Scripts and Revelations: Notes on the Gender Reveal Party

"Scripts and Revelations" argues that the gender reveal party is a creative response to the affordances of recent technologies: prenatal tests allow us to discern fetal sex before birth, and social media platforms allow us to share intimate moments for a potentially unlimited audience. Building on the work of scholars of gender (Astri Jack, Carli Gieseler) and disability (Robert McRuer, Tobin Siebers), and interpolating his experience as the father of a young woman with Down syndrome, the author argues that gender and disability cannot be considered in separation, and that the ritual's peculiarities are, in part, a reaction to prenatal tests that disclose both fetal sex and disability status; the gender reveal party strictly separates these-celebrating one, silencing the other-and thus tends to enforce strict norms around both disability and gender. Examining blog posts about gender reveal parties sponsored by prenatal testing companies, viral videos of catastrophic accidents, and compilations of "gender reveal fails," the author considers the gender reveal party from multiple angles, including economic (the gender reveal is an expressive act within a system that monetizes expression) and technological (the ritual reveals the extent to which our lives are coextensive with digital technologies). The author then turns to personal experience, raising the question of how to publicly welcome children with disabilities and other differences, those for whom no script of welcome yet exists.