a legend in Mattel™ minds

Tomorrow, Barbie® (the posh, doll collector's version, not the under-$20 Zellers variety) gets repackaged yet again, but this time with a Canadian...um, wrapper. Inuit Legends™ Barbie®™ is her latest incarnation, and in less than 24 hours she will join the ranks of other "World Culture" dolls like (accessorized with faux jade 'luck') Golden Qu-Pao™ Barbie®, flamenco dancing Andalucia Barbie™, Barbie™ as Empress Sissy (inspired by Austria's Habsburg-Lothringen Dynasty's 19th C. Sissy) and - and [no, I'm not kidding here], George Washington Barbie® ("patriotically personifying the style and spirit of America the beautiful!"). She's listed as the newest member of the "Dolls of the World™" collection ("representing cultures of the world"), but not - at least not yet - part of their "Native Spirit™" series. Designed by young Torontonian Christy Marcus, a second-year fashion student at Ryerson University who won the Mattel Canada's "What will Barbie wear in 2005?" competition last year, Inuit Legend Barbie™ (aka "Inuk Barbie" and the "the "Kenuajuaq Doll," after the designer's inspiration for the hand-painted crepe panels in her "gown"- artist Kenuajuaq Ashevak) apparently beat out "Mysteriously Romantic Barbie," "Butterfly Barbie" and "Let's Paint this Town Red Barbie" designs. She'll be retailing for about $70 bucks.

This is not the first time Barbie® has featured an Inuk (remember 1997's "Arctic Barbie®," and 1982's "Eskimo Barbie®?" If not, refresh your memory here - a pic of tomorrow's doll is also there), but what makes Inuit Legend™ Barbie® "new" is that it she was actually designed by a person of Inuit ancestry this time around (Marcus' grandmother was originally from Nunavik). She will also be sold exclusively in Canada (collectible websites aside, I assume).

A rather long and ridiculously-detailed preamble for what I actually wanted to chat about. On Friday, The Gazette published an article (syndicated - from the Edmonton Journal) on the doll. The Gazette's item was posted in the 'Nation' section with what is quite possibly the best interview I've read in the paper in a long while. The interviewee was one Jessica Paterson, described only as "a young Inuit woman whose family is from Pangnirtung, Nunavut." Her response to the doll was

She doesn't look Inuk. If you took a picture of any one of my family members, not one of us would look like that. Whoever decided that an Inuk looks like this did not go to where the Inuit live.

OK, that's Cape Dorset art right there...She's got fur around her wrists? That's good. We generally have fur around our wrists. But the fur's wrong. And there's no hood. A parka's useless without a hood.

In two short snippets (the journalist obviously thought it was more important to talk to the specialty doll shop owners so they could predict the bundles of cash they'll be rolling in rather than picking the brain of this bang-on girl), Paterson casually nodded to my very knee-jerk (What the fuck?!) reaction to the image of the new mold. I originally set out to find some more critical responses to it, and discovered that they have been few and far between. Although links have been made to the series she's a part of to the 'Disney (or "Pocahontas) Effect,' (see "When Sleeping Dictionaries Awaken: The Re/turn of the Native Woman Informant" by Rosemary Weatherston, for example), very little has been said about the new doll and the implications of her looking more like a thin, well-endowed, ill-proportioned version of a "ethnic'd up" Bratz™ doll. In fact, I was hard-pressed to find any critique at all (granted, I haven't the time to really hunt).

What I did find, though, was interesting in and of itself:

In 1997, Mattel’s most famous toy, the Barbie doll, emerged from the factory operating room with a “wider waist, slimmer hips, and...a reduction of her legendary bustline” (Wall Street Journal 1997). This reconfiguration of the West’s premiere icon of femininity after nearly forty years suggests that the image of femininity embodied by the original Barbie of the late 1950s has undergone a radical transformation of its own. Beauty, though highly subjective, is more than simply a matter of aesthetics or taste. Cultural ideals of beauty are also an index and expression of social values and beliefs—so much so that “the history of [society] is in large measure the history of women’s beauty” (Jury & Jury 1986) [qtd. in E. Reisher & K. Koo, "The Body Beautiful: Symbolism and Agency in a Social World" Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 33 (2004) 297-317].

So if a move this minor constitutes "radical transformation" on the part of toy manufacturers, I certainly shouldn't be surprised at the silence surrounding this one. It's "Canadianness" most probably contributes to the disinterest, as well as the assumption that the one one's who'll really be purchasing (or will be able to purchase) this limited edition, not mass-produced plastic beauty will be collectors - generally white, middle- to upper- middle class women.

Besides, the Mattel™ corp. has already gotten to the cheekiest punchline, anyway.