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In the year of Barbie's 35th anniversary, it would be impossible to miss the barrage of media coverage staged around what is perhaps the first toy in history to achieve superstar status. At present, Barbie is purchased somewhere on the planet every two seconds. She is accessorized by an army of multicultural friends, monumentalized in her own pavilion at Epcot Center, and idolized by a huge collectors culture with an international following. Barbie is the postwar answer to the teddy bear, but unlike the latter, which was modeled on the image of a mighty American patriarch, Barbie was created for girls, by (mostly) women executives and commercial artists at Mattel. Her status as "feminine" has produced a highly charged cultural response, as Barbie defenders and Barbie detractors-in both popular and intellectual venues-battle over her meanings, uses, and value. In this strange new world of "Barbie Studies," Erica Rand's Barbie's Queer Accessories stands out as an unusually thoughtful and engaging analysis of America's favorite plastic sweetheart.
Rand takes what is now a rather traditional cultural studies approach to her subject, looking at the "hegemonic" practices of the Mattel corporation and what she alternately calls the resistant, subversive, and queer uses that consumers make of the doll. For Rand, as for other queer theorists, the term "queer" does not simply refer to the interpretive protocols of marginalized subcultures existing somewhere in an underground universe. Instead, Rand shows us that Barbie's "queer accessories" are an integral part of the doll's mainstream wardrobe. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, queer pleasures are written into Barbie's hyperbolically "fem" design, and they are evidenced by both straight and gay consumers everywhere who use the doll in unexpected ways.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Mattel emerges as the villain, as Rand demonstrates how the corporation has historically engineered and promoted Barbie in both racist and sexist ways. More insidiously, Mattel's new line of multicultural dolls and its various charitable activities (including, for example, its children's summit) are unabashedly referred to as "marketing" strategies in the corporate reports. Even the stories Mattel has historically circulated about Barbie have used her alluring femininity as a green card for colonialist adventures. In a provocative analysis of the 1960s Barbie novels, Rand shows how Barbie took on the traditional role...