Social representations about pregnancy and motherhood: analysis of Facebook posts and memes

Pregnancy and motherhood are social and cultural processes that are crossed by digital social networks. Through these, moments, ideas, and information about them are announced, made visible, and shared. The objective of this work is to analyze the social representations about pregnancy and motherhood spread and transmitted in Facebook memes. Computer memes are spread quite frequently on digital social groups of pregnant women and on the personal Facebooks of pregnant women. A computer meme (drawings, jokes, videos, or sites) is a common-sense unit of thought that displays cultural patterns and symbols. In memes, information and opinions regarding a topic are transmitted and replicated with dizzying speed. The study was qualitative, netnography was done in the Facebook Group: "Pregnant and moms of Guadalajara" and in the Facebook profiles of 23 pregnant women. The netnography was carried out between June 22, 2017, and March 10, 2019. A total of 168 memes related to pregnancy and motherhood were found and 30 memes are analyzed, with interpretative hermeneutical analysis. In the findings, it stands out that memes resort to humor and sarcasm to install criticisms of hegemonic ways of understanding pregnancy and motherhood. The social representations spread in pregnancy memes speak of neglect in medical care, obstetric violence, pregnancy as a privileged situation, beliefs about pregnancy, the emotions that a pregnant woman "should" experience, and that the transformation of the body is secondary to the relevance of well-being and love for the unborn. Also, it was identified that the social representations of motherhood revolve around ideas of sacrifice, exhaustion, lack of time for oneself, blessing, exacerbated joy, and finding the meaning of one's life.