The Pink Dragon is Female: Halloween Costumes and Gender Markers

“The marketing illustrations for children’s Halloween costumes remains largely anchored in traditional gender roles, images, and symbols. The symbolic representations of gender contained within Halloween costumes may, along with specific costume titles, refurbish stereotypical notions of what women/girls and men/boys are capable of doing within the realm of their imaginations.”

Adie Nelson

Although the term “fantasy” implies a “play of the mind” or a “queer illusion,” the marketing illustrations for children’s Halloween costumes suggest a flight of imagination that remains largely anchored in traditional gender roles, images, and symbols. Indeed, the noninclusive language commonly found in the names of many children’s Halloween costumes reverberates throughout many other dimensions of the gendered social life depicted in this fantastical world. For example, the participation in the paid-work world and financial success for men and of physical attractiveness and marriage for women is reinforced through costume names that reference masculine costumes by…