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This paper presents an attempt to explore key aspects of an emerging phenomenon, a trend that from the US is spreading to the UK and the rest of Europe: the gender-reveal party. During a gender-reveal party, expectant parents learn and simultaneously announce the sex of their unborn child(ren) in front of an audience of friends and family through a surprise display that involves something pink or blue. The reveal is filmed and shared by the parents-to-be and by the guests on private as well as public social network profiles.
I am going to introduce the concept of gender reveal by presenting a description of the ‘liturgy’ of this ritual, based on the open access material I have encountered online, mostly on YouTube and Instagram, before turning to an exploration of some of the symbolic aspects of this practice from a psychoanalytic perspective, in the context of object-relation theory.
It is beyond the scope of this paper to explore ideas around the construction of gender and its paradigms. Moreover, this paper does not aim to speculate on the possible impact of the gender-reveal practice on the children whose sex is being revealed or on the implications of the dissemination of photos and videos of the event on private and public social media channels.
This paper and the way I refer to the expectant parents reflect the context in which the gender-reveal party has emerged and proliferated: its principal performers are predominantly heterosexual, married or partnered parents, and in most of the cases also white and middle-class.
A mainstream part of US pregnancies, and increasingly of pregnancies in the UK and the rest of Europe, is a theatrical reveal of the sex of the unborn child(ren) during a gathering hosted by their expectant parents. It is typical for the parents-to-be to ask the midwife not to tell them the sex of the child they are expecting when this is discernible from routine examinations and to request instead that they write down t