(First, check out this article for a parody extension of the “new masculinity” of Obama from The Onion.)
Barbie Nation, The Simpsons, Superstar, and Spigel’s article all offer examples of Barbie as a site of cultural negotiation. What links do you see between these cultural practices and the theoretical approaches we’ve explored this semester? How do your own experiences with Barbie fit into these theoretical models? (Everyone has a Barbie story – share it!)
The biggest connection I saw between the barbie controversy and our other theological models occurred on Marxist ground. Spiegel’s article explains that through “industrial modes of production” [Barbie} contains within it a longing for its opposite.” Here, through mass production, Barbie exploits the desire to a return to a more “wholesome” period, that probably never really existed in the first place. This theme is also taken up in Desjardins’ article. While fans liked Karen Carpenter for her wholesome image and songs harkening back to a “simpler time,” they found her anorexia more interesting as demonstrated by the made-for-television movie. In this way, Barbie is a very loaded text—simultaneously attempting to embody a “a nostalgia for preindustrial labor” while also representing (and promoting through the act of collecting) a commodifaction of the human form.
For my Barbie story, I suppose it’s pretty typical. Yes, I made my barbies have sex with one another. And while at this time I am unable to say if that had a positive or negative effect on my female image and sexuality, at least it offered me the opportunity to explore sex in a forum with my public school friends who did not undergo 12 years of a Catholic School Education. Whose, by the way, “Family Life” curriculum on sex consisted of: “Sexual consummation is for the sole purpose of reproduction in the confines of the holy sacrament of Matrimony.” Useful. So at least I can thank Barbie for that.
I’ll post on the readings and Barbie later, but this was an interesting article I read on the BBC today about ‘happyendingification’.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7976192.stm
The clips and readings assigned for this week also offer us Marxist (ideology) or ‘Negotiationist’ interpretations. From a Marxist perspective, Barbie is the symbol of the commoditization of persons and reinforces the societal norms laid out by Capitalism. Barbie signifies people’s commoditization because humans, literally made of plastic, are mass produced for mass consumption and bought & sold as any other commodity. In other words, Barbie symbolizes the disrespect our current economic system has towards human labor. Barbie is also worthy of Marxist critique because of its reinforcement of oppressive societal norms promoted by the bourgeoisie. As we see in Barbie Nation, Barbie is mass-produced and consumed. “Every little girl has (and thus must have) a Barbie doll,” and this capitalist mentality serves to ensure high consumption and thus enable the continuation of the oppressive social, economical and political arrangements of our current-day societies.
A negotiationist interpretation of Barbie would not focus on the product itself (or on its typical interpretation) but on the different ways it is viewed and given meaning by individuals. Unlike classical Marxists, negotiation theorists would suggest that Barbie is not completely successful in preparing future generations for their designated roles (social, economical, etc…). This is why Erica Rand from Spigel’s article still likes Barbie and turned out to be lesbian despite growing up with it. This is why Lisa decides to design another doll after her critique of the ‘barbie’ doll Malibu Stacy. This is why the doll artist Franklin from Barbie Nation recreates the Nativity scene with Barbie-doll Jesus, Mary and Joseph (Barbie itself does not include any religious connotations, thus resistance on behalf of masses exists).
As for my Barbie experiences, I never had a Barbie doll or played with one. Therefore, I guess Barbie was successful in preparing me for my heterosexual self through my lack of interaction with it. Though, I’m not sure about this interpretation and would appreciate any responses to this last point!
Before reading any cultural analysis on Barbie, I personally always viewed the doll and her cohorts as the primitive version of perfection that has evolved into other cultural texts like women’s magazines, beauty product commercials, fashion, and the like. Barbie epitomized the pristine and passive male-created version of femininity.
Thus, I first found my connection to the doll as coinciding mostly with Rakow’s “Images and Representations” perspective. This approach studies women’s images in popular culture and how/why they are intended specifically for non-academic middle-class women. The image of Barbie revealed that women’s position in culture was to be domestic, traditional, and ever-suffering like Karen Carpenter became. This is the most likely explanation why the documentarian chose Barbie to represent her superstar life and downfall. Karen Carpenter is seen as viewing herself as a second-class citizen whose greatest fulfillment in life was to satisfy the domineering men that fabricated the ideal image in the first place. Such negative stereotypes, as we see in the film, emerge and worsen greatly – the point of death even – when women like Karen Carpenter are underrepresented and trivialized by the media. She was objectified as a symbol of molded beauty, not as someone who could be (and should have been) idolized for her talents as a singer. Sadly, such classifications of images and representations have not changed much over the years. In fact, they have deteriorated greatly. My sister suffered from anorexia and I believe it was largely due to many of the similar circumstances that Karen Carpenter experienced (aside from international fame) – a close-knit family, the prescribed vision of material and superficial success at her side, as well as popular culture’s sickeningly gruesome illustration of how women should be to please men. There has been little negotiation in the struggle for women to overcome men’s objectification of them. There has been but mere suppression of morally laudible values, substituted by ethically reprehensible ones. And we sadly see this every single day as a result of popular culture’s imposing production and materialistically consumed texts.
With regards to negotiation, I think it is interesting to look at Barbie through Hall’s model of encoding and decoding. As the woman who invented the dolls and thus the sender of Barbie’s message, Ruth Handler encodes the meaning that Barbie is a positive role model for young girls. But this is not the message that is sent to most girls. The girls that play with Barbie decode her as an unattainable ideal that they must try to reach. This often leads to unfortunate stories (such as Karen Carpenter’s). Even though there is not just one way to decode Barbie for young girls, sadly many of these end up hurting rather than improving the girls’ self-esteems. In addition, to her “perfect” proportions, Barbie’s whiteness may be involved in the message that non-white girls take from the doll. Although there are now Barbies that represent different races and countries, they all nevertheless adhere to the white American ideals of feminine beauty. This contributes to even more negative interpretations of Barbie and creates confusion in the minds of non-white girls around the world regarding what they “should”, but cannot look like. As Barbie shows, Ruth Handler’s intended message is not the one most girls even consider in their decoding of the doll.
Barbie can also be connected to an ideological approach in terms of the various versions of her that have more recently been created. I never really played with Barbie dolls, but I was given a “WNBA player” Barbie when I was younger. I remember that I did not like it and thought it was ridiculous more than anything else. I’m guessing my relatives that gave it to me thought it would be appropriate because I played basketball and may have made me actually like Barbie. But that clearly backfired and I think I became even more disgusted with the doll as a result. Despite how Barbie has taken on more roles – from various ethnicities to higher-paying occupations (including professional sports) – in my case, and I think for most people, her message does not change. Even though Mattell may have tried to create these other versions of Barbie that make her look different, in actuality they are all the same.
Spigel and Desjardins both examine how Barbie is both a damaging and a beneficial role model for women. What is interesting to me is that my parents didn’t allow me to have Barbie. I remember wanting nothing more than a Barbie when I was little. I called my mom and asked her why she wouldn’t let me have any Barbies, and she said that she disagrees with what the Barbie body type presents to young girls as “normal”. Though Ruth Handler claims that Barbie’s body makes girls comfortable with their own breasts, she did not make any other part of Barbie’s body natural or realistic. If Handler wanted Barbie’s breasts to seem like something natural that happens to all girls, why is the rest of Barbie’s body so unnatural/ unrealistic? Girls play with these dolls and then realize that their bodies can never be like Barbie’s, and then they wonder what’s wrong with them, like the woman in Barbie Nation who was bulimic. I think my mom was trying to spare my sister and me from dealing with something like an eating disorder because of a childhood toy, especially if she could prevent us from having access to the toy. (She also didn’t let us watch the Simpsons, so you can guess what I’ve missed out on!) Lynn Spigel addresses this concern, saying that most adult Barbie collectors believe that Barbie is a positive role model for women because of the accomplishments Mattel gives her. But I think these accomplishments seem much more invented to a child than the doll’s actual body, which is something tangible. The difference is that they assume the Barbie body type is normal and natural, while her career accomplishments are merely possible. However, I do acknowledge that Barbie is a site of cultural negotiation because different people use her in so many different ways, according to their own interests. We saw this in Barbie Nation and in Spigel’s article. As Spigel says, “… even while Mattel promotes Barbie as the ultimate heterosexual virgin, she is never just that.” (Spigel, page 314)
The sequence in [i]Barbie Nation[/i] about the lesbian Barbie players who add genitalia to their dolls and put them in sexual and BDSM situations was amazing. The two women draw out the obscured sexuality of Barbie and Ken in a way that Ruth Handler probably could not even imagine. The implied sexuality that many (most?) Barbie collectors and players mentioned in the film is brought to the forefront, turning Barbie into a site for sexual expression and explicit fantasy bordering on pornography.
Barbie as a very sexual figure– with her large breasts and hips, blond hair, and overdone make-up– obviously contradicts the stated original goal of helping girls become comfortable with breasts and womanhood. This (supposed) attempted normalization of breasts in fact continues the patriarchal imaginary of women and their objectification.
As for my own Barbie story…. I don’t have much of one. I had plenty of stuffed animals to play with as a kid, but I do remember playing with my little sister’s Barbie horse that actually walked. I was never the one who was ripping heads off but I suppose I was recontextualizing that horse into something more conventionally masculine.
So I agree with Spigel’s argument that analyzing Barbie isn’t easy. There’s a lot of negotiation! On the one hand Barbie can only exist is a capitalist economy that produces top down mass culture, on the other hand, the consumption of Barbie (in its many, many different forms) complicates position as an ideological tool that conforms to dominant cultural practices. And if Barbie can get past hegemonic and ideological theories then there seems to be endless struggles between the different decodings of the doll.
Ok, so I have a story… and it doesn’t have a happy ending.
I had Barbies when I was younger. Not just one Barbie, but a collection. I didn’t ‘collect’ them, or any of the media that surrounded them, I just had maybe five, or six dolls. I played with them, in groups of girls, with my brother and by myself. They had names of their own and different relationships to each other. They took baths with me, they had shoe box cars, they dated my brother’s action men, and they jabbed me endlessly in the night when I insisted that they share my bed. I was jealous of my friend’s Barbie hair salon and Barbie stable. I was a little girl who liked Barbie.
But I grew up and swapped my Barbie for Buffy and I stopped caring about Barbie salons and started worrying about shaving my legs. But around a year ago Barbie popped back into my life.
So I have a cousin (now four-years-old, but was three at the time of this incident) and about a year ago, she got her first Barbie. Now, when I was growing up I had Barbie’s like Animal Hospital Barbie: complete with Veterinarian Degree, or Baby Sitting Barbie: complete with responsibility, or or Gymnast Barbie: complete with gold medal. And this was in the early nineties, so I’m thinking a decade and a half later, that clear plastic ceiling has got to be a bit higher!
So what does my cousin get? CEO Barbie? Professor Barbie? Film Director Barbie? Publisher Barbie? Eco Warrior Barbie? Senator Barbie? No. She gets Island Princess Barbie: complete with an impossible dream.
Now, I could have grown up to be a Vet, or a gymnast, my cousin’s not going to grow up and be a princess! What has Barbie become!? It isn’t setting an example for young girls everywhere, it is just a ridiculous farce (and yes, it took me longer than most to realize this…). Barbie has taken what was always an impossible body image and made it an impossible role model in every sense.
I think Barbie’s dissent into the impossible has a number of explanations, and I hope there’s a Barbie scholar somewhere out there exploring the matter. Personally, I think Barbie has failed to keep up with societal changes in attitudes towards sex, sexuality, gender, growing-up, and feminism. But whatever the reason for Island Princess Barbie, no other toy has ever disappointed me so much.
I didn’t play with Barbie dolls as a child, but I did use the action figures in my collection to create stories. Though the characters at hand were different—Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers taking the place of Barbie and Ken—the process of narrative formation was entirely the same. After watching Barbie Nation, I realized that, even as a child, I was participating in, and subverting, classic story structures that had been ingrained in my brain from television programs and films. There were love stories, action stories, dramas, tales of betrayal and struggle. But where did these stories come from? How did I know what each character might (or, rather, should) say, the twists that the story could take, and the ultimate outcome? Even at that a young age, I was familiar with a large amount of cultural forms and narrative tropes.
This was my particular decoding of action figures like Barbie. What I didn’t realize was the multitude of other possible decodings: In Barbie Nation, people decode the Barbie doll in several different ways that reject normative behaviors and characters—especially gendered ones—and stories. Seeing the different ways that Barbie’s audience could reinterpret and reappropriate the conventional system of significance made me realize just how conventional my little stories were.
I’m not going to weigh in on exactly what Barbie dolls mean for the generations of young girls who have consumed them. What I will say is that it’s interesting—after studying ideology and its formation—just how coded the objects that comprise our childhoods are.
Obviously, depending on the paradigm, barbie can be seen as a potential site of negotiation (hegemony theory: people can make their own meanings for barbie) or ultimately a tool for elitist and/or patriarchal domination (barbie is a commodity the consumption of which promotes capitalism and the inequalities and oppression thereof). I think the texts we have seen offer examples of cultural negotiation as well as cultural domination. Barbie Nation, in particular, can serve as a tool for cultural studies since it represents people’s reception of barbie as a text as well as the meanings that result.
I think it’s interesting how people were initially against barbie dolls because of the sexual connotation they carried, barbies were a radical shift in the realm of dolls for girls; parents discouraged their daughters from consuming barbie. Decades later, there are women collecting the dolls and rearranging them into S&M positions. The woman who did this in Barbie Nation says “a lot of people don’t want to acknowledge that barbie is a sexual doll… that’s certainly part of my beginnings as a child.” In effect, this woman is brining to life these parents’ worst nightmare; these parents did acknowledge barbie’s sexuality.
In terms of a barbie story, my mother kept a barbie doll that she received in her childhood. I never thought very much of it other than being an interesting artifact from my mother’s past. I remember, as a young boy, watching commercials for barbie and wondering what possible pleasure could be derived from playing with these dolls (for me, action figures were the only toys that had validity).
As many of you have already mentioned, Barbie is a fantasy. A hardline marxist position to take would be that Barbie provides a way for people to act out their desires or create their ideal world without actually acting on it.
Take the man in Barbie Nation who created this place called “Heavenly Valley.” In this world, he created his ideal in a sense – it’s a place where some people are straight, some are gay, but in the end everyone is free to be whomever they like. People are free to be sexually ambiguous and break out of the rigidly defined categories of sexuality that society seems to enforce on itself. Sounds great. But in the real world, there is this pressure to at least pick a defined sexuality if not be straight out right. In the real world, not everyone subscribes to the attitude “Do whatever gives you pleasure, because that is what your hear for.” There are ISAs and institutional pressures such as religion and politics that would say otherwise. My point is this – that while this man could be taking action (protesting, teaching, working within the government like Harvey Milk did, and so on), he’s sitting in his apartment playing with dolls. It might help people deal with the problems they have with the world, but it doesn’t change world itself in any real sense.
Thought I never really thought of it before reading Spigel, confession is essentially a form of fantasy. In referring to the “I’m obsessed” reader submitted confessions in Barbie Bizarre, she suggests that these kind of narratives propose “an impossible fantasy of self-control.” Take for example a 35-year-old woman who confesses that even at her age she is still obsessed with collecting Barbie dolls. She might feel like she is defying the system by buying products that aren’t aimed at her demographic, but in fact Mattel is aiming Barbie at the adult market.
In both cases, the revolutionary spirit is essentially dispelled and social norms are reaffirmed.
A potential counter-argument to this would be that a re-appropriation like heavenly valley, the Golden Barbie on the cross, the photos the recovering bulimic artist from the documentary takes and then ads captions about her disorder, and so on do effect some kind of change in that they provoke discussion.
But a lot of the examples that strike me as the most effective conversation starters are what Spigel would classify as craft. This brings up to me one of the most important questions of this course: is there really such thing as corporate sponsored hegemony. Or rather, how much resistance against the dominant ideology can their be when the means of production of that resistance are provided by or controlled by a corporation.
Take the Barbie Bizarre magazine for example. Yes, fans are sending in photos of their work and writing into the magazine. But as the official magazine, Mattell retains the right to exclude anything it doesn’t think will be consistent with the values it wants to promote for Barbie. I can’t really imagine a picture of Barbie using a vibrator would ever appear in the magazine.
The Simpsons, however, is truly complex and puzzling counter-example of corporate produced text that can (at times) effectively provide for resistance and discussion. In the episode we watched, for example, it does poke fun at the way hords of girls are so easily manipulated by marketing executives (i.e. Malibu Stacey’s new hat instantly provokes a riot).
The question now isn’t just one hegemony vs. ideology, but grass roots vs. corporate sponsored re-appropriation and resistance to the dominant ideology.
While this doesn’t relate at all to the arguments I just made, I will say this about my experience with Barbie – she taught me how to type. Every day after class in elementary school, my sister and I would try to get Barbie to ride to the end of the computer screen on her unicorn by hitting the correct keys in a timely fashion.
After reading the Spigel article, one phrase in particular jumped out at me: “Corporate Hegemony.” Can such a thing really exist? Or can negotiation only occur outside of the capitalist system, on the grass roots level?
ignore the last paragraph – forgot to delete it.
Unfortunately, I really have no Barbie story to tell–I was raised on Legos–but I think this made me all the most amazed and fascinated by Barbie Nation and Spigel’s article. There’s certainly an argument to be made for a Marxist ideological interpretation of the Barbie phenomenon. In the end, though, I think the pure volume and breadth of “readings” of Barbie shown in the documentary and the article show that even the most pervasive piece of mass-produced plastic is not merely a site of cultural domination. In other words, it seems Barbie is as good a piece of evidence as any in support of negotiation, encoding/decoding theories. Certainly a psychoanalytic analysis of Barbie-text would be fruitful as well–examining how children (and some adults) play out confusion and curiosity about sexuality using Barbie, just as Melissa admitted to doing in her post.
To ramble a bit more about what’s on my mind, I just can’t exaggerate how fascinated I was by the plethora of stories presented in our sources this week, from Fantasy Valley-man to Ruth Handler herself. In fact, Ruth Handler’s life story is full of interesting details in its own right; I admired her adamance in “preserving her femininity” in the role of a powerful and effective corporate executive. And the irony of giving into those “feminine” qualities of over-emotionality and indecisiveness after losing that which she felt was core to her womanhood–her breasts! Someone should write her biography for sure. We may not all agree with her stance on Barbie’s impeccable figure, but I think she is truly admirable for effectively running a successful corporation for years, with the respect of her subordinates, while really seeming to not become “overmasculine”, whatever that means.
It also just occurred to me–provoked by Lilli’s idea for “Senator Barbie”–that it might be a blast to discuss Sarah Palin in the context of Barbie. Just saying. Because talking about ol’ Palin just never gets old.
I think that there’s no question that there is a hegemonic mix of ideas within the consumer of the Barbie products in the way that they use Barbie in ways not first conceived by the producers, such as Mattel. As seen in Spigel’s article, there is a strong reaction with lawsuits after various fan activities sold Barbie with drugs and alcohol, clearly creating a whole different type of Barbie and not the All-American girl type. The whole idea of “craft” culture in which women collectors made homemade outfits for the dolls, collected vintage outfits, and put out huge displays of set pieces was not expected by Mattel. In Barbie Nation, there were a ton of different things that collectors were doing, including creating “Heavenly Valley,” which was a resort of dolls that a man created that involved the changing and switching of sexual preferences by many of the doll characters.
I didn’t play with Barbie dolls as a child (or at least I don’t remember that I did) but my male version of a Barbie doll would have to be my wrestling figures. Wrestlers of the WWE are tough patriarchal ass-kicking men who are buff and take care of things, in a matter of speaking. It’s all about the “manhood” and protecting it and proving it—what underlies that business and culture. And that is what I was all about as a nine year old!
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2294/is_55/ai_n19328330/pg_5/?tag=content;col1