As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste

From the Publisher. In this book Penny Sparke argues that “taste” has been a quality assigned to women while “design” is a man-made construction that has taken aesthetic authority away from women. She 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. 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 rethinking of the history of our modern material culture.