Gender-Reveal Parties as Mediated Events

Download or read book Gender-Reveal Parties as Mediated Events written by Carly Gieseler and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-11-22 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A decade ago, it was difficult to imagine parents-to-be jumping from planes or dyeing their hair to publicly declare the sex of their unborn children. Yet gender-reveal parties have rapidly grown in popularity, saturating the public imagination surrounding pregnancy and parenthood. As a highly visible trend, gender-reveals correlate with our increased digital capacity for sharing, competitive consumerism, ritualized communitas, and social media currency. At the roots of this trend, there may be motivations to reassert binary identities against a climate of acceptance and progression surrounding gender fluidity. To analyze the divisive discourse surrounding this phenomenon, this book explores issues including technologies of reproduction and media; community and competition; visibility and signifying the unborn; consumerist imperatives; and those uninvited from this trend. In the process of selecting costumes of gender before birth, Gieseler argues, parents-to-be appropriate the unborn body as a contested, discursive site.