Pregnancy online: Gender representations in social media
The active involvement of Internet users in the production of visual content, made possible by the advent of digital communications, has led to a change in behavioral constants. One manifestation of this change is gender representation in the virtual space. Their study in the framework of sociological and cultural analysis of visual communications requires the expansion of the methods and techniques of scientific research used. The purpose of the work is to determine and understand the sociocultural context of those visual and verbal messages by which pregnant women represent themselves in social networks. The work contains a description of the main approaches to the selective analysis of the content of visual information presented on the Instagram network. Gender representations are presented in several contexts: moral, medical, consumer and educational. It is concluded that there is a tendency for a gradual transition of gender standards of behavior from the traditional, mostly closed type of representations to more open ones. While some women wish to hide their pregnancy, others wish to reveal. it. This type of representation in the work is called «show off pregnancy». The work shows how the combination of visual images, headlines, comments and hashtags creates a new form of social interaction of pregnant women in a virtual network environment.