The Toffoletti readings prompted me to unearth and reflect on my own experiences with Barbie. In my nuclear family, Barbies were seen as a very American, unnecessarily expensive, and non functional ‘thing’. They were a point of fascination and curiosity, but also a sort of forbidden, strange object. My mom, a public health nurse, was quite openly critical about Barbie as an ‘evil’ unrealistic ‘thing’ that was not a healthy part of raising girls. My dad is in marketing, so discussions of packaging and advertising were always circulating. I guess you could say I had an awareness from an early age that toys weren’t just toys, but held meaning. I knew that having, liking, and playing with Barbies told other people significant things about you as a person.

I never asked for or bought a Barbie, but for several years my Aunt (whose daughters had a room full of Barbie the doll as well as hundreds of additions and accessories) would send me one every Christmas and birthday. I remember the familiar wrapped rectangle shape and my dis-ease every time. Why was I given this? Did they not know me? I wasn’t a Barbie girl. It was confusing. I quite literally didn’t know what to do with the thing. Toffoletti’s mention of hand making additions to commercial toys(64) struck a chord with me as my Grandma would send us boxes of hand me down kid clothes along with Barbie clothes she had made – all mixed in together. It always felt poky and sad trying to pull an odd crocheted dress onto a shiny new doll – the wool always got caught on Barbie’s sharp pointy hands and mussed up her brittle hair. Similarly to having my parents make ‘homemade’ Egg McMuffins instead of going to MacDonald’s, it was a very strange, deflating experience to have a version of something and know it wasn’t what it was supposed to be. I think it is interesting to reflect on how Barbies came into my household through female familial relationships, as a sort of communication and rite of passage. We had moved across the country from these family members, so there was a lot of anxiety about how we were relating to one another and how we were growing up.

My encounters with Barbie amplified the discomfort that propelled me to try to distance myself from girlhood. It was quite clear to me that there were categories of being a girl (think Spice Girls era) and that they couldn’t intermix. I wasn’t sporty. I didn’t play with dolls. I read books. I was Book Girl. Not Baby Spice. I was always desperate to distinguish myself as being different (and better) then girly Girls. Internalized misogyny and a growing up in a society that generally ridicules young girls for being inane and frivolous (regardless of what they do, say, or wear) meant I was frantic to prove I was more than that. I wanted to be smart and I wanted to be taken seriously. Barbie wasn’t smart. Barbie was girly, and girly was a pejorative. This dis-ease makes more sense when combined with Toffoletti’s discussion of how pervasive Enlightenment dialectics dissuade and prohibit women from being seen as fully human (19). I distanced myself from representations of the female body and activities associated with girlhood because the girlhood that was presented to me came at the expense of being viewed as intelligent, independent, and a ‘real’ person.

Our discussions in class about ‘scripts’ or hardwired responses to situations came into play in my reflections of Barbie. As a girl I was aware I was supposed to want Barbie, and aware that not wanting Barbie made me feel like there was something wrong with me. There was even a Barbie called Kelly (my name), as I was regularly reminded by classmates who taunted me with the TV jingle – knowing I hated it. Also, Aqua’s song Barbie Girl was played incessently on the radio for most of the late 90s. I looked up the lyrics to refresh my memory and it’s super unsettling to think of birthday parties full of seven year olds chanting “You can brush my hair, undress me everywhere/ Imagination, life is your creation”  (http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/aqua/barbiegirl.html)

Barbie seemed inescapable. I so wanted to want Barbie and for that to be easy and simple. Though I was regularly uncomfortable or disdainful around my own Barbies, this changed when my little sister was gifted the nicest Barbie that had ever come into our house. I was convinced it was intended for me and irritated that she played with it so innocently – oblivious to the anxiety and distress the layers of meaning surrounding it heaped upon me. When she cut off the Barbie’s long hair (to make it look like her own cropped mushroom cut) I was distraught. I got my older brother and we systematically broke all the Barbies in our house and threw them down the stairs. This seems really morbid – the dismembering of dolls – but it was quite a gleeful moment. These ‘things’ had caused us all to act differently then usual and it was a relief for them to be no more. This anecdote highlights how it was our varying perceptions and interactions with Barbie that impacted what this object meant. In other words, value shifted depending on if I was watching friends with their Barbies, receiving them from family members, or interacting with my siblings (62).