Doll Parts
I didn’t know shit was that serious. Had the Barbie provocations always been strong? I suppose it depends on who and when you’re asking. In the 1970s, women protested the sexist ambitions they said fashion dolls bolstered. But I was not a woman in the seventies, I am a woman now which is to say that when I was a girl, in the late nineties and early aughts. Barbie to me, though pervasive, was not a symbol of sexist oppression nor of feminist aspirations, but a toy. I’ve thought less of Barbie as a singular her—a woman, girl, or being—and more so a metonymic phrase to refer to the general entity of dolls fashioned to look like teens and young women but not infants.
At least this was my narrative as July 21st, 2023 came closer and the frenzied crusade of Greta Gerwig’s (and Mattel’s) Barbie marketing campaign clutched conversational spheres online and off. There were viral punches at the movie’s titular toy, in the name of feminism followed by stalwart refutes and defenses also in the name of feminism.
“Barbie has held every job.” Well no, I thought, she’s a doll. “Barbie landed on the moon before any man.” Except she didn’t, because she’s a doll. “Barbie is a bimbo slut.” She famously has no genitals, no holes to speak of, not to mention, many of her outfits are actually rather dowdy and conservative. I would never accuse Barbie of being inconsequential but I was surprised by the weight of significance underpinned in the opinions of my peers.
The only other instance of seeing such anxiety over the moral qualms of Barbie was in the 2018 documentary, Tiny Shoulders: Rethinking Barbie, in which Mattel created and launched their first diverse range of dolls. The execs and employees of the company fretted over the importance and meaning of the expansion of Barbie’s representation. Their anxiety seemed genuine as did their dedication to the brand, intriguing and sympathetic even, yet I couldn’t help but be amused with the gravity the toy held in their eyes. Had everyone long held critical relationships to Barbie or were we all in a Mattel induced psychosis, convincing us that, as the movie trailer said, she is an object that induces extremity of either love or hate? Was there room for ambivalence over its meaning to one's identification with femmehood?
At Black Iris ahead of a 9:40PM screening of Barbie at BAM, my friends and I recounted which versions of the toy we had owned over mezzes and wine. Many of mine, I recalled, had been second-hand or bought from dollar stores. Once an employee at a welfare office conspiratorially told me that she had a present for me before her expression turned serious, “Are you allowed to have white barbies?” She asked, seven-year-old me and not my mother. One of us must have said yes as she soon left and returned with a plastic bag full of the white plastic figurines.
During dinner, my friend’s mention of her Brandy Barbie spurred the recollection that I too had owned her, as well as a singer Vitamin C Barbie and a Shaving Fun Ken and a talking Working Woman Barbie and a Totally Hair Barbie Styling Head and maybe this toy had been a much larger part of my playlife than I initially gave credit.
Perhaps it’s because I rarely (to my recollection) craved a specific Barbie—had I ever placed one on a wishlist to Santa? There was the Princess of South Africa, a collectors item that sat stacked on the shelves of one of the many local Wal-Marts in my city. Seeing this particular Barbie was one of my earliest memories of thinking that someone was beautiful. On each trip to the store, while my mother stacked the cart with groceries, I ventured to the toy aisle where I stared awestruck, at the doll’s dark skin and cropped hair—not long, silky straight or even long springy curls but unmistakable coils specific to Black hair. I wanted to unbox and hold her, to feel the thickness of the dress and cape she wore, and finger the gold wires wrapped around her neck. I could tell by her regal stance that this Barbie was not for play. The number listed underneath her box was much higher than her compatriots but still I hoped for salvation from the pool of want in which I’d submerged; I could be lifted out with the simple unwrapping of a birthday or Christmas gift that revealed a Princess of South Africa Barbie.
That specific reprieve never came and the fixation was soon replaced by the oversized headed Bratz. What spawned that desire? Did I first receive it as a gift because it was the new thing to get little girls or had I asked, no implored, for my birthday after witnessing the succession of Bratz commercials and hearing their slogan hypnotically sung in an R&B pop whisper? I was (and often still am) very susceptible to a good ad. When I was five and first saw Baby Alive, a baby doll that peed, I nearly lost my mind at the manufacturer's commitment to realism. When I received the toy for my sixth birthday, I continuously fed it bottles so it was an incessant need of sitting on the accompanying potty as if it had acquired a bladder infection.
Since Baby Alive, I had not received a toy with such fervor. I loved my Sasha Bratz doll with a level of intensity not bequeathed to prior fashion dolls. I taped the accompanying “girls with a passion for fashion” poster that featured cartoon drawings of the first line of dolls—Jade, Chloe, Yasmin in addition to Sasha—to the bedroom I shared with my sister, who was old enough to know to distance herself from such toys but young enough to be enticed by their outfits of short skirts and cropped sweaters, exposing hourglass plastic stomachs.
And so it was, that instead of asking for Barbie and Ken I wanted a new Jade and Cameron. I procured, not a Barbie Dreamhouse to live out domestic bliss, but received a working landline phone in the shape of the Bratz’s signature heavily lined thick lips to call my friends and aunts to showcase my maturing autonomy. Only once was my stallworth brand commitment disrupted: by the short-lived Mattel line of MyScene dolls which featured a Black doll named Madison who I thought looked like me apart from the somewhat off putting icy Cillian Murphy-type eyes.
My ownership of Barbies was often the result of passive inheritance—gifts given because I was a young girl but with little consideration given to what kind of girl. Bratz were my choice and my first attempt at adherence to an archetype.
I am aligned with those that feel more could have been made and done with Barbie’s acknowledgment of children’s play. It’s first seen in the body of Margot Robbie gliding in the air for transport instead of walking, a gesture towards the hand that makes movement for the doll possible. This act is most notable in Kate McKinnon’s Weird Barbie who is a colorful contortion and jagged hair, an indicator of a doll that has been “played with too hard.”
Barbie and fashion dolls at large are often charged with setting unrealistic beauty standards for children but even as a kid, I was aware of the uncanniness of the dolls. The tales of dismembering and altering dolls was a well understood juvenile inclination though it was one I barely indulged. I once cut one of my Bratz’s hair, my original Sasha to my immediate regret. I was sorry for the disfiguration because of its permanence. It was unlike times when I spread the plastic limbs of my dolls as wide as they would go, threatening to snap but rarely relenting or when I smashed my fingers into the malleable face of a white Barbie. She was not very pretty. Her smile of thin lips was unconvincing of joy or kindness and did not reach her dull blue irises.
As a toddler, I had chewed the arched feet of a few dolls but as if in direct resistance to this phenomenon, Bratz had circular knobs on the ends of their legs that fit into platform heels and chunky sneakers. In a shoeless state, the dolls became most unsettling, calling attention to the absurd proportions to which I was typically endeared. The small suggestion of a nose, a tiny slope on the face, was dwarfed by alluring heavily lashed eyes and bulging lips. I located a strangeness in plastic bodies more appealing than the stifling encasing of my own skin that frequently flared in eczema breakouts. I pussed, bled and scarred unlike the silicone dermis of Bratz but how much stranger would it be to have a head so large that all my clothes needed a velcro seal or breasts so large I would have face-planted every morning into the carpet, trying to roll out of bed and stand?
I probably want more to look like a doll now, in adulthood, than I ever did while playing with them as a child. Brand collaborations with both Mattel and Bratz along with countless makeup tutorials on how to get the look of these dolls show that I am not alone in this aesthetic desire. Is it simply the stale fumes of nostalgia engulfing our brains or how has our world become more adaptable to dress up? It’s as futile to position myself as a former Bratz girl in lieu of Barbie as it is silly to position the latter as the prime example of antifeminist patriarchal ills or a totalizing representation of social progress and dream building. A doll is a doll is a doll.
There may be one, currently undersung, feat of Barbie (and in turn Bratz or any semi-successful toy line) which is its triumph in co-raising lifelong consumers. I learned the uncomplicated pleasure of getting the object of fanciful need. Looking back on my cavernous longing for new Bratzs, I can see the foolproof recipe with clarity: The want of the doll leads to the purchase of not one but several dolls and accompanying accessories but it also produces a consciousness of stye and aesthetic imitations that will blossom in adolescence—I want to look how I imagine those dolls felt—and encapsulated in adulthood with expendable money—I now can have in completion the look and feel I imagine to have imagined.
To name it is not actually resistance, I know. Perhaps it’s the same entry-level quasi anti-capitalistic and ambiguously feminist politic that was featured in Barbie and decried by many. There I was sitting in my bright pink tank top surveying the hybrid toy ad/film, here I am walking in my chunky heeled white sneakers, puckering my overlined lips, warping my limbs for angles, selling it so good and being sold, hard.
