Pink

“Pink is for girls.” From the first pink dyes to Barbie, through Act-up, the Pink Pompadour or even Paris Hilton, pink occupies a unique place in Western culture, associating it with the feminine everything it colors. Returning to the origins of this association, Kévin Bideaux highlights the ideologies underlying the uses of this color. It shows that pink contributes to an aestheticization of gender and the repetition of stereotypes: tour in turn a marker of beauty and seduction, of sweetness and naivety. By marking the feminine, pink makes it superficial and artificial, and therefore makes it invisible. Associated with the masculine, it connotes effeminacy, even homosexuality. In this sense, pink is a real “gender technology”, constantly participating in the production of the latter. At the intersection of gender studies and art history, this book traces the long social, artistic, political and cultural history of pink : from its rivalry with red to its association with the flower, passing through the rendering of flesh – and therefore of nudity – in painting; developments in fashion in the opposition of blue and pink, or to the uses that cinema, cartoons and video games have made it; from the construction of the preference for pink in its place in marketing, through the relationship ambivalent attitude that the feminist and LGBTQ movements have towards it.