I’d like to return to semiotics today if I could, and talk particularly about the social conventions relating to colour.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about semiotics, after we focused on it in one of our lectorials. Basically, semiotics is the theory that discusses communication through signs, and the meaning we gain from signs. Eg, if I hold up my forefinger and middle finger in the sign of a v, you might read that as a sign for peace. There’s nothing about my fingers that actually contains the meaning of peace, but it’s a socially accepted sign that you can recognise.

What I want to talk about this week is colour as part of semiotic theory. About a week ago I uploaded a post about a poster I made for Hockey Victoria’s Women and Girl’s Round. As you’ll notice, the poster is mostly in pink and reminds us to wear pink on the day (hence my pink fingernails in the picture below). At the Women and Girl’s Breakfast with guest speaker Nova Peris, we were even given pink towels and roller balls.

I’m definitely in two minds about all this pink. As a feminist, there’s a part of me that hates the way we feel we can reduce a whole gender to a single colour, especially one that is somewhat associated with childishness and, for want of a better word, sissy-ness.

But on the other hand, also as a feminist, I love having a clear and recognisable way to celebrate women in my sport. I don’t just play hockey; I coach it, I umpire it (as you can tell from my shirt in the picture) and I’m a member of my club’s committee. I live hockey, and I’m lucky enough to be able to see first-hand the amazing skill, dedication and sportsmanship women bring to my club. However, I’m unlucky enough to be a able to understand how little respect there is in the world for women who play sport. I love that Hockey Victoria has a Women and Girls Round, and I love the idea of getting people to show their support through wearing pink.

And there’s no denying that pink is recognisably feminine, even though this wasn’t always the case. If Stephen Fry and QI are to be believed, up until the 1940s it was actually the other way around; pink was used for baby boys as it was a watered-down form of the aggressive and masculine red, where powder blue was a cooler colour and therefore suited to the girls. At some point, though, they switched, and today the colours are pretty universal signifiers of each of the genders. For example, take a look at this Huggies ad, which demonstrates perfectly the use of the two together:

And it’s not just for gender that colour has significant meaning within the world of semiotics. For example, what more widely recognised signs for ‘stop’ and ‘go’ are there than the colours red and green? And although it may be different in other cultures, in the Western World it’s still generally accepted that you wear black to a funeral.

Colours are a perfect example of semiotics; in most cases they have no literal association with what they signify, and yet our social conventions assign them meanings of their own. While this can lead to frustrating simplification of more complicated issues (such as gender), on the whole it allows for communication that transcends language and can be widely understood.