Woah-Man: Defamiliarizing Pregnancy

A small man hugs a large man who is wearing a pink dress. The man has nearly shoulder-length blonde hair and has a visibly pregnant belly. The small man leaves the second story room and the pregnant man looks out the window at several pregnant women. He appears unhappy, and calls a woman and leaves her a message. The pregnant man flops a baby doll on a table in the process of putting a diaper on it and is reminded to be gentle with babies. Later, he is seen along with the pregnant women coming down a staircase, smiling. He improves in the baby-diaper application process, but still has immense difficulty moving his more than six-foot tall pregnant body around. He is highly emotional at times, and has difficulty getting his massive body into bed at the end.

Viktor Shklovsky asserts that “habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war” (16), and indeed, so does it also disable individuals from seeing, let alone appreciating, a woman’s experience with pregnancy. People become desensitized, and often altogether blind to, the experiences of others and the objects and images in their lives, and this is exactly how people perceive, or more accurately, do not perceive pregnant women. In response to this tendency to not “see” what is right before one’s eyes, Shklovsky explains that “art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony” (16). This clip from the film Junior certainly makes pregnancy pregnancy-y. Once one gets past the obvious humor of a man so large and so well known for being an action hero being in a pink dress and blonde wig, the viewer is forced to “see” pregnancy in all its glory. Although a large, pregnant man makes the experience and image of pregnancy shockingly grotesque, he also makes the viewer see the actions and feelings of pregnant women in a new light.