Nakamura, Digitizing Race, Introduction, chapter 5, Epilogue

Avatars and the Visual Culture of Reproduction 137
this fantasy of modularity—a digitally pregnant body is simply a “regular”
stock-model female body with another “feature,” a pasted-on belly—addresses
the anxiety of permanent transformation versus transient state that preoccupies
many pregnant women. (Complaints and fears about losing “baby
weight” and “getting your body back” give voice to this particular obsession
of the gestating body.)
In addition, an analysis of pregnancy Web site signatures enables a classbased
critique of a newly forming taste culture: the visual culture of pregnancy
and the body on the popular Internet. While scholarly discussions of
visual culture and taste have long acknowledged the roles of class and to a
lesser extent gender and race, little attention has been paid to the ways
that pregnancy creates visual cultural artifacts. The sociologist Herbert
Gans notes that childbearing and child rearing do have an impact on new
parents’ media consumption by exposing them to children’s programming—
the babysitter of the lower classes—but he considers this mainly in terms of
the ways that it forces parents to give up their previous television programs.
He envisions media choices and preferences as primarily an effect of class
and other factors but does not take pregnancy and parenthood itself into
account:
Many factors determine a person’s choice among taste cultures, particularly
class, age, religion, ethnic and racial background, regional origin, and place
of residence, as well as personality factors which translate themselves into
wants for specific types of cultural content. Because ethnic, religious, regional,
and place differences are disappearing rapidly in American society, however,
the major sources of subcultural variety are increasingly those of age and class.
Thus, for Gans, “the major source of differentiation between taste cultures
and public is socioeconomic level or class.” 15 However, pregnancy is an identity
state that truly crosses classes and possesses what might be called a temporary
taste culture in the sense that once its members bear and raise their
children, they are no longer part of it.
This is not to say, however, that the visual culture of pregnancy is not
inflected by a user’s class position in terms of style and conceptions of taste.
In recent years there has been a popular movement to “rescue” the visual
culture of pregnancy from its association with lower-class taste cultures. In
“The Modernist Nursery,” an article that appeared in the New York Times
Magazine in 2004, Elizabeth Weil writes that “Melissa Pfeiffer, 33, is the
founder of modernseed, a year-old store selling modern furniture, fashions
and accessories for kids, and Eric Pfeiffer, 35, is a contemporary furniture designer,
and theirs is the kind of home that inspires house envy, particularly