It’s officially European Barbie Book Tour Season!

That’s right folks– we took the Barbie books on the road!

In the words of actress Hari Neff, “No doll matters more than Barbie.” This is especially true for many transgender girls and women. My chapter on that subject, “Barbie the Girl-Maker: Transgender Girls, their Mothers, and the Whole Barbie Thing” has been published in Barbie in the Media: The Transmedia Presence of Mattel’s Celebrity Doll, edited by Emily Aguiló-Peréz and Rebecca Hains. This is the companion volume to #Barbie and Social Media: Digital Discourses and Mattel’s Celebrity Doll, also edited by Drs. Aguiló-Peréz and Hains. These books offer some of the most exciting scholarship happening today around gender and play, including works on Kinderculture, children’s media, millennial feminisms, girl culture, film, childhood, language, politics and more. I feel like all of this should qualify as a new sub-discipline–Barbie Studies, anyone?

Here is the full citation:

Pirie, S. C. (2025). Barbie the girl-maker: Transgender girls, their mothers, and The Whole Barbie Thing. In Hains, R. & Aguilo-Perez, E. (Eds), Barbie in the Media Vol 1: The Transmedia Presence of Mattel’s Celebrity Doll, pp. 315-352.Palgrave. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-89901-0_16

And as if that was not exciting enough, my chapter is offered in full color, as are the covers of both books, which I designed and illustrated because I am a very fancy artist and illustrator. To have so much work featured so prominently and in full color is a first for me. I can’t thank the editors enough for this opportunity to advance comics-based scholarship in style.

And even more exciting (I know- more exciting that full color?!?) than that, Drs. Aguiló-Peréz and Hains and I traveled to Prague and Krakow this May to deliver lectures on Barbie, gender, culture, method and media at Charles and Jagellonian Universities, respectively. We were so pleased to be hosted by faculty and students as we brought Barbie—and comics-based research—to two of the oldest and most prestigious universities in the world.  If you’d like to know more about my time in Krakow in particular, you can read about it here.

Just look at that gorgeous full color

Here’s the full abstract of my chapter:

Mattel, the makers of Barbie, have worked to make their doll more diverse, introducing Barbies with a wider range of body types, ethnically and racially diverse dolls, and Barbies with disabilities, to name a just a few. In 2022 Mattel launched a doll modeled on Laverne Cox, trailblazing transgender woman and activist. Beyond historic and increased trans visibility, this moment was even more significant because Cox was herself, like so many transgender girls, was denied access to Barbie as a child. Barbie was then, and is now, a toy whose interplay with gender—in access, in play, and as an emblem of iconic femininity in the popular imagination—is powerful. As one research study participant noted, “It’s not a toy. It’s a whole thing. The Whole Barbie Thing.”

As a plaything, Barbie is complex. She has been forbidden, blamed for destroying girls’ body image, charged with truncating girls’ future attainment and called too thin, too perfect and too materialistic and therefore too damaging (Dittmar, Halliwell & Ive, 2006; Henward, 2015; Sherman & Zurbriggen, 2014). But these studies, like nearly all other research, has drawn nearly exclusively from the experiences of cisgender girls (Trinidad, 2022). While this chapter is not an exploration of Barbie’s negative effects on trans girls as a mirror of cis girls’ experience, it is an open-ended and discovery-oriented descriptive account of trans girls interacting with Barbie dolls. These analyses employ an ecological model of gender congruence (Bronfenbrenner, 1998; Ehrensaft, 2012; Kuvalanka 2014) to explore transgender girls play with Barbie, including 1) how transgender girls play with and use Barbie as an imaginative play object and feminine credentialing tool both alone and with peers, and 2) how cis mothers of trans daughters navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of Barbie, the doll their daughters want, that they themselves played with, but that they now treat with a mixture of nostalgia, trepidation and an unexpected respite from political and social vigilance.

Mothers featured in these analyses guarded their own girlhood nostalgic Barbie experience, while also protecting their cis daughters from Barbie, all the while simultaneously using Barbie to show enthusiastic acceptance and love for their trans daughters. Meanwhile, trans girls’ Barbie play was largely imaginative (Kuther & McDonald, 2004), focused on imagined feminine futures, even if the deep cisheteronormativity implicit in much Barbie lore and play went unremarked upon. Further, their play differs from most accounts of cisgender girls’ Barbie play by also emphasizing tactile material experience and shared Barbie experiences as foundations of friendships and female belonging. As one 9-year-old exclaimed, “Barbie makes you a girl for real.” Discussion includes intersectional analyses of how Barbie play is experienced along raced and classed lines (Seiter, 1999), the problematics of both gender credentialing and camp, and the perils of viewing ‘gender socialization’ as female legitimation. Recommendations for creating a more trans-inclusive Girlhood Studies conclude the chapter.