"Check out that baby bump!" Online and print magazines, television shows, and personal blogs are awash with gossip and speculation about pregnant celebrities. What drives our cultural obsession with celebrity baby bumps? Pregnant with the Stars examines the American fascination with, and judgment of, celebrity pregnancy, and exposes how our seemingly innocent interest in "baby bumps" actually reinforces troubling standards about femininity, race, and class, while increasing the surveillance and regulation of all women in our society. This book charts how the American understanding of pregnancy has evolved by examining pop culture coverage of the pregnant celebrity body. Investigating and comparing the media coverage of pregnant celebrities, including Jennifer Garner, Angelina Jolie, Beyoncé Knowles, Kristen Bell, M.I.A., Jodie Foster, and Mila Kunis, Renée Cramer shows us how women are categorized and defined by their pregnancies. Their stories provide a paparazzi-sized lens through which we can interpret a complex set of social and legal regulations of pregnant women. Cramer exposes how cultural ideas like the "rockin' post-baby body" are not only unattainable; they are a means of social control. Combining cultural and legal analysis, Pregnant with the Stars uncovers a world where pregnant celebrities are governed and controlled alongside the recent, and troubling, proliferation of restrictive laws aimed at women in the realm of reproductive justice and freedom. Cramer asks each reader and cultural consumer to recognize that the seeing, judging, and discussion of the "baby bump" isn't merely frivolous celebrity gossip—it is an act of surveillance, commodification, and control.

Celebrity and Mediated Social Connections is a critical examination of the multiple realities of the mediated culture we traverse, extending from our imaginary inner worlds to the imagined communities of digital media. Chapters explore the dialogic at work when we connect with celebrities and internalize aspects of their personas due to the various social roles they serve within our everyday lives. What might begin as strong identification and internalization within our imaginary worlds, in this digital age, sometimes seeps out as we connect to celebrities, their fans, friends and followers in ways that were not formerly possible. The book contains topics that range from the degradation of micro-celebrities, the role of celebrities in promoting prescription drugs and their role in contemporary social movements. The common thread that runs through the book presents a mediated world that paradoxically allows if not encourages people to daydream, engage in stream of consciousness thinking and fantasize about celebrities, all while concurrently compelling us to engage in a digitally based objective world. The possibility of interaction on and through digital media intensifies the emotional connection between celebrity and fan. The more personal details one gives up, the closer we feel we become—digital intimacy based on the excessive self. Digital media entice us to engage and remain tethered to technology, staying continuously connected so as not to miss the latest post or meme. To suggest we should build a proverbial wall between the two—imaginary and objective worlds—runs counter to the reality of an always on, always connected culture in which we presently live.

America is fascinated with celebrities—from chefs to athletes to television, movie, and rock stars, and even to people who are only famous for being famous. This book explores the effect of celebrity on Americans' public and private lives. The contributors examine how celebrities bring about change, whether intentionally or unintentionally, and whether those changes are good or bad for the public that loves and follows them. They also discuss the flattening of celebrity and what the rise of pseudo celebrity portends for a society that accords fame without substantial accomplishment. Topics explored include health, philanthropy, activism, and celebrity attitudes toward feminism and police brutality—all issues that fall under the cultural magnifying glass today. Recommended for scholars of media studies, popular culture, and sociology.

This book offers a unique critique of socio-cultural constructions of pregnancy and the ways in which it is represented in contemporary culture.

This book analyzes the intersections of celebrity, self-branding, and "mommy" culture. It examines how images of celebrity moms playing versions of themselves on reality television, social media, gossip sites, and self-branded retail outlets negotiate the complex demands of postfeminism and the current fashion for heroic, labor intensive parenting. The cultural regime of "new momism" insists that women be expert in both affective and economic labor, producing loving families, self-brands based on emotional connections with consumers, and lucrative saleable commodities. Successfully creating all three: a self-brand, a style of motherhood, and lucrative product sales, is represented as the only path to fulfilled adult womanhood and citizenship. The book interrogates the classed and racialized privilege inherent in those success stories and looks for ways that the versions of branded motherhood represented as failures might open a space for a more inclusive emergent feminism.

In Manufacturing Celebrity Vanessa Díaz traces the complex power dynamics of the reporting and paparazzi work that fuel contemporary Hollywood and American celebrity culture. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, her experience reporting for People magazine, and dozens of interviews with photographers, journalists, publicists, magazine editors, and celebrities, Díaz examines the racialized and gendered labor involved in manufacturing and selling relatable celebrity personas. Celebrity reporters, most of whom are white women, are expected to leverage their sexuality to generate coverage, which makes them vulnerable to sexual exploitation and assault. Meanwhile, the predominantly male Latino paparazzi can face life-threatening situations and endure vilification that echoes anti-immigrant rhetoric. In pointing out the precarity of those who hustle to make a living by generating the bulk of celebrity media, Díaz highlights the profound inequities of the systems that provide consumers with 24/7 coverage of their favorite stars.

This collection of readings from a variety of perspectives allows readers to better understand and navigate the topic of teen pregnancy. Readers will evaluate several issues, including whether teen pregnancy is harmful to society, whether adult men cause the most teen pregnancies, and whether contraceptive-bases sex education reduces teen pregnancy. Do celebrity pregnancies encourage teen pregnancy? Is poverty a key factor in teen pregnancy? Help your readers find the answers they very definitely are wondering about teen pregnancy.

‘From Happy Homemaker to Desperate Housewives: Motherhood and Popular Television’ is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to key debates concerning the representations of motherhood, motherwork and the maternal role in contemporary television programming. The volume looks at the construction of motherhood in the ostensibly female genre of soap opera; the mother as housewife in the domestic situation comedy; deviant, desiring and delinquent motherwork in the teen drama; the single working mother in the contemporary dramedy; the fragile and failing mother of reality parenting television; the serene and selfless celebrity motherhood profile; and the new mother in reality pregnancy and childbirth television. ‘Motherhood and Popular Television’ examines the depiction of motherhood in this wide range of popular television genres in order to illustrate how the maternal role is being constructed, circulated and interrogated in contemporary factual and fictional programming, paying particular attention to the ways in which such images can be seen to challenge or conform to the ideal image of the ‘good’ mother that dominates the contemporary cultural landscape.

SuttaCentral has published an entirely new translation of the four Pali nikāyas by Bhikkhu Sujato, which is the first complete and consistent English translation of these core texts. This is an ebook version of Bhikkhu Sujato's translation of the Saṁyutta Nikāya, which can also be read at SuttaCentral website. The “Linked” or “Connected” Discourses (Saṁyutta Nikāya, abbreviated SN) is a collection of over a thousand short discourses in the Pali canon. The word “linked” refers to the fact that the texts are collected and organized by topic. In most cases the organizing principle is a particular theme of Dhamma, for example, the five aggregates, dependent origination, the noble eightfold path, mindfulness meditation, or the four noble truths. This collection contains the most extensive range of texts on these core themes. In other cases chapters are organized according to the person or kind of person who speaks. This collection has a full parallel in the Saṁyuktāgama (SA) of the Sarvāstivāda school in Chinese translation. In addition, there are two partial collections in Chinese (SA-2 and SA-3) as well as a number of miscellaneous or fragmentary texts in Chinese, Sanskrit, and Tibetan. Much of the organizational structure of SN is shared with SA, suggesting that this structure preceded the split between these two collections. This translation of Saṁyutta Nikāya was updated on March 8th, 2023.