Shapes of motherhood: exploring postnatal body image through photographs

This article contributes to, and extends, feminist and visual sociological scholarship by examining how a sample of pregnant women in Australia documented their postpartum experiences through digital photographs. It is argued that photography is powerful in helping women to articulate the ways in which subjectivities and bodily boundaries are reframed in the postpartum period. Dressing is used as a key example to demonstrate this. A further aim of this paper is to identify whether women's photographs can be used to contest dominant cultural ideologies and how we may read these using feminist perspectives. Throughout this article, women's individual embodied experiences of post-pregnancy are reflected in the production and viewing of their own photographic images.