(Duke University Press, 2005)
SBN 0-8223-3578-6 Cloth - $79.95
ISBN 0-8223-3591-3 Paperback - $22.95
From the press: “In The Ellis Island Snow Globe, Erica Rand, author of the smart and entertaining book Barbie's Queer Accessories, takes readers on an unconventional tour of Ellis Island, the migration station turned heritage museum, and its neighbor, the Statue of Liberty. By pausing to reflect on what is and is not on display at these two iconic national monuments, Rand focuses attention on whose heritage is honored and whose obscured. She also reveals the shifting connections between sex, money, material products, and ideas of the nation in everything from the ostensible father-mother-child configuration on an Ellis Island golf ball purchased at the gift shop to the multi-million dollar July 4, 1986 Liberty Weekend extravaganza celebrating the Statue's centennial just days after the Supreme Court's un-Libertylike decision upholding the antisodomy laws challenged in Bowers v. Hardwick.
Rand notes that portrayals of the Statue of Liberty as a beacon for immigrants tend to suppress the Statue's connections to people brought to this country by force. She examines what happened to migrants at Ellis Island whose bodies did not match the gender suggested by the clothing they wore. In light of contemporary ideas about safety and security, she examines the “Decide an Immigrant's Fate” program, which has visitors to Ellis Island act as a 1910 board of inspectors hearing the appeal of an immigrant about to be excluded from the country. Rand is a witty, insightful, and open-minded tour guide, able to synthesize numerous diverse ideas-about tourism, immigration history, sexuality, race, ethnicity, commodity culture, and global capitalism-and to candidly convey her delight in her Ellis Island snow globe. And pen. And lighter. And back scratcher. And golf ball. And glittery pink key chain.”
From the cover: “Much as she did in her earlier book, Barbie’s Queer Accessories, Erica Rand turns a kitsch artifact of consumer culture into a powerful tool for cultural analysis. In this insightful and engaging new work, she transforms an Ellis Island snow globe into a window through which we see how state control of borders and migrations structures sexuality, gender, desire, and family in unexpected ways. One of the best cultural studies books I’ve read in a long time.”—Susan Stryker, producer and codirector of Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria
“The Ellis Island Snow Globe is quite simply a great book. Destined to become a classic in contemporary cultural studies, it is one of the few books I’ve read in the last year or so that has taught me something new on every page.”—Henry Jenkins, coeditor of Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture
“The Ellis Island Snow Globe is a wonderfully creative, playful, and serious piece of scholarship. Demonstrating that pleasure and critique need not be incompatible, Erica Rand offers not only a model for thinking about contemporary capitalism but a way to live in it.”—Miranda Joseph, author of Against the Romance of Community
Barbie's Queer Accessories
(Duke University Press, 1995)
ISBN 0-8223-1604-8 Cloth - $74.95
ISBN 0-8223-1620-X Paperback - $21.95
From the Press: “She’s skinny, white, and blond. She’s Barbie—an icon of femininity to generations of American girls. She’s also multiethnic and straight—or so says Mattel, Barbie’s manufacturer. But, as Barbie’s Queer Accessories demonstrates, many girls do things with Barbie never seen in any commercial. Erica Rand looks at the corporate marketing strategies used to create Barbie’s versatile (She’s a rapper! She’s an astronaut! She’s a bride!) but nonetheless premolded and still predominantly white image. Rand weighs the values Mattel seeks to embody in Barbie—evident, for example, in her improbably thin waist and her heterosexual partner—against the naked, dyked out, transgendered, and trashed versions favored by many juvenile owners and adult collectors of the doll.
Rand begins by focusing on the production and marketing of Barbie, starting in 1959, including Mattel’s numerous tie-ins and spin-offs. These variations, which include the much-promoted multiethnic Barbies and the controversial Earring Magic Ken, helped make the doll one of the most profitable toys on the market. In lively chapters based on extensive interviews, the author discusses adult testimony from both Barbie "survivors" and enthusiasts and explores how memories of the doll fit into women’s lives. Finally, Rand looks at cultural reappropriations of Barbie by artists, collectors, and especially lesbians and gay men, and considers resistance to Barbie as a form of social and political activism.
Illustrated with photographs of various interpretations and alterations of Barbie, this book encompasses both Barbie glorification and abjection as it testifies to the irrefutably compelling qualities of this bestselling toy. Anyone who has played with Barbie—or, more importantly, thought or worried about playing with Barbie—will find this book fascinating.”
From the cover: "Over the course of the 1980s, Barbie has become an artist’s model, a collector’s ‘fetish,’ and, as Erica Rand shows us, an object of collective and personal memory. Barbie’s Queer Accessories will help to open up important issues about queer readings in relationship to one of the most feminine coded objects of contemporary culture."—Lynn Spigel, author of Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America
"Erica Rand gives new insight into the hottest topic in cultural studies today: Barbie!"—Jane Feuer, author of The Hollywood Musical