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Reviewed by:
  • Barbie’s Queer Accessories, and: Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll
  • Torri L. Thompson (bio)
Erica Rand. Barbie’s Queer Accessories. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995. M. J. Lord. Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll. New York: Avon Books, 1994.
M. J. Lord. Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll. New York: Avon Books, 1994.

It has long been a commonplace that children’s play is preparation for adult life. This somewhat restrictive view of play is mirrored in traditional perspectives of Barbie play and its significance for child and adolescent culture. Many parents, teachers, and others interested in popular culture have narrowed their interpretation of Barbie into a bipolar opposition, asking themselves whether or not this toy helps children practice positive or negative gender roles. Both Erica Rand’s Barbie’s Queer Accessories and M. G. Lord’s Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll challenge this perspective by arguing that no cultural artifact, including Barbie, is as simple as it may look.

Both Lord’s and Rand’s works are united by a focus on narrative and anecdote (personal and corporate or individual and cultural). Thus, it seems appropriate to begin with my own Barbie story. When I started reading Rand and Lord, I felt somehow inadequate or disqualified because I did not have a Barbie story of my own. I have no memories of either participating in Barbie play or rejecting it, even though I clearly remember farming in my sandbox with John Deere toys; playing and endlessly rearranging my child-size Avon carrying case filled with a complete line of cosmetics and toiletries; dressing and arranging my Mary [End Page 129] Poppins doll who came with the appropriate accessories, such as a floor lamp that magically fit into a tiny carpetbag. Barbie appears nowhere in the cast of characters in my childhood narratives. However, during the reading, writing, and reviewing of Barbie’s Queer Accessories and Forever Barbie, I did, quite unexpectedly, acquire a Barbie story. As fate would have it, I had just begun a relationship with a woman who had a teenage daughter who was extremely unhappy with and hostile towards me in particular and her mother’s very recent lifestyle changes in general. One day, I was sitting in my friend’s kitchen, drinking coffee and talking to her and her older daughter, while the younger daughter sat unhappily off to the side. In an effort to make conversation, my friend mentioned to her daughters that I was working on Barbie books. The older daughter and I began to talk about Barbie culture in general. Without warning, the younger daughter started to join in the conversation, made her first eye contact with me, told me about her Barbies in the attic, and how she used to love to play with them. From that day forward, she and I began to develop a positive relationship. I do not understand why, but it seems that Barbie provided a point of reference which the younger daughter could recognize, and, perhaps in her mind, my interest in Barbie identified me as a potential familiar instead of a threatening stranger. In short, Barbie gave us a much needed mutual narrative line to explore, which then led to a number of other shared areas of interest.

The fluid and sometimes even transformative nature of Barbie narratives, such as suggested by my story, is a recurring theme for both Barbie’s Queer Accessories and Forever Barbie. Barbie seems to have often transformed in multiple ways many of those who played with her or at least provided them with a means of self-identification, although not always positive; she continues to be transformed in various incarnations throughout Mattel’s history; and, finally, Lord’s and Rand’s books about Barbie have the ability to transform their readers into informed cultural consumers. The big question that underlies both Forever Barbie and Barbie’s Queer Accessories is how one small toy, one small idea, one small doll became a source of such tremendous American cultural fascination. This fascination is apparent on multiple levels and in many different audiences: children, parents, industry...

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