Nakamura, Digitizing Race, Introduction, chapter 5, Epilogue

Avatars and the Visual Culture of Reproduction 141
While the dolls are imbued with detailed identities right out of the box,
so to speak, endowed with manufactured “memories” as are the almosthuman
replicants in Blade Runner, another popular series of American Girls
is marketed on the basis of its composable identity and volitional ethnicity.
The American Girl Today series invites the user to “select the American
Girl Today doll with the hair, eye, and skin color you like best. Each doll is
18 inches tall and has a soft, huggable body with arms and legs you can
pose. Her beautiful eyes open and close, and her hair is long so you can style
it into all the looks you love! Your doll comes in her pretty new Go Anywhere
Outfit.” There are twenty-one possible combinations, and though some
of these dolls are phenotypically different from each other, no reference to
race is made in any of the discourse evident on the company’s Web site or
paper catalogs. Though straight hair is simply described by color, such as
“honey blond,” and by the word “curly” if the hair is “light,” the dark curly
hair evident on the “dark” doll is dubbed “textured.” Kapsalis notes the language
of modularity evident in the company’s discourse that stresses the
interactivity of the act of purchasing one of these dolls, an act that is overtly
figured as creative and reproductive in the sense that the buyer is steered toward
an act of visual self-replication: “The catalog encourages girls to pick
dolls that look like them, selecting skin, hair, and eye color as close as possible
to their own.” So while the character dolls are made to represent
specific types of ethnic and national “others,” American Girl Today dolls
create a representational landscape that replicates the discourse of reproductive
technology, one that promises to help mothers create babies that
look like them. While both “reborn” dolls and American Girl dolls are part
of the material culture that is derided by the tasteful parents described in
articles about designer nurseries and diaper bags, classified no doubt as examples
of the “plastic junk” that the Pfeiffers and Michael Ryan dismiss as
“not smart,” and definitely not something that “our mothers” would consider
chic, what is notable about this discourse is the way that it figures
reborners and American Girl doll enthusiasts as “hobbyists” and “collectors.”
These are both terms associated with creativity, but in a way that is
distinctly gendered, and in a way that still stresses consumption and selection
rather than creation and design. Michael Ryan and the Pfeiffers are described
as designers and entrepreneurs, partly because of their financial success (as
mentioned earlier, reborn and American Girl dolls generate a great deal of
revenue in both primary and secondary markets), but mainly because of the
way that their work is credited as “original” creation, because of their class