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ABSTRACT
Around 5–10 years ago parents began to use the term ‘pink boy’ for children assigned male at birth, who in one way or another are linked to the colour pink and the stigma of gender nonconformity. Since then pink boys have become the objects and subjects of a new discourse that grapples with cultural, medical and psychological concepts of feminine boyhood and the more recent phenomenon of the transgender child. I am interested in the ways in which pink has come to be visually, symbolically and affectively connected to seemingly fixed markers of gender nonconformity in children assigned male at birth. I will historically situate the recent formation of the pink boy by delving into the cultural and medical history of feminine boyhood. Reading the pink boy discourse as part of a longer history of feminine boyhood in America will give me an opportunity to reflect on the ways in which colour both reaffirms and upsets the binary of masculine contained emotions and feminine excessive emotionality which has marginalized, indeed pathologized, femininity in boys and men.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Dominique Grisard is a lecturer at the University of Basel and directs the Swiss Center for Social Research CSR in Zurich. From 2011 to 2015 Grisard was a Visiting Scholar at the City University of London, London School of Economics, Columbia University, City University of New York Graduate Center, the New School for Social Research, and the University of Chicago. Grisard is presently finishing a book-length project on the colour pink where she weaves a history of gender and sexuality through and around the colour pink (funded by the University of Basel and the Swiss National Science Foundation). She just organized a summer school and conference on the intersectional ‘Politics of Beauty’. In addition, Grisard is preparing the ‘Skin Color Reader’, an anthology on seminal work on the theme of skin colour and colourisms, as well as two special issues in journals: ‘Color Sells. Color as a Marketing Tool’ and ‘Skin Matters. Gendered and Racial Economies of Skin Color.’ Long-standing research interests are left-wing terrorism in the 1970s’ Europe, female political prisoners in Switzerland and the history of intimacies and sexualities in 19th and 20th centuries’ Europe. Grisard is the author of Gendering Terror (2011), a history of (counter)terrorism in the 1970s’ Switzerland and Germany, and the editor of three anthologies on gender theory: Verschieden Sein (2013), Gender in Motion (2007), and Gender and Knowledge (2004).
Notes
1. In her book Adventures in raising a fabulous, gender creative son (Citation2013) and her blog Raisingmyrainbow.com, Lori Duron raises similar concerns, and blogger-mother of Mothersoftrangenderchildren.wordpress.com concedes that some transgender children feel ‘trapped in the wrong bodies’, while other transgender children like her son feel ‘trapped in a binary world that didn’t allow for any variance in self-expression’.
2. Potential suicide is an argument that is regularly invoked by parents of pink boys (Mitchell Barr, Citation2015).
3. It remains unclear as to why the Nazis chose this particular colour to stigmatize men suspected of homosexuality, since the colour was not linked to homosexuality or femininity the way it is now (Jellonnek, Citation1990, p. 11; Till, Citation2000, p. 73).
4. Historically, parental worry and clinical treatment of gender variance in children assigned g male at birth have far outweighed that of gender-nonconforming children assigned female at birth (Bryant, Citation2008, p. 25).
5. Richard Green did not condone all reparative therapy. He for example problematized George Rekers as ‘moralistic’ and repudiates his categorization of homosexuality as a ‘sinful’, ‘promiscuous’ and ‘unfortunate perversion’ (Green, Citation1987, pp. 261–262; Pyne, Citation2014a).
6. On the debate that ensued, see Bryant (Citation2008, p. 461, p. 464), Bryant (Citation2006).
7. The DSM-5 harmonized the diagnostic criteria for GID in girls with those for boys. Up until 1994, children assigned males at birth needed to meet fewer criteria to be diagnosed with GID than those assigned as female (Zucker, Citation2010, p. 479).
8. Despite the different implications of the new word choice, GD is often used and described in similar if not identical ways to GID (www.mermaids.org.uk). See Tosh (Citation2015, pp. 85–87) for an elaboration of the term GD, and the addition of intersexuality to the criteria.