Learn It, Buy It, Work It: Intensive Pregnancy on Instagram

TLDR

Pregnancy is increasingly visible and marketed as a consumer identity, creating narrow norms of what a “normal” pregnancy or pregnant woman should be. The study examines how pregnant women portray pregnancy on Instagram, questioning whether they adopt or resist prevailing discourses and how visual and textual cues reinforce dominant narratives. The authors find that Instagram users enact pregnancy through three complementary discourses—“learn it,” “buy it,” and “work it”—which together constitute an “intensive pregnancy.”.

Abstract

This article analyzes how pregnant women perform their pregnancies on Instagram. We ask whether they rely on and reproduce pre-existing discourses aimed at morally regulating pregnancy, or reject them and construct their own alternatives. Pregnancy today is highly visible, intensely surveilled, marketed as a consumer identity, and feverishly stalked in its celebrity manifestations. This propagates narrow visions of what a “normal” pregnancy or “normal” pregnant woman should be like. We argue that pregnant women on Instagram do pregnancy via three overlapping and complimentary discourses of “learn it,” “buy it,” and “work it.” Together these form the current authoritative knowledge of pregnancy we call “intensive pregnancy” as performed on Instagram. Concurrently, this article highlights how the combined discursive power of hashtags, images, and captions may influence and enforce discursive hegemonies.