Expected
Exhibition, “Birth by the Book,” Herman B Wells Library, Indiana University, 2023
When I read What to Expect When You’re Expecting during my first pregnancy, the guide activated anxiety rather than reassurance: gendered expectations, a single normative model of birth, little room for the embodied reality of the experience. Expected responds directly to that source material.
A wax-encased original copy of What to Expect is cut with an opening of exactly 10 centimeters, the dilation of the cervix at full birth. The aperture is both anatomical fact and conceptual argument: a tactile void where the guide offers only prescription.
Contained within are two original works: a poem I wrote from the highlighted pages of the original text, reordered to offer an alternative to its prescriptive logic, and an intimate photographic sequence I made documenting my first birth, a somatic record of an experience the guide does not have language for.
What to Expect is among the most widely read pregnancy guides in the United States, built around a single normative model of birth. Expected deconstructs that model from the inside, making room for embodied knowledge that conventional reproductive narratives routinely exclude.