While much research around girls and Barbie dolls have drawn nearly exclusively from the experiences of cisgender girls, this chapter is an open-ended and discovery-oriented descriptive account of transgender girls engaging with Barbie toys and media. Analyses employ an ecological model of gender congruence to explore (1) how transgender girls engage with these materials as feminine credentialing tools both alone and with peers, and (2) how cis mothers of trans daughters navigate their daughters’ fascination with Barbie. The data featured in these analyses comes from a larger ongoing arts-based ethnographic study that ultimately involved over 100 gender diverse children aged 3–13 and their families and communities in diverse political contexts across the United States. These analyses draw from data gathered during the 2015–2019 period. Data gathering methods included participant observation, semi-structured ethnographic interviews, artifact collection, and a range of arts-based methods in which child participants created their own girlhood-descriptive media. Data analysis was an ongoing, recursive analytic process incorporating a comics-based approach that focused on close-reading, detailed coding and extensive visual memoing. Further, this chapter is written as a piece of comics-based research (CBR), restoring the images created by child participants alongside interview and observational data to create a complex, multi-layered, multi-faceted narrative. Study findings showed mothers who didn’t approve of Barbie play for cisgender girls embracing Barbie media and materials to show enthusiastic acceptance and love for their trans daughters. Meanwhile, trans girls’ use of these materials differs from most accounts of cisgender girls’ Barbie play by also emphasizing tactile material experience and shared Barbie media as a foundation of feminine credentialing. As one 9-year-old exclaimed, “Barbie makes you a girl for real.”

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Barbie the Girl-maker: Transgender Girls, their Mothers, and the Whole Barbie Thing

  • Sally Campbell Pirie

摘要

While much research around girls and Barbie dolls have drawn nearly exclusively from the experiences of cisgender girls, this chapter is an open-ended and discovery-oriented descriptive account of transgender girls engaging with Barbie toys and media. Analyses employ an ecological model of gender congruence to explore (1) how transgender girls engage with these materials as feminine credentialing tools both alone and with peers, and (2) how cis mothers of trans daughters navigate their daughters’ fascination with Barbie. The data featured in these analyses comes from a larger ongoing arts-based ethnographic study that ultimately involved over 100 gender diverse children aged 3–13 and their families and communities in diverse political contexts across the United States. These analyses draw from data gathered during the 2015–2019 period. Data gathering methods included participant observation, semi-structured ethnographic interviews, artifact collection, and a range of arts-based methods in which child participants created their own girlhood-descriptive media. Data analysis was an ongoing, recursive analytic process incorporating a comics-based approach that focused on close-reading, detailed coding and extensive visual memoing. Further, this chapter is written as a piece of comics-based research (CBR), restoring the images created by child participants alongside interview and observational data to create a complex, multi-layered, multi-faceted narrative. Study findings showed mothers who didn’t approve of Barbie play for cisgender girls embracing Barbie media and materials to show enthusiastic acceptance and love for their trans daughters. Meanwhile, trans girls’ use of these materials differs from most accounts of cisgender girls’ Barbie play by also emphasizing tactile material experience and shared Barbie media as a foundation of feminine credentialing. As one 9-year-old exclaimed, “Barbie makes you a girl for real.”