Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [53]
What they came up with was Day-to-Night Barbie, a yuppie princess, equipped to charge, network, and follow the market. Her attache case contains a credit card, a business card, a newspaper, and a calculator. Although her suit is baby-blanket pink rather than boardroom blue, it is tastefully cut and covers her knees. Her outfit, however, does more than look good during the day. Turn it inside out, and it is a fussy, glittery evening dress.
To decode the meaning of Day-to-Night Barbie, one must turn to the work of Joan Riviere, a female Freudian psychoanalyst, who in 1929 published an essay about a pattern she had begun to notice among her professionally accomplished female analysands. Many powerful women, Riviere discovered, were uncomfortable with their masculine strivings; to conceal them, they overcompensated, decking themselves out like caricatures of women. One woman, after giving a successful lecture, flirted idiotically and inappropriately; she also delivered her presentation in cartoonishly feminine clothes. Others exaggerated different aspects of femininity, and one even dreamt that she had been saved from a precipitous fall by wearing a mask. "Womanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask," Riviere wrote, "both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if [a woman] was found to possess it—much as a thief will turn out his pockets and ask to be searched to prove he has not the stolen goods."
In her book Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary, psychoanalyst Louise J. Kaplan uses the term homeovestism for this strategy of cloaking one's cross-gender strivings by disguising oneself as a parody of one's own sex. It is the reverse of transvestism, in which one acts out one's cross-gender impulses by wearing the clothes of the opposite sex. Nor is homeovestism practiced exclusively by women. A male homeovestite, for instance, might mask his feminine urges by dressing up like Norman Schwarzkopf. In literature, Scarlett O'Hara seems a convincing example of a female homeovestite. She is as aggressive and tenacious as any biological male, but she conceals it behind fluttering eyelashes and an affected fragility. Of course, the only people who know they are homeovestites are the homeovestites themselves. It is, I suppose, possible for a woman to tart up like a Gabor sister and not know she is a caricature. But if a high-powered female executive wears enough makeup for a Kabuki performance, negotiates in a purr, tosses her hair coquettishly, unbuttons more than two buttons on her clinging silk blouse, and generally vamps around the conference table, she may well be a homeovestite.
Day-to-Night Barbie strikes me as a teaching implement for homeovestism. Clearly, the doll is meant to be a serious professional; her case contains the tools for executive achievement, where the idea of possessing a "tool," a colloquialism for the penis, implies a sort of phallic empowerment. Her nighttime outfit, however, is about hiding those "tools." Like the thief who turns out his pockets, the doll disguises herself by exposing herself. Her shoulders are bare; her toes are uncovered; her translucent skirt flutters around her legs. She is fluffy, girlish, vulnerable. By day, a virago; by night, Little Bo Peep.
Mattel issued Day-to-Night ensembles for other vocations as well. By rearranging her costume, any female achiever—teacher, dress designer, TV news reporter—can masquerade as Maria Maples or Donna Rice. Ken also has a Day-to-Night incarnation, but his seems to reflect cross-class rather than cross-gender strivings. By day, a TV sports reporter; by night, a Wayne Newton impersonator.
Although Kaplan categorizes homeovestism as a "perverse strategy," it strikes me as both cynical and pragmatic. Masculine business clothing has always been power-coded; something as subtle as the width of a pinstripe can signal an executive's status.