Thursday, February 21, 2008

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)

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