Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [131]
Not all members of the former Soviet empire are welcoming Barbie with glee. In a full-page 1993 article in Sobesednik, a Russian pop cultural journal that had, until 1990, been a supplement to the Communist Youth Party newspaper, two waggish writers joked about Barbie's anatomical deficiencies and high cost—so steep, in fact, that in order to afford her, three families had to share her: "For a week the American girl will live with Masha; for a week with Dasha; for a week with Kolya." They describe Barbie as "the plaything of the century" and—racy pun intended—as "the most popular woman for sale in all the world."
One could end here, with Barbie's Eastern exodus, a path obliquely reminiscent of Hitler's annexation of the Sudetenland, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. But having opened this book with an emblematic spectacle, I had hoped to close with one—perhaps a snapshot of Teflon felon Ruth Handler restored to her rightful glory, autographing thirty-fifth-anniversary products for hundreds of fans in the Barbie boutique at Manhattan's FAO Schwarz. Yet the essence of Barbie—what makes her more than a global power brand—has to do with the way she colonizes the inner lives of children. Thus to des, ribe an official corporate function would have been to slight Barbie's grass-roots identity.
I was about to abandon the anecdotal approach when I learned that the College Art Association's 1994 meeting was scheduled to take place at the New York Hilton the same week as the American International Toy Fair. A little over thirty blocks from the showrooms where Mattel would be hawking its latest Barbies, Erica Rand, a Bates College art historian, was slated to make a very different Barbie presentation. Rand wasn't interested in the doll per se, but in how it could be subverted for women's pleasure. Her work had been inspired, she told Lingua Franca magazine, by a 1989 photo spread in On Our Backs, a lesbian pornographic journal, that featured a Barbie-like doll used as a dildo. Presented as part of a panel cosponsored by the Gay and Lesbian Caucus, her paper was entitled "The Biggest Closet Ever Sold: Barbie's."
I soon found myself on the phone with artists, scholars, and other contributors to this book, urging them to hear Rand's talk with me. Many were interested; two academics, with whom I had talked through some applications of feminist and psychoanalytic theory, had planned to attend even before my call. A. M. Homes, author of "A Real Doll," agreed to come, as did my college pal Ella King Torrey, a grants officer for a foundation she prefers not to name, who had debriefed Charlotte Johnson and Jack Ryan. I had hoped that Donna Gibbs, the Mattel publicist I had grown to admire for her ability to translate deep distaste into remarkable courtesy, might leave Toy Fair and hear the talk, but she was needed on the display floor.
Likewise, Maggie Robbins, the artist who makes "Barbie Fetishes" by hammering rusty nails into the doll, canceled at the last minute. Things were busy at McCall's and she couldn't get away.
As serendipity would have it, however, the admission pass I had obtained for Gibbs did not go to waste. Cindy Jackson, the woman who had been surgically remade into Barbie, was in town from London and called to say hello. Although it would cut into the time she had allotted to visit department stores, she agreed to show up, and materialized at the Hilton with an enormous shopping bag filled with L'eggs pantyhose. (She can't buy them on her side of the Atlantic.)
The panel—which also included papers titled "Warhol's Closet: