Beyond Barbie: Queer, Crip, Feminist and Anti-Racist Approaches to Pink

In the widely declared Year of Pink, thanks to the release of Barbie (2023), Pope.L expanded his iterative performance Eating the Wall Street Journal into Hospital at South London Gallery, an installation of ruined interiors with broken wooden towers, fragments of bathroom suites, and mystery liquids in misshapen glass containers. The walls of the main gallery were painted a pale pink as a nod to the influential experiments of psychologist Alexander Schauss with prison inmates in the US, mostly black men, whose physical strength and aggression were reportedly diminished through exposure a vibrant pink. Hospital evokes two additional dimensions of this celebrated and maligned mixed colour. Firstly, the prevalent assumption of global minority European complexions as the universal skin colour, from highly consequential medical guidelines to the white supremacist trope of visible blushing (‘blood in the face’) as an indicator of morality, whose mainstream application persists in heteropatriarchal gender norms. And secondly, pink as the (imagined) colour of the body’s interior, which highlights its penetrability and vulnerability, as in Pio Abad’s series of etchings on pink marble Giolo’s Lament (2023), re-rendering the hand of a tattooed enslaved Miangas islander whose skin was partially removed post-mortem and preserved for the Anatomy School collections at Oxford University.

This session invites contributions that nuance and/or resist celebratory approaches to pink as the colour through which women and femmes are addressed as consumers, foregrounding queer, crip, feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial approaches. A combination of research papers and a panel discussion will be considered.

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Dr Alexandra Kokoli, Middlesex University, a.kokoli@mdx.ac.uk