ban on surrogacy has ignited a global conversation about the ethics of reproductive labor. Amid this climate of uncertainty, American television has played a pivotal role in responding to seismic shifts in reproductive politics.
This paper examines how contemporary miniseries—including Top of the Lake: China Girl (Sundance 2017), Little Fires Everywhere (Hulu 2020), and Dead Ringers (Amazon Prime 2023)—engage with reproductive labor through narratives confronting in/fertility, surrogacy, and adoption. As feminist television scholars have demonstrated, representations of the reproductive body—whether through pregnancy (Dow 1996; Davies and Smith 1998; Feasey 2012), abortion (D’Acci 1999; Hendershot 2009), or childbirth (Morris et al. 2010; Sears et al. 2011; Winderman 2017)—have historically been fraught. Situating my analysis within feminist television criticism and motherhood studies, I explore how these recent miniseries intervene in a television industry that has often distorted the terms on which discussions of reproductive politics hinge.
Drawing on Douglas Kellner’s argument that the rise of the miniseries as a popular form allows for more complex storytelling and more profound critiques of contemporary crises, I ask: How does the miniseries reflect cultural and political anxieties surrounding reproductive politics in late-stage empires? Through narrative and textual analysis, this paper argues that these miniseries actively respond to and critique the ongoing erosion of reproductive rights, particularly in the post-Roe era, and how race, class, and citizenship intersect to determine who can be a mother. They do so through different interventions into systems governing reproduction and reproductive agency. For instance, Top of the Lake: China Girl engages with the exploitative dimensions of transnational surrogacy, while Little Fires Everywhere foregrounds the racial and class-based exclusions embedded in reproductive governance through narratives about US-based legal and immigration systems. Dead Ringers exposes the capitalist medical system’s disregard for marginalized women’s bodies to highlight the reproductive crises produced by profit-driven reproductive healthcare.
Together, these texts engage with reproductive politics, racial capitalism, and state violence—foregrounding race, class, and gender in ways that other surrogacy narratives often sideline. While the fight over reproductive autonomy continues in our post-Roe world, television remains a crucial site of cultural critique, with recent miniseries illustrating the racialized, classist, and imperialist methods of controlling reproductive bodies and arbitrating who is and is not allowed to be a mother.

Biographical Information

With a background in Women and Gender Studies and Film and Television Studies, my research examines how contemporary media represents the reproductive body in terms of sexuality, agency, and purpose. In the American Studies Doctoral program at Boston University, I focus on mediated discourses around the reproductive and maternal body and its intersection with reproductive politics. My dissertation, “Womb For Rent: The Politics of Surrogacy, Reproduction, and Motherhood on Television,” explores how television news coverage of surrogacy and surrogacy storylines on scripted series shape, challenge, and remake the boundaries of family, motherhood, reproduction, bodily autonomy, and personhood in American culture. You can find my work in the Feminist Media Studies journal and the forthcoming collections, Routledge Companion to Motherhood On Screen and Gendered/Transgendered Bodies in Popular Culture Since 2010.

Author

• Reut Odinak