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Doll Play, Part 1: The Cultural Logic of Barbie
Doll Play, Part 1: The Cultural Logic of Barbie
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)
Camp (Not Sontag's), Part 1: Ellie and Carrie introduce their own formative experience at an all-girls' sleep-away camp in Maine by discussing the cultural history of camp and its role in the American imagination. Works cited include "'The Ego Ideal of the Good Camper' and the Nature of Summer Camp" by Michael B. Smith (2006) and Abigail Ayres Van Slyck's "A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 1890-1960" (2006). by All Each Other Has