Gender Reveal Party

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Blue confetti signals a male baby.

A Gender Reveal Party (English, in German about sex unveiling ceremony , a Eindeutschung is not common) in the United States , a party whose central theme is the announcement of the sex of the unborn child.

history

Gender Reveal Cake with pink filling to announce a female baby

As inventor of the "gender reveal cake" (in German about sex unveiling cake ) blogger Jenna Karvunidis, the first time in 2008 wrote about is true. Her blog article went viral on the internet and the idea found many imitators. To tell friends or the public the gender of their future child, couples cut cakes with pink or blue filling in front of the cameras. The recordings were uploaded to the video portal YouTube , which was only four years old at the time , and the photo platforms Pinterest and Instagram were added in 2010 .

For trend gender Reveal Party was, according to the marketing department of YouTube from about mid 2011. Even people who out of the reality TV were known, took part in the emerging phenomenon and have been for rezipiert in the media. In the years that followed, the concept was expanded to include other baked goods such as cake pops and cupcakes . In addition, the cutting of baked goods for the purpose of communicating gender to the public gradually became an event.

Cutting a cake is still the most popular highlight of a gender reveal party. However, since the core content of the party is merely to present a clearly recognizable area in pink or light blue, forms of presentation emerged that completely pushed the original character of cake cutting into the background.

  • The presentation of other foods or dishes such as lasagna or fortune cookies is still close to the “gender reveal cake” .
  • Playful elements are integrated into the party and work towards the proclamation of gender. Examples are scavenger hunts , puzzle games or puzzles for the parents-to-be to solve.
  • A couple from Philadelphia held pink fireworks to mark the birth of a girl. Parts of the fireworks unfortunately hit the party guests.
  • A couple from National Harbor on the east coast of the United States made the city's landmark, a 55-meter-high Ferris wheel, glow pink as part of a gender reveal party.
  • Fine-grained, colored powder or colored confetti create a cloud in the desired color and can, for example, be filled into balloons, which are then made to burst. In 2019, a married couple used an alligator to create such a color cloud. In the US state of Arizona , a man used a solid container filled with colored powder and explosives instead of a balloon and shot at it as part of his Gender Reveal Party, whereupon 180 km² of forest and bushland burned down and 800 firefighters had to be used to extinguish the fire .

The concept of the Gender Reveal Party has over time been carried over to the disclosure of other information, for example in the United States to let friends or the public know which college application a young person was successful.

General

The term “Gender Reveal Party” only defines the central theme of the party. The course of the celebration itself is therefore not fixed, apart from the fact that the focus is on announcing the gender of the expected child. The prerequisite for the party is that the gender of the fetus has been determined as part of a medical examination . In Germany, according to Section 15 of the Genetic Diagnostics Act, parents-to-be may only be informed of their gender from the 13th week of pregnancy. Expectant parents who are planning a gender reveal party usually have the necessary ultrasound examination carried out around the 20th week of pregnancy. Gender reveal parties are therefore mostly held around the middle of pregnancy. The celebration can be combined with a classic baby shower .

Most of the time, the parents leave the organization of the party to a third party and let themselves be surprised; in this case, the gender of the child is written down by the doctor and the document is handed over to another person, who then organizes at least part of the announcement as a surprise for the future parents. The most common way of communicating the child's gender is when the expectant parents cut a cake with a pink or light blue filling. The taste of the cake is rather secondary. The party guests, who sometimes wear clothes or badges in pink or light blue depending on their assumptions about the child's gender, usually bring presents for the parents. Sometimes guests are asked to bring two gifts, each of which can be assigned to a gender, and to donate the gift for the “wrong” gender to a charitable cause after the party. The announcement should be as easy to see for the party guests as possible.

The majority of the parents-to-be who host Gender Reveal Parties, in the United States at least, are heterosexual, committed, or married, white and middle-class. Due to their age, they are usually experienced in dealing with digital technologies and especially social media . An editor of the US advice website for parents-to-be, BabyCenter , stated in 2018 that, in her opinion, the organizing parents are making use of the possibility of simply announcing the child's gender with a representation of their personalities, hobbies and by creating an extravagant gender reveal party Linking views, fueled by the explosion of social media exposure. The Canadian theologian Florence Pasche Guignard sees one of the main reasons for the emergence of gender reveal parties in a “spiritual void” that established religions have left with expectant parents by not prescribing rituals for pregnancy and childbirth that would be presented to believers in other life situations and give them support and guidance. Social media acted as a catalyst in the spread of the phenomenon because couples looking to host a gender reveal party would get inspiration from watching other couples' party videos.

criticism

At the end of the 2010s, questions about how to deal with non-binary gender identities were asked for the first time in connection with gender reveal parties , as the process that had been common up until then only provided for two genders and assigned a fixed color scheme. On the one hand, transgender guests can feel marginalized at a gender reveal party, and on the other hand, the expectant child is tacitly assigned a binary gender at the party, which may not be the gender with which the future person identifies.

The blogger Jenna Karvunidis criticized the concept that she helped shape in 2019 and said it had "got out of hand". An obsession with the gender of children has developed. A single aspect of a person's personality is overemphasized. She never wanted to trigger these “weirdos”. Karvunidis wrote: “Who cares what gender the baby is? Me, back then, because it wasn't 2019 and I didn't know what I know now: that if we pay so much attention to the gender of our babies at birth, we are simultaneously missing out on so many of their potentials and talents that are not relevant have to do what's between their legs. "

Another point of criticism is that the terms “sex” (biological gender) and “gender” (social gender) are mixed up. The magazine Medium therefore suggested the terms “genital reveal party” or “sex reveal party” in an article.

literature

  • Florence Pasche Guignard: A Gendered Bun in the Oven. The Gender-reveal Party as a New Ritualization during Pregnancy. In: Studies in Religion Vol. 44 (4), pp. 479–500. SAGE Publications 2015.
  • Carly Gieseler: Gender-Reveal Parties as Mediated Events. Celebrating Identity in Pink and Blue. Lexington Books, Lanham / Maryland 2019, ISBN 978-1-79360-383-8 .

Web links

Commons : Gender reveal parties  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b NYTimes.com: It's a Girl! It's a boy! And for the Gender-Reveal Cake, It May Be the End. Retrieved June 21, 2020 .
  2. ↑ I started the 'gender reveal party' trend. And I regret it. In: The Guardian. July 29, 2020, accessed on July 7, 2020 .
  3. ↑ a b c WashingtonPost.com: How do parents find out the sex of their baby today? Exploring the trend of gender-reveal parties. Retrieved June 21, 2020 .
  4. ↑ Today.com: Surprise! First Duggar grandchild is a girl. Retrieved June 21, 2020 .
  5. ^ Pasche Guignard, p. 9.
  6. ↑ People.com: You Can Now Buy 'Gender Reveal Lasagna' Which Contains Either Blue or Pink Dyed Cheese. Retrieved June 21, 2020 .
  7. ↑ CBSLocal.com: Are Gender Reveal Parties Getting Too Extreme? Retrieved June 21, 2020 .
  8. ↑ Fox13News.com: Pet alligator helps trapper's family reveal 10th baby's gender. Retrieved June 21, 2020 .
  9. ↑ NBCNews.com: Border Patrol agent pleads guilty to starting wildfire in gender reveal gone wrong. Retrieved June 21, 2020 .
  10. ^ People.com: High School Students Are Now Revealing Their College Decisions with Cupcakes - on YouTube. Retrieved June 21, 2020 .
  11. ↑ Gesetze-im-Internet.de: Genetic Diagnostics Act: § 15 Prenatal genetic testing. Retrieved June 21, 2020 .
  12. ↑ Pasche Guignard, p. 2.
  13. ^ Pasche Guignard, p. 9.
  14. ↑ Pasche Guignard, p. 8.
  15. ↑ Pasche Guignard, p. 4.
  16. ↑ Pasche Guignard, p. 3.
  17. ^ WashingtonPost.com: A Border Patrol agent threw a gender-reveal party. He ended up starting a 47,000-acre wildfire. Retrieved June 21, 2020 .
  18. ↑ My baby, an event - derStandard.de. Retrieved July 7, 2020 (Austrian German).
  19. ↑ Marinela Potor: Gender Reveal Party: That's behind the new social media hype. In: BASIC thinking. September 6, 2019, accessed on July 7, 2020 (German).
  20. ↑ Darcy Reeder: Here's Why You Shouldn't Throw a Gender Reveal Party. September 24, 2019, accessed on July 7, 2020 .