Configuring America

Iconic Figures, Visuality, and the American Identity

Klaus Rieser, Michael W. Phillips, Michael Fuchs, Klaus Rieser

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781841507620
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Tecnologia e ingegneria
• Subtopic: Risorse energetiche

ConFiguring America brings together a series of incisive essays that analyse a wide range of such figures: those who embody America's tendency to produce celebrities and iconic personalities with global reach. Drawing on theoretical insights from a variety of fields – including cultural iconography, visual culture, star studies and history – a diverse group of international contributors sheds light on how these figures and their media representations construct America's image beyond its borders. An important addition to an expanding field, ConFiguring America will deepen readers' understanding of celebrity, iconography and their worldwide implications.

PART I

Icons and the Struggle over Meaning

Chapter 1

‘Just Like You’, But Not Like Us: Staging National Belonging, Multiracial Femininity, and Collective Memory in the American Girl Family

Karina Eileraas

Re-Membering Race and Representation

Several months ago, my daughter burst in from preschool, eager to fill me in on her day’s activities. ‘I created my color in class today!’ she said, as she explained how she and her classmates had mixed pots of acrylic paint to approximate their skin colors. ‘Look, here it is!’ she shouted and lovingly described all of the ‘ingredients’ that had contributed to her unique concoction. ‘A blend of fawn, mahogany, snowflake, and cinnamon!’ My daughter felt that she had engaged in something revolutionary on that day: a proud swirling and re-mixing of paints, cultural heritages, and ‘races’, boldly conceived. Hungry for more details about this early experiment in claiming an identity, I asked, ‘How did you know when you had created exactly the right color, and when to stop mixing?’ ‘Because, look,’ she replied, holding her arm up to the painting, ‘this color looks just like me!’

By applying herself so diligently to the task of creatively approximating her skin color, my daughter had learned both everything and nothing at all about ‘race’ and the challenges of its representation. After all, race is nearly impossible to define. Popular understandings shift in relation to diverse cultural, scientific, and political objectives, transforming race into one of the ‘most contradictory and violent ideas’¹ (Guillaumin 1972: 183) of our time. While I celebrate my daughter’s delight in the act of claiming an identity, I am troubled by the social and pedagogical imperatives that encourage her to equate skin color with racial or ethnic identity. Because our identities are always forged in negotiation with, rather than outside, representation, the understandings of race that circulate in collective memory have a profound impact on subjectivity. They shape the parameters of what one imagines as ‘possible’ at the level of identity: all that one is and might become.

Navigating the relationship between image and identity is a particularly fraught endeavor for people of color in the post-9/11 global political landscape, where individual efforts to articulate diverse racial, ethnic, and religious perspectives collide with state initiatives to regulate the visibility of ‘difference’ in the public sphere. In July 2010, this intersection provoked intense debate in Arizona, where SB1070 proposed racial profiling of those perceived to have questionable trajectories of ‘belonging’ to the United States. Although SB1070 was ultimately overturned, similar attempts to legislate the public appearance of ethnic, racial, and religious ‘difference’ are in effect or underway throughout Europe and the Middle East, including a controversial ban on the niqab in France.

To challenge conventional mappings of the relationship between image and identity, it is imperative to ask why individuals and institutions remain invested in conventional racial categories in lieu of more nuanced models of identity and affiliation. How are categories of racial, ethnic, and national belonging imagined, performed, and resisted within popular culture? This chapter will explore racial and national identification as sites of collective memory and epistemic violence, and as openings onto the political possibilities of fantasy. I will focus on the American Girl brand of dolls, launched by Pleasant Rowland in 1985. As cultural icons, American Girl dolls shape popular fictions of femininity, difference, and national belonging, ‘fixing’ them within collective memory. To evaluate American Girl’s contribution to ongoing conversations about racial identification and classification in the United States, I will analyze visual artifacts (websites, catalogues, and retail displays) from American Girl’s line of customized dolls, the Just Like You (JLY) collection (renamed My American Girl in 2011), which I find especially pernicious because it reinforces lingering cultural equations between race and skin color.

‘Race’ Re-Mixed: Histories, Debates, Definitions, and Evolutions

Although often presumed self-evident, race is constituted as such only in relation to a complex and shifting web of fantasies, anxieties, and desires. Especially in light of human genome sequencing efforts that reveal more heterogeneity within, rather than across, conventional racial groupings, ‘race’, as Orlando Patterson highlights, is most productively conceived as an artifact: ‘something we invent: partly imposed on us, partly what we select and choose’ (quoted in PBS 1997: par. 21). ‘Race’ nonetheless begets material consequences and contributes to historically specific patterns of discrimination and domination (McLaren 1997: 303). Whereas colonial processes of racialization tended to inferiorize ‘Others’ to justify exploitation, contemporary racist discourse frames difference relative to a putative ‘threat’ in a transnational frame, emphasizing the ‘“irreducible alterity” of those who must be expelled from the body of a nation that cannot assimilate them’ (Lionnet 2008: 1505).

The racialized meanings grafted onto one’s skin have complicated histories and potentially shattering effects for subjectivity (Fanon 1967: 112).² The conflation of race with skin color confers invisibility on entire populations, precluding equitable citizenship. Historically, racial classification efforts have governed legal rights, the allocation of resources, and vital decisions about ‘who shall live and who shall die’ (Omi & Winant 1994: 54). Taxonomic ambitions have profoundly shaped the American political landscape and collective imaginary, especially during the American Eugenics movement of the early twentieth century. Proponents understood race relative to a continuum or evolutionary scale of skin color and deployed racialized iconography to justify social inequality.

In the same era, the one-drop rule established racial identity as a quantifiable measure of blood and ancestry, despite centuries of intermingling that have yielded plural entanglements across color lines. Americans with one drop of ‘black blood’ in their ancestry were classified as ‘colored’, hence denied the legal and socioeconomic privileges of whiteness. This fractional approach to racial identification ruled the American imagination during World War II, when anyone with 1/8 or more Japanese ancestry was forcibly relocated to an internment camp. The one-drop rule was upheld as recently as 1983 by the Supreme Court of Louisiana, which refused to allow a woman with white ancestry to change the classification on her birth certificate from ‘colored’ to ‘white’ (Omi & Winant 1994: 57). Fears of racial mixing informed scientific, cultural, and literary studies of degeneracy, as well, and shaped public opinion on interracial marriage until challenged by the U.S. Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia (1967). Anxieties about interracial mixing resurfaced recently in Louisiana, where an elected official denied a marriage license to an interracial couple (Siegel 2009).

Multiracial individuals today comprise the fastest-growing demographic in the United States. Statisticians first observed this shift in 2000, when Americans were given the option to ‘mark one or more’ race boxes on the U.S. Census.³ Analysts attribute this trend to higher rates of interracial marriage as well as a ‘national mixed race baby boom’ (Mavin Foundation 2008). Many predict that as more Americans identify as ‘multiracial’,⁴ we will ‘turn a corner’ with respect to how we think about race in this country (Prewitt 2001: 40). Yet, while mixed-race children often reject conventional racial categories in favor of fluid, intersectional models of identity (Moran 2003), their insights prove difficult to integrate with persistently narrow frameworks for thinking about race in the United States. Many Caucasians are troubled by the ‘browning of America’ (Guerrero 2009: 189). Questions about racial purity, citizenship, and patriotism that have plagued the Obama Administration reveal profound anxieties about ethnic ambiguity that haunt the American body politic post-9/11.⁵ Fear of infiltration encourages Americans to imagine the nation as a zone of perpetual violability, wherein the terrorist ‘threat level’ or perceived national security risk is attributed to individuals of foreign or indeterminate origin and used to justify heightened surveillance of the borders of the nation. This chapter will ask how American Girl dolls, as pop culture icons, reinforce limited understandings of racial and ethnic diversity in the national imaginary.

Framing American Girl: Consuming National Identity

Since its debut in 1985, American Girl has evolved into a highly successful commercial venture and household name. Founded by Pleasant Rowland to capture a pre-teen demographic and to whet young girls’ appetite for history, the brand aspires to ‘change the way girls conceptualize America and themselves’ (Acosta-Alzuru & Kreshel 2002: 140). Marketed and widely regarded by parents, educators, and consumers as pedagogical tools, the dolls inform popular fantasies of national identity, history, and belonging. Formal display cases interspersed throughout American Girl Place stores lend an air of legitimacy to American Girl’s historical mission. Combining a museum-like ambiance with nostalgic representations of the past, the stores resemble ‘brand museums’ (Hollenbeck, Peters, and Zinkhan 2008), whose intensely loyal fans travel far and wide to consume American Girl’s spectacular staging of femininity and national belonging (cf. Borghini, Diamond, Kozinets, McGrath, and Muñiz 2009).

Femininity dominates the American Girl market: virtually all of the dolls are female, and girls comprise the majority of American Girl’s customer base, as well. The hyper-visibility of female characters in the American Girl line implicitly reinforces women’s symbolic alignment with national identity, reproduction, and tradition. Conservative formulations of women’s role vis-à-vis the nation have been politically mobilized in nationalist discourse in diverse historical contexts including the U.S. post-WWII, the Algerian revolution, the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, and the 1990s civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Such symbolism often undercuts sex equality by depicting women as bearers of the nation while simultaneously denying them any direct relation to national agency. Similarly, while American Girl enlists girls as symbols and consumers of America, it invests them with limited forms of agency vis-à-vis the body politic.

Owned by Mattel, the American Girl brand reported an operating income of $113.1 million in 2011 according to Mattel’s annual report. The dolls have inspired over 46 million visits to their retail stores, where consumers have purchased roughly 21 million dolls.⁶ Dolls are just one component of the American Girl empire, which includes coordinated doll and child clothing, accessories, a magazine, hair salons, musical theaters, cafes, doll hospitals, books, a major motion picture, a kosher dinner cruise on the New York harbor, and a website that attracts 43 million visits per year. Given American Girl’s status as a cultural icon, it is vital to explore its peculiar orchestrations of race, femininity, and national memory.

American Girl capitalizes on the educational aspirations of young girls and their parents by channeling them toward consumption. The company encourages customers to purchase a dizzying array of products and, by so doing, to embrace a feminist mode of consumerism that celebrates consumption wherever it is perceived to have empowering effects for women (cf. Marshall 2008). Given American Girl’s commercial success, it is imperative to take seriously its packaging of ethnic identity and to ‘critically examine the lessons about gender and history contained in [its] unofficial yet salient curriculum’ (Marshall 2008). American Girl teaches young girls what it means to belong to the ‘imagined community’ of America (Anderson 1991). While the brand nominally celebrates diversity, consumers often question the place of ethnicity within American Girl’s national family (cf. Acosta-Alzuru & Kreshel 2002: 139–161). Captivated by the fabrics, colors, and hairstyles of ethnic identity conceived by American Girl, consumers nonetheless regard dolls of color as ‘different’ from the prototypical American Girl, perhaps ‘inassimilable to the nation in its pure form’ (Berlant 1996: 401). American Girl masks this ambivalence with utopian rhetoric, revisionist history, and superficially inclusive visions of the national family. By doing so, it reinforces collective forgetting as a vital component of national identity and situates multiethnic identity outside history altogether.

American Girl’s vision of the national family has evolved in response to significant demographic changes. In 1995, American Girl launched its line of JLY dolls—many of which appear to be ethnically ambiguous or multiracial—following U.S. Census Bureau predictions that non-Hispanic whites would soon comprise a minority of the U.S. population.⁷ American Girl capitalizes on trends in youth culture, including a tendency to identify as ‘mixed race’ at increasingly early ages.⁸ In 2006, in a nod to the expanding community of Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders on the mainland, the company introduced its first explicitly multiracial doll, Jess, a Hapa of mixed Japanese, Irish, and Scottish descent. Such updates have allowed Mattel to increase market share and maintain proprietary cachet (Sage 2006).

Yet American Girl’s strategy for fashioning a more ‘inclusive’ national family invites substantive critique. Some critics view the brand’s diversity initiatives as glib efforts to expand its customer base. Others understand American Girl’s strategy of diversification as a betrayal of corporate responsibility, since it tends to recycle pernicious stereotypes, advocate a tokenistic approach to ethnic representation, and promote a ‘whitewashed’ version of U.S. history.

Many Asian American parents regard the absence of Asians within the American Girl collection as symptomatic of the tendency to exclude hyphenated identities from the national family. One father describes how his initial enthusiasm for Jess, a limited edition JLY doll, yielded to skepticism of the doll’s ‘assimilated’ appearance and storyline: ‘A part of me [says] “yes! A Hapa doll!” But I wonder why her mixed-race background didn’t figure more [prominently in her story and presentation]’ (quoted in Aoyagi-Stom 2006: 2). By representing Jess as a generic ‘Asian’, Mattel sidesteps genuinely inclusive approaches to multiethnic representation.⁹ American Girl’s emphasis on assimilation reminds us that ‘not all hyphenated identities...