Pink Governmentality: Space, Gender, and the Politics of Pink in Mexico City
ROLE
Writer & ResearcherYEAR2015-2017
A curatorial research project exploring rosa mexicano—a vivid pink central to Mexican visual culture—as both a material and symbolic force in Mexico City’s landscape.
The project traces the dual deployment of pink in two intersecting spheres:
- State-led initiatives, where pink is employed as part of a broader urban branding campaign—most notably during the 2014 CDMX rebranding effort under Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera, which positioned pink as a symbol of “social capital,” progressive governance, and civic identity. Pink also appeared in gender-segregated public transportation measures that deployed the color to signify care, safety, and protection for women in response to widespread street harassment.
- Feminist art and activist interventions, where the color is reclaimed and recontextualized by collectives such as Las Hijas de Violencia and artists like Mónica Mayer to confront gender-based violence and reassert spatial agency in public space.
MONICA MAYER’S EL TENDEDERO (THE CLOTHESLINE), SHOWN HERE IN ITS 2016 ITERATION AT MUAC (MUSEO UNIVERSITARIO ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO), INVITES WOMEN TO PUBLICLY SHARE PERSONAL EXPERIENCES OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT. ORIGINALLY EXHIBITED IN 1978 AND REACTIVATED IN 2016, THE INSTALLATION TRANSFORMS DOMESTIC ICONOGRAPHY AND THE COLOR PINK INTO A PARTICIPATORY ARCHIVE OF TESTIMONY COLLECTIVE GRIEF.
Through interviews with feminist cultural workers, municipal officials, and community organizers—as well as visual and material analysis of color use in taxis, transit systems, political propaganda, and artistic practice—Pink Governmentality explores how color operates as a form of soft power: simultaneously aestheticizing liberal political agendas and serving as a medium through which gendered resistance is performed.
Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, this project introduces “pink governmentality” to describe the convergence of aesthetic strategies, gender politics, and neoliberal governance in the urban field. This project argues that the saturation of public space with pink—a color often associated with care, safety, and femininity—functions to regulate civic life while obscuring the structural conditions it purports to address. At the same time, the project foregrounds how feminist practitioners appropriate and subvert pink to make visible the limits of state care and to advance alternative forms of social and spatial justice.