'Barbie can be anything you want her (yourself) to be!' Thus the sales pitch for a plastic toy that in most people's minds simply represents the essence of bimbo-ness. But what if the big hair and tacky costumes were actually vehicles of patriarchal and racial hegemony, while also enabling a potentially subversive network of reappropriative authorial narratives? Investigations like Barbie's Queer Accessories defy you to giggle as they unfold with Monty Pythonesque obliviousness to the gulf between high-minded scrutiny and its silly object. But the premise of mickey-mouse academics is often fruitful: that the least cultural droppings are microcosms of a wider political dynamic, to be prodded and tested in a reflexology of the social body.

LRB 20 July 1995 | PDF Download