Den rosa overallen

Om genusfostran, modeller av jämställdhet och identitetspolitiska markörer

Abstract

The subject of this article is babies' clothes and the colour pink. Based on 20 interviews as well as participant observations among mothers and fathers on parental leave in the Stockholm region, connections between choices of children's clothing and the view on child rearing concerning gender, are discussed. Even though the parents mostly would dress their children according to dominating, contemporary gender conventions (pink and red for girls and blue, grey and green for boys), most of them still had a negative attitude towards the colour pink. For girls, pink was considered oppressive and old fashioned, and for boys degrading. Pink was such a common theme in the interviews that I tend to think of it as, in Sherry Ortner's terminology, a key symbol — a central figure that contains messages of fundamental values in a group or in a society. In this case, pink becomes a reflection of the parents' models of equality and gender relations. But the colour also reflects how a certain group of people, through the rhetoric of equality, construct themselves as modern, urban middle class parents.