From Library Journal
Have you ever dressed Barbie in Ken's clothes or let her sleep with Skipper? If so, consider yourself an accessory to the crime of liberating Barbie from her conformist, straight world. Describing herself as a dyke cultural critic and political activist, university teacher Rand examines how consumer interactions with Barbie affect and reflect their political, social, and gender identities. She contrasts owners' recollections of what they thought about and did to their Barbies with the conventional characteristics and socially approved uses promoted by the doll's corporate manufacturer, Mattel. Speaking from an alternative viewpoint, Rand shows how adult reinterpretations and subversions of white, blond, straight Barbie (for additional examples see Lucinda Ebersole and Pichard Peabody's Mondo Barbie, St. Martin's Pr., 1993) become forms of resistance to disempowering and discriminatory cultural messages. Recommended for academic libraries and scholars of popular cultural and gay or women's studies.?Carol A. McAllister, Swem Lib., Coll. of William and Mary. Williamsburg, Va.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"Over the course of the 1980s, Barbie has become an artist’s model, a collector’s ‘fetish,’ and, as Erica Rand shows us, an object of collective and personal memory. Barbie’s Queer Accessories will help to open up important issues about queer readings in relationship to one of the most feminine coded objects of contemporary culture."—Lynn Spigel, author of Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America
