The Prettier Doll: Rhetoric, Discourse, and Ordinary Democracy (review)

The essays collected by Karen Tracy, James P. McDaniel, and Bruce E. Gronbeck in The Prettier Doll: Rhetoric, Discourse, and Ordinary Democracy explore the rhetorical details and patterns of grassroots democracy as they emerged in one particular controversy in a Boulder, Colorado, school district in 2001. Attending to the specificities of the case is crucial to the editors' larger mission: to offer a radically localized alternative to the field's penchant for "grand theory," which, they suggest, too often neglects or ignores "the tenacious intrusions of the nonsovereign subject speaking to neighbors and the institutions of the village, town, and city" (37).

The essays all explore what, for a while, became known in the media as "Barbiegate." In 2001, in a predominantly white suburb of Boulder, a third-grade girl conducted a social experiment for her school science fair. She presented two Barbie dolls, one black and one white, each wearing a different colored dress, to thirty fifth graders and thirty adults. The subjects were asked to choose which was the prettier doll. Then she switched the dresses and asked the question again. Of the adults, all chose the doll wearing the purple dress, regardless of skin color. Of the fifth-graders, nearly all picked the white doll, regardless of what color dress it wore. On seeing the student's poster presenting her findings, school administers banned the project, arguing that it violated the district's nondiscrimination policy. The girl's father vehemently denounced the decision, claiming that his daughter's civil liberties were at stake. Controversy erupted in school board meetings, the local paper, and later the national media. Barbiegate served as a microcosm of some of the country's most hot button issues: free speech, racism, education, and the uneasy mix of politics and science.

However, rather than approaching Barbiegate as simply an example by which to illustrate larger theoretical concepts about democracy and citizenship in general, the authors in this collection make careful effort to keep their theorizing "on the ground," to explore the character of one particular instantiation of grassroots politics at work, what the editors call "ordinary democracy." McDaniel and Gronbeck provide the interpretive frame for the collection in their thoughtful essay "Through the Looking Glass and Back: Democratic Theory, Rhetoric, and Barbiegate." In considering ordinary democracy, they explain, one must attempt to avoid, on the one hand, "'descent' into the infinite variety of details" and, on the other, "abstraction or elevation above the minutia." They continue: "To take seriously the means by which ordinary citizens engage in civic dispute presupposes that details matter, but moreover it suggests that democratic theorizing requires grounding in the 'mundane'" (33). With an eye toward analyzing Barbiegate as a demonstration of the "vernacular intelligence" of ordinary political actors, McDaniel and Gronbeck postulate four imperatives that characterize ordinary democracy: 1) "the imperative of place": "localness should be understood both conceptually and materially as a marked or circumscribed place for political activity"; 2) "the imperative of time," as "ordinary democracy is what rhetoricians these days call kairotic—marked by not only the hereness but also the nowness of a particular time-in-place"; 3) "the imperative of performativity," meaning that "to perform politically is to be engaged in a face-to-face encounter with an other, each proposing and/or attacking visions of a better (morally, pragmatically) tomorrow"; 4) "the imperative of the doxatic," meaning those "species of communal thought and values that must fill up the abstracted self of the citizen if he or she is going to have rhetorical efficacy in localist political environments" (35–36).

With these imperatives framing the collection, McDaniel and Gronbeck make the case for slowing our tendency to default to more privileged norms of political practice and instead turn to the particulars of texts and their performances, as only then "can we begin to develop strong interpretations of what is actually present, what...