Barbie Play and the Public Pedagogy of Abjection

Abstract

The iconic Barbie doll and young girls’ Barbie play, in particular, is an ambiguous site where the distinctions between Barbie as a normative gendered object and girls’ subjective desiring and fantasizing through the doll play, collide in an act of abjection. Using Julia Kristeva’s (1982) feminist theory of abjection, we substantiate our argument with two ethnographic cases of preadolescent girls’ transgressive Barbie play, which includes homosexual enactment, gender bending, and violent acts. We analyze these acts as replacing the dominant symbolic order, or what Kristeva calls the Law of the Father, with the maternal, affective, (pre)symbolic bodily performance. Furthermore, we propose to view young girls’ Barbie play as a form of public pedagogy that offers opportunities for a productive disruption and critique of the hegemonic gender regimes.