It’s Barbie’s World.

Farah

Turns out Melbourne will soon be host to ‘Forever Barbie’ – an exhibition which “celebrates 50 years of a pop culture icon.” I’ve had my fair share of Barbie dolls when I was younger but an exhibition? Since when did Barbie become an appropriate ‘cultural’ artefact to celebrate?

The critiques against Barbie are well known; she is a commodification of the “feminine” and symbolises and perpetuates (white) standards of beauty. Barbie constructs a certain reality of femininity, one in which her consumers by extension participate. Barbie exists to consume. She pairs endless consumption with the attainment of a particular beauty standard. Capitalist tools don’t get better than her. You can read more in “Barbie Culture” by Mary Frances Rogers.

Later, it was decided to give Barbie some ethnic friends. Through these later dolls Mattel reinforced the white standard of beauty by reduce cultural difference to costume changes and different colours of plastic. One of the highlights is “Princess Moroccan Barbie” and another Barbie Mattel created (which I can’t find a picture of) called “Leyla” who apparently was made to be a 1720’s Turkish Muslim slave girl.

Princess Morrocan Barbie

These dolls demonstrate how a certain type of the Other is created and promoted through the white, female body of plastic Barbie. Thanks Mattel. I feel sufficiently included within your capitalist gaze.

Now, we have Fulla who is marketed as a Muslim doll. She represents a ‘culturally sensitive alternative to Barbie’s flashy lifestyle.’ She isn’t made by Mattel but by a Syrian based company (called NewBoy) though she does have physical similarities to her white American counterpart (11” tall, can’t stand up, and both are made in the same factories in China). Fulla has “outdoor” and “indoor” clothes; her outdoor clothes include a hijab, a black abaya, or a long, cream coat.

Fulla

Her indoor clothes includes trendy, Western-style outfits. She also comes with a mini pink prayer mat. Fulla herself has long black hair, large brown eyes, painted on eyebrows, and an olive-like complexion (some of the images I’ve seen on the internet range from dark to as white as Barbie). She also has two ‘friends’; blonde-haired Yasmine and red-haired Nada. The
story was picked up in the media.

In her article “Islamic Barbie: The Politics of Gender and Performativity” Amina Yaqin discusses Razanne, a Muslim doll (again similar to Barbie) made by a Muslim couple in the US and sold through their website. Razanne is different to Fulla in that she doesn’t have ‘friends’ but you can get her in different ‘ethnicities’ – Fair Skin/Fair Hair, Olive Skin/Dark Hair or Dark Skin/Dark Hair. Like Fulla, Razanne has “inside” and “outside” fashion. At home, Razanne dresses in all the latest fashion, and when she wants to go out she wears her hijab and jilbaab. Yaqin argues that dolls like Razanne and Fulla to a certain extent present an alternative conception of Muslim identity because the dolls are presented as a substitute to the culture of commodification. However, she concludes that it arguable whether the dolls break stereotyped representation of Muslim women, or whether the dolls reinforce stereotypes through the universalizing of a female Muslim subject. She rightly argues Razanna is a ‘veiled mimicry’ of Barbie.

So do Fulla and Razanne represent “protest products” made to resist Western consumer culture? Or, as Katie Cercone argues, are Fulla and Razanna (like their white Barbie counterparts) “emblem[s] of the cultural pressure to conform to one extremely limiting female role?” Renée Terrebonne takes up this point in her article “Fulla, the veiled Barbie: An analysis of cultural imperialism and agency”. Like Yaqin she argues that Fulla is a capitalist cultural artifact through her existence as a mime of Barbie. But she also argues that Fulla is “Barbie done differently to fit the needs of a group of people.” The consumer takes the globalised artifact (Barbie) and makes it local (Fulla). The capitalist icon is transformed, and is a complicated mimesis. It’s a positive step for Barbie and Barbie-like dolls everywhere.

I’ve always been a bit skeptical about the ‘glocalisation’ argument. McDonalds usually trots it out to make the claim that they “respect” other cultures by offering halal Big Macs. In this case I think it is important to realise while dolls like Fulla and Razanne do offer an alternative to Barbie, the doll is still inherently consumerist and constructs its own discourse of femininity. For example, take Razanne. While she is offered in different colours to ‘represent’ different ethnicities, the different dolls have exactly the same features, but are just slightly different colours. Fulla is created in the same factory in China as Barbie, and looks nearly exactly like Barbie just with slightly larger eyes and a slightly darker complexion. And none of them can actually stand up properly!

To a large extent Islam is being commodified to sell the doll. Fulla has started off a craze in the Middle East; you can get Fulla chewing gum, bags and bicycles, matching clothes, and a matching pink prayer rug for her young owner. A comment by a toy-store owner in Syria

Fulla CD player plus sing-a-long karaoke set

(quoted in a New York Times article got my attention. “”If you’ve got a TV in the house, it’s Fulla all the time,” she said.”The parents complain about the expense. But Fulla gives girls a more Islamic character to emulate, and parents want that.”

So capitalism’s ok as long as it teaches the kiddies? Forgive me if I want something other than a doll to teach my (potential) daughter my religious and cultural values.

This is a commercial for Fulla. It’s in Arabic, but watch it and try to spot all the Fulla merchandise: she’s praying on her signature pink rug, when on the phone to her friend she waves about a Fulla photo album, she uses Fulla cake mix to bake her friend a (Fulla brand) cake which is then decorated in her signature jasmine flower motif, she uses Fulla plates, she sleeps in Fulla bed sheets. In the end, glocalisation isn’t about finding the ‘agency’ of consumers in globalisation – it’s about Barbie done differently to sell more stuff.

One writer at the Guardian probably sums it up, “For parents it will be the same story regardless: an empty wallet and a houseful of small plastic people with fixed smiles and moulded matching accessories.”

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