PS 17323 Introduction to Cultural

Studies II: Introduction to Gender

Theory: Historical and Critical
Perspectives of #MeToo Feminism

Essay Coversheet and Academic Integrity

Statement

Please attach this sheet to the front of your essay.

Name: Martha Telschow

Student ID: 5352263

Essay Title: ‘Congratulations! It’s a beautiful human
being.’– Michael Heath
- A discourse on gendered expectations at the
example of ‘gender reveal parties’ -
Word Count (including 2065
footnotes but excluding
Bibliography):

-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­
-­-­-­-­

Declaration:

I certify that the following submission is my own work and that academic debts
and borrowings have been properly acknowledged and referenced.

Signature:

Date: 20.08.2019
Freie Universität Berlin
Institut für Englische Philologie
17323: Introduction to Cultural Studies II: Historical and Critical Perspectives of #MeToo
Dozentin: Dr. Zoe Sutherland
Sommersemester 2019
Datum: 19.08.2019

‘Congratulations! It’s a beautiful human being.’– Michael Heath

- A discourse on gendered expectations at the example of ‘gender reveal parties’ -

Martha Telschow
[email protected]
Matrikelnummer: 5352263
Kombibachelor Englisch & Informatik

Table of contents

1. Introduction 1
2. Sex vs. Gender 1
3. The problem with the naming 2
4. Gendered expectations and the construction of gender 3
5. Gender reveal parties – the anti-#metoo 4
6. Conclusion 5
7. Bibliography 6
8. Declaration of Academic Integrity 8
 1

1. Introduction

‘[…] ’sex’ is a regulatory ideal whose materialization is compelled, and this materialization
takes place (or fails to take place) through certain highly regulated practices. In other words,
‘sex’ is an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time.’(Butler 1)

By the act of being born, the sex of the child is declared by the midwife as being either
a ‘boy’or a ‘girl’ using the well-known phrase ‘Congratulations, it’s a (insert the sex of
the baby)!’. With this declaration, we are burdened with the performativity of gender
as well as societal expectations of male masculinity and female femininity (Butler 13).
Today, the declaration of the sex of a child and presumably the gender as well,
however, do not necessary take place exclusively in the delivery room anymore. In
July 2008, the first gender reveal party published on social media, was featured in The
BUMP Magazine, organized by ‘Mommy Blogger’ Jenna Karvunidis (Karvunidis,
25.07.2019). She and her husband had assembled a simple get together with close
friends and family and prepared two rubber ducky cakes, one with pink, the other with
blue filling. She blogged about this event, revealing that she was having a girl, simply
because the rubber ducky cake had shown a pink filling (McCormack). Her story was
picked up by a local magazine and with that, gender reveal parties had, over time,
started to gain traction within the online community, reaching its peak as a highly
popular search keyword in August 20171. With this paper I want to show, why gender
reveal parties are an anti-#metoo-movement and what possible impacts these parties
have on a child, that has not been born yet. By taking a closer look at Judith Butlers
Text ‘Bodies that matter’ and several other texts and articles about gendered
expectations, gendered language as well as advertising gender, I want to investigate
the importance of changing the aforementioned utterance to ‘Congratulations! It’s a
beautiful human being.’ (Key 60).

2. Sex vs. Gender

The gender of a person not born yet, cannot be determined by the correlative sex of
masculine or feminine (Jule 9). Gender is ‘[…] influenced by cultural norms and

1
Google Trends Results,
<https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2004-01-01%202019-08-14&q=gender%20reveal%20p
arty> [14.08.2019]
 2

expectations and interacts with other social variables such as age, class, regional or
ethnic identity […]’ (Berger 5). Meaning, gender-identity is a construct which is
acquired over time and ‘something that we do, not something that we have’ (ibid).
Sex, on the other hand is, for most people, determined by being born male or female
(Jule 9).2 It is related to gender but not the same thing. (ibid).

3. The problem with the naming

One of the more obvious problem with gender reveal parties is the naming of the ritual
itself. At around 12 weeks of pregnancy, the medical interpellation ‘shifts an infant
from an ‘it’ to a ‘she’ or a ‘he’’ (Butler 7). With this new knowledge about the unborn
child, some parents decide to hold a party to reveal the presumed gender of the unborn
child to themselves as well as family and friends. This celebration, however, is not
about the child itself, but rather about bringing the domain of language and kinship
onto the child through the exclamation of gender (ibid), namely boy or girl. The adult
gender identity (Money and Ehrhardt 3) the child develops in later years is not taken
into consideration. Therefore, a gender reveal party should rather be called a sex
reveal party.

The chromosomal combination passes the programming of sex to the undifferentiated

gonad, which ‘determines its destiny as testies or ovary’. (ibid 2). This determination,
however, does not have any influence on the ‘subsequent sexual and psychological
differentiation’ (ibid). The differentiation of gender is developed much later in life
during different stages of psychological and hormonal morphology (ibid 4). The term
gender reveal party does, of course, match the gender stereotyping of girls and boys
better than naming them sex reveal parties. But still, the name gender reveal party is a
faulty one. Gender is not binary as most of these parties suggest. A person is not male
or feminine per se. We are a combination of a variety of characteristics that could be
‘understood as either or both depending on the context’ (Jule 10). Even the sex of a
baby is not binary. Approximately one out of 1.666 children will be born with

2
Due to the length of this paper and the general theme, I will abstain from thoroughly discussing the
existence of further biological sexes (comp. John Money and Anke Ehrhardt in Man & woman, boy &
girl: the differentiation and dimorphism of gender identity from conception to maturity).
 3

genitalia, which cannot be determined as either being male or female (ISNA). So even
the term ‘sex reveal party’ would not fit all cases in which an ultrasound is, at the core,
the basis of this ritual.

4. Gendered expectations and the construction of gender

The general procedure of gender reveal parties has been roughly mentioned during the
introduction of this paper. Since the beginning of this trend in 2008 the market to
accommodate the need for such parties has met consumer expectations in full blown
over consumerism. If we type into google the search keyword ‘gender reveal party’,
we receive 93.700.000 matches 3. The genders portrayed via the products that are
displayed using the keywords gender + reveal + party are a construction by the mass
media in which we as consumers co-participate (Jule 39). Money and time are spent
on these gender reveal parties to construct an acceptable version of girl or boy onto the
unborn child (comp. ibid). Blue is mainly considered a boyish colour and pink a girlish
colour, thus predetermining the colour schemes for most baby reveal parties4.
Expecting parents who organize a gender reveal party, are consequently placing
gendered expectations onto their child by heavily categorizing it into either being male
or female long before meeting it for the first time.

‘If the subject is constructed, then who is constructing the subject?’ In the first case,
construction has taken the place of a godlike agency which not only causes but composes
everything which is its object; it is the divine performative, bringing into being and
exhaustively constituting that which it names, or, rather, it is that kind of transitive referring
which names and inaugurates at once. For something to be constructed, according to this view
of construction, is for it to be created and determined through that process. (Butler 6)

According to Butler the aforementioned type of the construction of gender is a

‘manipulative artifice, a conception that not only presupposes a subject, but
rehabilitates precisely the voluntarist subject of humanism that constructivism has
[…]’ (Butler 7). This exact type of construction is taking place when gender reveal
parties are held. The godlike agency being the parents who predetermine what kind of
gender they expect their child to embody. The labelling of either girl or boy then, is

3
Google Web Search Results, <https://www.google.com/gender+reveal+party> [15.08.2019]
4
Google Image Search Results, <https://www.google.com/gender-reveal-parties-image-search>
[15.08.2019]
 4

nothing but a performative utterance which, with its formulation, repeats a coded
formula (comp. Derrida 18) that predetermines the subsequent interaction with the
child, beginning with the celebratory reveal of its gender. This materialization of
gender will from then on be a kind of citationality (comp. Butler 13 - 15) which is
‘governed by the regulatory norms in order to ascertain the workings of heterosexual
hegemony’ (Butler 16). Through identification ego emerges according to Freud (Butler
13). By prematurely gendering a child, the first identification process is not acquired
through ego, but through predetermined expectations of gender. After such parties, the
gender neutral treatment of the child shifts and the family ‘begin to associate certain
gender characteristics’ (Allyson Jule 10) and ‘imagine particular future experiences
because of their babies’ sex’ (ibid). These expectations continue throughout childhood,
the teenage years and of course adulthood.

5. Gender reveal parties – the anti-#metoo

In 2017 an article featured in the The New York Times magazine (Kantor & Twohey)
brought on a movement which would soon be known as #metoo5. After the publication
of the article, several women as well as men came forward and shared their experience
with sexual harassment in the entertainment industry, forcing ‘[…] a conversation
about the intersection of gender and power setting’ (Nicolaou). The #metoo movement
put a spotlight on

women’s issues around the world, and elevated the global consciousness surrounding the
obstacles women encounter in their daily lives, both personal and professional. (Langone)

Gender is socially constructed and implicated in the institutionalised power relations

of societies, where women’s interests are subordinated to men’s (Christine Christie
119). The mainly social media based #metoo movement wants to create awareness
regarding the imbalance of power between men and women in society. To break up
this imbalance, it seems important to not only raise awareness but to stop stereotyping
gender as well. To stop stereotyping gender, one must start with the beginning. Gender

5
Due to the thorough discussions during the seminar about the #metoo moevement and the limited
length of the paper, I will not summarize the events surrounding the Harvey Weinstein scandal
 5

reveal parties, at their core, are nothing but ‘performative act’, a ‘discursive practice
that enacts or produces that which it names’(Butler 13): gendered expectations.

Gendered expectations are the beginning of the power imbalance between men and
women. Stereotyping the unborn child’s sex with either ballerina or footballplayer,
bows or moustaches, these gender reveal parties continue to nourish the inequality in
society the #metoo movement is trying to break.

Social media is driven by a specific kind of identity construction – self-mediation – and what
users post, share and like effectively creates a highly curated and often abridged snapshot of
how they want to be seen. (Khamis)

With the immense influence that platforms such as Instagram, Youtube and twitter
have on our society, we need to be aware what kind of influence popular hashtags
have. If ‘discursive practice produces what it names’ (Butler 13) we can also relate
this notion to hashtags themselves. Unlike the #metoo movement, gender reveal
parties and their presence on social media further support the imbalance of power
between men and women.

6. Conclusion

On July 25, 2019 Jenna Karvunidis revealed on her public Facebook page, that the
daughter she had once held the first gender reveal party for, is now wearing suits (High
Gloss And Sauce). She also stated,

that assigning focus on gender at birth leaves out so much of their potential and talents that
have nothing to do with what's between their legs.’(ibid)

Holding parties specifically designed to celebrate gendered stereotypes via social

media, leaves the door open for the continuation of power imbalance women and men
are still facing today. Movements like #metoo are trying to change the social narrative
and shed light on the ongoing issues between the powerless and the ones in power.
Butler refers in her work ‘Bodies that matter’ to psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan by
stating that societal law has a status as a symbolic law, preceding the assumption of
sex. It is only a symbolic law, because sex is only known through approximation that
sex occasions (Butler 14). If the performativity of gender is materialized through
 6

citationality (Butler 12), gender reveal parties are the performative act that
materializes the stereotyping of gender. Sharing these parties on social media and
glorifying them, gendered stereotypes are continuously nurtured by generations to
come, making movements like #metoo so much harder to change the power imbalance
between the tough footballplayer vs. the soft ballerina. By understanding the
imbalance such parties create, we are able to deduce that instead of holding gender
reveal parties, the celebratory notion of the general excitement over a pregnancy needs
to change to celebrate expectant parents and their beautiful human being.

7. Bibliography

Berger, Claudia. The Myth of Gender-Specific Swearing: A semantic and Pragmatic

Analysis. Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung GmbH, 1st edition, 2002.

Butler, Judith, Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of ‘sex’ (Routledge, 1993)

Christie, Christine, Gender and Language: Towards a Feminist Pragmatics

(Edinburgh University Press, 2000)

High Gloss And Sauce, Facebook Post from 25.07.2019, 05:19 p.m, Facebook,
<https://www.facebook.com/HighGlossSauce/posts/2571540479531011> [18.08.2019]

ISNA, How common is intersex?, Intersex Society of North America,

< http://www.isna.org/faq/frequency> [14.08.2019]

Jacques, Derrida, Signature, Event, Context, Limited, Inc. Gerald Gaff ed.; tr. Samuel
Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988)

Jule, Allyson, Speaking up: Understanding Language and Gender (Multilingual

Matters, 2018)

Kantor, Jodi; Megan Twohey, Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers
for Decades, The New York Times,
 7

<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/us/harvey-weinstein-harassment-allegations.ht
ml> [15.08.2019]

Karvunidis, Jenna, Tweet from 25.07.2019, 05:10 p.m, Twitter,

<https://twitter.com/HighGlossSauce/status/1154408493052358658> [14.08.2019]

Key, Mary Ritchie, Male/Female Language (The scarecrow, Inc. Metuchen, N.J.,
1975)

Khamis, Susie, Self-branding, ‘micro-celebrity’ and the rise of Social Media

Influencers, Taylor and Francis Online,
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19392397.2016.1218292>
[17.08.2019]

Langone, Alix, #MeToo and Time's Up Founders Explain the Difference Between the 2
Movements — And How They're Alike, TIME,
<https://time.com/5189945/whats-the-difference-between-the-metoo-and-times-up-mo
vements/> [17.08.2019]

McCormack, Ange, "Who cares about the gender?" Mum who started gender reveal
parties has new perspective on trend, triple J HACK,
<https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/gender-reveal-parties/11371094>
[14.08.2019]

Money, John, 1921-2006; Ehrhardt, Anke A., Man & woman, boy & girl: the
differentiation and dimorphism of gender identity from conception to maturity (New
York : New American Library. , 1974)

Nicolaou, Elena, A #MeToo Timeline To Show How Far We've Come — & How Far
We Need To Go, Refinery 29,
<https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2018/10/212801/me-too-movement-history-timeli
ne-year-weinstein> [17.08.2019]
 8

8. Declaration of Academic Integrity

Hereby, I declare that I have composed the presented paper independently on my own
and without any other resources than the ones indicated. All thoughts taken directly or
indirectly from external sources are properly denoted as such.
This paper has neither been previously submitted to another authority nor has it been
published yet.

Berlin, 19.08.2019

Martha Telschow