Gender-reveal parties: performing community identity in pink and blue

Abstract

The gender-reveal party has become the latest trend to publicize and commoditize what was once a private, intimate moment in parenthood. As this trend has grown in popularity, it has sparked a divisive discourse and reasserted normative ideals of gender. This article explores the representations and conversations surrounding this trend across newspapers, magazines and Internet sites. Approaching this phenomenon through performance and performativity illustrates how these parties highlight issues of liminality, gender, communitas and visibility. The gender-reveal party offers a performative space at the threshold of life, a liminal moment drawing on the power of communitas while creating a sense of permanence and security in the categorization of sexual and gendered difference. Uniting a community permits a collective reshaping of the now-sexed/now-gendered baby through rituals linked to binaried perceptions of identity. It allows adults to recuperate what they have learned from their own gendered constructions, reinscribing expectations and assumptions onto the unwritten body of the unborn and propelling these ideals into the digital, social, public world.