Challenge to pink

The objective of the Pink Stinks movement is to highlight and control the overwhelming emphasis on pink products that are marketed for girls. The campaign’s focus is to stress and challenge imposed stereotypes associated with pink, as they claim it places limits on girls. In December 2011, Hamleys became one of the first stores to stop classifying their departments by colour: blue and pink for boys and girls. However, what is perhaps less well publicised is that whilst the floors may no longer be colour co-ordinated, the products still come in blue and pink (William, 2011). Another campaign set up by concerned parents is the Let toys be toys campaign (online), who announced that they had made progress with Boots and Morrisons agreeing to take down the boys and girls toys signs in their stores. Next also agreed not to have ‘boys stuff’ on their packaging and likewise Tesco said that it would remove the label ‘boys’ toy’ from a chemistry set. Argos, in May 2013, also took down their gendered webpages for toys and replaced them with the categorising of toys by age and topics for play: for instance science and creativity.

However, a closer inspection of the science category shows that it contains toys such as a bright pink Perfume Lab (Argos (a), online). It could be argued that this in itself is not problematic, but it becomes perhaps more concerning when all the pink products in this category relate to appearance and conversely toys like Science is Magic or the microscope, which come in blue, promote investigation and exploration. Thus, the gendered packaging of the products promotes different types of activities. In a similar pattern, Argos’ creative toys such as Blingles Bling and Creation Studio come in purple, pink and lavender, whilst Disney Pixar Cars 2 and Klip Kitz Mini Kitz Assortment come in dark red and blue and are

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evidently for boys. Whilst all of these stores have taken steps in the right direction to adjust the obvious gendering of products, it is clear more changes are necessary.

At the empirical stage of this research, when the discussion focused on toys, Friends by Lego ( a new line launched in 2012) was used as a specific talking point. The product has many themes, one of which announces:

Join Olivia, Stephanie, Emma, Mia and Andrea as best friends in Heartlake City. Hang out in the cool City Park Cafe, explore in Stephanie's car or take care of your pets at the Heartlake Vet. With the five girls and an exciting world waiting for you, every day is filled with fun, adventure and friendship!

Argos (b, online)

Lego is widely acclaimed as the most successful toy worldwide and traditionally has been viewed as a creative construction toy. However, the latest addition to its range, Friends appears to have a very narrow focus where gender stereotypes of appearance, friendship and pets—which could be associated with nurturance—are being promoted. The various play environments offered are set in the beauty parlour, the vets and the bakery. The toys’

promoters claim the environments will develop girls’ imagination by tapping into their interests. This view could suggest that manufacturers consider girls’ imaginations to be limited to these types of key themes.

The Friends figures also reinforce connections to female appearance, as these Lego figures have small waists and breast shapes, which suggest female sexualisation. Cartoon and toy representations of women as sexual beings are not new. Lara Croft was promoted as an action figure and was clearly a heroine character, but nonetheless was visually sexualised and mainly targeted at a male audience. A recent controversy over Brave (Iger, online) has become an online campaign in response to Disney’s redrawing of Merida, the female character. The red hair rebel has been included in what Orenstein (2006, online) in the New York Times describes as their ‘Disney Princess line up’. In the film Merida is portrayed as a young woman who objects to being married off, is disinterested in her appearance and prefers adventure and freedom to marriage and domesticity. However, she has been redesigned visually to fit with the more glamorous traditional view of a Disney Princess. Merida has gone from being defiant, independent and strong to coquettish and alluring. The campaign questions why Merida’s appearance has changed. Her dress is now low cut and off the shoulder, and she has a more defined womanly figure with a small

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waist. Her face has lost its child-like quality with the addition of high cheek bones, and her unruly hair, which reflected her character, has been tamed and tidied. The need to change the character demonstrates the continued limited and idealised view of what it is to be a girl. This can result in a cluster of metaphorical assumptions about what women can be, where colour is a contributing feature. However, such changes also relate to other themes that promote particular connotations where female potential is restricted and then

replicated, limiting the acceptable images of women and the spectrum of what it is to be female.

This pattern is replicated in many commercial outlets. In WHSmith’s children’s section, there is a specific section for girls, where the books tend to be in pink with many sparkly covers. The topics of these stories appear to be limited to fairies, princesses, creativity, and themes of care and friendships. Once again there is a reinforcement of traditional

stereotypes where communication, creativity and pink are really what girls are innately drawn towards. Likewise, children’s television, according to Chorley (2011), lacks strong female characters. He cites a study in 2007 that found that approximately two-thirds of the main characters on children's TV in the UK were male. He reports that such trends by TV producers tend to reiterate the mantra that they are only responding to market forces and choices made by children.

As discussed in Chapter 2, the explanation often given for the pink phenomena is that girls are biologically predisposed to desire girlie pink things. The disturbing aspect of such casual acceptance of these assumptions is that the belief that they are natural, thus making them resistant to change. To question these assumptions requires that the notion of girlieness to be examined. What does girlieness consist of? The term to most people does not immediately bring to mind neurological scientists or a potential astronaut for the

NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) programme; it is rarely associated with high academic qualifications or an independent and self-reliant woman. Rather, it tends to imply a female who is subordinate to others and often taken care of, as represented in the opening comment of this dissertation’s rationale, where Louisa’s aspiration is to find

‘a man to take care of her’. These perceptions have become part of modern day culture and are often assumed to be natural, which can lead to blindness toward the need for change or a complacency that accepts that nothing should—or can—be done.

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In Chapter 3, I highlighted the fact that children respond to and learn from their environment. If, as theories of socialisation suggest, children develop schemas which reflect what is familiar and consistent, I would argue that if girls and boys are given consistent images that present them in particular ways, they will learn to accept these as normal. The question that Fines (2010:209) asks is how can ‘children ignore gender when they continually watch it, hear it, see it, are clothed in it, sleep in it, eat off it?’ Everything around the child reinforces the great divide of the sexes and this confirms in children’s minds—and adults’ minds—that this division is important. For things to change it is necessary that children are exposed to and encouraged to interact with different types of toys, books and characters to encourage distinctly different types of play and learning.

To change these perceptions there is a need to challenge the culture where feminine stereotypes result in fixed gender boundaries for girls and subsequently women. This does not mean that there is a need or even a desire for an androgynous society, where femininity is restricted or dismissed; rather, it is the misrepresentation of women’s interests,

appearance, potential and capabilities that needs to be changed. It is important to note that as boys and girls are often viewed as the antithesis of each other, these restrictions on females where girls and women are presented as solely one dimensional also result in corresponding restrictions on how boys should also be viewed. The qualities that are often stereotypically viewed as being particular to women—care and empathy—should be promoted across all of society so that ‘we enter a world with more freedom, not less, because then those behaviours traditionally associated with masculinity and femininity could become real choices for each individual’ (Walters, 2010:230). This world would present positive images of maleness, as well as femaleness.

If, as noted by Muller and Goldberg (1980), children by the age of five expect adults to behave differently towards them depending on whether they are boys and girls, it is necessary for adults to consider how they respond to the youngest children in our society.

As discussed in Chapter 2, if nurture can become nature (Eliot, 2009) it is important that children are exposed as early as possible to experiences that are not restricted to the stereotypes discussed above. One such area of society that should consider how adults respond to and treat children is the pre-5 sector. However, prior to this consideration, it is necessary to examine the structure and place of the nursery as a society that exerts a power on the development of gender.

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4.7 Biopolitics in the nursery

The nursery is an environment that is subject to and reflects the norms of society at any given time and place. In addition, the nursery exists as a space in its own right with clearly defined grammars and customs. Gendered societal norms are (re)produced and (re)created in the nursery. In order to analyse and uncover the interplay of the gender dynamics evident in the nursery, a Foucauldian framework helps to provide an understanding of the politics, including the power relationships that operate there and will be used in the framework detailed in Chapter 6 and 7 to analyse and present the data collected. Initially, here, I outline why a Foucauldian framework was employed, with particular reference to issues of power and its operation.

Attention to Foucault was motivated by his attention to the body and to sexuality as cultural constructs and to what he offered by way of attention to power, including the way in which ‘modern power operates in a capillary fashion throughout the social body’ and, so, ‘is best grasped in its concrete and local effects and in the everyday practices which sustain and reproduce power relations’ (Armstrong, 2005: Section 3). Taking, as I do, a socially constructed view of gender, Foucault’s anti-essentialist approach to the body resonated with my views on sex and gender as did his notion of disciplinary power. Whilst reluctant to accept that the participants in my study, and the children they refer to, could be reduced to ‘docile bodies’, I was taken by the idea that they and we, all of us, are or think we are under surveillance and that our behaviours and attitudes may be regulated,

controlled and disciplined in subtle, almost invisible, and frequently unconscious ways that result in a sense of what is and is not ‘normal’ and desirable. For Foucault, ‘a key struggle in the present is against the tendency of normalizing-disciplinary power to tie individuals to their identities in constraining ways’ (Armstrong, 2005, Section 4). For this study, I wanted to explore ways in which the participants might have become ‘docile’ in the face of such normalizing disciplinary power with particular respect to gender. I was also interested to see if the participants, or the children they discussed, did or could subvert the ‘normal’

and resist the regimes of power of gender, stereotyping and attitudes that could restrict and define identity according to sex. Butler draws on the Foucauldian concept of ‘the

constituted character of identity’, suggests Armstrong (2005:Section 4), ‘to politicize the processes through which stereotypical forms of masculine and feminine identity are