Black Barbie and the Deep Play of Difference

I played with Barbies probably until the age of 10 – 11 or so and up until taking a Women’s Studies course where Barbie was deconstructed and some saying that they would never buy them for their daughters one day I had never really put much thought into their significance. I absolutely loved playing with them, all 15 or so of them which are all now stuffed in a box in my childhood bedroom. I had all different kinds of them, not to mention the quintuplet babies and one Ken doll. My father had built this massive house for all of them as well. I did not think anything of it back then obviously but I did not have one single non-white doll. All had the long blond hair, fair skin and fancy clothes. I think the only one that sort of stood out from the rest was my Gem and the Misfits doll which wasn’t really a Barbie. I do not think I ever desired a Black Barbie because it didn’t occur to me that I needed to have one. I had seen them on store shelves and Sears catalog but I did not identify with them. When I read « Now little girls of varied backgrounds can relate directly to Barbie »(109) – new ethnic Barbies for self-identification and positive play and allowing girls from all over the world to live out their fantasies in spite of a real world that may seem too big. – Living through a doll – implying that because they are of a certain race or class or look they will never be able to achieve what Barbie has or looks like. I remember struggling with White Barbie even though I had such a big number and types. I had greasy long light brown hair, had fair skin covered in freckles, chubby cheeks and legs and grayish blue eyes and wearing my sister’s hand me downs or clearance sale clothes from the local K-Mart. All I remember is just desperately wanting to look like her because this is what I thought was beautiful. Skinny, long blond hair, perfect blue eyes, legs as long as I had ever seen and beautiful shiny clothes. I never for one second thought that this was manufactured and completely unrealistic.

So this article speaks of difference and identifying the self with this so called different « ethnic » Barbie. Mattel attempted to produce multicultural meaning and market ethnic diversity…does so by mass-marketing the discursively familiar – by reproducing stereotyped and visible signs of racial and ethnic difference. Just like I found that I couldn’t identify completely with White Barbie, how is it even possible for an addition of dark tint to the plastic mold appeal to little Black girls? As duCill argues Mattel is making the Other at once different and the same and what she calls the idea of a melting pot pluralism which simply « melts down and adds on a reconstituted other without transforming the established social order, without changing the mold. » Idea of multiculturalism without valuing difference- Mattel did it and we do it in our own everyday practices. When I was working full time, I had the role of assisting the event planner and remember having to help organize Multicultural Day and also the opening ceremony for Aboriginal Awareness Week. For both events, a variety of « cultural » foods were to be provided for taste but we never stopped and explain the significance or origins but just said eat this, it’s different. It’s like we think well I ate this, it was good and I participated in promoting multiculturalism.

To come back to Barbie, there is another point that I found interesting is when she presented the idea of using Barbie to show children how unlike any real woman Barbie is. We hear all these negative comments about Barbie and how we should not buy them for our daughters. Honestly, I think that we cannot stop buying them because they present a negative image. If we stopped buying into everything that is as bad as Barbie seems to be, the market would take a downward plunge. Why not buy Barbie and make a positive use of out her, use her as a teaching tool. I did not have that luxury when I was growing up and for that reason, I had to unlearn certain assumptions and beliefs at a much later age which turned out to be very difficult. As duCill concludes, “hazard lies less in buying Barbie than in buying into Barbie, internalizing the larger mythologies of gender and race that make possible both the ‘like me’ of Barbie and its critique.”(128)

Second-Hand Dresses and the Role of the Ragmarket (Angela McRobbie)

I really enjoyed this article. I love fashion and shopping so to look at the industry and more specifically at the ragmarket in a more attentive and critical way was quite eye opening. The way she analyses fashion through culture and gender is really interesting. However, the only negative comment I have about the article is that all her examples are based on Britain made it a little difficult to relate to.

The main argument of the chapter is that second hand style should be analysed within the broader context of postwar subcultural theory. So to understand this I had to look up the definition of 'subcultural theory' first. Wikipedia defines it as a "distinctive culture within a culture, so its norms and values differ from the majority culture but do not necessarily represent a culture deemed deviant by the majority."(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subcultural_theory)

McRobbie focuses on entrepreneurial infrastructure within youth cultures and on the opportunities which second-hand style has offered young people, at a time of recession, for participating in fashion. (135) She also makes a point to identify a discrepensy in the cultural academic literature on the act of buying and the process of looking and choosing.

McRobbie identifies shopping as having been put under the category of domestic labour – absorbed into consumerism where women and girls are seen as having a particular role to play – she criticises contemporary feminism lack of challenge to the idea that women were the slaves to consumerism. I think this idea is still very current. In ads, tv shows and in our own daily conversations and actions, women are portrayed as the endless consumers.

Notice the reactions of those around you if a woman, perhaps yourself, says that they do not enjoy shopping. The immediate reaction is that of shock and lack of understanding why and how a woman does not have that "natural" shopping instinct that is too often labelled onto women. Or look at it differently and imagine the reaction towards a man saying that he enjoys shopping. What is the immediate reaction to that? O.k. I seem to have gone way off topic now but this would make for really interesting research I think. To look at how dominant discourses have dictated who should what kind of shopping and the reasons why.

To come back to the ideas of the article, the author analyses the 60s hippy fashion as a statement against materialism , « a casual disregard for obvious signs of wealth, and a disdain for the "colour of money" » (137) Stuart Hall’s analysis of it was that this was an «identification with the poor » and sort of a disavowal of conventionality of the middle-class. I never actually saw it in this way, I always thought it was just forming and/or portraying a different identity, trying to be a rebel. I never thought of it in terms of poverty and the power to create such an image. She does argue that this behaviour or way of dressing is an unconscious identity formation and is not meant to be hurtful to those who « need » to shop the ragmarkets. This introduces the question she raises through Angela Carter’s work, on whether those who rummage in those « jumble » sales make light of those who search in need and not through choice. « Does the image of the middle-class girl "slumming it" in rags and ribbons merely highlight social class differences? » Does it bring the idea that middle-class individuals have the power to pull off that look, the power to move through various social classes without feeling the repercussions or experiencing the reality of it. This is what she calls the idea of being able to «afford » to look back and play around with idea of being poor (138)

Although she points out that this is done unintentionnaly, I started thinking about my childhood clothing. My family was lower middle-class and seeing as I was the youngest, I inheritated my sister’s hand me downs which were 5 years old and only got some new clothes for the new school season. Even then, it was from the cheepest place in town which was K-Mart at the time. I remember being envious of those who had new clothes all the time, especially those with brand names(especially in high school). I wonder what my reaction would have been if I knew that people were purposely wearing hand me downs or shopping at second hand clothing stores even though they had money for the nice things.


McRobbie also mentions that 1960s hippy clothing was a reminder of stigma of poverty, the shame of ill-fitting clothing but for the hippies it was not to create an element of shock rather than to promote a come back to nature, and authentic fabrics and a protest against man made synthetics. There is and was more value in a piece of clothing that was made through and through by one individual. It was also seen (as I still see it today) as a political action in the sense that it was/is creating an alternative society. Today for example, we boycott brandnames (Nike and Gap for example) to demonstrate our disapproval of sweat shops and child labour exploitation. I also think that buying from subculture markets is a way of encouraging local vendors and promoting local economy instead of buying into the whole capitalist consumerism 'thing'.

I've included cartoons and pictures boycotting certain stores that I thought would be not only entertaining but somewhat relevant to the article.

This image is of a boycott the Gap protest where the people said they would rather wear nothing than "The Gap".
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/images/0626-02.jpg

This is just to show how ridiculous capitalism and exploitation is.
http://www.gearnosweat.com/frameset/swetshrt.gif

This is by far my favorite. I think it fits perfectly well with the discussion about 'ragmarket' clothes.
http://www.cartoonstock.com/newscartoons/cartoonists/mba/lowres/mban835l.jpg

Just as a side note, although I did find this article interesting in its analysis of the ragmarket and consumerism, I was bothered by the following comment: « still the case that those who possess cultural capital can risk looking poor and unkempt while their black and working class conterparts dress up to counter the assumption of low status." I feel as though she assumes that those who do not possess cultural capitial are Black and working class. I might be true that some Black people fall into that category but so do a variety of other races, Whites included. It is unfair to make such an assumption. She should have been specific or problematised this claim.

The Everyday Life of Queer Trauma (Ann Cvetkovich)

The author is interested in the "way trauma digs itself in at the level of the everyday, and in the incommensurability of large-scale events and the ongoing material details of experience." Drawing on 4 theoretical perspectives which include feminism, critical race theory, Marxism and queer theory she hopes to analyse trauma. She is also wishing to take the concept away from the traditional biomedical discourse to "place it back in the hands of those who make culture, as well as to forge new models for how affective life can serve the foundation for public culture."
Her investigation of trauma is an inquiry into how affective experience that falls outside of institutionalized or stable forms of identity or politics can form the basis for public culture. She basically wants to focus on how trauma makes its way into the everyday lives and the material details of experience.

The first thing I want to address is her discussion of trauma as a category of national, public culture. What kept playing into my mind as I was reading this section was 9/11. What I think is ‘funny’ is how the States took this tragic event as an excuse for what they were already doing overseas. Not only that but their excuse was irrelevant as they were targeting a different group than that of who they accuse of doing this. They have and still are fighting this battle and killing innocent people in the process, including their own soldiers. I think it just reinforced American national unity and identity, and ideas and assumptions about what they view as the ‘Other’.

Secondly, I found significant the idea that "public culture takes as a starting point the nation as a space of struggle, seeking to illuminate the forms of violence that are forgotten or covered over by the amnesiac powers of national culture, which is adept at using one trauma story to suppress another." In a different light, culture doesn’t see sexism as issue of trauma anymore but thinks it has been resolved and as a result has moved on to something else. Another example of this how ‘news worthy’ events;.we focus on them for a little while and then move on to what we consider more traumatic and rarely go back to those events and the aftermath. There is too much focus on the immediate.

I enjoyed the section about the 2.5 Minute Ride mostly because I could relate, having been to Auschwitz and Birkenau. Holocaust offers representations, which are the product of successful efforts to create a culture around a historical trauma. The author looks at juxtaposition of visiting the Holocaust. When I visited the site, it felt very surreal, almost made up in some areas. It has become a museum more than anything. It is only upon visiting the grounds of Birkenau that you ‘feel’ the trauma I think. I felt like the grounds were enough, I didn’t need to see the many objects collected and displayed through a window. Cvetkovich writes that "the challenge it addresses is how to make room for another kind of story in the face of the hyperrepresentation of the Holocaust and its saturation of the cultural landscape by a proliferation of horrific images."(23) As you can observe from the pictures, I also felt that I should not smile or show any sense of pleasure from being there. I had it in my head that I had to be in a particular mood when I was there and I this began from the moment I got in the train from Kracown. I’m not denying the true feelings that came of being there or the significant impact it had on my identity as a historian but I somehow had to make it worse in my head to do the place justice.








Finally, what I retained the most from this work is the need to push boundaries, not to be in the either or categories. This idea of everyday insidious trauma which Cvetkovich refers to, made me question the measurements of the impacts of trauma. It is a very difficult question to debate. Even after having spent some time on the issue in class, I still cannot decide if we can even begin to deconstruct trauma. How does one judge what is a "bigger" trauma than an other. There is a tendency to think that larger public traumas are more devastating than everyday life traumas. Truthfully, a build up of everyday trauma can be just a devastating, like the example we discussed about living with the repercussions of colonialism and how this oppression is part of the everyday. It affects how individuals shape their identities. Thus it is how you interpret your trauma and what it symbolises to you. We feel trauma and are not victims of it and it is a positive thing to feel what your life is like/your everyday and in the end make culture with it.

Who's Read Macho Sluts (Clare Whatling)

Who’s Read Macho Sluts? (Clare Whatling)

In some way I found this article quite interesting and relatable.

By drawing from examples of the book Who's Read Macho Sluts, Whatling focuses on the debate around consensual lesbian sadomasochism. One side says that it is a construction and effect of patriarchy and that it reproduces and condones many power imbalances while the other argues that it is more an imitatation of patriarchal relations as parody and occasionally deconstructs them.

She also speaks of "the notion of moral purity of one group of women (vanilla) is problematic where a hierarchy of values is set up in our society which makes of one practice the norm and of the rest scales of deviance from." (419)I have issues with this idea that everything that falls out of the norms of sexual behaviour is wrong. What is considered normative in sex is usually man and woman, man experiencing pleasure, woman perhaps (if she’s lucky), woman being passive, man being aggressive; this is not always the case obviously but it is the general idea. Or even the assumption that sex between woman and man is out of love and is consensual. Unfortunately, that is not always the case.

What I found most interesting in this piece is her discussion on women's relation to violence and sadism as it has been theorized in feminism. Feminism has worked with the idea of violence as the prerogative of men and as the abuse of women. This way of thinking is to Whatling a fundamental one to a certain moment within feminism but argues that this focus on men and violence has ignored other power relations. I think that we have to recognise the power of women in relationships and sex, women are not only victims of abuse but perpetrators of it as well. This ties in to the what Whatling says about what we think is the non-existence of female sexual sadism but that in reality it is rendered invisible by its cultural suppression. "Women are not believed to be sadistic because they are not seen to be, at least if they wish to remain “womanly"."(421) What is the definition of "womanly"? I see this attitude as a refusal or denial on the part of feminism that there is a possibility that patriarchy is not to blame in this case. Since patriarchy has held most of the blame for so long, it seems that feminism might find it difficult to part from it.

The author is also arguing for a way of reading "which allows women access to a multiciplicity of subject positions and thus multiple viewing-pleasures, whereas beforehand only one was theorized, namely the masculine."(423) This made me reflect on the fact that we very often or almost always hear or are forced to hear the stories of male fantasies but very seldom hear of women’s fantasies. It's always about a what men desire (ie: threesome, woman/woman) and women having to hear about it or made to feel guilty about not engaging in these activities to fulfill fantasies. I found it interesting when she gave the example of a lesbian woman giving fellatio to a man and experiencing pleasure as her own. The idea that she’s not doing it because she feels obligated to do so like in some cases of heterosexual relations where a woman is performing the act as a way to satisfy man's desire and/or respond to norms of foreplay.

Another crucial idea in this text, in my opinion, is that feminism allows for fantasies of "Amazons and vampire to our heart’s desire, as soon as fantasy enters the realm of the explicitly sexual, a totally other standard pertains and we are required to police our thoughts for signs of political reaction."(423) It also involves issues of guilt from these fantasies. I always wondered that if one like myself who has a feminist identity fantasises about events or actions that in reality are against what whe are fighting for or believe in, should feel guilty. Whatling argues that we cannot assume that "although fantasy isn’t real, it is culpable because it imitates actual events, in other words, that someone’s fantasy is someone else’s reality."(425) We have to remind ourselves that there is no active relation to what torture means in reality. There needs to be exploration of the pyschological relation between fantasy and desire. At the same time, Whatling explains that desire does not have to be confined to one’s active sexual preference, that sexual identity does not necessarily have to do with the one you take on in your fantasy, which in the end, allows for more freedom of self identification. It allows for choices basically.