This week’s Times Educational Supplement featured a Barbie movie-inspired post by the Royal Geographical Society’s Steve Brace. He set out 4 lesson ideas for young people who may have watched the film: on carbon footprints (CO2 emissions and recycling), geopolitics (the film’s controversial map), gendered spaces (its patriarchy storyline), and trade (mentioning our follow the things project). It’s a short article and Steve has shown really nicely what following Barbie dolls along their supply chains might look like.

This post is a follow-up, highlighting a couple of ideas / approaches that teachers may like to bring into their classrooms to encourage their students both to find out more and to find creative ways to think through and present what they find.

Sweatshop Barbie

In December 2013, a life-size ‘Sweatshop Barbie’ was unveiled in Paris.

“The life-size Sweatshop Worker Barbie doll was unveiled in a towering hot pink box, in the centre of a busy intersection in Paris, by French organisation Peuples Solidaires along with China Labour Watch, as an artistic protest against working conditions in Chinese Mattel factories, where Barbie dolls are manufactured.”

GNC News Network (2013) New Life Size Barbie Doll Unveiled in Paris, Not What you Expect [link]

This activism was featured in Cosmopolitan [link] at the time, and it’s perhaps easy to think that working conditions might have improved since then. But China Labor Watch have continued to monitor these conditions and their 2020 report makes for sobering reading.

Mattel’s more inclusive range of dolls now inspires the young people who play with Barbie to be anything they want to be when they grow up. A pilot. A lawyer. A doctor. An astronaut. But these dolls and professions are yet to include a working class Chinese Barbie assembly-line worker wearing assembly-line workwear. In this shock-genre of cultural activism, this Barbie’s arms seem chained by her side to indicate that she has no power, and her mouth is taped-over to indicate she has no voice. It’s tempting to ask what her ‘dream house’ might be.

To help to think through Chinese assembly workers’ dreams, it’s interesting to watch this short extract from a 2011 documentary called Dreamwork China in which young electronics assembly-line workers in Shenzhen talk about their lives, work and dreams.

This more gently-conveyed knowledge of Chinese workers’ lives can then feed into some imaginative work based on what they say.

Talking Dolls / deleted scenes

We think about what commodities could tell us about their lives if they could speak. All the time.

In an iconic example of commodity activism in the early 1990s, members of the Barbie Liberation Organisation switched the voice boxes of talking GI Joe and Barbie dolls and returned them to the shops for people to buy. Reversing the gendered stereotypes of one’s desire to shop and the other’s desire to kill made a powerful point through the dolls.

More recently Art Activist Barbie‘s social media posts have shone a critical light on gender politics in the art world. A doll, a lolly stick, a piece of paper, a message – making a placard – then a photo taken in the right place can make a powerful point through the doll too.

The Barbie movie showed the world what Barbies and Kens might be like in person (not forgetting Alan, of course), where they lived their perfect lives, and how these lives could be disrupted and re-thought through exposure to the Real World.

But they didn’t reminisce much about their early lives in that Real World, in the oil industry where their plastics were derived, in the factory complexes where they were put together, in the transport infrastructures that took them from here to there, and all the people who helped them to be toys, along the way.

There’s a long history of commodities telling us about their own lives in this way, and some excellent recent work too. Here’s a summary from our Museum of Contemporary Commodities ‘zine published last year:

We researched a fact sheet about an actual talking internet-connected doll called My Friend Cayla (the one pictured above), whose life as a commodity had been very eventful (warning some content not suitable for children). It ended with a challenge:

So what if we asked students curious about the lives of their dolls to script some spoof ‘deleted scenes’ from the Barbie movie?

Or script a prequel to the Movie – Barbie – the early years? – in which she and her friends reminisce and wonder about the people around the world who designed, made, packaged, shipped, delivered, bought and eventually played with them?

Maybe getting into that tiny car to visit their worlds?

Or accidentally bringing Sweatshop Barbie into their perfect Barbie world.

In 2011, Mattel made a ‘Sweet Talking Ken’ doll that could have helped bring these stories to light…

PS

The ‘Zine screengrabs above are from:

Paula Crutchlow & Ian Cook (2022) Museum of Contemporary Commodities zine. Exeter: Museum of Contemporary Commodities [download here]