Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [47]
Barbie's new face, fashioned by doll sculptor Joyce Clark, was the face of disco. The doll appears in the 1977 catalogue against a black background, as if on the edge of a cavernous dance floor. Light glints off her glossy magenta boa, her burnished gold hair, her luminous diamondlike ring. Gone is the haughty smirk of her early years. Seemingly stupefied by the disco beat, SuperStar Barbie's mouth is set in a broad smile.
The revamped Barbie changed the relationship between the doll and the little girl who owned it. Barbie could still function as an object onto which the child projected her future self; but because the doll had the trappings of celebrity, the girl's imagined future had to involve being rich and famous.
Nor did the doll's paraphernalia indicate how she came to hobnob with the stars. Did she earn her money as an actress or a model? Did she inherit it? Or was she running some nefarious business and being paid off the books? (Did Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss play with this doll?)
In 1978, Mattel established Barbie's persona as a cover girl with a mechanical contraption called Fashion Photo Barbie. This play set came with a toy camera and a Barbie doll that struck fashion poses when the child "focused" the camera. The brainchild of Derek Gable, a British engineer who had been recruited to join Ryan's team in 1968, Fashion Photo Barbie is very much a boys' action toy masquerading as a girls' play set. Like Growing Up Skipper, it reflects a masculine understanding of the female experience; a little boy could take the role of fashion "photographer" as easily as a little girl could. But when a girl operates the toy, she can pretend to be either the model or the photographer; thus the toy encourages her to internalize a sense of herself-as-object; to split herself, in John Berger's words, into "the surveyor" and "the surveyed."
In the middle-seventies, feminist film theory began to focus on the "male gaze"; mainstream cinema, the argument went, presumed a male spectator and objectified women accordingly. "In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female," Laura Mulvey wrote in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," a 1975 essay that has generated mountains of scholarly rebuttal, qualification, and elaboration. "The determining gaze projects fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness."
Fashion Photo Barbie comes with preprinted "photographs" of Barbie in various fashion poses that the child can remove from the camera when the "photo session" is over. These teach—for children willing to be taught—a code of feminine erotic styling, of "to-be-looked-at-ness." They define what looks are acceptable, just as—for women who are willing to accept such definitions— photos of models in magazines do.
But Fashion Photo Barbie is not just about passivity. Little girls are not required to project themselves onto Barbie; they can view the doll as wholly other. Nor do they have to play with the "acceptable" photographs. Fashion Photo Barbie offers a girl power not only over an image of an adult, but over an adult celebrity. When the child adjusts the lens, Barbie responds instantly; her body pivots and her head snaps to the side. Peering through the viewfinder, the girl can interiorize the "male gaze." She is Richard Avedon, David Bailey, Deborah Turberville. She can play at controlling— and therefore defining—feminine erotic style. She can also explore less socially approved themes in her fashion photo-play: voyeurism and the erotization of her own gender.
Curiously,