Deconstructing Dolls: Girlhoods and the Meanings of Play ed. by Miriam Forman-Brunell

Reviewed by: Deconstructing Dolls: Girlhoods and the Meanings of Play ed. by Miriam Forman-Brunell Jennifer Helgren Deconstructing Dolls: Girlhoods and the Meanings of Play. Edited by Miriam Forman-Brunell. New York: Berghahn, 2021. xii + 182 pp. Paper $27.95/ £22.95, cloth $120/ £89.00. Since at least the Enlightenment, intellectuals have queried the importance of doll play to girls. In the late twentieth century, research accelerated as feminists questioned the role of dolls, especially Barbie, in the development of gender identity and expression. Girls' studies blossomed in the twentyfirst century, gaining an academic venue, Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, in 2008, and an outpouring of sophisticated scholarship followed. Doll studies use interdisciplinary methods, many informed by critical race theory and feminist epistemologies, to understand the complex relationship between girlhood and doll play. Deconstructing Dolls makes available to a broad audience a selection of these innovative articles, most of which appeared in Girlhood Studies' 2012 special issue. The volume, edited by doll studies' scholar [End Page 157] Miriam Forman-Brunell, typifies her work to develop girls' studies and support rising scholars. Collectively, this interdisciplinary volume presents how girls and grownups across times and cultures have generated gender and race identities via their dolls. The authors understand dolls as dynamic texts, created and marketed by adults with varying ideological goals, but mediated by the girls who come to play with dolls, express their identities through them, and even produce their own dolls. The dolls and girls that appear in these pages are mostly from the United States, but dolls and girls of Great Britain, Canada, and South Africa, as well as the designs of a French architect, are also featured. The studies about the United States and Canada are noteworthy for their attention to girls of color. The volume's first three essays examine dolls with narrative backstories. Lisa Marcus explores the representation of history and memory in the American Girl brand's popular Jewish doll Rebecca Rubin. She understands the doll's appeal within the American Jewish community as a source of validation and belonging. Still, she criticizes how Rebecca's story replaced the anti-Semitism that American Jews faced with "dolled-up history" that failed to help children deal with the complex realities of their own social-political contexts. The second article, by Hannah Field, examines the colorful paper doll costumes produced by Samuel and Joseph Fullers' London publishing house in the early 1800s. The doll costumes, designed to engage and fascinate, were coupled with contradictory didactic tales warning girls against the extravagant consumption that the costumes elicited. Field highlights, however, that the paper dolls' participatory format invited children to veer off script. Molly Brookfield's essay returns to American Girl, describing how adults who once played with the dolls remember them with ambivalent nostalgia. They recognize the historical inaccuracies presented by the dolls and their books but also recall how the dolls drew them into participatory play and encouraged their interest in history. Five more essays explore design, gender and race performance, and identity formation through doll play. Frederika Eilers's "Barbie versus Modulor" pairs Barbie—or, more specifically, her Dream House—and Le Corbusier's stylized figure of architectural proportions to examine the gendered body and the global white, able-bodied architectural standard. Next, April Renée Mandrona examines the potential within the do-it-yourself movement for girls to construct their own dolls and identities. Rebecca C. Hains discusses how a racially diverse group of girls plays with Bratz dolls. Often criticized for their oversexualized dress styles, the Bratz dolls, with their varying skin colors, nonetheless, prompt girls of color to interrogate historic and current race relations. Girls, Hains [End Page 158] shows, are not tethered to narrow gender scripts but merge their play with classroom civil rights lessons, popular culture, and interpersonal relationships. Next, Jennifer Dawn Whitney examines Nicki Minaj's Harajuku Barbie performance to demonstrate further how dolls carry multiple, unstable meanings. Minaj's playful impersonations of idealized femininity create alternate modes of gender performance in the manner of Judith Butler's theories of parody; Minaj adopts and redeploys the gender tropes in US capitalist culture to display their absurdity and alter their...

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