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  • "Difference That Is Actually Sameness Mass-Reproduced":Barbie Joins the Princess Convergence
  • Lisa Orr (bio)

The Disney princess line began in 1999 with the unlikely premise of lumping eight princesses together as a single brand to be marketed, despite their differences of race, centuries, and even species. Out of this disparate assortment of characters grew an even more widely varied line of merchandise. Snow White, Jasmine, Belle, Pocahontas, Mulan, Ariel, Cinderella, and Aurora can now be found, together or in select groupings, on clothing, video games, lip balm, books—altogether, more than 25,000 different products (Orenstein). Theorists of children's culture call this convergence, and note that it is hardly accidental (Goldstein, Buckingham, and Brougere 2). Integrated marketing means that companies simultaneously release related products in multiple formats, from digital to print to collectibles. These expanded, interdependent products cannot be examined in isolation, for "every 'text' (including commodities such as toys) effectively draws upon and feeds into every other text" (Goldstein, Buckingham, and Brougere 2).

Like the incongruous group of princesses that began it all, the sudden explosion of princess material can best be managed as one unit, one grand text to decipher. Princess culture includes a vast array of material objects and media representations, but also marketing rhetoric and weighty expert studies of children as consumers. In addition, even the most fragile-seeming princesses carry the weight, not just of Disney's constructions, but also of the hundreds of years prior of princess folklore, all strangely intermixed with contemporary notions of beauty, body image, and race. The princess text, then, binds together a complicated, interrelated web of texts, some of which appear to contradict each other.

When Barbie first entered princess culture, two years after the introduction of the Disney princess line, she seemed to offer a challenge to the princess narrative. The marketing language of both Disney and Barbie's manufacturer, Mattel, encouraged this perception: Disney was the traditionalist, Barbie the [End Page 9] new wave, in what seemed one more expression of the culture wars. The two companies followed the decades-long marketing model of Coke versus Pepsi, wherein Coke positioned itself as the drink of family values and Santa Claus, while Pepsi celebrated youth and hipness (Pendergrast 273-74). Barbie's variations on the princess theme made her seem more independent and modern than her Disney counterparts. In fourteen computer-generated, feature-length films released since 2001—Mattel's answer to Disney's long-established lock on animated princesses—Barbie refuses to marry a prince, chooses career over marriage (at least in the short term), and prefers studying science to attending balls. Mattel's princesses pose as counters to Disney's housekeeping, abuse-swallowing ones. Disney's long history of filmmaking gives it some advantage, but also means that its princesses are the products of a different era. Logically, it seemed, Disney princesses must appeal to the more traditionalist consumer.

But as I examined them, I found striking similarities between the competing brands of princesses. Instead of contradictory texts, they revealed themselves as consistent, though not identical, parts of the same whole. The strange congruence between the marketing analyses made public by the companies and their researchers and the available scholarship on the princess phenomenon supports the notion of a unified princess-culture text. Though couched in different language, both seem to reach similar conclusions on how princess culture is deployed, and how it successfully influences consumers, be they adults or children. That vastly different motives and methods can generate essentially the same understanding of princess power is both surprising and disturbing.

The discussions of the root causes of princess culture provide a case in point. Historian Miriam Forman-Brunell points out that princess worship tends to arise at times of social upheaval (qtd. in Orenstein), while marketing experts attribute the princess phenomenon to nostalgia for the simpler past. Much of Disney's princess material is itself the product of an outdated past. Disney's public take on this is to call it a strength: as an executive Vice President of Disney sales and marketing put it, "I think the unique thing about Disney Princesses is they tend to have multigenerational devotees—daughter, mother, and...

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