As Long as It's Pink: The Sexual Politics of TasteWhy do car manufacturers use paisley interiors to sell their products to women, and does it work? Is women's taste really different to men's? Who says so? And does it matter? In this highly original book Penny Sparke uses familiar objects of our everyday environments - furniture, cars and domestic appliances and interiors - to look at how taste has become a gendered issue in our culture. Ever since the industrial revolution, the cluttered interior has been associated with femininity while the minimal forms of modernist architecture have acted as markers of a masculine aesthetic. As Long as It's Pink argues that 'taste' has been a quality assigned to women while 'design' is a man-made construction which has taken aesthetic authority away from women. This in turn has succeeded in trivializing and marginalizing women's material culture. Ranging across histories of domesticity, feminine consumption and home-making, as well as modern design and broader cultural theories, Penny Sparke offers a completely new version of the history of our modern material culture. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Women and Modernity | 73 |
Women and the Moderne | 120 |
Copyright | |
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advertising aesthetic American Andreas Huyssen architects architectural and design Art Deco Art Nouveau automobile Bauhaus beauty became Betty Friedan Britain British characterised Charles Eastlake Christine Frederick colour comfort consumer consumption contemporary Corbusier Cult of Domesticity curtains decade decorative arts department stores design reform Dick Hebdige display domestic interior dominant Eastlake Elsie de Wolfe environment expressed fashion female feminine culture feminine domesticity feminine taste flowers furniture gender high culture home-making household housewife housewives ibid idea ideal ideology increasingly industry influence inter-war kitchen Le Corbusier linked lives London manufacturers marketplace masculine culture mass culture mass media mass production material culture middle-class modern modernist movement nature nineteenth century novelty objects ornament parlour popular post-war postmodernism rational rationalisation reinforced role seen sexual social standardised stereotypical streamlined style suburban symbolic technological tion traditional transformed underpinned values Victorian visual women women's culture