Through an examination of one of my childhood Barbie dolls as an artifact, I hoped to investigate my research inquiry: How has growing up as a minority in America, and being surrounded by idealized “American” representations such as Barbie, affected my identity forming as a Muslim-Syrian American?
Garance Marechal says that autoethnography is defined as a “form or method of research that involves self-observation and reflexive investigation in the context of ethnographic field work and writing”.[1]Through examining ideas on Barbie as “American-ness”, I wanted to unpack my alienation, and understanding of my identity: whether I was “American” enough in relation to my classmates. I went to elementary and middle schools that did not have much diversity, and so I was always the only Muslim/Arab person in my class. I think I would have felt very differently had there been people more like me, or even just more diversity around me at school.
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According to Stephan Rössner in “Barbie”, “Barbie is a fashion doll created by the American business woman Ruth Handler” who, when watching her daughter Barbara play with her dolls, she noticed that Barbara often gave her dolls adult roles.[2]Barbie was first launched in 1959 by the Mattel Company. This is the first Barbie doll. It is estimated that over a million Barbie dolls have been sold in more than 150 countries.
As a child, I loved Barbie films, especially Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus, Barbie as Rapunzel, and Barbie in the Twelve Dancing Princesses. In all of them, Barbie vanquished an evil villain, wore beautiful gowns, and fell in love with a handsome prince. In all of them, Barbie was blonde, blue eyed, and flawless.
The XO Valentine Barbie was sold in 2007. This doll has strawberry blonde hair which was lightly curled at the bottom. She also carries a black heart purse, and wears black heels, and a studded silver heart necklace. Her skirt is short and red and her shirt has a heart print and red belt. I was given this doll as a child by my dad, and I instantly loved it. I named the doll Rachel.
Growing up, I wanted to be like Barbie, but I didn’t feel like I fit the image. I wasn’t blonde, and even though I was born in America I didn’t feel all-American. My parents spoke Arabic, I ate Middle Eastern cuisine at home, and the women in my family wore head scarf. I didn’t dress the way that Barbie dolls dressed. Hanoch Flum and Avi Kaplan state, “Developmentally, identity is an integrative concept. It may capture the objective and subjective; it commonly connects between the self and aspects of the world-out-there; it synthesizes past, present and future experiences”. [3]I was American, like Barbie, but I was not exactly Barbie-American. I didn’t celebrate Christmas, Halloween or Easter, or wear bikinis or have a boyfriend. I struggled with things that Barbie never did: balancing the culture I had at home with the culture I had at school. At school, I never wanted to feel different from my classmates, and so I didn’t much talk about my Arab background. When I was younger, I resented my name: people at school didn’t pronounce it properly, and it stood out among all of the very typical American names of my classmates: Taylor, Michaela, Abigail. I didn’t even have a middle name, I was the only one in my class who didn’t, and when we were asked to sign projects with our full initials, mine only had two letters. This resulted in surprise and questions from my classmates-why don’t you have a middle name? My older sister sometimes used the name Rachel as a stand in for her real name at restaurants, to prevent confusion in the cashier taking her order. I liked this idea as a child: that I could tell people a different name from my own, and so I wished sometimes that my name was Rachel, because it would be easier for people to say, and I wouldn’t stand out so much from my classmates.
I wonder what it would have been like for me growing up if I had a headscarf for my dolls: if I would have felt less alienated and less different from my classmates. When I played Barbie, I was limited to a set of dolls just as limited in diversity. Looking through my old box of Barbies, I was pulling out blonde after blonde after blonde doll. I don’t think me or my parents ever really noticed. None of my dolls looked like me or dressed like me. I had brown hair and brown eyes. I prayed and fasted in Ramadan and sometimes wore a headscarf. In short I was just not like Barbie. Seeing as Barbie is American, when I played with Barbie I had her do decidedly American things: she would go on shopping sprees, surf at the beach, have fashion shows, and go to the school dance.
According to Katherine Zoepf, in a 2005 article titled “This Doll Has an Accessory Barbie Lacks: A Prayer Mat”, Barbie dolls disappeared from shelves in toy stores in the Middle East, and were replaced with the Fulla doll.[4]The doll has brown hair and brown eyes, and reflects “Muslim values”. Barbie and Fulla have similar proportions, but Fulla wears a black abaya and matching headscarf. The doll was introduced in 2003 by the NewBoy Design Studio company, based in the Middle East. Young girls and parents in the middle east loved the Fulla doll, complete with her tiny pink prayer rug. According to Lena O. Saleh and Lois Harder, Fulla “appears to resonate with Arab consumers in a way that Barbie, as a non-Islamic, non-Arab American consumer good simply cannot”.[5]Fulla and Barbie are both fashion dolls, however in Fulla, Barbie received not only a physical makeover, but an identity makeover as well.[6]Saleh claims that “Fulla doll and her advertisements participate in processes of identity building and socialization (of children) across the Arab world”.[7]They also state, “Fulla,…reaches right into the home, hearts, and minds of children. Children glean a sense of self-worth and understanding of the world around them partly from the cultural objects with which they interact”.[8]Saleh and Harder also quote Ann DuCille who says: “More than simple instruments of pleasure and amusement, toys and games play crucial roles in helping children determine what is valuable in and around them. Dolls in particular invite children to replicate them, to imagine themselves in their dolls’ images”.[9]As a mass-produced Western consumer good, the Barbie doll “was unable to account for various aspects of the ‘lived culture’ of many people in the Arab world. Barbie is categorically not Arab.[10]The Fulla doll was therefore an identity-based project “catering specifically to Arab consumers by offering them an authentic alternative to the Western Barbie doll”.[11]Saleh says “Fulla is also a character that consumers in the Arab world want to relate to. Fulla, therefore, is not simply a re-dressed Barbie doll, but also an entirely different person with her own unique cultural identity”.[12]By playing and interacting with dolls and toys, children learn information about the world around them. However, the designs of their toys “impact the sort of play children can engage in and therefore, also alters the sorts of lessons children learn from their toys”.[13]By including a miniature hijab and abaya in Fulla’s box, children’s play is different for some Middle Eastern children than for American children, including me.
Zeopf also states that Fulla is not the first Barbie-like doll to wear Hijab, “Mattel markets a group of collector’s dolls that include a Moroccan Barbie and a doll called Leila, intended to represent a Muslim slave girl in an Ottoman court”.[14]I had never seen these dolls. It wasn’t until Barbie released their Ibtihaj Muhammad doll in 2017, modeled after the American Muslim fencer as part of their “Shero” line, that I had seen a Barbie with Hijab.
I did not have a Fulla doll growing up. The only dolls I saw in stores in America were ones that all looked and dressed the same-but not like me. Barbie dolls had some diversity, but in mainstream Barbies I never saw a representation of an Arab Muslim American anywhere in toy shelves. If I had seen myself, my mom and my sisters represented in the toys I had, I think I would have felt more validated in embracing my Arab Muslim American culture earlier on, as I do now. It would have helped me, and I think, my classmates as well to feel a normalization in diversity and cultural expression. It may have supported an understanding and sensitivity of American Muslim women in American children, different from the harmful stereotypes perpetuated in media and the news. However, I don’t imagine that Barbie will be producing a widespread Hijabi Barbie anytime soon, I would imagine they would receive a lot of complaints from certain types of people in the American public. Because of lack of understanding, some people still view the Hijab as controversial.
Over time, I began to care less about my differences from my classmates, and instead began to embrace them. I had real life role models within my family and community, ones that were not stagnant like Barbie, and as I grew too old to play with dolls, Barbie became less of the quintessential “American” and more a nostalgiac part of my past. Once I shed away the feelings of distance and disparity from my classmates, I stopped shying away from my differences, and learned more about Islam, Syrian culture, and history. My differences were not something to be ashamed of, but something to celebrate.
My inquiry of the incongruence between my Arab Muslim American upbringing and my Barbie dolls can be analyzed through Paul Duncum’s “Seven Principles for Visual Culture Education”. One can consider power: “all images involve an assertion of ideas, values, and beliefs that serve the interests of those for whom they are made—political, social, and economic—and audiences, in their turn, exercise the power of interpretation”.[15]Because of controversial and misinformed beliefs held by the American public, there are some people who would protest a Hijabi Barbie being put on store shelves. The lack of a Hijabi Barbie can maybe be traced to the power of the American public: “All images offer arguments about what the world is like, [what it] should be, or should not be”.[16]To have such dolls would help normalize the headscarf and diversity. Another of Duncum’s principles that relates to my inquiry is that of ideology, which “refers to ideas, ideals, beleifs, and values”[17]As seen through the Fulla doll, A Hijabi Barbie would have taught me about my religious identity and culture, and gave me validation and cultural worth among my mostly white American classmates. Another principle that applies is representation. Duncum states, “Representation is closely aligned with ideology because it refers to how ideology is represented in visual form”, in this case, the all-American Barbie doll donning a headscarf.[18]He continues, “It [representation] involves what images represent, how they represent, and what they fail to represent. What is privileged and what is marginalized?”.[19] An absence of representation is equally problematic.[20]Not seeing myself reflected in my Barbie dolls resulted in me sometimes feeling alienated, out of place, dismissed, and invisible. Now, I don’t necessarily need such representations to feel valid and accepted, but when I do see them, I recognize their power in abolishing harmful misconceptions around Muslim women, and feel reassured in the fact that someone is making an effort to change the discourse.
[1]Garance Marechal, “Autoethnography” inEncyclopedia of Case Study Research,ed. Albert J. Mills, Gabrielle Durepos and Elden Wiebe. (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, Inc., 2010), 2.
[2]Stephan Rössner, “Barbie,” Obesity Reviews 15, no. 3 (March 2014): 224.
[3]Hanoch Flum and Avi Kaplan, “Identity Formation in Educational Settings: A Contextualized View of Theory and Research in Practice,” Contemporary Educational Psychology 37, no. 3 (July 2012): 240–245.
[4]Katherine Zoepf, “This Doll Has an Accessory Barbie Lacks: A Prayer Mat,” New York Times (1923-Current File), (New York, N.Y.: New York Times Company, September 22, 2005).
[5]Lena Saleh and Lois Harder, “Boxes Fulla Fun: The Fulla Doll, Identity and Consumption in a Globalizing Arab World,” (ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2013), 4.
[6]Lena Saleh and Lois Harder, “Boxes Fulla Fun: The Fulla Doll, Identity and Consumption in a Globalizing Arab World,” (ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2013), 5.
[7]Lena Saleh and Lois Harder, “Boxes Fulla Fun: The Fulla Doll, Identity and Consumption in a Globalizing Arab World,” (ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2013), 6.
[8]Lena Saleh and Lois Harder, “Boxes Fulla Fun: The Fulla Doll, Identity and Consumption in a Globalizing Arab World,” (ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2013), 65.
[9]Lena Saleh and Lois Harder, “Boxes Fulla Fun: The Fulla Doll, Identity and Consumption in a Globalizing Arab World,” (ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2013), 65.
[10]Lena Saleh and Lois Harder, “Boxes Fulla Fun: The Fulla Doll, Identity and Consumption in a Globalizing Arab World,” (ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2013), 82.
[11]Lena Saleh and Lois Harder, “Boxes Fulla Fun: The Fulla Doll, Identity and Consumption in a Globalizing Arab World,” (ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2013), 82.
[12]Lena Saleh and Lois Harder, “Boxes Fulla Fun: The Fulla Doll, Identity and Consumption in a Globalizing Arab World,” (ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2013), 109.
[13]Lena Saleh and Lois Harder, “Boxes Fulla Fun: The Fulla Doll, Identity and Consumption in a Globalizing Arab World,” (ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2013), 113.
[14]Katherine Zoepf, “This Doll Has an Accessory Barbie Lacks: A Prayer Mat,” New York Times (1923-Current File), (New York, N.Y.: New York Times Company, September 22, 2005).
[15]Paul Duncum, “Seven Principles for Visual Culture Education,” Art Education 63, no. 1 (January 2010): 6.
[16]Paul Duncum, “Seven Principles for Visual Culture Education,” Art Education 63, no. 1 (January 2010): 6.
[17]Paul Duncum, “Seven Principles for Visual Culture Education,” Art Education 63, no. 1 (January 2010): 7.
[18]Paul Duncum, “Seven Principles for Visual Culture Education,” Art Education 63, no. 1 (January 2010): 7.
[19]Paul Duncum, “Seven Principles for Visual Culture Education,” Art Education 63, no. 1 (January 2010): 7.
[20]Paul Duncum, “Seven Principles for Visual Culture Education,” Art Education 63, no. 1 (January 2010): 8.