Category Archives: Body, exercise, and physical culture

Barbie: The Doll Who Will Live Forever?

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Cultural commentators have had a lot to say about Greta Gerwig’s smash summer movie, but no one I’ve read has considered Gerwig and Baumbach’s clever script as a post-modern take on a classic doll story like Rachel Field’s Hitty: Her First One Hundred Years (1929). The first I know of was Richard Johnson’s The History of a Doll (ca. 1780).  The heroine Charlotte could  describe and comment upon her experiences to the reader, from being carved from a tree branch to passing through several owners’ hands.  After surviving many accidents that required extensive restoration of her face and body, she was eventually burnt up in a fire.  Her lack of agency is central to the action: appearing lifeless to her owners, she is as much at their mercy, as if she were a servant or an enslaved person.

Barbie’s origins are more glorious than poor old Charlotte’s.  The little girls on earth are caring for their baby dolls when they see her in a striped one-piece bathing suit descending from the heavens like a goddess.  The little girls are so enchanted by the prospect of possessing a far more glamorous and empowering plaything that they immediately cast aside the baby dolls and heartlessly smash them to bits.  A less violent version of this scenario with a fairly happy ending plays out in Brenda’s “Victoria-Bess,” in which a beautiful expensive doll rules the nursery until deposed by an even more fashionable French one.  Ordered by her fickle, spoiled mistress to throw the shabby former favorite into the trash, a charitable relative rescues the humbled Victoria-Bess, who gratefully goes to a new owner, a poor girl recovering from surgery in the hospital.

Gerwig’s Barbie behaves less like a doll than an autonomous being that is not exactly human.  While the first shot is of a Mattel doll, the subsequent footage features Margot Robbie, who flirtatiously lowers her shades and winks.   What is that gesture supposed to mean?  A signal to not to overthink the ride on the hot pink roller coaster?  But the cracks and inconsistencies reveal some interesting angles on her creator’s game.

After Barbie finds herself thinking about death and her feet flatten, she is urged to consult the oracular Weird Barbie, a victim of rough doll play, from whom she learns that there’s a patch of cellulite on her thigh (surely impossible on hard plastic) and her old owner must be messing with her. While the director acknowledges that doll play comprises savagery, she roller blades around the possible plot implications of the Barbies being subject to the whims of Real World owners.  If Weird Barbies constituted the underclass, then mobs of mangled, neglected dolls like the one led by the Bad Doll in Ian McEwan’s The Daydreamer, might periodically roil Barbie Land.  If most girls’ nights were stopped dead by outbursts of existential angst, then the Barbies would all be in analysis and there would have to be a health care system.  The truly flawless Barbies could only belong to collectors, museums or extremely meticulous kids.  They would constitute the ruling class, which would disturb the benevolent, egalitarian administration of Barbieland’s vacuous perfection.Without any memories of having been a child’s plaything, Stereotypical Barbie has to seek the complete stranger who transferred anxieties to her and disrupted the rhythms of an rosy eternal now in the Real World (Los Angeles, naturally).   Throughout Barbie’s adventures, she is perceived neither as a doll or a human being all of the time: her status may fluctuate according to the situation, but her affect never changes.  When she crosses the border into Venice Beach, she passes for human in spite of her outfit—which didn’t seem especially outré for La-La-Land–because she attracts attentions from construction workers and a random bystander gives her shapely bottom a big smack.  The Mattel suits have no trouble identifying her as the doll that has to go back in the box, yet she can run like a gazelle in the painted-on, hot pink, lace-up bell bottom pants through the corporate head quarter’s labyrinthine corridors and maze of offices.

Reunited her owner and daughter, they all return to Barbieland and set the things which have gone so terribly wrong back to rights with the Mattel suits in hot pursuit.  After quelling the Kens’ abortive insurgence and restoring the matriarchy with only a few gracious concessions to the rebels, Stereotypical Barbie expresses the desire to be a real girl in the Real World.  She turns for help to Ruth Handler, the marketing barracuda behind the brand in her final incarnation as a sweet old bubbe who listens sympathetically over cups of tea.  This stand-in for a fairy godmother cautions her creation that humans get only one exit, but ideas live forever (presumably “Girls can do anything”). If Barbie truly wishes to be flesh and blood, i.e. sentient with a vagina, she, like Dorothy Gale, has always had the power to make her dream come true.  Without a dramatic wave of a wand that transforms plastic to muscle and bone (holding Ruth’s hands seem to have had something to do with it), the doll-being formerly known as Stereotypical Barbie leaves her dream house for Los Angeles, slips her flat feet into pink Birkenstocks, and is dropped off at the gynecologist’s.    And that’s all, folks.  No promise that she’ll live happily ever after.

For over a decade, a succession of creative teams tried to bring Barbie to the big screen, but crashed, and burned.  Margot Robbie was sure no one would finance the Gerwig-Baumbach script.  A successful director of small-budget Indie films who was ready to break the glass ceiling, Gerwig has to have known what side her bread was buttered on.  One way of keeping the plate with the Mattel logo up in the air was to avoid dark aspects which have always been present in doll stories.  Her claim that the movie had to be “totally bananas” could be interpreted as a palatable but slippery justification for furiously whipping the mixture to a froth and never letting it deflate. “Totally bananas” means that the poster boys for patriarchy had to be paper tigers.  The Mattel executives are more bumbling than the Keystone Cops, the Kens too disorganized to remember the all-important constitutional vote, and who could take Alan seriously?  The heartbroken Stereotypical Ken had to be satisfied by the stale old Tinseltown line that the key to happiness is the discovering that being yourself is better than good enough..  And the paradise of Barbies?  It’s a stretch to take seriously President Barbie, Dr. Barbie, Diplomat Barbie, etc. when they were brainwashed as easily as if they were bimbos (they are styled like them too).  Gloria’s rousing oration has no relevance to the powerhouses of Barbieland, none of whom have offspring to complicate their lives.  It’s really pitched to feminists and tired moms in the auditorium and to me it sounded more like a prompt to cheer at a pep rally than a serious statement about the difficulties of modern women’s lives.  And what would Ordinary Barbie look like?  Would she really be a marketable commodity?  Given the silliness of almost everyone Stereotypical Barbie meets during the film, it is hard to envision the advantages of trading one condition for the other.  Writer Barbie or exhausted executive assistant?  Unlike a doll in a traditional it-narrative, Stereotypical Barbie has told audience members too little about her thoughts and feelings for them to understand her dramatic change of heart.  Or did she?

With a billion dollars and counting in profits this week, Gerwig doesn’t have to apologize to anyone for any of her creative decisions. As eye-poppingly imaginative as the script and art direction was, more substantial ideas might have been mixed in with the fun for viewers to think about after they left the show.  Having seen it a second time last night with a first-time viewer, there’s plenty to talk about after the credits roll, but how much is the herky-jerky race through a landscape so packed with details that it makes your eyes bug.  Perhaps the film could be compared to a very elaborate doll house presented to a young girl, which the Edgeworths observed in Practical Education (1798), may not be able to hold her attention long, even though she may peep inside from time to time.

A furnished baby-house [ i.e. doll house] proves as tiresome to a child as a finished seat is to a young nobleman.  After peeping, for in general only a peep can be had into each apartment, after being roughly satisfied that nothing is wanting, and that consequently, there is nothing to be done.

Documenting Transgender History Using Children’s Books

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Historian Susan Stryker has defined transgender people as those who “move away from the gender they were assigned at birth,”  a phenomenon that can be documented in many societies and cultures long before medical technology allowed these individuals to bring their bodies into alignment with their identities. Writing transgender history from the perspective of the marginalized is a challenge when the chief sources until recently tended to be produced by medical professionals, psychologists, law enforcement officers, etc. belonging to institutions with an interest in controlling them as outsiders. Autobiographers had to brave enough to risk inviting readers, whose intentions and sympathies could not be known, into their confidence.

With many prospective buyers of children’s books wanting ones that promote diversity by showing child characters that look and live in accordance with their identities, there has been an explosion of books for families with transgender members, many of them by people with lived experiences or by sympathetic activists. Reviews and recommendations are relatively easy to access because so many lists of resources are available on the webpages of medical schools and psychiatric associations, specialized independent bookstores and blogs.  to mention just a few.

Cotsen is assembling a cross-section of illustrated books about transgender childhoods and history for young readers which researchers can consult now, but even more importantly, in the future.  With increased pressure on public and school libraries to discard or severely restrict access to controversial books for children, the responsibility to preserve these materials as historical sources falls on collections whose primary constituents are not young people and their families, the teachers, and librarians who engage with them.

I Am Not a Girl by Maddox Lyons and Jessica Verdi with illustrations by Dana Simpson is a project published in 2020 by Roaring Brook Press, one of the most prestigious imprints in the Macmillan Children’s Book Department. “Based on a true transgender identity journey” of co-author Maddox Lyons, who wrote this after he came out to his parents because they could not find books “for and about kids like him.” Simpson the illustrator considers this assignment “an honor and a privilege” for a transgender woman like herself who hopes the book will foster mutual understanding between parents and their transgender kids who “should get to be who they are.”   The best incidents in the main character Hannah’s story are surely based on Maddox’s experiences—the pirate queen denying she’s a girl on Halloween, rehearsing his coming out speech to his parents in front of an audience of stuffed animals, admiring the boy’s haircut he’s always wanted for wear for class picture day.   A list of transgender individuals, male, female, and non-binary, from  Renee Richards “eye surgeon, veteran, athlete, and tennis coach who won a landmark case for transgender rights” to Jonathan Van Ness “nonbinary hair stylist, podcaster, and television personality” are included for inspiration.

If LGBTQIA+ parents want to be able to introduce their pre-school-age children to inspirational role models in transgender history, Little Bee Books , an independent publisher of progressive and inclusive children’s books in New York City, has started an uplifting series board books called “People of Pride”  featuring biographies of  television star Ellen De Generes, Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician in California, and drag queen, activist, and media personality, Ru Paul Charles.  Victor Chen is credited for the illustrations, but no one lays claim to the pedestrian text about a “trailblazer” (defined in the glossary as “a person who makes it easier for others to succeed”) surely called for a lot more sparkle.  Even if the text had more juice, it probably could not have helped a toddler grasp anything about the contributions AIDS activists and drag queens have made to society.Sarah Savage, author of She’s My Dad: A Story for Children Who Have a Transgender Parent or Relative (2020) illustrated by Joules Garcia is good example of the positive children’s books about difference that British publisher Jessica Kingsley  is known for.  The picture book shows without judgment a child’s joyful acceptance of her father’s transition to a changed body, new identity, and happier life. Reviewer Ugla Stefanía Kristjönudóttir Jónsdóttir, writer and co-director of My Genderation, praised She’s My Dad as “a sweet, gentle book that doesn’t make being transgender a big deal at all. It’s presented as a part of everyday life and will allow kids to connect to the characters and at the same time learn about different types of families.”

This book seems to present an ideal scenario of unconditional love fulfilled, which the community hopes will someday be the norm. While the account covers the issue of pronouns cogently, it glides over other equally important difficulties inherent in the characters’ situations.  The father is presumed to be a single parent, supported by his parents and brother, his Black wife, and mixed-race daughter.  Mini’s mother is never mentioned and her daughter expresses no sadness at her absence from the family group, the perfect daddy’s girl. The process of transitioning from “he” to “she” covers the surgery and recuperation at home, which disrupts any family’s routine in tiring and unexpected ways, in a page about to a hospital visit, where Mini gives her dad a card and favorite stufftie for comfort.  The chief markers of transitioning are  changes in clothes and hair styles: Mini in her overalls and rainbow tee and her dad in a long layered bob and summery white dress bond over doing their nails together. How honest is six-year-old Mini’s perfect acceptance of her father’s decision, over which she has no power, yet impacts her enormously?  Does Mini as an exemplar set up impossibly high standards for other children, who may be intimidated by Mini, when they compare their divergent thoughts and confused emotions to hers?

If one takes the long view of these books, they are as old as time, no matter how controversial the contents. Their purpose is to train children how they should go, so imagination and art are powerful tools to make the presentation of the values the community wants internalized compelling.