Playing with America’s Doll: A Cultural Analysis of the American Girl Collection by Emilie Zaslow (review)

In her 2017 monograph, Playing with America’s Doll: A Cultural Analysis of the American Girl Doll Collection, Emilie Zaslow undertakes a comprehensive study of the American Girl dolls, books, and merchandising in order to analyze their reception and historical importance. This is a vast undertaking, requiring both depth and breadth, but Zaslow manages it capably, utilizing her background in American Studies, Women’s Studies, and Media, Culture and Communication to provide effective critical lenses to examine all things American Girl. Zaslow combines scholarly critique of the American Girl books with feminist media analysis of the dolls and other companion merchandise. Additionally, she employs empirical analysis, conducting interviews not only with mother-and-daughter consumers but also with the producers, authors, advisory board members, manufacturers, and marketing teams involved over the years with the American Girl dolls and accessories. Zaslow begins to unpack a generation of “definitions of American and girlhood created by this brand” (6), and in this way, her study brings together several insightful angles that all inform each other in order to scrutinize the products in relation to media and the construction of gender identity.

The American Girl company from the beginning has sought to present historically accurate, diverse, and empowering stories for girls and ways for different girls to see themselves, and their cultures and histories, reflected in the characters. However, the fact that the American Girl company is a corporate entity (now owned by Mattel) involved with marketing, sales, and profit of a luxury product is almost intrinsically at odds with the company’s feminist and educational objectives. Is American girlhood history, or a commodity? Indeed, it is an uneasy yet fascinating combination.

Zaslow approaches the pop culture phenomenon with a “dual lens” of both fan and scholar. Her primary critical questions interrogate who is writing and producing what stories for whom, and under what conditions, and how it affects the readers/recipients of the texts—indeed, the entire “mediascape of dolls, accessories, and retail experiences” (5). Simplistic binaries defining “black” and “white” or “inclusive” and “alienating” regarding American Girl are ineffective, both in exploring the products as well as the human American Girls involved. Instead, as Zaslow interrogates the constant conflicts in American Girl products, she confronts the inevitable “either/or” “and/but” tensions in intersectional identities and addresses the outright hypocrisies involved with the dolls and products and how they’ve functioned for girls (and their mothers). Examining any element of the American Girl products requires constant, nuanced investigation of multifaceted issues regarding race and culture, not just in how doll-characters are portrayed and stories told, but how they are received and incorporated by diverse children and their parents. Zaslow combines textual analysis of books themselves, analysis of dolls as cultural artifacts (relying on Robin Bernstein’s intersectional approach of dolls as “scriptive things” providing racial ideology [44]), as well as quantitative analysis with girls who own and engage with American Girl dolls and other products. While Zaslow recognizes her own study’s biases, including her small sample size, incorporating such a focus group reflects the very conflicts of the American Girl brand, the locus of power and narrative, and the whos and hows of defining American Girlhood itself.

Gender and sexuality related to American Girls is a labyrinthine topic in itself, but the company’s objectives and implications become almost impossibly convoluted when considering racial and ethnic experiences. Zaslow’s text interrogates race and culture regarding how American Girl doll-characters are portrayed and their stories told, as well as how they are received by diverse girls (and their mothers). A large part of the text involves scrutinizing racial, cultural, and ethnic identity as “American Girls” in both the dolls/characters, and the readers/consumers themselves. For example, Zaslow’s fifth chapter specifically explores Pleasant Company’s desire to present “authentic” representation of multiple points of view, to represent a spectrum of black and nonwhite experiences. Their efforts to...