
Stretch exposes the form it envelopes with no means for resistance.
Introduction
Ultrasound imaging, invented in the nineteen-fifties, completed the transformation of pregnancy into a story that, by default, was narrated to women by other people—doctors, politicians, activists. In 1965, Life magazine published a photo essay by Lennart Nilsson called “Drama of Life Before Birth,” and put the image of a fetus at eighteen weeks on its cover. The photos produced an indelible, deceptive image of the fetus as an isolated being—a “spaceman,” as Nilsson wrote, floating in a void, entirely independent from the person whose body creates it.[1]
I have reached the phase where every twinge, sharp movement, run of a little foot puts my body on full alert. Is today the day? They say, “You’ll know,” but until that time comes, mysteries of the internal workings of a pregnant body remain unexplained, territories unexplored.
Conversely, the external pregnant body, the female object, has been ideological fodder for centuries. From mythology to portraits and literature, advertisements to fashion and dress, the pregnant body has been contained and controlled through the media and images we consume, the commodities we buy, the clothes we wear. Nowhere is this clearer than in the maternity jean.
As monstrous as Jekyll and Hyde, maternity jeans serve as a beacon of the pregnant body’s suppression and exposure. They tell a story of the female form. From the hips down, they are ‘normal’ pants, a ‘regular’ pair of jeans—hiding a new deformation of body—but between breast and hip a different territory is formed. In a solid line stitched inches below the belly button, a spandex band wraps around the waist to stretch over a pregnant belly. While the band may cover the bump, it simultaneously replicates its form. Thus, it is no wonder the double-bind has become a keystone of feminist theory: women are always resisting something. She is too exposed, too covered; too skimpy, too modest; too thin, too fat; too young, too old; too loose, too uptight. The female body is always in tension, its form objectified and shaped through physical (and ideological) means, and the pregnant body is no exception.
The following essay and set of drawings explore the tensioned pregnant body as a form of resistance through three methods of loose-fit: to stretch, to swell, to dilate. Rooted in subjectivity, mobility, and open-endedness, loose-fit establishes a frame for anchoring and delaminating an exterior skin from an interior structure. It resists objectifying practices of form and space making, while expanding feminist theories and histories to architecture practice. Caught between Virgin Mary and monstrosity,[2] each loose-fit method questions juxtapositions of ideologies that bind the pregnant body (liberation/containment, pleasure/shame, beauty/monstrosity); each method moves beyond the external pregnant body as rigid object to explore prenatal organs and internal workings as tensioned architectural spaces (matrix/vessel, layer/mask, threshold/trap). Here, I am particularly interested in how flexible layers of pregnant bodies can stretch to resist hard-shelled depictions of maternity that are neither suppressed in movement nor exposed in form.
to stretch: liberation/containment | loose/tight | matrix/vessel

placenta; to stretch: liberation/containment | loose/tight | matrix/vessel
From Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy: “The skin across your abdomen may be dry and itchy from all of the stretching and tightening….You may also notice pink, reddish or purplish indented streaks on the skin covering your breasts, abdomen or perhaps even upper arms, buttocks or thighs. These are stretch marks….They seem to be caused, quite literally, by a stretching of the skin, coupled with a hormone-related decrease in your skin’s elasticity.…With time, they should fade to light pink or grayish stripes, but it’s unlikely that they’ll completely disappear.”
– Myra J. Wick, Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy (Rochester, MN: Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, 2018), 169.
Stretched over every pregnant curve, Rihanna turned heads in a red lace Alaïa bodysuit and matching long gloves on the cover of April’s Vogue magazine. Her pregnant bump shaped the garment, its form an exact replica of the body underneath. She was labeled (by some) as ‘indecent’[3]—an amusing description given she is covered from shoulder to toe—but hailed (by many) for her fearlessness and beauty. As a pregnant woman myself, I was thrilled to see a prenatal body dripping with confidence and sex appeal, liberated from maternity wear (she also hates maternity jeans[4]), countering the narratives and images that continue to confine pregnant women. Why did Rihanna cause such a stir? She (and others who have dared to express their pregnant bodies) stands in stark contrast to arguably “the most definitive and prolific archetype of [pregnant] womanhood to be found in pictures”[5]: the Virgin Mary.
The ‘perfect’ woman, Mary embodies a double-bind, never touched or ‘spoiled’ and yet, a mother—pregnant through immaculate conception. As an allegory, she fulfills her duty as a woman without experiencing the pleasure or shame of sex. She is nothing but a contained vessel. As Catherine McCormack writes, “The more we consider this metaphor of the Virgin Mary, the more it starts to feel like sheer horror….Beneath the starched surface of Mary is a body that has been sealed shut, from which only breast milk and tears escape.”[6] While this paints a bleak picture, the ideologies entangled with Mary have a continuous effect on our society and culture. Even Rihanna, a revolutionary beacon of body positivity and pregnant confidence, is shown in her perfect idealized form. She has no stretch marks, appears to gain little weight other than in her baby bump or (possibly) her breasts, her body is pulled tight, starched, gorgeous, and sensual. In an image labeled “GRAND TOUR” she conjures the persona of Mary. Covered from head to toe in a black veil, she evokes a deity floating across the room, a gorgeous vessel of life.
McCormack traces the lineage of Mary to Artemis and Diana of Greek and Roman mythology, goddesses of chastity and fertility (two opposing feminine qualities that have bound women for centuries). Fortunately, she also looks further back in history, to a mother deity from early Mesopotamia—Ninhursag:
Her [Ninhursag’s] symbol is the one now known as omega in the Greek alphabet—a symbol that now signifies endings but once symbolised the open uterus, the flowing in and out of life and death. She is Tiamat, the ancient primordial goddess of creation, the slippery and germinative salt water from ancient Babylonian religion. She is the abyss at the beginning of time, known as the ‘former of all things’, or ‘Ummu-Hubur’. Before it was a sealed spring and enclosed garden, the maternal body was a boundless and incomprehensible force not made in the service of God—it was God.[7]
The body of Ninhursag presents a swelling, an opening, a surging forth. She expands, not as a starched object but an infinite field, a matrix of life. To create a matrix is to expand through a series of systems and relationships, to construct something from nothing—its “original meaning was uterus or womb, coming from the Latin word ‘mater’ or mother”[8]—and this presents a very different picture than the sealed vessel of the Virgin Mary that has come to be “embedded in our collective consciousness.”[9] As Madonna and Child have established a set of iconologies and ideologies that shape our societies’ perceptions of not only pregnancy and motherhood but tightly bound ideas of womanhood, Ninhursag invites us to explore pregnancy beyond its external shell, to venture into the internal unknown.
To step inside the pregnant body, to examine it as a matrix of infinite space, is to move beyond discussions that revolve around the bulge of child, the object of a woman’s body, how she appears to wandering eyes of the world. When viewed from within, the everchanging space of the pregnant body not only stretches to accommodate new life, it pulls tight around organs and muscles that grow, shift, loosen, become crushed. During pregnancy, a woman’s rib cage expands 2 to 3 inches in circumference,[10] her womb swells to a volume about 500 times its original size,[11] her blood volume increases by 30 to 50 percent,[12] her diaphragm is pushed upwards, her bladder pressured by the fetus. Every day brings new changes as her body is reshaped to grow more than just a child.
Specifically, she also grows the placenta. A baby forms when a sperm successfully fertilizes an egg, when two existing structures join to form something new. Once the egg has been fertilized, the matrix of the pregnant body expands. Within a few days of fertilization, the cells of the developing baby form into a blastocyst (“a group of cells arranged around a fluid-filled cavity”).[13] The inner cells of the blastocyst become the fetus, but the outer cells, the trophoblast, serve a different purpose.[14] As the blastocyst becomes embedded in the uterine wall, the uterine blood vessels are “remodeled” to pump maternal blood to the baby[15] and grow a new organ from nothing: the placenta [ 1 ]. The placenta is a “circular, flat organ that’s responsible for oxygen and nutrient exchange and the elimination of wastes between mother and fetus.”[16] It is the joint between mother and new body, the regulator of life. While the placenta grips the uterus (or womb), the baby is free to move, to float in the amniotic fluid, anchored to the placenta by the umbilical cord. This is a connection forged until after birth, when, for a moment, the placenta tethers a fleeting, loose-fit connection between mother and child, inside and outside, matrix and world.
to swell: pleasure/shame | expand/contract | layer/mask

uterus (womb); to swell: pleasure/shame | expand/contract | layer/mask
From Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy: “Swelling (edema) is common during pregnancy when your body tissues accumulate more fluid due to dilated blood vessels and increased blood volume…During the last three months of pregnancy, about half of pregnant women notice their eyelids and face becoming puffy, mostly in the morning….In the last few weeks of pregnancy, nearly all women have some swelling in their ankles, legs, fingers or face. By itself, swelling is annoying but not a serious complication.”
– Myra J. Wick, Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy (Rochester, MN: Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, 2018), 421.
To be clear, I find images like pregnant Rihanna to be empowering, to have ideological impact on the loosening and liberation of pregnant bodies. In her Vogue interview Rihanna says, “ ‘I’m hoping that we were able to redefine what’s considered ‘decent’ for pregnant women…My body is doing incredible things right now, and I’m not going to be ashamed of that. This time should feel celebratory. Because why should you be hiding your pregnancy?”[17] Makeup perfect, clothing immaculate, I find her to be everything I want to be as a pregnant woman—why hide my bump? Mask or feel shame about the miracle my body is working? Therein lies the power of images—Rihanna has made pregnancy look glamorous, has made my pregnant body feel glamorous—and such power is not limited to Rihanna. In her New Yorker article “Is Rihanna’s Pregnancy All Bump and No Grind?” Naomi Fry writes: “I recalled how, during my own pregnancy, a little more than a decade ago, for the first time since I was a small child, I wasn’t embarrassed to accentuate my own abdomen. I was unlikely to wear a belly chain, but I also wasn’t going to great lengths to cover up the reality of my changing body.”[18]
But such is the challenge of the double-bind. While images conjured by Rihanna or Fry speak of the liberated pregnant body, such bodies are also contained. While I revel in my ‘pregnancy glow,’ I can’t help but ask: what happens when the body no longer holds a child, when it ceases to be pulled tight in sensual glory, stretched over a nested body within, when it deflates, sags, softens, and wrinkles? Will it still be deemed beautiful? Empowered? Liberated? Will its loose form be celebrated? If we continue to focus solely on the pregnant vessel, are we all just Mary’s? Smooth exteriors—pure and unblemished, stiff and unyielding—fulfilling maternal destinies? Fry concludes her article by saying, “But that mentality didn’t last long, and, once my daughter was born my insecurities returned. In the public imagination, there’s nothing particularly glamorous about the postpartum body—the body that remains after the miracle of creation is done with.”[19]
To this point, while we have been reassured that our stretched, pregnant bodies are “the most lovely—and sensuous—of feminine shapes,”[20] that our changing bodies are the most natural thing in the world, the exodus of child heralds different expectations. Postpartum bodies are expected to ‘bounce-back.’ After birth, we are assured both uterus and cervix will shrink and become firm, encouraged to begin a regiment of Kegel exercises to strengthen our pelvic floors, sold any number of creams and remedies for diminishing stretch marks and melasmas. Bounce, shrink, firm, strengthen, diminish: each has a tightness, a tension, a return to a normative fit. All imply a contraction to the hard Venus of pre-birth, the starched Virgin Mary, the idealized object of female form. For “[h]er womb having performed its service, becomes obsolete….Mary is beautiful and benevolent, but, like the figure of Venus, she is more a man-made symbol than she is human. She is, as the philosopher Julia Kristeva has suggested, ‘a woman whose entire body is an emptiness through which the patriarchal world is conveyed.’”[21] And this is no wonder, given the prominence of pleasure and shame that bind motherhood and the pregnant body.
In the United States, political actions have made clear that a woman’s body is not her own. She is a vessel to be contained, her child a method of restraint. Women have inequitable access to healthcare, maternal leave, childcare. Contraceptive pills require a prescription, Plan B pills and vibrators are locked in drugstore boxes amongst hundreds of easily accessed condoms (male contraceptives), and through recent, chilling actions, abortions are highly regulated or banned. The message: women are meant to be mothers, they should not have sex for their own pleasure, and when they do have sex—even in the course of creating a child—that sex is shameful. As McCormack points out, it would seem the only pleasure woman are allowed is that of motherhood. For, “when we do see images of mothers experiencing pleasure, it tends to be focused on and fulfilled by the baby and is located anywhere but in the body of the mother.”[22] And what if we do look into the pregnant body, the swollen uterus, the physical manifestation of sexual exchange? What if we stopped and made the world look? We might find ourselves asking, as Elina Reenkola: “is a woman’s fertility, her ability to give birth, so powerful that men—and women—must invalidate and deny it, or women must guard it as their secret in order to prevent its destruction?”[23]
And nothing would seem more expansive or powerful than the uterus, or womb [ 2 ].[24] The uterus is central to the female reproductive system and plays a role in both menstrual cycle and pregnancy. It consists of three layers: the perimetrium (a soft outer shell), the myometrium (a muscular center), and the endometrium (an inner lining).[25] During pregnancy, all three layers swell to house an expanding fetus and placenta. As the baby develops, so does the uterus—it creates a loose shell around baby, amniotic fluid, and amniotic sac. Through the cervix, it connects to the birth canal and vagina—although the cervix will stay closed, plugged with mucus, until the myometrium layer[26] of the uterus begins to contract in preparation for labor. Ultimately, when the time is right, the uterus contracts to push the baby out.[27]
Most astonishingly, the uterus is a living organ that expands to not only connect a mother with this baby but all future babies. Unlike the placenta, the uterus is a flexible, infinite space that will contract back to its original size once the baby is delivered and prepare itself to swell and grow again. Blood, mucus, amniotic fluid—to stray from the hard-shelled exterior of the pregnant mother to interior realms is to veer into monstrous[28] territories.
to dilate: beauty/monstrosity | open/close | threshold/trap

cervix; to dilate: beauty/monstrosity | open/close | threshold/trap
From Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy: “One sign that labor is starting is that your cervix begins to thin (efface) and soften (ripen) in preparation for delivery. As labor progresses, the cervix eventually will go from an inch or more in thickness to paper-thin.…Your care provider may also tell you that your cervix is beginning to open (dilate). Dilation is measured in centimeters, with the cervix opening from 0 to 10 centimeters (4 inches) during the course of labor….Thinning, softening and dilation of the cervix often precede other signs of labor.”
– Myra J. Wick, Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy (Rochester, MN: Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, 2018), 202-203.
In preparation for birth, the cervix[29] [ 3 ] grows in three-dimensions. In section, it stretches during a process called effacement. It spreads from about 4 centimeters in thickness to paper thin, lengthening as it morphs and changes to wrap the baby’s head. In plan, the cervix dilates, opening from fully closed to 10 centimeters in diameter. A mother’s cervix must be both 100% effaced and 10 centimeters dilated to give birth, and even then, it does not provide a perfect fit. The baby still needs to twist and rotate, loosen and align to make a new space for herself in the birth canal. The cervix either provides a threshold for the baby into the world or traps her inside, calling for alternative measures: episiotomies,[30] birth by forceps,[31] or cesarean sections. Luckily, the pregnant body is flexible. It dilates and contracts, opens and closes to improvise and construct whatever space is necessary. Herein lies its resiliency, beauty, and uncontrollable power.
Before becoming pregnant, I had often heard, “It’s called labor for a reason.” Birth is not easy. It is testament to the strength of women. Whole chapters in pregnancy books are dedicated to pain management, but I cannot tell you how many times (usually by strangers) I have been asked, “Are you planning on having a ‘natural’ birth?”—as if any assistance (medicinal or otherwise) is ‘unnatural,’ renders me less of a woman, exposes some weakness, diminishes the feat of pushing a new life into the world. Interestingly, Doctors Myra Wick and Angela Mattke, discussing empowerment during birth, speak about the use of an epidural (a method of anesthesia used during labor and delivery[32]). They say, “It seemed like the delivery was more controlled with an epidural…even though most deliveries are a little bit chaos…there seems to be more a level of calm…especially if there has to be an intervention, like vacuum delivery or forceps.”[33] Posing low risk for mother and baby, interventions like an epidural allow a woman to retain some control over her body during birth. Why then the stigma, the emphasis on a ‘natural’ birth, the encouragement to ‘experience’ the pain often depicted of childbirth instead of embracing the possibility that some moments of labor may be “blissful”[34]? Perhaps, as McCormack notes, “birth has been made to seem too horrendous, taboo and obscene to contemplate”;[35] “the birthing body might call to mind a two-headed monster, something to fear.”[36] More likely, it about containment of that birthing body (“Unto the woman [Eve] he said, I will greatly multiply they sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.”[37]). For there is nothing more shocking than a woman who controls her pleasure and reproductive body; nothing more terrifying than a woman who knows her power.[38]
Conclusions
How then, do we engage this power?
To abandon the female body as a vessel for another and instead explore her pregnant body as a matrix (see [ 1 ] ), a spatial field, is to consider the complex position she occupies. She is neither a hard object nor static. Like the placenta she is a growing space of in-between—betwixt loose and fit, liberation and containment, inside and outside—a constantly changing body that expands and contracts to construct new space and new life.
To make visible that which is often invisible—“the woman’s body and inner life as the source of her pleasure”[39]—is to stretch open the double-bind and ask: what happens in this space? We occupy the swelling uterus (see [ 2 ]) and view into the cervix (see [ 3 ]) to tap into the power of birth, that which “has been made to seem too horrendous, taboo and obscene to contemplate,”[40] as generative of architectural space. As a form itself, the pregnant body acts in resistance. It is a flexible material pulled in tension, stretching and swelling, enveloping and nesting, dilating and shrinking. The pregnant body is a tensile structure that constructs its own space (seemingly) from nothing. A layered matrix, it resists the display of most stretch materials, housing a space within that neither objectifies the form of its nested body nor hides its bulge. The pregnant body creates a loose-fit between internal space and external form. Body within body, it is a sea of infinite possibilities.
To write about and draw the interior pregnant body is a method of activism that resists a culture posited between beauty and monstrosity. For, as Catherine McCormack has pointed out again and again, images matter. To resist depictions of the objectified and idealized pregnant body is to unmask its power. To delaminate the layers that construct its swelling material and political forms, to explore its infinite space as stemming from inside-out, to engage its stretching, growing, and loosely-fit structures (vagina, cervix, uterus, amniotic sac, amniotic fluid, placenta): these are forms of resistance.