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Abstract: Doll play is critical in the formation of young black girls' gender, race, and class identities. In this article, I use textual analysis that emphasizes how physical changes in dolls correspond to contextual shifts in society over the last seven decades, and qualitative research with ten Afro-Caribbean girls and young women in Toronto to reveal the racial and cultural meanings of dolls in young people's everyday lives and how doll play is complicated by racist and classist representations of dolls. By exploring what doll play meant to them, I show how it helps black girls understand racial and gendered norms. Through doll play, girls reveal an understanding of their racialized identities and marginalization as they demonstrate unacknowledged skills in their ability to navigate barriers that reinforce racial inequalities and social hierarchies in girls' material culture in a multicultural Toronto.
Keywords: Afro-Caribbean, Barbie, Bratz, material culture, racial inequality, sexualization
Introduction
Toys are important tools through which the social constructions of race, gender, and class are explored and enacted, particularly, but not exclusively, among children. Within a multicultural Canadian context, ethnic dolls have been criticized by a number of social and cultural theorists on the grounds that they promote racial stereotypes. Black dolls, in particular, have been criticized for their sexualization of black girls. Some ethnic dolls, including the Bratz doll line, have been criticized for their sexually suggestive attire that conveys a particular representation of black girls (see Bernstein (2011) and Doris Wilkinson (1974, 1987). My article focuses on black Barbie and other ethnic dolls in order to study the wider phenomenon of how black girls see the reality of their lives as compared to the lives of white girls.
I begin with a review of the historical and contemporary fields of black doll materiality that shows explicitly how the dominant group's perceptions of racialized characteristics are embedded in black doll culture, particularly in the Global North. I go on to describe the methodological approach I adopted in a participatory survey with a small group of girls and young women from Afro Caribbean communities in Toronto. Using their feedback, I then demonstrate how, in multicultural and multiracial Toronto, doll play is used by girls to effect resistance as well as to learn social rules,...