Gender-Reveal Parties as Mediated Events: Celebrating Identity in Pink and Blue

(Hardback)

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Description

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.

Reviews

Carly Gieseler uses a critical lens to evaluate the popular social media craze that is hard to miss: the gender-reveal party. By expertly analyzing these parties and their widespread distribution on social media, Gieseler delves into why modern couples might be drawn to them, and how technology, culture, and biology intricately intersect to reinforce an exaggerated (and misleading) gender binary. Gender-Reveal Parties as Mediated Events: Celebrating Identity in Pink and Blue helps us understand how a seemingly benign social gathering perpetuates, and ultimately strengthens, the patriarchy.--Christia Spears Brown, University of Kentucky

Author Bio

Carly Gieseler is associate professor in the Department of Performing and Fine Arts at York College, City University of New York.