Essai Critiques / Review Essays Out of the Garden and Into the Mall

310 ESSAIS CRITIQUES / REVIEW ESSAYS
means that anyone anywhere can see the movie or the video, watch the spin-off
TV program, buy the licensed merchandise, eat the cereal promoting the characters,
and enter the fast-food-chain contests for a possible winning prize to meet
the characters at Universal Studios. Whether one buys into Jurassic dinosaurs, the
Beverly Hills 90210 gang, or Ninja Turtles, the larger discourse of contemporary
childhood culture is available globally, in every conceivable merchandise transformation,
and in a variety of print and electronic narrative genres. Kline is right:
“one factor has tended to be overlooked: that the rise in character marketing has
all but eliminated images of real children playing in the normal course of their
lives — in dramas or narratives about and for the young” (p. 141).
Chapters 6 and 7 recapture the marketing of childhood in historical perspective.
Both chapters are useful for teachers and/or academic educators to use as
a model for students to investigate the history of childhood culture and markets.
Kline’s analysis of the cross-media and cross-corporate marketing of media tie-in
merchandise is a fascinating look at postmodernist capitalist re-alignments and
relations, and a way of understanding what Foucault meant by the historical
construction of social subjects. Kline’s historical mapping of the development of
childhood culture and markets provides an accessible way to understand how
concepts of the child and childhood experiences have changed historically. In the
last few decades, communications technologies and changing consumer and
marketing relations have enabled the “making” of a “new” concept of the child
and childhood experiences (cf. Luke, 1990). In some ways, the arrival of the late
20th-century postmodern, high-tech child parallels the emergence of the printliterate
and educable child of the 16th century. As Foucault explained to us,
social subjects appear, disappear, and reappear in discourses and social and
cultural practices throughout the course of history.
In Chapter 8 Kline outlines the potential and limits of marketing ideas and
products. The near total reliance on media promotions (through TV ads and programs)
for successful toy launches and retail dominance means that profit returns
at broadcasting, manufacturing, and retail levels need to be guaranteed. It also
means an increasingly aggressive push into global media and retail markets.
What this globalization of play suggests is the universalization of primarily
American (middle-class and white) childhood culture. This universalized and
normative — albeit highly gender-differentiated — discourse has significant pedagogical
consequences for inducting children into standardized linguistic, behavioural,
and play repertoires. Even in their Care Bear, My Little Pony, or Strawberry
Shortcake “warm fuzzies” variations, these toys — and the ad narratives in
which the symbolic connections to sharing, love, and emotional bonding are
structured — remain a sanitized discourse and experience. “Preschool plush,” as
Kline puts it, is a calculated pale imitation of the rich emotional texture of young
children’s real creativity and imagination. Despite some 20 years of feminist
research and policy intervention into business-as-usual, the gendered discourse