“More like a drug cartel than a baby plan”: A multimodal analysis of infertility GIFs on Reddit

This research presents a multimodal analysis of 189 infertility GIFs collected from the subreddit <i>r/trollingforababy</i> over a 12-month period. Drawing on symbolic interactionism and Bakhtinian concepts, the analysis examines how users repurpose popular culture imagery to narrate infertility struggles on digital platforms. Three major themes emerged: temporal disjuncture and the symbolic weight of waiting, dialogic resistance and carnivalesque inversion of infertility social scripts, and the grotesque medicalized body and the politics of visibility. Across the three themes, GIFs emerge as symbolic performances that enable users to negotiate stigma, build collective meaning, and resist dominant reproductive ideologies, positioning infertility as not only a medical and social condition but also a communicative site where meaning, identity, and agency are contested.