Barbie Gets a Life

Lorna Scott Fox

  • Barbie’s Queer Accessories by Erica Rand
    Duke, 213 pp, £43.50, July 1995, ISBN 0 8223 1604 8
  • The Art of Barbie: Artists Celebrate the World’s Favourite Doll edited by Craig Yoe
    Workman, 149 pp, £14.99, October 1994, ISBN 1 56305 751 4

‘Barbie can be anything you want her (yourself) to be!’ Thus the sales pitch for a plastic toy that in most people’s minds simply represents the essence of bimbo-ness. But what if the big hair and tacky costumes were actually vehicles of patriarchal and racial hegemony, while also enabling a potentially subversive network of reappropriative authorial narratives? Investigations like Barbie’s Queer Accessories defy you to giggle as they unfold with Monty Pythonesque obliviousness to the gulf between high-minded scrutiny and its silly object. But the premise of mickey-mouse academics is often fruitful: that the least cultural droppings are microcosms of a wider political dynamic, to be prodded and tested in a reflexology of the social body.

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