Pink Technologies and Playful Pedagogies: Gender, Design, and Barbie Transmedia in Digital and Museum Spaces

• In Event: Roundtable Session 102
  In Roundtable Session: Design and Learning in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, Virtual Worlds, and Fan Sites

Abstract

This paper explores gendered identities and practices made available to young girls through design experiences with Barbie artifacts in a children’s museum exhibit and in a virtual world. Critical multimodal analysis of digital photographs of the exhibit and video data of children playing on barbiegirls.com website showed foregrounded or backgrounded modes, revealing naturalized practices associated with particular situated identities (e.g., foregrounded modes of color in shopping and clothing design which make up a nexus of expected practices for Barbie fans who are expected to be exclusively girls) supported by postfeminist and neoliberal discourses. Backgrounded modes in both sites, however, created transformative opportunities to engage gendered and consumerist identities in complicated ways, enabling girls to act as producers, retailers, and critics.

Authors

• Karen E. Wohlwend, Indiana University - Bloomington

• Kylie A. Peppler, Indiana University - Bloomington