As long as it's pink: The sexual politics of taste

Abstract

Design historian Penny Sparke joins the ranks of those authors exploring the influence of gender role formation on culture in As long as it's pink: The sexual politics of taste. Sparke's approach is an ideological deconstruction of 'feminine' taste and its  antithetical relationship with 'masculine' Modernism from Victorian times to the present. She demonstrates that feminine taste has customarily been associated with conservatism, domesticity and consumption in the private sphere, whereas male taste has been equated with progress, mainstream culture and mass production in the public sphere. According to Sparke the history of taste and objects reveals that a tension ensured between gendered values, and influenced the ways in which men and women used and related to everyday objects.