Historiann

Boy, most of you really hated “Barbie Death Camp!”  Here’s a soothing balm of Barbies and Kens in their vintage fashion knitwear.  (Connoisseurs will note that these aren’t the “real” Ken and Barbie dolls, but rather inferior knockoffs.  The male dolls here look strangely more childish than Mattel’s Ken ever looked.)

Check out that Beatles-era red skinny suit with black piping on “Ken” at the far left!  Snappy.  Also, someone should give top-row “Ken” the memo that says that heavy sweaters generally aren’t worn with swim trunks.  I kind of like that pale ice blue dress and coat combo next to swim trunk “Ken,” though–anyone know where I could find something like that?  I’ve got a big conference next month, and I’d like to look my best. 

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I’m not sure what I think about this installation at Burning Man 2007, “Barbie Death Camp,” but since this blog is one of the few places on the non-peer reviewed internets where you can find deep, intellectual discussions of Barbies and dismembered doll parts, I suppose I have to cowgirl up.  (Be sure to click on the link above to see the whole slide show–this still photo is just one of many.  Thanks to Historiann’s newly tenured friend G.S. for the tip.) 

This blog says that “Barbie Death Camp” is clearly anti-consumerist, anti-corporate satire, but I’m not so sure it can be viewed only or primarily through this lens.  Looking at the slide show is disturbing–is it a feminist commentary on the  commodification and dismemberment of women’s bodies?  Is it a commentary on the ambivalent relationship girls have with their Barbies, since they frequently train their aggression on the dolls, cutting their hair and frequently removing their arms, legs, and heads?  Or is it just another example of female bodies being dismembered for our pleasure and entertainment?  (You can’t see it in this photograph, but the yellow school bus near the lower right corner has “DIE BITCH” scrawled on the side, so it’s not accidental that it’s a Barbie and not a Ken or G.I. Joe Death Camp.  I’m not sure how I feel about the appropriation (complete with toy ovens) of a specific historical event, the Holocaust.  Does it trivialize the attempted genocide of Jews, Gypsies, Gays, Poles, and disabled people in the twentieth century?  Is there an implicit commentary of the uniform perfection of Barbie bodies being destroyed in the same manner as the “racially inferior” or otherwise imperfect victims of the Holocaust?  Is it an accident that the Barbies in BDC look like they’re all white and are overwhelmingly blond, too?  What if it had been called “Middle Passage Barbie,” “Barbie Trail of Tears,” or “Killing Fields Barbie?” 

Reflecting on Historiann’s recent foray into contemporary feminist art, this project seems like it could have been included in the recent The Way that we Rhyme:  Women, Art, & Politics exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.  It shares many of the same features:  the use of found objects in particular, but also the ”outsider art” fetish that many “insider artists” have affected lately, an aesthetic of amateurism and bad taste.  (Actually, in many ways, “Barbie Death Camp” is more compelling and provoking than many of the installations at the YBCA, which seemed to labor rather humorlessly under a different kind of historical weight.)

For those of you interested in pursuing some of these issues in a more serious forum, at the 2008 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, we’ve got a panel on “Gender, Torture, and Memory,” which features papers on American POW’s in Korea, Femicide in Guatemala in the Cold War to the twenty-first century, and women in Stalin’s Gulags.  (Unfortunately, our roundtable on “Women and the Holocaust:  Reshaping the Field in the 21st Century through Oral History and Personal Narratives,” was cancelled.)  We also have a roundtable on “What (if anything) Can Women’s History and the History of Sexuality Teach Us about Genocide and Extreme Violence,” and a Sunday morning seminar on “Historicizing Sexual Violence,” led by Estelle Freedman of Stanford University, which features many papers about rape and sexual violence in wartime and in occupied or colonized countries:  colonial and postcolonial India, Nazi-occupied territories, 17th century Ireland, 1950s and 1960s Argentina, and 19th and 20th century Kenya, South Africa, and Costa Rica.  (You can find the full program here.) 

What do you think?  Is “Barbie Death Camp” funny?  Horrifying?  Feminist, or anti-feminist?  Too clever by half?  Or just really good bad art?

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Perfect for a spring stroll through your city!  The entire Historiann household has been on a spring vacation for the past few days, and will be away for a few more.  I’ll continue checking in from the road, and perhaps posting vacation photos along with my prankish yet trenchant observations on early American history, gender and sexuality issues, academic politics, the 2008 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, and occasionally, vintage Barbies. 

For those of you wanting some not-academic politics to get you going in the morning, check out Bob Somerby’s post yesterday, a twofer rundown of Paul Krugman’s Friday column and a glimpse of the Sunday New York Times Magazine article about idiot blowhard Chris Matthews.  As always, Le Somerby is incomparable!  Why can’t Bob take Matthews’s job?  Why, Lord, why?

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Historiann commenter Indyanna sent these spectacular Barbie photos so that I could present them to you as a Historiann.com exclusive.  (I guess that now makes Indyanna my second on-the-ground reporter in the Philadelphia area!)  This was captured on the 2200 block of Rittenhouse Square Street in the City of Brotherly Barbie Love, a little block between Spruce and Locust, and 22nd and 23rd Streets.

Apparently, the two barbies above have a sister planted as an orphan in another window box to the side, or perhaps above.  Indyanna also sent along this blurred shot of the forlorn one, leaning over as if to catch what the other two are talking about.  The little minxes!

Thanks, Indyanna, for having your wits (and your cell phone camera) about you as you prowl Center City–and please keep the dolls-in-weird-places photos coming.  I’ve been thinking that I should update you all on Creepy Doll Head in her new home, my back garden–perhaps later this spring, when the garden will be green and blooming.

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Because I got so worked up over that post on Wednesday (quel bummer!), I had to take a break to play with my Barbies again.  Here’s another Barbie photo shoot, this one featuring three different sleeve lengths on the same coctail dress model.  (Susan:  do you like any of these, or do you still prefer the black-and-silver number?)  Barbie 1958 is in the red short sleeves, Barbie 1962 is in the blue 3/4 length sleeves, and Barbie ca. 1977 is in the seafoam sleeveless dress.  Barbie ca. 1977 is having a bad hair day every day for the rest of her life.  In my efforts to save the hair, it seems that I have destroyed the hair.  Barbie hair is really difficult to cut in any flattering way, because of the weird design of the rooting.  It’s just not designed for short hair or layering, I’m afraid!  Here’s a horrifying closeup of the damage:

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Thanks for all of your kind wishes about family funerals.  Since I was back in the ancestral homelands, I had the opportunity to play with my Barbies again, and so can furnish you with more photographs of the couture knitwear collection I introduced to you a few weeks ago.  Here, from left to right, are some of the more eccentric items in the collection:  Barbie 1962 is wearing my all-time favorite in the collection, the sparky black and silver coctail dress; Barbie 1958 is wearing the swimsuit, Barbie ca. 1977 is wearing the ice skating outfit with angora trim, and Malibu Barbie 1966 is wearing the caftan.  I’ve got sad news to report:  in the course of dressing up Malibu B., I wrenched off her remaining leg, so she’s a paraplegic an amputee now!  All of them except Barbie 1962 have pretty significant health and/or aesthetic flaws–but more on that later next week.  We’re all getting older, after all.

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Here’s another photo of my Seven Years’ War lead soldiers and captives, which were a very cool recent birthday present.  I’m considering using them on the cover of my next book–they’re much cooler, more ambigous, and more mysterious than the portrait of Esther Wheelwright that hangs in the Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS, for short).  And, a portrait is what you would already expect in a biography cover, right?  Esther commissioned a portrait shortly after she became Mother Superior, and then sent it to relatives in Massachusetts as a remembrance.  According to the curator of paintings I consulted with at the MHS in 2001, Anne Bentley, the painting is probably singular in their collection because it’s a portrait of a woman that wasn’t commissioned by her father or husband.  It’s pretty good for an amateur portrait–I wish I could show it to you, but I don’t yet have a digital copy, and the MHS doesn’t have all of their paintings on-line.  It was likely painted by an artist in the convent, as the Ursulines were known for their artistic excellence in producing elaborately embroidered altarcloths and giltwork items for churches, as well as humbler embroidered objects for the tourist trade. 

The MHS has done a wonderful job digitizing a bunch of other documents and images and organizing them into web displays.  For example, you can find this most excellent bit of military intelligence there, along with other Seven Years’ War-era maps.  Other rich web installations are African Americans and the End of Slavery in Massachusetts, and a featured “Object of the Month.”

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It’s been a while since I’ve posted any photos of dolls, creepy or otherwise.  Here’s the Historiann Barbie family lineup, from left to right, according to the copyrights stamped on their bums:  Barbie 1958 (the original!), Barbie 1962, Barbie ca. 1977, and Malibu Barbie 1966.  (They’re not in chronological order, because Malibu Barbie is missing a leg and had to be propped  up against the window frame.  Malibu B. has other health problems–like the creeping melanomas that she’ll surely suffer now that she’s in her 40s and still sporting that kind of a tan.)  Barbie 1958’s skin has become discolored by the copper posts of the real earrings she’s worn for 50 years now, and her hair has to be worn on top of her head because she looks rather bald otherwise.  (Note her resemblance to Dare Wright and Wright’s creation, Edith, in The Lonely Doll.)  Barbie 1962 is holding up better than all of them–she’s a survivor.

Something that we girls of the 1970s and 1980s missed out on was the quality, high-fashion Barbie clothing that was the doll’s signature from her introduction in the U.S. in 1959 until the late 1960s.  These Barbies are wearing items from a hand-knitted couture collection from the early 1960s, courtesy of a co-worker of Historiann’s grandmother, whose name is lost to history but whose remarkably detailed handiwork has survived nearly 50 years of children tugging and pulling the garments on and off.  (She must have used Barbie-scale knitting needles!  And these items are less than a fifth of the entire collection, which includes a bathing suit, an ice-skating outfit, a peignoir, a caftan, and multiple skirts and tops.)  Of course, as a child I thought these clothes were dorky and old-fashioned compared to the sleazy, poorly manufactured but more contemporary fashions that Barbie ca. 1977 and Malibu Barbie came with, but then, I used to think Sean Cassidy and Leif Garrett were pretty great, too.

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  The recent postings on children’s stories and dolls were not just a lame Gen-X nostalgia trip for Historiann (although they were admittedly that too), but rather part of my current research project, which has required an excursion into the new history of childhood (suggested in the New Year’s Eve entry below). It’s back, and this time the best of it is very intertwined with feminist history’s fascination with developing an archaeology of power in the 1990s and early 2000s. Barry Levy’s excellent review essay in the July 2007 William and Mary Quarterly (sorry–for subscribers only) is a great explanation of the older historiography of childhood as well as an explanation of the issues and concerns of the newer literature. He writes that “the sorrow of most early American children’s experience and their own and their parents’ efforts to overcome haunting memories and events” is an assumption that structures the newer literature on early American childhood. Because I’ve written extensively about the experience of Indian captivity for both English captives and their Indian captors, and the book I’m writing is about an English girl taken into captivity by the Abenaki in 1703 at age seven, this emphasis on trauma makes sense to me. But one doesn’t need to seek out subjects who witnessed or experienced warfare in such an intimate way–consider the daily traumas suffered and absorbed by enslaved children, the indignities of being a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century English orphan, or the dislocation and disease of colonial Indian childhood. The colonial world was all about the violent exploitation of the few by the many, and children were at least witnesses to if not also victims of this harsh reality.

Kriste Lindenmeyer recently informed me that there is a new historical journal devoted to this topic, The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, and its inaugural issue is published this month. It features articles on global childhood and a roundtable on “Age as a Category of Historical Analysis,” the title of which is a clear homage to Joan Scott’s signal 1986 article, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” (sorry–subscribers only, again!) Pioneers of the new history of childhood like Lindenmeyer, Mary Jo Maynes, and Ping-chen Hsiung have contributed to this journal, and it features several emerging scholars as well, notably Leslie Paris and Laura Lovett, whose first books are hot off the presses. I’m pleased to report that many of this journal’s first contributors (and all of the historians specifically mentioned above) are also on panels on the history of childhood and girlhood that will be presented at the Fourteenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, June 12-15, 2008, for which I am a Program Committee co-chair. By my count, we’ve got at least eleven panels that deal wholly or in part with the history of childhood, not counting individual papers that might have something to say on the topic. Check out the program here.

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Date: A Friday morning around 11 a.m., spring 2007

Place: In the middle of an access road in front of a funeral home, Pottersville, Colorado, U.S.A.

Description: Soft plastic doll head formerly attached to a polyfill body. It suffers from a serious case of road rash administered when the body was obliterated presumably by being tossed out of a car and run over, perhaps more than once. The subject’s body was beyond repair, as were her little soft plastic arms and legs.

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