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Male pregnancy advertsing campaign

nia.pike's picture

I came across the following article while perusing the internet. I don't know how to put a link to the article in my Serendip post, so I'll just post the URL:

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2013/07/30/why-male-pregnancy-matters/

The article begins with the introduction of a new advertising campaign in Chicago meant to take an alternative approach than the usual slut-shaming of teen pregnancy campaigns. Thus, the Chicago Department of Public Health came out with the following adevrtisements:

This advertising campaign is manipulating the binary sense of gender to bring awareness that the effects of teen pregnacies do not just affect who is carrying the baby. However, by doing so brings up the fact that transgendered men can have children. And that the borders of gender are not black and white as this advertisement implies. Gender is not a binary and it is not defined by one's ability to bear children or not. In fact, I think this advertisement further installs transphobia in society with its caption of "Unexpected?" next to these images. It can be said they are using pregnant male bodies as shock value to perputate transphobia.

I put these images up on our blog as food for thought in many different realms. Our class discussions on how to define gender. How media portrays gender. How media influences us. How we disagree with media, but don't know how to react. How society is controlled by media.