“Goals in every way moon goddess”: Shame and Instagram pregnancy
Channel: Postdigital Intimacies
Date: 2021-12-13

Adrienne Evans, Reader in Media in the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University, UK

In a recent pregnancy image posted on Instagram by celebrity Jenna Dewan, one of her followers commented “Honestly, you are goals in every way moon goddess”, while others simply stated that the image was “divine”, “timeless” and “so incredibly beautiful”. The images posted by Dewan shares much in common with a spectacular visibility of pregnancy on the platform. To represent ‘goals’, Dewan’s images and others like them presents a form of pregnancy that is cosily domestic, idyllic and normatively perfect.

In this paper, I consider how sharing pregnancy images on Instagram creates the contexts for aspiration, but also, by necessity, for shame. Following pregnancy through the hashtags #babybump, #thebump, #pregnantstyle and #bumpstyle, this mapping itself creates intimacy through a relational connection of images to each other within the platform. In my analysis, I suggest the normative expectation to live up to idyllic representations of pregnancy creates a failure of the viewing subject, so that such images are “haunted by shame” (Lasén & Puente, 2021, p.1). Aspiration/shame becomes part of Instagram pregnancy’s “moral-intimate-economic” fantasy of achieving an ideal, normal, secure life (Berlant, 2011, p.2), which is nevertheless made unattainable: it is designed to be experienced as shameful. It creates an idyllic visual landscape that is exclusionary and exclusive, while also limiting women’s roles in public life to those that are reassuringly feminine.

Adrienne Evans is Reader for Media in the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University, UK. Her research focuses on accounts of intimacy in the context of a postfeminist sensibility. In her work, she explores ways in which gender organises personal, social, intimate and cultural relationships, as well as their manifestations in media culture. She has published extensively on these topics and is the author of, among others, Technologies of Sexiness (OUP, 2014) and Postfeminism and Health (Routledge, 2018).