摘要：What happens to men's masculinity in the event of childbirth and new fatherhood? In the face of demasculinization by the 'sensitive man' movement of the 1990s combined with the empowering yet simultaneously disempowering role for fathers in the medical birth setting since the 1970s, the ways men negotiate masculinity during childbirth is historically and contemporarily complex. Visual representations in film reveal masculinity at work in childbirth for either fathers or the medical institutions; Hollywood comedies situate the labouring mother within an institutionalized hierarchy of patriarchal power in the hospital.
By placing the mother under the male control of either her husband or the medical institution, as directed by prepared childbirth models adopted by hospitals (like the Lamaze Method), medicalized childbirth in Hollywood comedies function as a complicated pro-masculine project that works both for and against fathers. I have labelled this process - as reflected and reinforced in Hollywood - the masculinization project of hospital childbirth practices.
Larger questions include whether power equates masculinity, if traditional stereotypes of masculinity are actually harmful, and how pregnancy and especially birth in preparation for the emotional aspects of fatherhood may function as a 'softening' of traditional masculinity as posited by the 'real man' movement. The masculinization project manifests itself in film through the empowerment of the medical institution, the demasculinization of the individual, and the medicalization and control of the labouring woman's body. The failure of individual masculinity in the face of childbirth is a common theme, and I situate this in the larger social and medical discourses surrounding pregnancy and paternity.
