Wearing Pink as a Stand Against Bullying: Why We Need To Say More

Abstract

This article presents a contextual discourse analysis of the media response to a campaign against bullying that was developed in the spring of 2007 in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. As a feature of masculine socialization, male-on-male bullying secures the reproduction of an aggressive and heteronormative hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1987) for boys and young men in contemporary North American mainstream culture. I argue that the celebration of the “Pink Campaign” is illustrative of the normalizing silences, or “unremarkability,” about the related discourses of sexism and homophobia that motivate everyday practices of male-on-male bullying.

KEYWORDS:

• bullying
• masculinity
• gender
• homophobia
• discourse

I would like to thank Beert Verstraete, Tony Thomson, and the anonymous reviewers at the Journal for their insights and suggestions; Lisa MacDougall for her able research assistance; and Karen Turner for her generosity and Microsoft Word magic. Thanks also to Kate Campbell for her encouragement and clarity throughout the writing process.

Notes

1. Subsequent coverage of this story identifies these students as male (Jeffery, 2007).

2. Not unsurprisingly, as I will demonstrate, the reports do not mention the gender composition of participants or offer perspectives from non-pink wearing students.

3. The coverage of the bullying incident and the ‘Pink Campaign’ deliberately does not disclose the name of the bullied student.

4. Adolescent girls are also perpetrators and victims of “bullying.” These behaviors, for girls, are more likely to take the form of relational aggression or relational bullying, which involves “a covert use of relationships as weapons to inflict emotional pain” (Skowronski & Jaffe Weaver, 2005).

5. This institutionalized authority also structures the resistance and socialization of girls. Given the focus of the discourse of femininity on the ornamentation and display of women's bodies, however, girls’ gendered policing tends to take the form of “body talk” or “fat talk” rather than physical aggression directed at others. I hope to address these issues in a subsequent article.

6. Throughout the mid to late 1990s, this show was consistently among the highest rated prime-time television programs. It continues to garner large contemporary audiences in syndicated distribution.

7. This articulation of real men as sporting men and, therefore, the antithesis of the effeminacy represented by a pink-wearing man has also been reproduced in the online group “I Hate Sydney(sic) Crosby.” This group's page on facebook.com features a photo of the young National Hockey League star wearing a pink flowered dress that has been transposed on an advertising image of Crosby. The group description calls Crosby “a girl” and “a whinning (sic) little bitch.” As of April 9, 2008, the group had 97 members.