I seem to spend an inordinate time discussing pregnant celebrity weight loss and weight gain on this blog. Then I saw a fantastic article in the Globe and Mail about the pressure to lose baby weight for professional ballet dancers. Of course! Why in the world hasn't anyone discussed this before?Two ballerinas from a Toronto dance company discuss the business of being a pregnant and a ballerina:
"Being a ballerina is all about fighting your body, fighting the effects of time. It's about being preternaturally young and beautiful. You have these 20-year-olds nipping at your heels all the time. And being pregnant is about surrender to your body. You're going to gain 40 pounds. You have to deal with it. You have to accept it."
This is such an fascinating body narrative; to be ballet dancers, women are constantly in the pursuit of perfection, almost to excess. In a sense, to be a ballerina is to engage in a sort of feminine protest against the meanings and the shape of a typically feminine body (curves, breasts). As Bordo argues in obsessively pursuing slenderness and hollowness, women come to embody the 'masculine' values of the public sphere (e.g. a body that is always controlled, contained). The ballerina embodied this intersection in almost a 'battle' between male and female sides of self.
On the other hand, pregnancy is a time of constant, uncontrollable bodily change and is a bodily state striking in its inscription of extreme femininity. Self-management in pregnancy becomes more elusive, the more hotly it is pursued. Whereas a ballerina posseses a body in defiant protest of conventionally feminine body shapes, pregnant bodies not only resist cultural norms of slenderness, they constantly threaten to erupt and challenge normative femininity. As a ballerina's body is coded as a rebellion against the maternal, domestic femininity; pregnancy is the embodiment of reproduction and the maternal.
Pregnancy for a ballerina is a major career decision. "It's pretty traumatic. You worry if you will get your body back. It is your instrument for your art." The dancers in the interview reveal that that they purposely had to wait until the 'end' of their careers to fall pregnant (age 37 or 38) essentially because the 'damage' done is irreversible.
"The end of the [ballet] career happens to coincide with the end of your reproductive career. By the time you are 40, most people have finished their classical ballet careers, and most women are not having babies past 40. It's a decision all ballerinas have to make."
And we thought being a celebrity was hard work.
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