It was very difficult to read Rand’s work and not gush at both what she does and what I can remember about Barbie. But the most exciting thing about this chapter are Rand’s effort to continuously challenge the modes of thinking. Rand will drop a testimony and read it in a particular way , only to explore in the following paragraph that that a particular lens may be excluding other thoughts. For me, it was the intricacies surrounding approaches to testimony that were so valuable.

Rand deconstructs the multitude of Barbie stories through the almost exclusive use of adult testimonies, broken up by short acknowledgements to marketing practices. She additionally breaks down the chapter to address several issues: consumer generated meaning for Barbie and consumer resistances to perceived Barbie messages. Additionally, Rand concerns herself with almost exclusively women’s stories for what I imagine are obvious reasons.

She summarizes her chapter quite succinctly several pages in, at the end of an analysis of Carol Nicksin’s testimony, where Rand observes that “Barbie […] seemed to demand a stance, which often had to be fought for, or fought over, because more than Barbie was at stake. Taking a position on Barbie meant taking a position about other issues, or defining oneself, or defying authority” (98). She read the Barbie phenomena as one that necessitates a conversations on naturally intersecting topics. To address Barbie at all, regardless of your age, is to enter into this space.. And this is a really exciting thing to say in one sentence.

Rand notes her concerns openly in the third paragraph of the chapter as she remarks “memories, even the most vivid, are notoriously unreliable, their veracity hard, if not impossible, to test.” (94) The issues surrounding these testimonies, all by adults who are looking back on their childhoods reveals to Rand the importance of understanding the impact of perception and personal stake. These moments where she pauses to examine her approach were the most valuable to me. She writes that “anecdotes can’t be placed on a continuum from acceptance to rejection, mainstream to marginal, or straight to queer” (102). This is easily defended through Rand’s extensive collection of testimonies, and put serious pressure on how we approach such a messy primary source.

Rand quotes William Pope who points out how “Barbie turned my sister into a materialistic bimbo” has the same truth value as “Barbie loves Ken.” Barbie cannot actually do either of those things. Yet the first, unlike the second, often stands as a credible description of reality because phrases like “turned my sister into” are understood as figures of speech” (104-105). The statements that are commonly taken with a level of meaningful truth and those that get pushed aside reveal a hierarchy of interests. It is much more interest, it would seem, to hear about the tragic downfall of young women as opposed to an uncontested statement about heterosexual affection. There is perhaps some unintentional irony here, as Rand will proceed to talk almost exclusively about the queering of the Barbie experience in about 5 sentences. 6 if you count the subheading. This does lead to a general concern (which really fits into any kind of inquiry); what narratives or normative behavior are we dismissing as we address testimony?

These questions/concerns become further complicated as we reach the dyke destiny stories. This section of the chapter brought in some key questions that reoccur throughout the text. In reviewing the adult testimonials, Rand comes across a number of recollections that “wink” to Barbie as somehow a lens or catalyst towards understanding that child is somehow queer. Yet this simple assumption of a connection between a young child’s relationship or play with Barbie and their identity in adulthood gets deconstructed and challenged as she broadens the scope of her stories.

Observations Rand makes on interpretation are exciting, as she notes, by quoting Nestle, that “there is a tendency to interpret a fem’s use of and pleasure in certain styles and attributes traditionally labeled as feminine as a sign that she has uncritically bought the whole package, instead of as a sign that she has picked those particular elements and not others” (110). Just a few lines down on the page we see an observation by Rand who observes that “Fem stories get told less often, and without the dyke destiny nudge because dykes scan our childhoods with an eye toward the coming-out story” (110). There is a palpable expectation of queerness (and later sections will add race and class as the audience changes, but we don’t ever leave expectation behind) that isn’t a generalized wanting. It is a wanting that looks for rebellion, where queer narratives, by nature of their rebellious quality when discussing Barbie, establishes them as the more attractive story. (141) These connections and expectations are drawn throughout allege testimonies, regardless of the revealed identity of the speaker.

Having gone through discussions of dyke destiny stories, class associations with Barbie accessories (I am aware that this has been largely ignored by me), hegemonic marketing by Mattel (which has its own delightfully messy hands in race politics), and predominately white heterosexual ideologies, Rand reaches her conclusions. “Another indication of the extent to which people construe Barbie narratives through already extent habits of cultural narration is the striking similarity between tales designated nonfiction by their tellers and those categorized as fiction” (137). For our purposes, its pretty useful that testimonies can (but not always) fall into a narrative structure. However, how does the need for an interesting narrative and the expectation of “uniqueness” develop a normative standard for Barbies testimonies – or for testimonies in general? Do children, who still haven’t been trained to make the same form of narrative moves and conventions, have another shared structure?

However, exciting as these challenges are, none of it is to suggest that we throw out or accept less critically these testimonies. However, and more in line with the goals of the class, every single recollection, subversive moment, move to rebel that get retold in Rand’s writing lends itself to combat the creepy myth that children are simply passive consumers. These personal testimonies attribute to that reality, and come wrapped up with a concluding warning that “many dubious censorship moves are justified by raising the specter of impressionable children who merely absorb what they see” (147). Even though there is a whole book beyond this chapter, Rand does end with an affirmation of the complexity of childhood. Reading these stories might be problematic, but that is where we can find all these intricacies and complexities.