Pink consumption areas: research accomplishments and future perspectives

Abstract

Pink consumption areas are a collection of places that were created and/or stand out for their openness towards the LGBT community. Research of pink consumption first arose in the 1990s and took place in an urban context almost without exception, and was largely geographically limited to Anglo-America and Western Europe. Night clubs have been identified as the starting points of pink consumption, but pink consumer spaces are becoming increasingly diversified with the liberalisation of social relations in the Western world. However, entertainment remains the dominant domain and the most research attention has been focused on this area. Purchasing systems, including consumption management called rainbow washing, has also been well studied, though studies on culture and health related to this area are strongly lacking. Research of pink consumption spaces shares a common methodology with this issue. A central issue is the lack of a public list of LGBT persons, which makes it virtually impossible to have any form of probability sampling. Accordingly, qualitative research based on the interview method, focus group discussions, and geosemiotic analyses are more frequently used than quantitative research.