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'Not just a colour': Pink as a Gender and Sexuality Marker in Visual Communication

by Veronica Koller

 

The article explores the functions of the colour pink as a marker of gender and sexuality in cultural models and the multimodal texts that they inform. Through a pilot survey on colour associations and an analysis various visual texts such as leaflets, advertisements, websites and magazines, it is found out that pink functions to gender textual referents, attract female readers’ attention and index sexuality and sexual identity. Furthermore, the associations and multimodal text analysis reveal an emergent scheme that relates pink to post-feminist femininity. This means that the conventional and counter-cultural associations of the colour pink are complemented and extended to stereotypical feminine characteristics or gayness, respectively. Lastly, the author pursues an approach to colour using both social semiotics and cognitive semantics.

 

Studies on Colour

Colour transcends disciplinary boundaries. Its nature as a physical phenomenon with strong cultural connotations makes it as an object of study of various fields such as the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the arts and humanities. It has been specifically discusses in the fields of physics, cognitive psychology, cognitive and socio-linguistics, history of art and design, and social semiotics. (Koller, 397)

 

The discussion of colour and its physical properties can be dated back to Newton’s Opticks which emerged in 1704. Meanwhile, colour as an object of study in cognitive psychology makes the field a merging of the natural and social sciences. Through lab-based experiments, cognitive psychologists aim to “account for how colour, rather than being an inherent quality of objects, is experienced by the interplay between the human visual apparatus and visual cognition” (Jacob and Jeannerod; Ruskin cited in Koller 397). Their experiments show that “visual cognition is ultimately based on neural circuitry in the brain” (Koller 397). From this we can derive that the individual’s perception of colour has physiological explanations.

 

In addition to these findings, Lakoff and Johnson theorizes the experience of colour as rising to concepts, or mental representations, of colours, which display a centre-periphery structure, with the centre standing for the most prototypical instance of the colour (Lakoff and Johnson cited in Koller 397).

 

In the works of Kay and McDaniel (1978), Kemmerer (1998) and Rosch (1972), colour terminology has also been studied. Claims have been made about possible universals in colour terminology across languages as based on human visual perception.

 

Koller also takes note of the constructivist view on colour by referring to the work of Pastoureau (2004). According to the study, colour has to be explained in social and anthropological terms and has to be treated as a cultural practice and system of symbolic values the main functionof which is classificatory (Pastoureau cited in Koller 397). This classificatory function of colour is achieved because colour is used as a marker of social identity. It is also used to identify different social categories such as religion, subcultures and gender and sexuality. For example, the subculture goth is identified by the colour black while the colour pink, the focus of Koller’s study, is identified as a colour of femininity. The colour itself does not only serve as a group identity marker; the language used to identify the colour is also associated with a particular group. For example, Lakoff (2004) suggests that a differentiated colour terminology is typical of feminine speech. (Koller 398)

 

Given that colour associations have to do with social categories, colour is also treated in social semiotics or the study of the ideological function of signs in social formations. In line with this, Kress and Van Leeuwen (2002) states that colour qualifies as a semiotic mode because:

 

  • it is ‘regular, with signs that are motivated in their constitution by the interests of the makers of the signs, and not at all arbitrary or anarchic’ (p. 345)

  •  it fulfils all three Hallidayan metafunctions in that it ‘can clearly be usedto denote specific people, places and things as well as classes [thereof]’(ideational metafunction), it is further employed to ‘do things to or foreach other’ (interpersonal metafunction), and in its textual metafunction, it ‘can also help create coherence in texts’ through colour coordination(pp. 347– see also Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006: 229–30);

  • it forms a system of elements that can be combined with each other in apotentially infinite number of possibilities, but ‘grammar’ rules operateupon appropriate combinations (p. 352).

 

Source

Koller, Veronika. “’Not just a colour': Pink as a Gender and Sexuality Marker in Visual Communication.” Visual Communication 7 (2008): 395-423. PDF File.

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