Posted: February 27th, 2023

analyzing Explosion at Gender Reveal Party Kills Woman

analyzing

Explosion at Gender Reveal Party Kills Woman, Officials Say

By Sandra E. Garcia
The New York Times

Oct. 28, 2019

A woman in Iowa died during a gender reveal announcement on Saturday after flying
debris from an explosion from what amounted to a homemade pipe bomb struck her,
the authorities said on Monday.

The woman, Pamela Kreimeyer, 56, died instantly after she was struck in the head by a
piece of metal from a device that was intended to reveal the sex of the baby, the Marion
County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement on Monday.

Guests gather at gender reveal parties to watch expectant parents announce the sex of
their baby. The announcements have become more elaborate, with some involving
plumes of smoke, pops of confetti or explosive effects to the shades of blue and pink.

On Saturday afternoon, members of the Kreimeyer family and the expectant mother
were at a home in Knoxville, Iowa, about 40 miles southeast of Des Moines.

“Our investigation showed that members of the Kreimeyer family were experimenting
with different types of explosive material on Friday and Saturday in an attempt to record
a gender reveal that could be posted on social media for friends and family,” the
statement said.

The family was trying to create a device that could shoot colored powder into the air to
share the gender of the baby, the statement said.

Gunpowder was placed in the bottom of a homemade stand that was welded to a metal
base.

“A hole had been drilled in the side for a fuse, a piece of wood was placed on top of the
gunpowder and colored powder was placed on top of the board,” the statement said.
“Tape was then wrapped over the top of the metal tubing, inadvertently creating a pipe
bomb. Instead of the gunpowder shooting the powder out the top of the stand, the stand
exploded sending metal pieces flying.”

One of these metal pieces struck Ms. Kreimeyer in the head, “causing instant death,” the
statement said.

She was standing with other family members about 45 feet from the device. The
projectile that struck her continued 144 yards farther through the air and landed in a
field, the statement said.

“This family got together for what they thought was going to be a happy event with no
intent for anyone to get hurt,” Sheriff Jason Sandholdt said in the statement. “This is a

https://www.nytimes.com/by/sandra-e-garcia

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/pipe-bomb-rnc.html

reminder that any time someone mixes these things there is a high potential for serious
injury or death. Please do not take these unnecessary risks.”

Gender reveal parties have gained popularity on social media but some have gone awry.

A United States Border Patrol agent’s gender reveal party in Arizona last year sparked a
fire that consumed more than 45,000 acres and caused more than $8 million in
damage.

The agent, Dennis Dickey, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor violation of federal Forest
Service regulations because of the explosion at his gender reveal party. The fire, which
came to be known as the Sawmill Fire, required 800 firefighters working a week to put it
out.

In Australia, a car that began slowly expelling blue smoke to announce the gender of a
baby burst into flames. The driver, who jumped out of the vehicle, was convicted of
dangerous operation of a car.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/us/gender-reveal-arizona-fire.html?module=inline

https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2019/07/09/australia-gold-coast-brisbane-gender-reveal-burnout-accident-lon-orig.cnn

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2017.1287066

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

Carly Gieseler

Speech and Communication, department of Performing and fine arts, York College, City university of new York,
Jamaica, nY, uSa

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.

Approach

ing 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.

Introduction

Recently, my close friends found out they were having twins. After an outpouring of congratulations,
they mentioned that they would soon learn the sex of the babies. After a few more weeks, the couple
visited the doctors’ office and came out … not knowing the sex of the babies. Instead, they sealed the
results and took them to a third party who arranged a themed celebration. With close friends and
family present, the couple invited everyone outside where a photographer blindfolded them. The
party-planning third-party friend then dipped the father-to-be’s hands in a vat of paint, asked him
to embrace his wife and place his hands on her stomach as the guests gasped in delight. It was still
time for the parents-to-be to reveal the big news to each other. Placed back-to-back, they took several
dramatic paces, turned, and fired cans of silly string at each other. The blindfolds came off and their
faces registered the mess of bright pink silly string, the pink handprints across her belly, and the joy
in realizing they were pregnant with twin baby girls. From that moment, all followed suit: gifts turned
from neutral colors to multiple shades of pink; advice began pouring in about raising daughters; and
the parents themselves began researching and worrying and hoping about the future of two baby girls.
While these may seem commonplace for all parents-to-be, this once-private dialogue became public

ARTICLE HISTORY
received 9 april 2016
accepted 16 January 2017

KEYWORDS
Gender-reveal; performance;
community; visibility;
liminality

© 2017 informa uK limited, trading as taylor & francis Group

CONTACT Carly Gieseler cgieseler@york.cuny.edu

Journal of Gender StudieS
2018, Vol. 27, No. 6, 661–671

mailto: cgieseler@york.cuny.edu

http://www.tandfonline.com

662 C. GIESELER

because of the mother’s pregnancy blog, the couple’s social media posts, and the sense of community
established at that gender-reveal celebration.

My friends are part of a prominent trend: the gender-reveal party. The spectacle described is but one
of countless variations on the same theme. Sonogram results go directly from the lab to a third party
and are unleashed at the celebration, where expectant parents and guests: pop piñatas unleashing
blue or pink candies; bite into cupcakes stuffed with pink or blue filling, or open sealed boxes releas-
ing pink or blue balloons. The event typically engenders sharing on multiple social media sites. Social
media has unleashed an era of disclosure and access transforming the intimate phases of pregnancy
into public knowledge; the gender-reveal marks one of the more pivotal points in this public process.

Arguably, the gender-reveal trend speaks to deeper needs than an excuse for a party. This need may
correlate with our increased capacity for sharing, our competitive consumerism, or our drive to perma-
nently articulate moments so unfathomable or temporal. While causes and effects of cultural trends
are not overdetermined, I posit the gender-reveal party as something a part of and apart from these
motivations. The gender-reveal party offers the performative space at the threshold of life, a liminal
moment that draws on the power of communitas while creating a sense of permanence and security
in the categorization of sexual and gendered difference. In exploring this phenomenon, I analyse the
divisive media discourse surrounding this trend to reveal how these parties act as performative spaces
highlighting issues of liminality, gender, communitas and visibility.

Approach

In this essay, I focus on the performative power revealed through the gender-reveal trend. To explore
how these public performances reconfigure ideas of gender, parenthood and consumerism, I explore
several online articles and texts. Methodologically, this study is rooted in the critical analysis of mediated
texts. Gill states that ‘media culture should be our critical object’ (2007, p. 148). Focusing this media
analysis on internet websites and articles illustrates how these issues rhetorically manifest in the instant
commentary available in the online world. The online response to the growing trend shapes the con-
structions of gender, parenting and consumerism; furthermore, these constructions become themati-
cally linked across the selected online websites and articles. Analysing these images and conversations
surrounding gender-reveal celebrations provides an indicator of how both mainstream and specialized
audiences perceive this trend. This encourages critical analysis focusing on how various vocabularies
and performances of liminality, gender, communitas and visibility emerge in online discourse.

A qualitatively oriented critical analysis focusing on these performative elements permitted rec-
ognition of the consistencies and contradictions in themes across the selected texts. At the time of
writing, the top results returned when searching online for discussions and articles about ‘gender-reveal
parties’ and ‘gender-reveal’ (both with and without hyphenates) focused on ideas for throwing these
celebrations through websites like www.parenting.com and www.pinterest.com. These returns were
immediately followed by several articles with subject lines like: ‘Narcissism in Pink and Blue’ from The
New Yorker and ‘Here’s Why Gender-Reveal Parties Are the Worst’ from the Phoenix New Times. Initial
search terms were expanded to include ‘gender reveal parties narcissistic’ and ‘gender reveal parties and
cultural despair’, suggestions from the Google search engine. Expanding search terms helped ensure
the collected texts would fully reflect the tension surrounding this trend in online discourse.

This critical media analysis draws on international, national and local magazines and newspaper arti-
cles. These selected articles and commentaries came from feature pages (The New York Times; The Daily
Mail; the Phoenix New Times; The Telegraph), blogs (The Society Pages’ open-access ‘Girl w/Pen! Bridging
Feminist Research and Popular Reality’), news pages (The Telegraph), and opinion or commentary pages
(The New Yorker; WBUR’s Cognoscenti; The Washington Post). These texts were published either in print
or online form between the years of 2012 and 2015. The majority of articles were published in 2012,
marking the public recognition of this trend. However, two of three UK articles were published in 2015,
illustrating the spread of this US-born trend overseas. Further online examples were selected from
popular Internet sites, including pregnantchicken.com, laybabylay.com, and The Stir’s cafemom.com.

http://www.parenting.com

http://www.pinterest.com

JOURNAL OF GENDER STUDIES 663

These texts were chosen as representative of the larger dialogue surrounding gender-reveal parties.
The articles and websites selected guide the analysis of how discourse and performativity is constituted
through gender-reveal parties.

This study focuses on publically available content for its immediacy, access and global reach.
Analysing internet discussions and representations of gender-reveal parties provides an indicator of
how this trend is reflected in the international, popular imagination. The selected texts reveal the com-
plicated dynamic between gender, ritual and consumerism across a public discourse and performative
stage. While these are not the only discussions regarding gender-reveal parties, these online articles
and websites most relevantly reflect the popular imagination and critical implications of this trend.
While this research is not intended to systematically document all online discourse or representation of
gender-reveal parties, the focus of this critical analysis instead illustrates this trend and its performative
strategies. In fostering a critical dialogue surrounding this trend, these texts raise significant questions
regarding how gender, parenthood and consumerism are constructed globally. Prior to turning to this
analysis, I provide a theoretical context of performance and performativity illustrating the elements of
liminality, gender, communitas and visibility.

Performativity

Communication and performance merge to create a space encouraging performative strategies, rituals
and reproductions of gender, sexuality and the body. Within these performative spaces, we confront
fear, confusion, hatred, love, joy, freedom. Surviving these performances allows a ‘purging of those
emotions … all drama creates a set of expectations in the audience, and dramatic form deliberately
manipulates these expectations’ (Bell, 2008, p. 93). The community gathered for the performance works
through the cathartic cleansing; the ritual creates new sets of expectations and assumptions at the
decisive moment of liminality.

Liminality
Van Gennepp (1960) and Turner (1988) illustrate the significance of ritual transitions in performance.
Van Gennep’s notion of the liminaire – rites of passage – and Turner’s conceptualization of liminality
reveal how social drama is marked by a sense of play. These ritual transitions work across the thresh-
olds of being, performing, knowing. Goffman (1958) contributes his dramaturgical perspective to
illustrate how performance becomes a ‘doing’ of socialization which ensures all social interaction
leads to achievement and realization. Any disruptions expose the reality of how identity is created
and maintained, reinforcing the importance of performance in sustaining social realities. Goffman’s
concept of social dramas stresses the necessity of collective collaboration in the making of our social
worlds, much as the cooperation of those invited to gender-reveal parties normalize the gendered
production of a child still in the womb.

Jill Dolan speaks of the power of performance insofar as it allows a space where marginalized indi-
viduals can teach and share vocabularies ‘performatively and playfully’ (1993, p. 32). In keeping with
Dolan, there should be acknowledgement that the fluidity permitting the assumption of subject posi-
tions in performance theory also allows for shifting those positions to understand how others view the
world. Dolan marks this postmodern perception of repositioning as an opportunity ‘to keep changing
my seat in the theater, and to continually ask, “How does it look from over there?”’ (1993, pp. 95, 96).
Performance forces us to position ourselves on the edge of our seats, on the edge of identity, splaying
open the dialogue regarding exactly where this edge actually lies and how it continuously shifts.

Gender
Even as performance theory draws upon fluid identity, those seeking to fix identity are just as capable
of utilizing performance, social drama and ritualization. While parents who can afford to create gen-
der-reveal celebrations may not be considered ‘marginalized’ in terms of class, perhaps those unsettled
by an era more accepting of gender fluidity become motivated to mark their unborn children’s sex.

Performance reveals the potential of identity politics through issues of materiality, representation,
subjectivity, language and spectatorship. Butler (1988) takes up the idea of performativity to spotlight
the ways in which the body may cure, dramatize and replicate our historical contexts. As Butler sug-
gests, ‘if the personal is a category which expands to include the wider political and social structures,
then the acts of the gendered subject would be similarly expansive’ (1988, p. 523). Butler posits that
gender is akin to clothing or costume, something we don on a daily basis under the constraints and
confines of facing the world. When this act becomes repetitive, it often becomes taken for granted as
an essential fact of language.

Butler also contributes to an untangling of the essentialism/constructionism knot, a bind that often
halts feminist discourse. As Pellegrini states, ‘“sex” is a regulatory ideal or commandment, to whose per-
fect measure gendered subjects must always hopelessly approximate themselves’ (1997, p. 5). Advancing
the idea of sex as an essential truth and gender as its interpretation, the relationship instead becomes
one of performance. When we mistake sex as bound to nature and gender as borne of culture, there is
a tendency to make assumptions that sex is the basic, the natural, the real at the core of any gendered
performances. Performance enables thinking beyond the sex/gender binary and undermines attempts
in which cultural productions of gender conceal or costume themselves as basic, natural or real.

As Pellegrini argues, the body becomes ‘posed as the last and first best hope of holding the line
between nature and culture, “sex” and gender’ (1997, p. 6). Sexual difference permits the idea of sub-
ject-hood; further, it articulates the boundaries of self and Other, normative and deviant, known and
unknown. In permitting us to define the sexed or gendered self in opposition to the unknowable Other,
there is an identification of power, an establishment of superiority or inferiority to that Other. Yet, the
articulation of sexual difference or gendered identity perpetuates an anxiety that demands continuous
checking of the Other to maintain the opposition that sustains how we define ourselves.

Communitas
Collaboration, coordinated meaning and collective ritualization work as unifying survival strategies
for communities. Yet, as Pellegrini suggests, ‘collaboration also conjures up the troubling specter of
the double agent, that treasonous representative of misplaced identifications’ (1997, p. 9). Even in a
postmodern era of multiplicity and fluidity, we still strive for identification through individual or col-
lective experience. This is made evident by the gender-reveal trend. No longer are expectant parents
learning of the sex of their children in doctors’ offices or delivery rooms. What was an intimate, personal
moment has now been made a public event. The collaborative ritualization, the publication of this
moment moves beyond an excuse to party; quite possibly, this trend emerges from our deeper drive
toward collective recognition and commemoration of sexual identification. Ambiguity challenges our
need to categorize, to define in opposition to what something is not. It creates anxiety and demands
recognition for identification and, often, misidentification.

Turner’s work on liminality and communitas provides a mapping of spaces where heightened experi-
ence gathers individuals into groups to explore performative ritual and play. The ritual at the thresholds,
particularly at the limen of unborn invisibility and born visibility, manifests a none-ness and all-ness at
the confluent borders of identities while rearticulating these borders. Normative ways of doing sexual
or gendered identity in the representational field erode as the liminal community constitutes its own
internal structure for (re)producing gender at the threshold. In the communitas of the gender-reveal
ritual, identity becomes marked ‘as a time and place of withdrawal from normal modes of social action, it
can be seen as potentially a period of scrutiny for the central values and axioms of the culture in which it
occurs’ (Turner, 1967, p. 156). Inviting a public into the intimate telling of gender creates a liminal ritual,
a shelter of communitas apart from the traditional negotiations of gender identification in everyday
life. The uncontrollability of gender and identification motivates this drive to a collaborative, controlling
ritual in which gender is controlled and displaced onto the invisible unborn. As Moller states, ‘when
survival demands complete alertness and concentration, our relation to ourselves is erased, and this
can give rise to ecstatic experiences of being fused with the situation’ (2007, p. 193). Thus, the potential
space at the limen creates a potent performative strategy at one of the most significant thresholds of all.

664 C. GIESELER

Visibility
The public ritual of the gender-reveal party creates performances indicating the complex relationships
between visibility and invisibility, representation and reproduction. Phelan touches on these issues
in her exploration of the anti-abortion Operation Rescue group, especially in terms of technological
access to fetal imagery. The sudden visibility of the foetus ‘locates reproductive visibility as a term and
an image independent of the woman’s body. Once that independence is established, fetal imagery
itself becomes vulnerable to all the potential manipulations of any signifying system’ (1993, p. 132).
Many parents experience that profound bonding experience upon first viewing the sonogram; this is
the realization of a new life but also the recognition that this life must be protected. Perhaps writing
gender onto the blank canvas of the foetus achieves this goal: it is an opportunity to clarify and cate-
gorize, the first moment within that signifying system.

As Munoz suggests, ‘shuttlings and displacements are survival strategies that intersectional sub-
jects … between different communities, must practice frequently if they are to keep their residences
in different subcultural spheres’ (1999, p. 156). Munoz pushes Turner’s concept of liminality as the ulti-
mate zone of hybrid identity; this enables a move toward new political projects in performance and
productions of social possibilities for individuals and communities. The performances that engender
intersectionality work to enact and disrupt public desires and fears surrounding identities of differ-
ence (Crenshaw, 1991). And yet, they also serve as entry moments for those who need to reassert the
security and permanence of identity. When parents-to-be throw a (sex) gender-reveal party, they are
using performances as ‘both theatrical and everyday rituals … the ability to establish alternate views
of the world’ (Munoz, p. 195).

Performativity expands our knowledge, escaping our assumptions of the world, crafting critical
commentary, rejecting tradition and often, reproducing these assumptions all over again. Gender can
be storied, a way of narrating our becoming through culture, history, politics and materiality (Butler,
1990). As Burke suggests, the construction of new worlds, rituals and performances may become a
‘rejoinder to assertions current in the situation in which it arose’ (1967, p. 109). Gender-reveal parties rise
with and against our modern fragmentation of identity, our new narratives of gender fluidity. These are
ritual celebrations at that most mysterious of limens: the threshold into life. Bell speaks of the power of
performance in its abilities to move from ‘entertainment to efficacy, from role theory to performativity,
from work to play, from rites of passage to communitas’ (Bell, 2008, p. 4). Shifting from ambiguity and
uncertainty, gender-reveal parties serve as performative processes that make these moves, permitting
the illusion of shifting from the ambiguity of identity, the inexplicability of life not yet made visible.

In framing the body through representation and ritualization, there is a risk and reality of fixing
that subject in permanence (Kuppers, 2003). Performance moves toward a dialogue that is open and
ambiguous; yet much as Butler reasserts the idea that repetition can create normalization, assumption
and static expectations of identity, so too can ritualization of (sex) gender celebrations. Long gone are
the days of men passing out cigars in the waiting room if ‘It’s a boy!’ Yet, here again are the days of men
and women spending untold amounts on pink and blue surprise cakes, balloons and party favours to
share the joy of one sex over another. Even as performance offers fluid constructions and disappearances
of the self, these performances of parenting and gender reposition historical permanence. While these
ritualized performances may grant an illusory sense of security and stability, the gender-reveal trend
has also amplified the self-absorbed social ‘ME’dia moment, incited competitive consumerism, and
generated a polarizing discourse that speaks compellingly to gender construction and performance
in the postmodern moment.

Baby talk

The first published video featuring a gender-reveal event was posted on YouTube in 2008; by the time
of this writing, approximately 128,000 results are now posted to the website under ‘gender-reveal
party’. Also on YouTube, around 8880 results follow for ‘gender-reveal party ideas’, and about 11,800 for
‘gender-reveal party gone wrong’. Using Google as a larger search engine, 23,100,100 results appear

JOURNAL OF GENDER STUDIES 665

under ‘gender-reveal party’. The popular app Pinterest is filled with ideas for gender-reveal parties
and countless websites offer lists of gender celebration themes and gifts. The communicative spaces
dedicated to this trend not only offer ideas but market products to achieve the ideal image of the
celebration so that this image can subsequently be plastered across social media sites like Pinterest,
Facebook, Instagram. As Royal (2013) points out, the sharing mechanisms of Facebook, Pinterest and
Etsy have helped spread the idea for gender-reveal parties quickly, giving legs to the trend and gain-
ing advertising capital as sources. To illustrate this dialogue, I look to an array of articles detailing this
cultural phenomenon.

As with many cultural trends, gender-reveal parties create a divisive discourse regardless of contrib-
utor familiarity with the experience of pregnancy, parenthood or the parties. The gender-reveal party is
but one example of the growing trend in making the private events of parenthood public. As Williams
and Murphy suggest, ‘it’s the rare surprise party that people can give for themselves’ (2012, para. 3).
Yet there is not merely a sense of sharing that marks these moments but almost an obligation, from
pregnancy blogs to tweets about baby’s first word to Facebook pictures of baby’s first smile, crawl and
walk; the culture of hyper-mediated sharing now requires parents-to-be to become parents-to-be-shar-
ing. According to many online opinions, the gender-reveal trend is either a self-sustaining consumerist
phenomenon or a narcissistic serpent eating its own tail.

Applequist’s (2014) exploration of Pinterest’s impact on the gender-reveal trend used data from the
site to examine how US pregnancy culture reasserts commodification of the gender binary. Applequist
suggests that ‘the baby shower has been re-appropriated to reflect specific representations of gender,
using a popular social media tool as its vehicle for the message’ (p. 51). Through the reinforcement of
a link between ‘pins’ on Pinterest with pink or blue, there is a representation which elevates a neolib-
eral feminist subject and negates other categories significant to feminist positions. Furthermore, the
uniquely visual aspect of Pinterest encourages representation of gender primarily through images. The
image alone begins standing in for the intricate performances and constructions we negotiate daily.
The visual commoditization made possible through the initial gender-reveal party (in which identity
is bound to bows or bowties, pink balloons or blue cakes) is then perpetuated in the instant visual
gratification of social media reproductions.

As pregnancy blog pregnantchicken.com offers, one of the pros in not revealing gender is that it
‘puts off the gender stereotyping for a while’. The site even offers a giveaway and referral to the web-
site NotFindingOut.com where expecting parents can register and receive blue, pink or NFO items
along the pregnancy timeline. The site laybabylay.com instead offers gifts for a gender-reveal party or
announcement, using cherubic tots posing with a pre-programmed phone which will reveal the sex
of their soon-to-be sibling. On The Stir’s cafemom.com pregnancy subsite, they offered Judy Dutton’s
‘10 Creative Ways to Reveal Baby’s Gender’ exactly two months before Suzee Skwiot’s (26 May 2015)
article ‘15 Outrageously Inappropriate Gender-reveal Cakes’, in which Skwiot calls the parties ‘either
adorably exciting or just another celebration families and friends are forced to attend before baby’s
actual arrival’. Skwiot’s list of cakes asked: ‘Pistols or Pearls?’; ‘Guns or Glitter?’, ‘Badges or Bows?’ Skwiot
noted the biases in this trend, asking questions like: ‘Maybe now’s not the time to start a conversation
about the Second Amendment?’ and ‘Does this mean that girls can’t be police officers?’

Grey Allen, who writes a blog for new fathers called daddytypes.com, also critiques the gender-re-
veal party. Allen has seen countless crazes in the parenthood sharing game, yet finds this latest trend
distasteful. As Allen told the New York Times, ‘creating drama around your baby’s gender seems so
staged and fake … the whole connection of cutting into the cake to find out, like it’s a stand-in for the
uterus, is sort of sickening’ (Williams and Murphy, 2012, para. 25). While the visual element of slicing
into the ‘pregnant stomach’ or ‘baby’s blanket’ cake is somewhat unsettling, even more troubling are the
questions of ‘Rifles or Ruffles?’, ‘Badges or Bows?’ pasted across cakes. These questions create gendered
expectations and eliminate choices while the child is still a foetus.

In response to a query regarding gender-reveal parties, famed columnist Miss Manners (2014)
responded that ‘not everyone is as excited as you are about every detail of your child’s life, let alone the
pre-life’. Miss Manners also suggested that this new trend is mostly farcical: ‘You will actually get more

666 C. GIESELER

profound and prolonged joy if you reveal (or “identify”) the gender (or “sex”) one by one to individuals
who you think might genuinely be excited by the news’. Yet this is no longer the model through which
we communicate; social media has enabled all of us to become mass media sources, constantly blasting
personal messages to the masses.

The gender-reveal trend made its way to the UK with journalists commenting on it as early as 2012.
Bryony Gordon wrote in The Telegraph: ‘We have our friends in America to thank for delivering us the
latest fad’ (2012, para. 1). Gordon continued, suggesting that ‘these parties make the baby shower
– another American import … look restrained. They make the people who live-tweet their pregnan-
cies and upload their baby’s scan as their Facebook profile picture look positively private’ (2012, para.
5). Gender-reveal parties in the UK have achieved celebrity status, with reality stars like TOWIE’s Dan
Osborne and his actress girlfriend Jacqueline Jossa sharing images of a pink-filled cake slice on social
media. According to Gordon Rayner of The Telegraph, this celebrity hype was cemented during the
Duchess of Cambridge’s second pregnancy. Rayner wrote: ‘The betting public is convinced the Duke
and Duchess of Cambridge are going to have a baby girl, and they won’t be the only ones getting a
windfall if Prince George has a little sister’ (2015, para. 1). This was a comment on Kate’s parents Carole
and Michael Middleton’s Party Pieces website, which saw a correlating bump in sales. Rayner detailed
the website’s gender-reveal items, including simple tableware asking ‘girl or boy’ colored in half-pink,
half-blue, a ‘Baby Carriage Mini Pinata’, and ‘Baby Bump Measuring Game’ featuring measuring tape to
be wrapped around the suddenly public property of the mother-to-be’s pregnant stomach.

Aside from the invasive baby bump measuring tape, these items seemed relatively inoffensive com-
pared to the US gender-stereotyping of ‘Bows or Badges?’ cakes. Yet the game of gender-reveal has only
just begun in the UK; the Duchess’ pregnancy commenced the public guessing game of gender. Public
figures participating in gender-reveal trends (directly or implicitly), function to: ingrain the visibility of
the trend; make the pregnant woman’s body public property; and, permanently broadcast gendered
expectations for the unborn child. As Smith writes for the The Daily Mail.com: ‘One couple who are tak-
ing part in the act said it allowed relatives to join in with a woman’s pregnancy’ (2015, para. 9). Again,
this follows an assumption that the parents-to-be are actively inviting the public into what was once
an intimate process. To ‘join in’ creates a communal bond, yet also inscribes expectations of gender on
the foetus and thrusts the mother’s body into public domain.

In a cultural moment where events and rituals are often created to garner a share of the spotlight,
these parties have flourished. Packer comments on these manufactured customs: ‘They emerge from
an atomized society in order to fill a perceived void where real ceremonies used to be, and they end
by reflecting that society’s narcissism’ (2012, para. 5). Much of the online discourse surrounding the
gender-reveal trend springs from what Brody (2013) calls its existence ‘at the intersection of All About
Me Avenue and Oversharing Boulevard’. While gender-reveal parties may exemplify this social sharing
obsession and mediated self-absorption, there are higher stakes involved in the phenomenon.

The gender-reveal trend commoditizes a major event in parenthood and feeds several capital
interests that might never have been involved with this stage of parenting. For example, ‘Cake Boss’
Buddy Valastro claims he makes hundreds of gender-reveal cakes every month, costing between
$100 and $1000 each. Donna Vela, who owns and operates online stationary store Little Angel
Announcements, receives multiple orders every day. Williams and Murphy document how ‘creative
decorating tips for the parties have popped up on design blogs, and handmade knickknacks for
gender-reveal parties are sold on Etsy shops’ (2012, para. 12). Mediated sharing of the trend sustains
the capitalist imperative; creating the perfect image to send out into the world via social media
fuels this competitive consumerism.

The consumerist drive perpetuating the gender-reveal trend marks a great deal of the discourse. Yet
what is not mentioned as frequently is the potential for this parenting performance to widen an equity
and authenticity gap. Gender-reveal parties create clear socio-economic division between parents who
can or cannot afford to buy into this trend. This subsequently impels these increasingly lavish public
performances as parents compete to prove their worthiness in having and raising a child. Furthermore,
despite socio-economic obstacles to providing a public ritual deemed necessary to modern ideals of

JOURNAL OF GENDER STUDIES 667

pregnancy, many parents who cannot afford or cannot have access to these celebrations could become
culturally pressured into the performances anyway. This trend shifts the power from the medical insti-
tution to capitalism and further diminishes individual agency.

Beyond the critiques of capitalism and narcissism in this trend, I suggest that the gender-reveal
party acts as a reiteration of traditional social constructs, ritualizing the borders and expectations on
gendered identity that have eroded in the past few years. Of course, one of the more insidious aspects to
this trend is locked in the language. Despite the progress made in the past few years regarding gender
identity, parties that reassert the significance of a gender-reveal (or more accurately, sex-identification)
are placing significance on distinctions in sex and reifying language that we have tried to move beyond.
Brody touches on the misnomer, stating that ‘what we actually are revealing here is sex … biological and
physiological characteristics, not a social construct’ (2013, para. 17). This trend seems to circumvent social
strides toward greater acceptance of gender difference; moreover, these manufactured rituals often
negate the significance of understanding gender as an identity construct and performance unbound
to biological or physiological characteristics.

Not only does this trend encourage and ritualize gender binaries, it also creates a celebration of
gender stereotyping. Writing about these parties, Siegel said, ‘gender – and therefore gender stereo-
typing – begins in utero’ (2012, para. 3). Siegel points to sociologist Barbara Katz Rothman’s 1986 study
asking 120 pregnant women to describe how their unborn children moved in the womb. As Rothman
discovered, the women who’d already learned the biological sex offered descriptives following gen-
der stereotypes. The women aware they were carrying a girl spoke of gentle, moderate movements,
while the women who knew they were carrying boys described the movements as vigorous, jabbing
and kicking. The pregnant women who did not find out the sex of their foetus did not follow these
descriptive stereotypical patterns.

The gender-reveal party works as a parental performative act communicating expectations for the
unborn child; moreover, it seems to reassert a construction of normative gendered parenting. This is not
new, as birth announcements or baby showers worked in shades of blue and pink for years to ritualize
gender construction. Yet moving beyond previous announcements or intimate celebrations, gender-re-
veal parties work in the pervasive era of social media. These performances of intimate revelations are
now broadcast – often in real time – directly to a mass audience. This performatively inscribes the foetus
with the expectations and assumptions of gender, interpellating identity through the articulation, ritual
and publication of the gender-reveal moment.

Discussion: the big reveal

Turner speaks of social dramas as transformative, reflexive, regenerative events that act as a salve in times
of social chaos. Strong reactive movements often manifest in times of greater acceptance of diversity;
thus, perhaps even the assumed light-hearted play in celebrating a foetus’ sex illustrates Huizinga’s
(2016) suggestion that there is a seriousness of play in our culture. What many might perceive as a
period of ambiguity in gender roles, others may view as a necessary moment to recuperate fixed and
assigned gendered identity. The idea that ‘people just love a party’ or that ‘people make money off of
it’ should not be the final statements attached to this trend.

As Murphy Paul states, ‘the gender of babies always comes freighted with meaning, of a worldly and
even of a metaphysical kind’ (2010, p. 111). From the misidentifying label to the ritualized celebration of
biological discovery, gender-reveal parties subvert the cultural realization of gender that forms over the
history of a life. Instead, the gender-reveal party returns to sex as the natural core, the reality underlying
all gendered performances yet to come for the unborn child. If parents-to-be are now choosing Butler’s
‘costumes’ of gender before they are born, the ritualized nature of the gender-reveal party becomes
something that normalizes this experience. If performances of gender have already been chosen prior
to birth and ritualized through celebrations of this ‘knowledge’, the body enters the world already
tattooed by the normalizing, ritualized choices of others. This is made possible through appropriation
of the unborn body as a contested, discursive site (Phelan, 1997).

668 C. GIESELER

As Pellegrini (1997) posits, there is an anxiety pushing us toward identification, categorization and
often misidentification. This motivates the birth announcements of the past, the gender-reveal parties
of the present. The knowledge that the child will grow into a set of constructions and performances that
define and redefine gendered identity throughout history may impel this need to inscribe gendered
subject-hood onto the foetus. This ignores the performative possibilities for addressing difference and
identity without establishing or reasserting oppositions and binaries. Pre-inscribing and ritualizing the
gendered binary through the reveal party omits the potential to find identification across and through
difference.

The gender-reveal trend encourages a revision of thinking about the relationship between visibility
and power; as Phelan says, ‘visibility and invisibility within representation are always liminal’ (1993,
p. 140). To recognize, celebrate and stake that claim of gender depends on visibility as a strategy of
gaining power through representation. We seek security and identity through the representational, the
visible. Yet, when we employ seeing as the primary means of knowing, we cast ourselves (and in this
case, the unborn) into narrative scripts dictated by hegemonic language and binaries that empower
and disenfranchise based on the fixed label of sex/gender difference. Gender-reveal parties act as
collaborative mimetic representations promising security through a collective belief in identity and
witnesses to this (mis)identifying process.

Returning to Turner and his extension of van Gennep’s works on the rites of passage, the concept
of liminality illuminates the significance of ritualized steps across these social worlds. Gender-reveal
parties predicate the importance of the liminal passage from womb to world, pre-assigning and affix-
ing gendered identity to a being not yet in the world. This enables a reassertion of control through a
collective ritualization process prior to the unpredictable leap of liminality. The gender-reveal party
recalls communitas as a magical togetherness for those experiencing liminality as a group (Turner,
1967). Communitas cultivates a vibrant sense of belonging, loyalty, personal sacrifice and collaborative
commitment to a goal. In moving the act of gender-reveal from the privacy of the sonogram experi-
ence or delivery room to public spheres, parents-to-be not only publically identify and articulate the
gender of their baby, they also generate this mystical communitas. This provides a collective sharing of
that liminal moment between unborn invisibility and born visibility. The performances of articulating
gender – be it through pink or blue balloons unleashed from a box or pink or blue filling in a cupcake
– become strategies to affix the assumption of power and security in the representational field to the
ambiguous unknown of the invisible, reproductive field.

Conclusion

While Munoz (1999) argues for disidentification as a strategy to critique oppressive regimes, it is possi-
ble that parents-to-be are using ritualized performances to inscribe a perception of gender based on
biology. It is also feasible that these parents are establishing an alternate paradigm that counters the
gender fluidity of the modern era. Beyond that, it is plausible that any parent willing to celebrate and
ritualize the (sex) gender of their unborn child is also establishing parental control and categorization;
this may also serve as a strategy of protection and production through ritual and celebration. Perhaps
parents are refusing to allow the vulnerable foetus to become subjugated to the signifying system;
instead, these parents commemorate and ritualize gendered identity, staking a claim to categorical
identification for their child and protecting them from the oppressive mechanisms of the system. Yet,
this is ultimately another layer of control as the parents inscribe reproductive visibility onto the still
invisible child (Phelan, 1997). This strengthens the identification between the foetus and its named
gender (recognized sex) before the child is born. Gendered binaries support patriarchal and hegemonic
interests and institutions; therefore, the foetus is thrust into the hegemony via language and ritual as
the pregnant woman is subsumed in the province of patriarchal control.

Perhaps these rituals could serve positively to increase the participation of male partners throughout
pregnancy. While traditional baby showers have been located in the feminine realm, the gender-re-
veal party invites male partners and community members to this celebration. However, recalling the

JOURNAL OF GENDER STUDIES 669

celebration in which my male friend marked his wife’s pregnant belly pink, some rituals might reaffirm
man’s power to reclaim the woman’s body and the unborn child. Thus, as the communal nature of the
gender-reveal party may reinforce public ownership of pregnant bodies, the presentation by the male
partner might also publically rearticulate the woman’s body and foetus as his domain. These are signif-
icant considerations as the pregnant body becomes subjected to strategies of surveillance, reasserting
legacies of control over women’s bodies in relation to pregnancy and parenthood.

The trend of gender-reveal parties also inevitably preferences one gender over another. The velocity
of technological and scientific advances will produce greater power in revealing and even determining
the sex of the child. We may face an era in which sex selection of the foetus is as accepted as other
notions that were once controversial, such as prenatal testing or in vitro. Drawing from her survey of
over one-thousand Americans, Murphy Paul states that if asked to choose the sex of a child ‘by taking
a pink pill for a girl and a blue pill for a boy; 18 percent said yes, they would’ (2010, p. 136). While sex
selection still looms over the horizon, the ability to identify the sex of a foetus has never been easier.
With access to products like sex-identification kits sold in pharmacies, the ‘ever-shrinking curiosity
gap means that we will be applying our expectations and assumptions about gender to our children
sooner than ever before’ (2010, p. 137). Thus, with greater technologies, the mysteries of the unborn
child fall away.

Increased access to knowledge can be powerful but it can also be exploitive, especially when it
encourages a return to preconceived notions or biases surrounding gender differences. Finding out
the sex of the foetus is a significant moment and the right for any parent. Yet, as Siegel asks, ‘don’t
most enlightened parents these days act with shock and glee regardless of which sex is announced?
Shouldn’t we be a tad more concerned with “Who will it be?” than “What will it be?”’ (2012, paras. 5, 6).
Despite proclamations of progressive thinking regarding gender, there remains a lag in moving past
the gendered boxes surrounding the unborn child or newborn. Baby clothes, toys and decorations still
adhere to narrow constructs of gender; with the advent of the gender-reveal phenomenon, we have yet
another commoditization of identity and chance to affix gender stereotypes before the child is born.

In exploring the performative nature and the critical discourse surrounding gender-reveal parties,
there remain several questions that could be addressed in future research. While a critical media anal-
ysis against a performance studies background informs this present study, other methodological or
theoretical approaches might divulge more in exploring the gender-reveal trend. For example, an
ethnographic approach focusing on interviews with pregnant women and their partners could pro-
vide invaluable insight regarding the significance and impact of planning and ritualizing gender in
a public way. Narrative experiences of pregnant women and their partners could also contribute to
understanding issues of performances and expectations related to the parenting experience. Families
with inter-sexed children, adoptive families or families refusing to adhere to gendered binaries might
also contribute their experiences as symbolically excluded from this trend. Furthermore, a deeper inter-
rogation of how this trend impacts social implications surrounding race, ethnicity, religion and class
could be especially illuminating.

As Schechner states, ‘performances mark identities, bend and remake time, adorn and reshape the
body, tell stories, and allow people to play with behavior that is “twice-behaved”, not-for-the-first-time,
rehearsed, cooked, prepared’ (Schechner, 1998, p. 361). In the example of gender-reveal parties, these
words become eerily profound. The ritualized performance of the gender-reveal creates a space for
parents to articulate and mark the identities of their unborn children. Uniting a community permits a
collective reshaping of the now-sexed/now-gendered baby through shared stories, games and visual
celebrations linked to binaried perceptions of identity. It allows ‘twice-behaved’ performances of what
adults have learned from their own gendered construction, placed upon the intimate, private, blank
canvas of the foetus and propelled into the digital, social, public world.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

670 C. GIESELER

Notes on contributor

Carly Gieseler is an assistant professor in the Department of Performing and Fine Arts at York College – City University
of New York. She earned her doctorate at the University of South Florida in the Department of Communication; her dis-
sertation, ‘Performances of Gender and Sexuality in Extreme Sports Culture’, focuses on how the marginalized cultures
of extreme sports offer new possibilities for performing gender, sexuality and the body with and against mainstream
sports and culture. Her work focuses on issues of gender, performance, identity and representation in emerging trends
and marginalized communities.

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QUICK HIT: Six Reasons I Think Gender-Reveal Parties Are For the Birds

QUICK HIT: Six Reasons I Think Gender-Reveal Parties Are For the Birds

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• Abstract

Introduction

Approach

Performativity

Liminality

Gender

Communitas

Visibility

Baby talk

Discussion: the big reveal

Conclusion

Disclosure statement

Notes on contributor

References