Barbie's Queer Accessories

Barbie's Queer Accessories
By:"Erica Rand"
Published on 1995-01-01 by Duke University Press

She's skinny, white, and blond. She's Barbie—an icon of femininity to generations of American girls. She's also multiethnic and straight—or so says Mattel, Barbie's manufacturer. But, as Barbie's Queer Accessories demonstrates, many girls do things with Barbie never seen in any commercial. Erica Rand looks at the corporate marketing strategies used to create Barbie's versatile (She's a rapper! She's an astronaut! She's a bride!) but nonetheless premolded and still predominantly white image. Rand weighs the values Mattel seeks to embody in Barbie—evident, for example, in her improbably thin waist and her heterosexual partner—against the naked, dyked out, transgendered, and trashed versions favored by many juvenile owners and adult collectors of the doll. Rand begins by focusing on the production and marketing of Barbie, starting in 1959, including Mattel's numerous tie-ins and spin-offs. These variations, which include the much-promoted multiethnic Barbies and the controversial Earring Magic Ken, helped make the doll one of the most profitable toys on the market. In lively chapters based on extensive interviews, the author discusses adult testimony from both Barbie \

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