Hand Me Down Knowledge

Making Meaning from My Size Barbie…

My Size Barbie was a doll crafted in 1992.  It was a little over 3 feet tall and fashioned so that little girls could in effect become their Barbie dolls.  The original doll according to some sites included two outfits that could be worn by Barbie and the little girls who wished to emulate her.  This doll took Barbie another level.  It transformed the product and provided new ways in which the Barbie doll, its image and concept could be manipulated by consumers and manufacturers.  Since its advent Barbie has been everything to all people.  Once a “fashion doll for adults” (Toffoletti 57) Barbie has since been a doctor, a teacher, a princess, even an angel, etc., suggesting to consumers that the idea of Barbie has always been malleable, one that can change (and has changed) with time.  While the Barbie doll is often given a bum rap, one which criticizes Barbie for giving little girls warped ideals and expectations of femininity, female identity and beauty, Kim Toffoletti described it as “a type of plastic transformer who embodies the potential for identity to be mutable and unfixed.” (59). She suggested that Barbie is merely a simulation of the female image she was designed to represent thereby providing “alternative understandings of the body and self as transformative, rather than bound to an established system of meaning.” (59).   

As a child of the late 80s and 90s I am no stranger to the Barbie doll; however, considering the work of authors like Toffoletti and DuCille (to whom Toffoletti alludes with regard to the development of multicultural Barbie dolls) I am becoming more aware of how the popular culture references characteristic of my childhood are actually representative of my struggle as a young immigrant girl growing up in the United States attempting to situate herself in mainstream society.  Although I did not realize it at the time, the preferences and the choices I made as a child were indicative of the development of my own double consciousness.  Moreover, they were suggestive of my perceptions of myself in relation to the world around me.  When we look at the Barbie doll and all that it has come to represent, as well as consider the meaning of sociological endeavors such as the toy doll experiment of Kenneth and Mamie Clark in the 1940s, it begins to resonate that the toys, music, clothing, and things we believe are fixed in meaning or symbolism, trapped in a particular time period, actually transform individuals and transcend boundaries based on the experiences associated with them.  All that we know is waiting to be “taken and used in another context.” (57). Halberstam & Livingston stated that “Culture processes and appropriates a subculture only as quickly as the subculture becomes visible as culture:  the Imaginary of dominant culture is always only a culmination of appropriated forms and plagiarized lyrics” (4).  I understand this to mean that nothing is authentic or real (Baudriallard).  Instead all that we know, the information that we process, is an interpretation of something that came before it – a sort of hand me down knowledge that undergoes a metamorphosis based on the next person to inherit it. 

Side Note:  On my travels along the information superhighway I discovered Grace Porras' (2012) --  Multicultural Barbie is Uni-Dimensional -- in which she described the different ways the Barbie doll represents a commodification and exploitation of race/ethnicity and female identity.