American Girl: Just Like You

The Nakamura text mentions the American Girl franchise, which, according to a reference to “American Girl hair” in the season premiere of Gossip Girl, is still going strong. Like many consumer products aimed at children, the AG website features a number of auxiliary activities/quizzes/games for their target audience, young American girls. All of which are designed, of course, to steer parental pocketbooks back to the shopping cart.

I find the “Just Like You” dolls especially creepy. The other dolls (each doll has a “story”) smooth out American history so that its apparent class and racial divisions have been unified in sisterhood. But building “Just Like You” dolls, as Nakamura states, sidestep racial qualifiers in problematic ways. Here is the girl with “textured” hair:



Interestingly, the “mass customization” (in Sarah Berry’s terms) here follows the emphasis on the face that Gonzalez and the DailyMakeover site promote; each “Just Like You” doll comes with the exact same clothes: the “star hoodie outfit” complete with “a hoodie dress, cropped leggings, underwear, ballet-flat shoes, and a plaid headband.” Though such an outfit might seem fairly neutral in terms of race or ethnicity, it does appear to mark a distinct class orientation which is made evident elsewhere on the site as a middle-to-upper class “casual” aesthetic in keeping with the fairly hefty price tag on these dolls. The ability to also outfit oneself like the dolls is also a key sales strategy in the maintenance of wardrobe-as-class signification.