Multicultural barbie and the merchandising of difference

From Multicultural Barbie and the Merchandising of Difference

Ann duCille has served as the chair and director of the Center for Afri- can American Studies at Wesleyan University. She has published widely on black women writers and on race and popular culture, particularly in her book Skin Trade (1996), which won the Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in 1997. The essay here originally appeared in the spring 1994 issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. In this piece about Barbie, you’ll hear one of duCille’s key interests in popular culture — the ways we all help establish cultural norms through producing and consuming goods and ideas.

A quick look through duCille’s MLA-style works cited list at the end of the essay shows that she draws on a range of academic conversations to frame her analysis of Barbie. She responds not only to scholars who write about Barbie but also to those who write about adolescent self-image,

528 CHAPTER 14 BusinEss

raising African American children, and various aspects of multicultural- ism and diversity. As you read duCille’s essay, keep track of when and how she draws on those she calls “Barbiologists” and those whose ideas give con- text to her broader analysis of culture. You will have to make similar moves in your own writing as you use various sources to help you build your own point.

While she draws on many other scholars’ ideas to help her build her point, duCille also invites readers to identify with her personal experi- ences, particularly in the opening and closing sections of the essay. How effectively do these personal anecdotes—her own and others’—draw you into the piece? How might they shed new light on toys you played with as a child, toys you may have forgotten about? Considering the way culture teaches us to pay attention to both race and physical appearance as we think about who we are, duCille ends her essay by asking, “Is Barbie bad?” Her answer: “Barbie is just a piece of plastic, but what she says about the economic base of our society — what she suggests about gender and race in our world — ain’t good.” DuCille’s essay invites you to reconsider your own experiences with “the ideological work of child’s play” (para. 5). If you ask the kinds of questions duCille asks of Barbie, you should discover similarly eye-opening answers.

nnn

The white missionaries who came to Saint Aug’s from New England were darling to us. They gave Bessie and me these beautiful china dolls that prob- ably were very expensive. Those dolls were white, of course. You couldn’t get a colored doll like that in those days. Well, I loved mine, just the way it was, but do you know what Bessie did? She took an artist’s palette they had also given us and sat down and mixed the paints until she came up with a shade of brown that matched her skin. Then she painted that white doll’s face! None of the white missionaries ever said a word about it. Mama and Papa just smiled. (Sarah Delany)

This is my doll story (because every black journalist who writes about race gets around to it sometime). Back when I started playing with Barbie, there were no Christies (Barbie’s black friend, born in 1968) or black Barbies (born in 1980, brown plastic poured into blond Barbie’s mold). I had two blonds, which I bought with Christmas money from girls at school.

I cut off their hair and dressed them in African-print fabric. They lived together (polygamy, I guess) with a black G.I. Joe bartered from the Shepp boys, my downstairs neighbors. After an “incident” at school (where all of the girls looked like Barbie and none of them looked like me), I galloped down our stairs with one Barbie, her blond head hitting each spoke of the banister, thud, thud, thud. And galloped up the stairs, thud, thud, thud, until her head popped off, lost to the graveyard behind the stairwell. Then I tore off each limb, and sat on the stairs for a long time twirling the torso like a baton. (Lisa Jones)

Growing up in the 1950s, in the shadow of the second world war, it was natural for children—including little black children like my

1

DuCiLLE from MuLTiCuLTuRAL BARBiE 529

two brothers and me—to want to play war, to mimic what we heard on the radio, what we watched in black and white on our brand new floor model Motorola. In these war games, everyone wanted to be the Allied troops—the fearless, conquering white male heroes who had made the world safe for democracy, yet again, and saved us all from yellow peril. No one, of course, wanted to play the enemy—who most often was not the Germans or the Italians but the Japanese. So the enemy became or, more rightly, remained invisible, lurking in bushes we shot at with sticks we pre- tended were rifles and stabbed at with make-believe bayonets. “Take that,” we shouted, liberally peppering our verbal assaults with racial epithets. “And that! And that!” It was all in fun—our venom and vigor. All’s fair in wars of words. We understood little of what we said and nothing of how much our child’s play reflected the sentiments of a nation that even in its finer, pre-war moments had not embraced as citizens its Asian immigrants or claimed as countrymen and women their American-born offspring.

However naively imitative, our diatribe was interrupted forever one 2 summer afternoon by the angry voice of our mother, chastising us through the open window. “Stop that,” she said. “Stop that this minute. It’s not nice. You’re talking about the Japanese. Japanese, do you understand? And don’t let me ever hear you call them anything else.” In the lecture that accom- panied dinner that evening, we were made to understand not the history of Japanese-Americans, the injustice of internment, or the horror of Hiro- shima, but simply that there were real people behind the names we called; that name-calling always hurts somebody, always undermines someone’s humanity. Our young minds were led on the short journey from “Jap” to “nigger”; and if we were too young then to understand the origins and fine points of all such pejoratives, we were old enough to know firsthand the pain of one of them.

I cannot claim that this early experience left me free of prejudice, but 3 it did assist me in growing up at once aware of my own status as “different” and conscious of the exclusion of others so labeled. It is important to note, however, that my sense of my own difference was affirmed and confirmed not simply by parental intervention but also by the unrelenting sameness of the tiny, almost exclusively white town in which I was raised. There in the country confines of East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, the adults who surrounded me (except for my parents) were all white, as were the teach- ers who taught me, the authors who thrilled me (and instilled in me a love of literature), and the neighborhood children who called me nigger one moment and friend the next. And when my brothers and I went our sepa- rate ways into properly gendered spheres, the dolls I played with—like almost everything else about my environment—were also white: Betsy Wetsy, Tiny Tears, and Patty Play Pal.

It seems remarkable to me now, as I remember these childish things 4 long since put away, that, for all the daily reminders of my blackness, I did not take note of its absence among the rubber-skin pinkness of Betsy

530 CHAPTER 14 BusinEss

Wetsy, the bald-headed whiteness of Tiny Tears, and the blue-eyed blond- ness of Patty Play Pal. I was never tempted like Sarah Delany to paint the dolls I played with brown like me or to dress them in African-print fabric like Lisa Jones. (Indeed, I had no notion of such fabrics and little knowledge of the “dark continent” from which they came.) Caught up in fantasy, completely given over to the realm of make-believe, for most of my childhood I neither noticed nor cared that the dolls I played with did not look like me. The make-believe world to which I willingly surrendered more than just my disbelief was thoroughly and profoundly white. That is to say, the “me” I invented, the “I” I imagined, the Self I day-dreamed in technicolor fantasies was no more black like me than the dolls I played with. In the fifties and well into the sixties of my childhood, the black Other who was my Self, much like the enemy Other who was the foreign body of our war games, could only be imagined as faceless, far away, and utterly unfamiliar.

As suggested by my title, I am going to use the figure of multicultural 5 Barbie to talk about the commodification of race and gender difference.
I wanted to back into the present topic, however, into what I have to say about Barbie as a gendered, racialized icon of contemporary commodity culture, by reaching into the past—into the admittedly contested terrain of the personal—to evoke the ideological work of child’s play. More than simple instruments of pleasure and amusement, toys and games play cru- cial roles in helping children determine what is valuable in and around them. Dolls in particular invite children to replicate them, to imagine themselves in their dolls’ images. What does it mean, then, when little girls are given dolls to play with that in no way resemble them? What did it mean for me that I was nowhere in the toys I played with?

If the Japan and the Africa of my youth were beyond the grasp (if not 6 the reach) of my imagination, children today are granted instant global gratification in their play—immediate, hands-on access to both Self and Other. Or so we are told by many of the leading fantasy manufactur- ers—Disney, Hasbro, and Mattel, in particular—whose contributions to multicultural education include such play things as Aladdin (movie, video, and dolls), G.I. Joe (male “action figures” in black and white), and Barbie (now available in a variety of colors and ethnicities). Disneyland’s river ride through different nations, like Mattel’s Dolls of the World Collection, instructs us that “It’s a Small World After All.” Those once distant lands of Africa, Asia, Australia, and even the Arctic regions of the North Pole (yes, Virginia, there is an Eskimo Barbie) are now as close to home as the local Toys R Us and F.A.O. Schwarz. And lo and behold, the inhabi- tants of these foreign lands—from Disney’s Princess Jasmine to Mattel’s Jamaican Barbie—are just like us, dye-dipped versions of archetypal white American beauty. It is not only a small world after all, but, as the Grammy award–winning theme from Aladdin informs us, “it’s a whole new world.”

DuCiLLE from MuLTiCuLTuRAL BARBiE 531

Many of the major toy manufacturers have taken on a global perspec- 7 tive, a kind of nearsightedness that constructs this whole new world as small and cultural difference as consumable. Perhaps nowhere is this uni- versalizing myopia more conspicuous than in the production, marketing, and consumption of Barbie dolls. By Mattel’s reckoning, Barbie enjoys 100 percent brand name recognition among girls ages three to ten, ninety-six percent of whom own at least one doll, with most owning an average of eight. Five years ago, as Barbie turned thirty, Newsweek noted that nearly 500 million Barbies had been sold, along with 200 million G.I. Joes— “enough for every man, woman, and child in the United States and Europe” (Kantrowitz 59–60). Those figures have increased dramatically in the past five years, bringing the current world-wide Barbie population to 800 mil- lion. In 1992 alone, $1 billion worth of Barbies and accessories were sold. Last year, Barbie dolls sold at an average of one million per week, with overall sales exceeding the $1 billion all-time high set the year before. As the Boston Globe reported on the occasion of Barbie’s thirty-fifth birthday on March 9, 1994, nearly two Barbie dolls are sold every second some- where in the world; about fifty percent of the dolls sold are purchased here in the United States (Dembner 16).

The current Barbie boom may be in part the result of new, multicul- 8 turally oriented developments both in the dolls and in their marketing. In the fall of 1990, Mattel, Inc. announced a new marketing strategy to boost its sales: the corporation would “go ethnic” in its advertising by launching an ad campaign for the black and Hispanic versions of the already popu- lar doll. Despite the existence of black, Asian, and Latina Barbies, prior to the fall of 1990 Mattel’s print and TV ads featured only white dolls. In what Newsweek described as an attempt to capitalize on ethnic spending power, Mattel began placing ads for multicultural Barbies in such Afrocen- tric publications as Essence magazine and on such Latin-oriented shows as Pepe Plata after market research revealed that most black and Hispanic consumers were unaware of the company’s ethnic dolls. This targeted advertising was a smart move, according to the industry analysts cited by Newsweek, because “Hispanics buy about $170 billion worth of goods each year, [and] blacks spend even more.” Indeed, sales of black Barbie dolls reportedly doubled in the year following this new ethnically-oriented ad campaign.1 But determined to present itself as politically correct as well as financially savvy, Mattel was quick to point out that ethnic audiences, who are now able to purchase dolls who look like them, also have profited from the corporation’s new marketing priorities. Barbie is a role model for all of her owners, according to product manager Deborah Mitchell, herself an

1Mattel introduced the Shani doll—a black, Barbie-like doll—in 1991, which also may have contributed to the rise in sales, particularly since the company engaged the services of a PR firm that specializes in targeting ethnic audiences.

532 CHAPTER 14 BusinEss

African American. “Barbie allows little girls to dream,” she asserted—to which the Newsweek reporter added (seemingly without irony): “now, eth- nic Barbie lovers will be able to dream in their own image” (Berkwitz 48).

Dream in their own image? The Newsweek columnist inadvertently 9 put his finger on precisely what is so troubling to many parents, feminist scholars, and cultural critics about Barbie and dolls like her. Such toys invite, inspire, and even demand a potentially damaging process not sim- ply of imagining but of interpellation. When little girls fantasize them- selves into the conspicuous consumption, glamour, perfection, and, some have argued, anorexia of Barbie’s world, it is rarely, if ever, “in their own image that they dream.”2 Regardless of what color dyes the dolls are dipped in or what costumes they are adorned with, the image they present
is of the same mythically thin, long-legged, luxuriously-haired, buxom beauty. And while Mattel and other toy manufacturers may claim to have the best interests of ethnic audiences in mind in peddling their integrated wares, one does not have to be a cynic to suggest that profit remains the motivating factor behind this merchandising of difference.3

Far from simply playing with the sixty or so dolls I have acquired in 10 the past year, then, I take them very seriously. In fact, I regard Barbie and similar dolls as Louis Althusser might have regarded them: as objects that do the dirty work of patriarchy and capitalism in the most insidious way—in the guise of child’s play. But, as feminists have protested almost from the moment she hit the market, Barbie is not simply a child’s toy
or just a teenage fashion doll; she is an icon—perhaps the icon—of true white womanhood and femininity, a symbol of the far from innocent ideo- logical stuff of which the (Miss) American dream and other mystiques of race and gender are made.

Invented by Ruth Handler, one of the founders of Mattel, and named 11 after her daughter, Barbie dolls have been a very real force in the toy mar- ket since Mattel first introduced them at the American Toy Fair in 1959.
In fact, despite the skepticism of toy store buyers—who at the time were primarily men—the first shipment of a half million dolls and a million

2Of course, the notion of “dreaming in one’s own image” is always problematic since dreams, by definition, engage something other than the “real.”

3Olmec Toys, a black-owned company headed by an African American woman named Yla Eason, markets a line of black and Latina Barbie-like dolls called the Imani Collection. Billed on their boxes as “African American Princess” and “Latin American Fantasy,” these dolls are also presented as having been designed with the self images of black children in mind. “ We’ve got one thing in mind with all our products,” the blurbs on the Imani boxes read: “let’s build self-esteem. Our children gain a sense of self impor- tance through toys. So we make them look like them.” Given their obvious resemblance to Barbie dolls—their long, straight hair and pencil-thin plastic bodies—Imani dolls look no more “like them,” like “real” black children, than their prototype. Eason, who we are told was devastated by her son’s announcement that he couldn’t be a superhero because he wasn’t white, may indeed want to give black children toys to play with that “look like them.” Yet, in order to compete in a market long dominated by Mattel and Hasbro, her company, it seems, has little choice but to conform to the Barbie mold.

DuCiLLE from MuLTiCuLTuRAL BARBiE 533

costumes sold out immediately (Larcen A7). The first Barbies, which were modeled after a sexy German doll and comic strip character named Lilli, were all white, but in 1967 Mattel premiered a black version of the doll called “Colored Francie.” “Colored Francie,” like white “Francie Fairchild” introduced the year before, was supposed to be Barbie’s “MODern” younger cousin. As a white doll modeled and marketed in the image of Hollywood’s Gidget, white Francie had been an international sensation, but Colored Francie was not destined to duplicate her prototype’s success. Although the “black is beautiful” theme of both the civil rights and black power movements may have suggested a ready market for a beautiful black doll, Colored Francie in fact did not sell well.

Evelyn Burkhalter, owner, operator, and curator of the Barbie Hall of 12 Fame in Palo Alto, California—home to 16,000 Barbie dolls—attributes Colored Francie’s commercial failure to the racial climate of the times. Doll purchasing patterns, it seems, reflected the same resistance to inte- gration that was felt elsewhere in the nation. In her implied family ties

to white Barbie, Colored Francie suggested more than simple integration. She implied miscegenation: a make-believe mixing of races that may have jeopardized the doll’s real market value. Cynthia Roberts, author of Bar- bie: Thirty Years of America’s Doll (1989), maintains that Colored Francie flopped because of her straight hair and Caucasian features (44), which seemingly were less acceptable then than now. No doubt Mattel’s deci- sion to call its first black Barbie “Colored Francie” also contributed to the doll’s demise. The use of the outmoded, even racist term “colored” in the midst of civil rights and black power activism suggested that while Francie might be “MODern,” Mattel was still in the dark(y) ages. In any case, neither black nor white audiences bought the idea of Barbie’s colored relations, and Mattel promptly took the doll off the market, replacing her with a black doll called Christie in 1968.

While a number of other black dolls appeared throughout the late six- 13 ties and seventies—including the Julia doll, modeled after the TV charac- ter played by black singer and actress Diahann Carroll—it was not until 1980 that Mattel introduced black dolls that were called Barbie like their white counterparts. Today, Barbie dolls come in a virtual rainbow coali- tion of colors, races, ethnicities, and nationalities—most of which look remarkably like the prototypical white Barbie, modified only by a dash of color and a change of costume. It is these would-be multicultural “dolls
of the world” — Jamaican Barbie, Nigerian and Kenyan Barbie, Malaysian Barbie, Chinese Barbie, Mexican, Spanish, and Brazilian Barbie, et cetera,
et cetera, et cetera — that interest me. For me these dolls are at once a sym- bol and a symptom of what multiculturalism has become at the hands of contemporary commodity culture: an easy and immensely profitable way off the hook of Eurocentrism that gives us the face of cultural diversity without the particulars of racial difference.

If I could line up across the page the ninety “different” colors, cultures, 14 and other incarnations in which Barbie currently exists, the fact of her

534 CHAPTER 14 BusinEss

unrelenting sameness (or at least similarity) would become immediately apparent. Even two dolls might do the trick: “My First Barbie” in white and “My First Barbie” in black, for example, or white “Western Fun Bar- bie” and black “Western Fun Barbie.” Except for their dye jobs, the dolls are identical: the same body, size, shape, and apparel. Or perhaps I should say nearly identical because in some instances — with black and Asian dolls in particular—coloring and other subtle changes (stereotypically slanted eyes in the Asian dolls, thicker lips in the black dolls) suggest differently coded facial features.

In other instances, when Barbie moves across cultural as opposed to 15 racial lines, it is costume rather than color that distinguishes one ethnic group or nation from another. Nigeria and Jamaica, for instance, are repre- sented by the same basic brown body, dolled-up in different native garbs —

or Mattel’s interpretation thereof.4 With other costume changes, this generic black body becomes Western Fun Barbie or Marine Barbie or Des- ert Storm Barbie, and even Presidential Candidate Barbie, who, by the way, comes with a Nancy Reagan–red taking-care-of-business suit as well as a red, white, and blue inaugural ball gown. Much the same is true of the generic Asian doll—sometimes called Kira—who reappears in a vari- ety of different dress-defined ethnicities. In other words, where Barbie is concerned, clothes not only make the woman, they mark the racial and/or cultural difference.

Such difference is marked as well by the cultural history and language 16 lessons that accompany each doll in Mattel’s international collection. The back of Jamaican Barbie’s box tells us, for example, “How-you-du (Hello) from the land of Jamaica, a tropical paradise known for its exotic fruit, sugar cane, breathtaking beaches, and reggae beat!” The box goes on to explain that most Jamaicans have ancestors from Africa. Therefore, “even though our official language is English, we speak patois, a kind of ‘Jamaica Talk,’ filled with English and African words.” The lesson ends with a brief glossary (eight words) and a few more examples of this “Jamaica Talk,” complete with translations: “A hope yu wi come-a Jamaica! (I hope you will come to Jamaica!)” and “Teck care a yusself, mi fren! (Take care of yourself, my friend!).” A nice idea, I suppose, but for me these quick-and-dirty eth- nographies only enhance the extent to which these would-be multicultural dolls treat race and ethnic difference like collectibles, contributing more

to commodity culture than to the intercultural awareness they claim to inspire.

4After many calls to the Jamaican Embassy in Washington, D.C., and to various cul- tural organizations in Jamaica, I have determined that Jamaican Barbie’s costume—a floor-length granny-style dress with apron and headrag—bears some resemblance to what is considered the island’s traditional folk costume. I am still left wondering about the decision-making process, however: why the doll representing Jamaica is figured as a maid, while the doll representing Great Britain, for example, is presented as a lady—a blonde, blue-eyed Barbie doll dressed in a fancy riding habit with boots and hat.

DuCiLLE from MuLTiCuLTuRAL BARBiE 535

Is the current fascination with the black or colored body—especially 17 the female body — a contemporary version of the primitivism of the 1920s?
Is multiculturalism to postmodernism what primitivism was to modern- ism? It was while on my way to a round table discussion on precisely this question that I bought my first black Barbie dolls in March of 1993. As carbon copies of an already problematic original, these colorized Mattel toys seemed to me the perfect tools with which to illustrate the point I wanted to make about the collapse of multiculturalism into an easy plural- ism that simply adds what it constructs as the Other without upsetting the fundamental precepts and paradigms of Western culture or, in the case of Mattel, without changing the mold.

Not entirely immune to such critiques, Mattel sought expert advice 18 from black parents and early childhood specialists in the development and marketing of its newest line of black Barbie dolls. Chief among the expert witnesses was clinical psychologist Darlene Powell Hopson, who coauthored with her husband Derek S. Hopson a study of racism and child development entitled Different and Wonderful: Raising Black Children in a Race-Conscious Society (1990). As part of their research for the book, the Hopsons repeated a ground-breaking study conducted by black psycholo- gists Kenneth and Mamie Clark in the 1940s.

The Clarks used black and white dolls to demonstrate the negative 19 effects of racism and segregation on black children. When given a choice between a white doll and a black doll, nearly 70 percent of the black chil- dren in the study chose the white doll. The Clarks’ findings became an important factor in Brown v. the Board of Education in 1954. More recently, some scholars have called into question not necessarily the Clarks’ findings but their interpretation: the assumption that, in the realm of make-believe,

a black child’s choosing a white doll necessarily reflects a negative self concept.5 For the Hopsons, however, the Clarks’ research remains compel- ling. In 1985 they repeated the Clarks’ doll test and found that an alarming 65 percent of the black children in their sample chose a white doll over a black one. Moreover, 76 percent of the children interviewed said that the black dolls “looked bad” to them (Hopson xix).

In addition to the clinical uses they make of dolls in their experiments, 20 the Hopsons also give considerable attention to what they call “doll play”
in their book, specifically mentioning Barbie. “If your daughter likes ‘Bar- bie’ dolls, by all means get her Barbie,” they advise black parents. “But also choose Black characters from the Barbie world. You do not want your child
to grow up thinking that only White dolls, and by extension White people, are

5See among others Morris Rosenberg’s books Conceiving the Self (1979) and Society and the Adolescent Self-Image (1989) and William E. Cross’s Shades of Black: Diversity in African American Identity (1991), all of which challenge the Clarks’ findings. Cross argues, for example, that the Clarks confounded or conflated two different issues: atti- tude toward race in general and attitude toward the self in particular. How one feels about race is not necessarily an index of one’s self-esteem.

536 CHAPTER 14 BusinEss

attractive and nice” (Hopsons 127, emphasis original). (Note that “Barbie,” unmodified in the preceding passage, seems to mean white Barbie dolls.) The Hopsons suggest that parents should not only provide their children with black and other ethnic dolls but that they should get involved in their children’s doll play. “Help them dress and groom the dolls while you com- pliment them both,” they advise, offering the following suggested routine: “ ‘This is a beautiful doll. It looks just like you. Look at her hair. It’s just like yours. Did you know your nose is as pretty as your doll’s?’” (119). They also suggest that parents use “complimentary words such as lovely, pretty, or nice so that [the] child will learn to associate them with his or her own image” (124).

Certainly it is important to help children feel good about themselves. 21 One might argue, however, that the “just like you” simile and the beau- tiful doll imagery so central to these suggestions for what the Hopsons call positive play run the risk of transmitting to the child a colorized ver- sion of the same old beauty myth. Like Barbie dolls themselves, they make beauty — and by implication worth — a matter of physical characteristics.

In spite of their own good intentions, the Hopsons, in linking play 22 with “beautiful” dolls to positive self-imagining, echoed Mattel’s own mar- keting campaign. It is not surprising, then, that the Hopsons’ findings and the interventional strategies they designed for using dolls to instill ethnic pride caught the attention of Mattel. In 1990 Darlene Hopson was asked
to consult with the corporation’s product manager Deborah Mitchell and designer Kitty Black-Perkins—both African Americans—in the develop- ment of a new line of “realistically sculpted” black fashion dolls. Hopson agreed and about a year later Shani and her friends Asha and Nichelle became the newest members of Barbie’s ever-expanding family.

Shani means “marvelous” in Swahili, according to the dolls’ press kit. 23 But as Village Voice columnist Lisa Jones has noted, the name has other meanings as well: “startling, a wonder, a novelty” (36). My own research indicates that while Shani is a Swahili female name meaning marvel- ous, the Kiswahili word “shani” translates as “an adventure, something unusual” (Stewart 120). So it seems that Mattel’s new play thing is not just marvelous, too marvelous for words, but, as her name also suggests, she is difference incarnate — a novelty, a new enterprise, or, perhaps, as the black female Other so often is, an exotic. Mattel, it seems to me, both plays up and plays on what it presents as the doll’s exotic black-is-beautiful differ- ence. As the back of her package reads:

Shani means marvelous in the Swahili language . . . and marvelous she is! With her friends Asha and Nichelle, Shani brings to life the special style and beauty of the African American woman.

Each one is beautiful in her own way, with her own lovely skin shade and unique facial features. Each has a different hair color and texture, perfect for braiding, twisting, and creating fabulous hair styles! Their clothes, too, reflect the vivid colors and ethnic accents that showcase their exotic looks and fash- ion flair!

DuCiLLE from MuLTiCuLTuRAL BARBiE 537

Shani, Asha, and Nichelle invite you into their glamorous world to share the fun and excitement of being a top model. Imagine appearing on maga- zine covers, starring in fashion shows, and going to Hollywood parties as you, Shani, Asha, and Nichelle live your dreams of beauty and success, loving every marvelous minute! (emphasis added)

While these words attempt to convey a message of black pride — after the fashion of the Hopsons’ recommendations for positive play—that mes- sage is clearly tied to bountiful hair, lavish and exotic clothes, and other outward and visible signs not of brains but of beauty, wealth, and success. Shani may be a top fashion model, but don’t look for her (or, if Mattel’s own oft-articulated theory of Barbie as role model holds, yourself or your child) at M.I.T.

Like any other proud, well-to-do parents of a debutante, Mattel gave 24 Shani her own coming out party at the International Toy Fair in February
of 1991. This gala event included a tribute to black designers and an appear- ance by En Vogue singing the Negro National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing!” — evidently the song of choice of the doll Mattel describes as “tomor- row’s African American woman.” Also making their debuts were Shani’s friends Asha and Nichelle, notable for the different hues in which their black plastic skin comes—an innovation due in part to Darlene Hopson’s influence. Shani, the signature doll of the line, is what we call in the cul- ture “brown-skinned”; Asha is honey-colored (some would say “high- yella”); and Nichelle is deep mahogany. Their male friend Jamal, added in 1992, completes the collection.

For the un(make-)believing, the three-to-one ratio of the Shani quar- 25 tet—three black females to one black male—may be the most realistic thing about these dolls. In the eyes and the advertising of Mattel, however, Shani and her friends are the most authentic black female thing the main- stream toy market has yet produced. “Tomorrow’s African American woman” (an appellation which, as Lisa Jones has noted, both riffs and one- ups Essence’s “Today’s Black Woman”) has broader hips, fuller lips, and a broader nose, according to product manager Deborah Mitchell. Principal designer Kitty Black-Perkins, who has dressed black Barbies since their birth in 1980, adds that the Shani dolls are also distinguished by their unique, culturally-specific clothes in “spice tones, [and] ethnic fabrics,” rather than “fantasy colors like pink or lavender” (qtd. in Jones 36) — evidently the col- ors of the faint of skin.

The notion that fuller lips, broader noses, wider hips, and higher der- 26 rières somehow make the Shani dolls more realistically African American raises many difficult questions about authenticity, truth, and the ever- problematic categories of the real and the symbolic, the typical and the stereotypical. Just what are we saying when we claim that a doll does or does not “look black”? How does black look? What would it take to make a doll look authentically African American? What preconceived, prescriptive ideals of legitimate blackness are inscribed in such claims of authentic- ity? How can doll manufacturers or any other image makers—the film

538 CHAPTER 14 BusinEss

industry, for example—attend to cultural, racial, and phenotypical differ- ences without merely engaging the same simplistic big-lips/broad-hips ste- reotypes that make so many of us—blacks in particular—grit our (pearly white) teeth? What would it take to produce a line of dolls that more fully reflects the wide variety of sizes, shapes, colors, hair styles, occupations, abilities, and disabilities that African Americans—like all people—come in? In other words: what price difference? . . .

The Body Politic(s) of Barbie

Barbie’s body is a consumer object itself, a vehicle for the display of clothing and the spectacular trappings of a wealthy teenage fantasy life. Her extraor- dinary body exists not simply as an example of the fetishized female form typical of those offered up to the male gaze, but as a commodity vehicle itself whose form seduces the beholder and sells accessories, the real source of corporate profit. Like Lay’s chips, no one can buy just one outfit for the doll. Barbie is the late capitalist girl incarnate. (McCombie)

In focusing thus far on the merchandising of racial, perhaps more 27 so than gender, difference, I do not mean to imply that racial and gender identities are divisible, even in dolls. Nor, in observing that most if not all
of Mattel’s “dolls of the world” look remarkably like what the company calls the “traditional, blond, blue-eyed Barbie,” do I mean to suggest that the seemingly endless recapitulation of the white prototype is the only way in which these dolls are problematic. In fact, the most alarming thing about Barbie may well be the extent to which she functions as what M. G. Lord calls a teaching tool for femininity, whatever her race or ethnicity. Lord, the author of Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll, due out later this year, describes Barbie as a “space-age fertility icon. She looks like a modern woman, but she’s a very primitive totem of female power” (qtd. in Dembner 1).

Barbie has long had the eye and ire of feminists, who, for the most 28 part, have reviled her as another manifestation of the damaging myths of female beauty and the feminine body that patriarchy perpetuates through such vehicles as popular and commodity culture. A counter narrative also exists, however, one in which Barbie is not an empty-headed, material girl bimbo, for whom math class is tough, but a feminist heroine, who has been first in war (a soldier who served in the Gulf, she has worn the col- ors of her country as well as the United Colors of Benetton), first in peace (she held her own summit in 1990 and she’s a long-time friend of unicef, who “loves all the children of the world”), and always first in the hearts

of her country (Americans buy her at the rate of one doll every second). While time does not allow me to reiterate or to assess here all the known critiques and defenses of Barbie, I do want to discuss briefly some of the gender ideals that I think are encoded in and transmitted by this larger- than-life little woman and what Barbie’s escalating popularity says about contemporary American culture.

DuCiLLE from MuLTiCuLTuRAL BARBiE 539

In Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body 29 (1993), Karen Sanchez-Eppler argues that all dolls are intended to teach little girls about domesticity (133). If such tutelage is Barbie’s not so secret mission, her methodology is far more complex and contradictory than that

of the Betsy Wetsy and Tiny Tears baby dolls I played with thirty-five years ago. Those dolls invoked and evoked the maternal, as they and the baby bottles and diapers with which they were packaged invited us to nestle, nurse, and nurture. Barbie’s curvaceous, big-busted, almost fully female body, on the other hand, summons not the maternal but the sexual, not the nurturant mother but the sensuous woman. As Mel McCombie has argued, rather than rehearsing parenting, as a baby doll does, Barbie’s adult body encourages children to dress and redress a fashion doll that yields lessons about sexuality, consumption, and teenage life (3). Put another way, we might say that Barbie is literally and figuratively a titillating toy.

Bodacious as they may be, however, Barbie’s firm plastic breasts have 30 no nipples—nothing that might offend, nothing that might suggest her own pleasure. And if her protruding plastic mounds signify a simmering sensuality, what are we to make of her missing genitalia? McCombie sug- gests that Barbie’s genital ambiguity can be read as an “homage to ‘good taste’” and as a “reflection of the regnant mores for teenage girls—to be both sexy and adult yet remain virginal” (4). I agree that her body invites such readings, but it also seems to me that there is nothing ambiguous about Barbie’s crotch. It’s missing in inaction. While male dolls like Ken and Jamal have bumps “down there” and in some instances simulated underwear etched into the plastic, most Barbies come neither with draw- ers nor with even a hint of anything that needs covering, even as “it” is already covered or erased. As an icon of idealized femininity, then, Bar- bie is locked into a never-never land in which she must be always already sexual without the possibility of sex. Conspicuously sensual on top but definitively nonsexual below, her plastic body indeed has inscribed within
it the very contradictory, whore/madonna messages with which patriarchy taunts and even traumatizes young women in particular.

This kind of speculation about Barbie’s breasts has led the doll’s cre- 31 ator, Ruth Handler, to chide adults for their nasty minds. “In my opinion people make too much of breasts,” Handler has complained. “They are just part of the body” (qtd. in BillyBoy 20). Mrs. Handler has a point (or maybe two). I feel more than just a little ridiculous myself as I sit here contem- plating the body parts and sex life of a piece of plastic. What is fascinating, however, what I think is worth studying, what both invites and resists the- orizing, is not the lump of molded plastic that is Barbie, but the imaginary life that is not — that is our invention. Barbie as a cultural artifact may be able to tell us more about ourselves and our society — more about society’s attitudes toward its women—than anything we might say about the doll her- or, rather, itself.

In the nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville and others argued 32 that you could judge the character, quality, and degree of advancement
of a civilization by the status and treatment of its women. What is the

540 CHAPTER 14 BusinEss

status of women in soon to be twenty-first-century America, and can Bar- bie serve as a barometer for measuring that status? Barbie, it seems to me, is a key player in the process of socialization — of engendering and racial- ization—that begins in infancy and is furthered by almost everything about our society, including the books children read, the toys they play with, and the cartoons they watch on television.

While changing channels one Saturday morning, I happened upon a 33 cartoon, just a glimpse of which impelled me to watch on. At the point that I tuned in, a big, gray, menacingly male bulldog was barking furiously
at a pretty, petite, light-colored cat, who simply batted her long lashes, meowed coquettishly, and rubbed her tiny feline body against his huge canine leg in response. The more the dog barked and growled, the softer the cat meowed, using her slinky feline body and her feminine wiles to win the dog over. Her strategy worked; before my eyes—and, I imagine, the eyes of millions of children—the ferocious beast was transformed into a lovesick puppy dog, who followed the cat everywhere, repeatedly saving her from all manner of evil and danger. Time and time again, the bulldog rescued the helpless, accident-prone pussy from falling girders, oncoming traffic, and other hazards to which she, in her innocent frailty, was entirely oblivious. By the end, the once ferocious bulldog was completely domesti- cated, as his no longer menacing body became a kind of bed for the cat to nestle in.

There are, of course, a number of ways to read the gender and racial 34 politics of this cartoon. I suppose that the same thought process that the- orizes Barbie as a feminist heroine for whom men are mere accessories might claim the kitty cat, too, as a kind of feminist feline, who uses her feminine wiles to get her way. What resonates for me in the cartoon, how- ever, are its beauty and the beast, light/dark, good/evil, female/male, race and gender codes: light, bright, cat-like femininity tames menacing black male bestiality. Make no mistake, however; it is not wit that wins out over barbarism but a mindless, can’t-take-care-of-herself femininity.

Interestingly enough, these are the kinds of messages of which fairy 35 tales and children’s stories are often made. White knights rescue fair dam- sels in distress from dark, forbidding evils of one kind or another. As Dar- lene and Derek Hopson argue: “Some of the most blatant and simplistic representations of white as good and black as evil are found in children’s literature,” where evil black witches and good white fairies—heroes in white and villains in black — abound (121).

What Barbie dolls, cartoons like the one outlined above, and even the 36 seemingly innocent fairy tales we read to our children seem to me to have in common are the mythologies of race and gender that are encoded in them. Jacqueline Urla and Alan Swedlund maintain that Barbie’s body type con- structs the bodies of other women as deviant and perpetuates an impos- sible standard of beauty. Attempting to live up to the Barbie ideal, others argue, fosters eating and shopping disorders in teenage girls — nightmares instead of dreams. BillyBoy, one of Barbie’s most ardent supporters, defends his heroine against such charges by insisting that there is nothing abnor-

DuCiLLE from MuLTiCuLTuRAL BARBiE 541

mal about the proportions of Barbie’s body. Rather, he asserts, “she has the ideal that Western culture has insisted upon since the 1920s: long legs, long arms, small waist, high round bosom, and long neck” (22). The irony is that BillyBoy may be right. “Unrealistic” or not, Barbie’s weight and measurements (which if proportionate to those of a woman 5'6" tall would be something like 110 pounds and a top-heavy 39–18–33) are not much different from those of the beauty queens to whom Bert Parks used to sing “Here she is, Miss America. Here she is, our ideal.”6 If Barbie is a monster, she is our monster, our ideal.

“But is Barbie bad?” Someone asked me the other day if a black doll 37 that looks like a white doll isn’t better than no black doll at all. I must admit that I have no ready answer for this and a number of other questions posed
by my own critique. Although, as I acknowledged in the beginning, the dolls
I played with as a child were white, I still remember the first time I saw a black doll. To me, she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen; I wanted her desperately, and I was never again satisfied with white Betsy Wetsy and blonde, blue-eyed Patty Play Pal. She was something else, something Other, like me, and that, I imagine, was the source of her charm and my desire.

If I did not consciously note my own absence in the toys I played with, 38 that absence, I suspect, had a profound effect on me nevertheless. We have only to read Toni Morrison’s chilling tale The Bluest Eye to see the effect
of the white beauty myth on the black child. And while they were by no means as dire for me as for Morrison’s character Pecola Breedlove, I was not exempt from the consequences of growing up black in a white world that barely acknowledged my existence. I grew up believing I was ugly: my kinky hair, my big hips, the gap between my teeth. I have spent half my life smiling with my hand over my mouth to hide that gap, a habit I only began
to get over in graduate school when a couple of Nigerian men told me that
in their culture, where my body type is prized much more than Barbie’s, such gaps are a sign of great beauty. I wonder what it would have meant for me as a child to see a black doll—or any doll—with big hips and a gap between her two front teeth.

Today, for $24.99, Mattel reaches halfway around the world and gives 39 little girls—black like me—Nigerian Barbies to play with. Through the wonders of plastic, dyes, and mass production, the company brings into the homes of African American children a Nigeria that I as a young child did not even know existed. The problem is that Mattel’s Nigeria does not exist either. The would-be ethnic dolls of the world Mattel sells, like their “traditional, blond, blue-eyed” all-American girl prototype, have no gaps,

6In response to criticism from feminists in particular, the Miss America Pageant has attempted to transform itself from a beauty contest to a talent competition, whose real aim is to give college scholarships to smart, talented women (who just happen to look good in bathing suits and evening gowns). As part of its effort to appear more concerned with a woman’s IQ than with her bra size, the pageant did away with its long-standing practice of broadcasting the chest, waist, and hip measurements, as well as the height and weight, of each contestant.

542 CHAPTER 14 BusinEss

no big ears, no chubby thighs or other “imperfections.” For a modest price, I can dream myself into Barbie’s perfect world, so long as I dream myself in her image. It may be a small world, a whole new world, but there is still no place for me as me in it.

This, then, is my final doll story. Groucho Marx said that he wouldn’t 40 want to belong to a club that would have him as a member. In that same vein, I am not so sure that most of us would want to buy a doll that “looked like us.” Indeed, efforts to produce and market such truer-to-life dolls have not met with much commercial success. Cultural critics like me can throw theoretical stones at her all we want, but part of Barbie’s infinite appeal is her very perfection, the extent to which she is both product and purveyor

of the dominant white Western ideal of beauty.
And what of black beauty? If Colored Francie failed thirty years ago in 41

part because of her Caucasian features, what are we to make of the current popularity and commercial success of Black Barbie and Shani, straight hair and all? Have we progressed to a point where “difference” makes no difference? Or have we regressed to such a degree that “difference” is only conceivable as similarity — as a mediated text that no matter what its dye job ultimately must be readable as white. Listen to our language: we “tol- erate difference”; we practice “racial tolerance.” Through the compound fractures of interpellation and universalization, the Other is reproduced not in her own image but in ours. If we have gotten away from “Us” and “Them,” it may be only because Them R Us.

Is Barbie bad? Barbie is just a piece of plastic, but what she says about 42 the economic base of our society—what she suggests about gender and race in our world — ain’t good.

note

I am particularly pleased to be publishing this essay in differences, since its genesis was at a roundtable discussion on multiculturalism and postmodernism, sponsored by the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University, in March of 1993. I wish to thank the many friends and colleagues who have encouraged this project, especially Indira Karamcheti and her four-year-old daughter Gita, who introduced me to the miniature Barbies that come with McDonald’s “Happy Meals,” and Erness Brody, who, with her daughter Jennifer Brody, is a veteran collector of vintage dolls. I owe a special debt to fellow “Barbiologists” M. G. Lord, Mel McCombie, Jacqueline Urla, and Eric Swedlund, who have so generously shared their research, and to Darlene Powell Hopson for talking with me about her work with Mattel. I wish to acknowledge as well the work of Erica Rand, an art historian at Bates College, who is also working on Barbie.

works cited

Berkwitz, David N. “Finally, Barbie Doll Ads Go Ethnic.” Newsweek 13 Aug. 1990: 48. BillyBoy. Barbie: Her Life and Times. New York: Crown, 1987.
Cross, William E., Jr. Shades of Black: Diversity in African American Identity. Philadelphia:

Temple UP, 1991.
Delany, Sarah, and Delany, A. Elizabeth. Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100

Years. New York: Kodansha, 1993.
Dembner, Alice. “Thirty-five and Still a Doll.” Boston Globe 9 Mar. 1994: 1+. Jones, Lisa. “A Doll Is Born.” Village Voice 26 Mar. 1991: 36.

DuCiLLE from MuLTiCuLTuRAL BARBiE 543

Kantrowitz, Barbara. “Hot Date: Barbie and G.I. Joe.” Newsweek 20 Feb. 1989: 59–60. Hopson, Darlene Powell and Derek S. Different and Wonderful: Raising Black Children in

a Race-Conscious Society. New York: Simon, 1990.
Larcen, Donna. “Barbie Bond Doesn’t Diminish with Age.” Hartford Courant 17 Aug.

1993: A6–7.
Lord, M. G. Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll. New York: Morrow,

1994.
McCombie, Mel. “Barbie: Toys Are Us.” Unpublished essay.
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Washington Square, 1970.
Roberts, Cynthia. Barbie: Thirty Years of America’s Doll. Chicago: Contemporary, 1989. Rosenberg, Morris. Conceiving the Self. New York: Basic, 1979.
——— . Society and the Adolescent Self-Image. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1989. Sanchez-Eppler, Karen. Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the

Body. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.
Stewart, Julia. African Names. New York: Carol, 1993.
Urla, Jacqueline, and Alan Swedlund. “The Anthropometry of Barbie: Unsettling Ideals

of the Feminine in Popular Culture.” Deviant Bodies. Ed. Jennifer Terry and Jacque- line Urla. Bloomington: Indiana UP, [1995].

nnn

reading as a Writer: Analyzing rhetorical choices

1. List the key phrases duCille uses to build her argument in her early para- graphs (you might look in particular at paragraphs 5, 9 and 10), and be ready to explain them in your own words. Be sure you look up words that are new to you. For example, what do you think duCille means by “the commodification of race and gender difference” in paragraph 5? Work in pairs or groups to help make sense of some of these challenging phrases that are important to duCille’s argument about Barbie.

2. Find two passages where duCille uses a specific doll as an example to illus- trate her larger argument. What words and phrases does she use to move between her detailed descriptions of the dolls and their packaging, and her analysis of those details? How persuasive do you find her claims, based on the evidence in these passages? Explain your answer.

Writing as a reader: Entering the conversation of ideas

1. DuCille and Noël Sturgeon examine the ways that attitudes toward racial differences are constructed through children’s popular culture. Select as a test case a children’s film not covered by Sturgeon that you can ana- lyze through both duCille’s and Sturgeon’s insights about race and gender. How do these authors’ ideas help illuminate aspects of this film that audi- ences might miss? What significance do you see in this “hidden” story?

2. DuCille’s emphasis on women’s bodies and the marketplace intersects with the concerns of Jean Kilbourne and Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber. Write an essay in which you use insights from duCille and one or both of these other writers in order to analyze a specific product (and perhaps its advertising) that relies on gender—feminine or masculine—for its mar- keting. What do you conclude?