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Doll Play, Part 1: The Cultural Logic of Barbie

Doll Play, Part 1: The Cultural Logic of Barbie

FromAll Each Other Has


Doll Play, Part 1: The Cultural Logic of Barbie

FromAll Each Other Has

ratings:
Length:
47 minutes
Released:
Jul 29, 2022
Format:
Podcast episode

Description

Ellie and Carrie recall their time spent world building with Barbie, Ken, Midge, Skipper, Christie, et al. Using Molly Rosner’s “Playing With History: American Identities and Children’s Consumer Culture” (Rutgers University Press, 2021) as a framework, they introduce Barbie dolls as "didactic amusements” instructing girls on what it means to be feminine and introducing them to their identities as American consumers. What do cultural artifacts like Barbie tell us about the world in which they were produced? Ellie links the world's introduction to Barbie in 1959 with Nixon and Khrushchev famous Kitchen Debate that same year in Moscow. Was Barbie a capitalist soldier in the cold war against communism? Carrie brings up the work of Harvard professor Sarah Lewis, who has posited that images create culture as much as culture creates images. Other topics include Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s doll studies in the 1940s as well as doll play's influence on pornography predilections.
Released:
Jul 29, 2022
Format:
Podcast episode

Titles in the series (26)

Two sisters Ellie and Carrie Monahan (the former a millennial, the latter on the Gen Z cusp) analyze topics like fame by proxy, sleep-away camp in the American imagination, their adolescence of Carnegie Hill etiology, Sontag's portents of the influencer economy, dialectical thinking, cyberbullies, the enduring power of Madame Alexander dolls, and more. Done through a sometimes academic, often solipsistic lens. They love each other, and love you for listening.