Domesticating Barbie - Richard Stockton College Word Press ...

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Domesticating Barbie 255 Fig. 13. Intergalactic glamour: Astronaut Barbie (198S). workout discipline in the 1980s was potentially under threat from a few contradic tory accessories, such as the "Barbie Loves McDonald's," "Barbie Soda Shoppe," and "Barbie Ice Cream Shoppe" playsets (Summers, 1997, pp. 158-159,162). The "threat" from such accessories was only symbolic, though, since Barbie's plastic body demanded no exercise discipline. Generally, Barbie's physical fitness came through low-impact social exercise, such as "Tennis Barbie" (1986), "Tennis Stars Barbie and Ken" (1986), and "Roller Skating Barbie" (1980) (Summers, 1997, pp. 83, 95, 108). This content downloaded on Tue, 15 Jan 2013 10:45:42 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
256 Pearson and Mullins BARBIE AS A DISTORTED REFLECTION It is often argued that Barbie is simply a reflection of her times, a mirror of fashion, women's roles, body image, and material consumption. Barbie ma terial culture certainly does not ignore dominant social currents, but Barbie's "reflections" represent only select possibilities at various historical moments. What Barbie reflects is a complicated tangle of dominant ideologies and resistant sym bolism: if Barbie is a mirror of society, it is at best a distorted and prepossessed reflection. Well before 1963, when Betty Friedan (1983) defined "the problem that has no name," a significant number of women were defying the Feminine Mystique and forging a place for themselves in the male-dominated workforce. Barbie was created in the image of these women, the Charlotte Johnsons and Ruth Handlers of the world, whose aspirations and agency basically went unspoken. Consequently, the doll had potentially revolutionary implications from the outset by even tacitly acknowledging women's agency and power in a wide range of settings. According to Mattel, Barbie's persona and age deliberately were left vague so that children could play with her according to their own imaginations, rather than a preset Barbie personality. To facilitate flexible play, Mattel marketed a varied wardrobe appropriate to settings ranging from very casual to very elegant. But Barbie never was designed to be a cipher that could accommodate a vast range of social possibilities or experiences. Barbie was a structured representation, a career woman whose every box proclaimed her status as 'Teen-age Fashion Model" and implicitly bespoke her class standing. Her sophisticated, high-fashion outfits were things Barbie modeled as part of her job and not "real life," but there were no "Factory Shift" ensembles suggesting a lower-class lifestyle, and the college educated Barbie spent her vacation time at resorts and on cruises. Consumers who wished to defy such symbolism could make their own Barbie clothing, limited only by their imagination and sewing skills, or they could purchase patterns (Caviale, 1997; Cross, 1996). Patterns certainly were less costly than the prefabricated fash ions: in 1962, for instance, Mattel-licensed patterns retailed in the Ward's catalog for 98tf for a package of 12 {Barbie Bazaar, 1994, p. 68). This contrasted with the price of premade fashions, which ranged from $1.29 to $2.64 each in the same catalog (Barbie Bazaar, 1994, p. 69). These licensed patterns, though, represented the same activities as the fashion ensembles. Certainly an imaginative child could place a well-dressed Barbie in virtually any sort of play situation, and an enter prising parental seamstress could produce outfits that encouraged nontraditional roles, but neither the patterns nor the fashions stimulated such resistance. Barbie's early career options reflected historicized gender expectations, be cause most of her activities were coded as female occupations about which a young girl might dream (e.g., model, registered nurse, ballerina, stewardess, nightclub singer). Yet, while in explicitly gendered female careers, Barbie was nonetheless working at a time when few American women were employed This content downloaded on Tue, 15 Jan 2013 10:45:42 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions outside the home.
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