The San Francisco-based advocacy group has singled out what it calls "corporate pinkwashing"--companies using their support of the breast cancer cause in "an effort to boost sales and promote their image among female consumers," […]
Popularized by Avon, American Express, Yoplait, and others, such corporate "pinkwashing" campaigns, in the words of Breast Cancer Action, "exploit the most conventional stereotypes of women—cooking, cleaning, shopping, wearing makeup—suggesting that women are more suited for consumerism than political action."
2008 — Maren Klawiter, The Biopolitics of Breast Cancer: Changing Cultures of Disease and Activism, University of Minnesota Press (2008), →ISBN, page 250:
BCA helped coin the term "pinkwashing" to characterize these corporate promotional campaigns.
2009 — Barbara L. Ley, From Pink to Green: Disease Prevention and the Environmental Breast Cancer Movement, Rutgers University Press (2009), →ISBN, page 118:
By the same logic, pinkwashing refers to the ways in which businesses seek to attract customers by presenting themselves as caring about women's health and wanting to improve it through breast cancer advocacy at a time of rising public concern about breast cancer.
2009 — Micaela Preston, Practically Green: Your Guide to Ecofriendly Decision-Making, North Light Books (2009), →ISBN, page 121:
Don't be fooled by pinkwashing, the practice in which companies position themselves as advocates of breast cancer — while selling products that contain chemicals that may actually be contributing to an increase in breast cancer.
2011 — Gayle A. Sulik, Pink Ribbon Blues: How Breast Cancer Culture Undermines Women's Health, Oxford University Press (2011), →ISBN, page 371:
Economic constraints have encouraged pinkwashing and large organizations in pink ribbon culture to use it to fuel the pink machine.
One such pinkwashing campaign was KFC's "Buckets for the Cure," an attempt by the fried chicken franchise to raise breast cancer awareness in partnership with Susan G. Komen for the Cure.
Noun: "(LGBT) the practice of presenting something, particularly a state, as gay-friendly in order to soften or downplay aspects of its reputation considered negative"
2011 — Ali Abunimah, "Gaza, Goldstone, and the Movement for Israeli Accountability", in The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict (eds. Adam Horowitz, Lizzy Ratner, and Philip Weiss), Nations Books (2011), →ISBN, page 397:
Critics have parodied this strategy as "greenwashing" and "pinkwashing" (or "gaywashing") — a transparent public relations effort to paint Israel as a center of environmentalism, social freedoms, and tolerance designed to appeal to Israel's idea of Western liberals.
The growing global gay movement against the Israeli occupation has named these tactics "pinkwashing": a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians' human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life.
2012 — Nada Elia, "The Brain of the Monster", in The Case for Sanctions Against Israel (ed. Audrea Lim), Verso (2012), →ISBN, page 57:
Alongside its cultural and pinkwashing campaigns, Israel is also pushing to present itself as a "normal" country by offering the world's finest academic programs.
Several protesters, many of whom said they were Jewish, invoked what they called pinkwashing, Israel's alleged touting of its progressive stance on gay rights as a way of deflecting global attention away from its treatment of Palestinians.