For this assignment, I chose to do an audience that actively resists against Barbie. This is applicable to the assignment requirements because Mattel Inc wishes to exact legal punishment for the infringements of his copyrights on Barbie. These fans of Barbie that engage in textual poaching and show resistance are coming face-to-face with a monolith that wants to enact vengeance and solidify an empire of consumerist profit. I will use Mark Napier, the webmaster of The Distorted Barbie (http://users.rcn.com/napier.interport/barbie/barbie.html) and the AntiBarbie Club (http://www.antibarbie.com/). These websites will demonstrate how the audience’s shared experiences allow them to reconstruct the ideological values that Mattel Inc had inscribed in Barbie.

The reasons that motivate this audience to resist against Barbie is because of its foundational influences on today’s society. According to Steiner (1988), individuals may adopt reasons to resist the media in such ways as removing themselves from their “role as consumers or by actively struggling against the ideas and images projected [by the media]” (p. 3). Mark Napier is a perfect example of this “struggle against the ideas and images” of the media because he clearly states that:

I created this site to explore the phenomenon of Barbie. Not Barbie as a toy or collectible, but Barbie as a symbol that a culture has created, absorbed, shaped, and been shaped by. The site is a visual exploration. (www.detritus.net).

For Napier, his struggle to resist the Barbie phenomenon has come under fire by Mattel Inc and so, this struggle is his justification as to why one should explore the influence of Barbie. Barbie is a site of struggle for Napier because he connects this to his daily social experiences (Livingstone, p. 351) and it is therefore connected with strong relevance to his life. In this way, Mark Napier is attempting to shape “[his] media culture,” (Livingstone, p. 339) by “[beginning his] Barbie awareness program” (www.detritus.net). Mark Napier is resisting the Barbie paradigm and his resistance comes in the form of informing and allocating a resistance movement, perhaps, to produce a paradigm shift against Mattel Inc. Those who agree with Napier are “contributing to the process of shaping and co-constructing their material and symbolic environments” (Livingstone, p. 339). This means that Mark Napier and those who agree with his statements about Barbie can re-construct reality in accordance with their beliefs. They may not influence Mattel Inc, but their influence is indirect, as it influences the audience that receives Barbies. This is their motivation, to ensure that audiences receive information about how Barbies are being created and being solidified in a materialist culture.

Napier and the critically conscious fan community engage in textual poaching that, for Mattel, intellectually infringes upon the rights of the Mattel. Since these images appear to intentionally impact the original make-up of the Barbie, The Distorted Barbie performs experimentation that children have been performing for centuries on the Barbie. These experimentations that children have been engaging in have not appeared into Mattel’s consciousness; however, once they are spread through the media, he does not react to these images in a positive way and does not engage in discourse as to why this fan community distorts Barbies, but files lawsuits and court action. In several cases, these court proceedings have been ruled as free speech and parodies. For example: Mattel filed a trademark infringement and lawsuit in September 1997 against Aqua for their hit song “Barbie Girl” which resulted in the decision that it was a parody.

This fan community considers Barbie to be an exceptional source of intrigue and knowledge from society itself and this is evident in the various parodies songwriters to website designers have created against the Barbie.

The interpretive community that provides the “frame” for oppositional readings is the Barbie critical audience. These critical consumers have framed the issue of Barbie as a social construction. Mark Napier’s fan community is attempting to contextualize the problem of consumer relations with Barbie. For Mattel, the wide-spread use of Barbie is an integral component to his success in the industry and against his competitors. However, for Napier and his interpretive community, they find that Barbie is a deliberate construction of many negotiations which relate to ideological promotion of materialist consumption and that Barbie perpetuates a necessity for these consumers. In The Distorted Barbie, Mark Napier outlined about 6 websites which were taken down by Mattel Inc. He explained that their interpretive community was under attack because of their ideological resistance to the consumption of materialist culture.

Steiner (1988) states that, “readers construct meaning according to assumptions and strategies they adopt by virtue of their participation in a specific interpretive community” (pg. 3). Essentially, the Barbie community is a collective in which they all agree that problems arise out of the dependency of the Barbie. The Anti-Barbie Club (www.antibarbie.com) is a widely renowned as one of the leading websites that promote a passionate hate towards Barbie. In their “About Anti-Barbie” page regarding why they were doing what they were interested in, they stated that:

Anti-Barbie was formed in late 2002 by ex-Barbie doll collectors who finally had enough of the negative impact Barbie was having on today’s society. Actions by Mattel Inc have been not only stupid and devilishly evil but greedy, callous, devious and just plain not very nice (www.antibarbie.com)

This interpretive community finds it necessary to deconstruct Barbie’s connotations because of Mattel’s attempts to safeguard it from their influence. In this way, they find it necessary to align themselves as a collective so that their efforts can slowly reverse Mattel’s hostility towards them. As a collective, their influence becomes greater and so will their interpretive community. Furthermore, their frames of opposition will grow stronger the more Mattel resists.

The effectiveness of oppositional voices is very minimal because of Mattel’s aggressive corporate structure, which is intent on removing any and all traces of resistance activity against the Barbie copyright. Voices like Mark Napier are understood by Mattel Inc as inflicting with his original message that Barbie is a necessity for young girls. In a letter to Mark Napier, Mattel’s lawyer wrote “Mattel’s copyrights with respect to the BARBIE character are therefore extraordinarily valuable” (October 10, 1997: www.users.rcn.com). Mattel’s lawyer wrote that Napier must “immediately take whatever steps are necessary to remove this page from the Internet and prevent the further publication of its contents, and (ii) confirm to me in writing that you have done so within 5 business days” (www.users.rcn.com). In this way, the effectiveness of oppositional voices may be diminished from the producer’s use of legal protection of his intellectual property.

The producer (Mattel) and the oppositional voices (Napier) are in almost equal plane of influence, however, more power rests with the producers. This is because producers are the ones encoding the messages into the text, stated Hall, and audiences simultaneously decode these messages “according to diverse discursive contexts which are themselves socially determined” (Livingstone, p. 343). This is because Napier is part of the ideological state apparatus whereby his polysemic readings of Barbie are limited by the ideological institutions of his society (Napier is Catholic). However, Napier is able to spread influence by his “awareness program,” and perhaps that is a different form of power that audiences use. In this case, although Mattel’s work is his copyright (Barbie), the distortions that Napier creates are attempting to influence Barbie consumers into a new way of receiving their Barbie product. In this way, the power that Napier enacts is a semiotic robinhood, in that he uses symbology and intertextual references to other forms of popular culture and mainstream religion to bring to perspective another way of interpreting Barbie. This grants him an influential power that is different from owning the intellectual property of Barbie.

As stated before, Mattel does not willingly subside his hostility, and, according to Doss (1999), Mattel fails to realize how beneficial the fan community’s discontent truly is. Since Mattel primarily focuses on the economical benefits of Barbie, he approaches his audience as puppets of consumerism rather than an intellectual audience who may or may not enjoy Barbie. Although the fan community is not readily able to concentrate their influence like Mattel, they are able to spread the knowledge of their experiences collectively.

The Barbie fan community utilizes the easy distribution and cost-effective strategy of disseminating their discontent with Barbie online. This is an important medium for this audience because it is the only medium that will allow them to simultaneously expand their knowledge of Barbie as well as get in touch with other resistant groups. Furthermore, this audience finds it an interesting way to keep in touch with other resistors online, particularly through the sharing of experiences. Also, the internet has this particular versatility and flexibility that provides them with a complete understanding of their social and cultural institutions. Essentially, the medium of choice is an optimal one as it is able to guarantee them anonymity and share knowledge about their past experiences with Barbie.

This is a highly intelligible audience because they are able to frame their interpretations based on the experiences they gather. Mark Napier’s experience began when he was in camp and that helped him see how another girl in the camp used Barbie. He then became very interested in the ways that Barbie nests this ideology of consumerism. For Napier and the others, they felt that their experiences were important and it was their experiences, which led them to review how significant the impact of Barbie had been in society.

The Barbie fan community reads differently but understands the initial text of Barbie itself. Those who enjoy Barbie facilitate the dominant reading that Mattel Inc. had prescribed. These collectors oftentimes wield close to a hundred dolls each, some enthusiasts, according to Abercrombie & Longhurst (1998), maintain a satisfaction for Barbie that is consistent with hyper-consumerism. Grossberg called this a hyper-consumerist sensibility and although these fans read the same text that resistors read, their gratification intensifies and leads to the consumption of multiple Barbie products. Essentially, these are the consumers that Mattel Inc. wishes to target, otherwise Mattel would react hostile towards other ways of decoding.

Towards the polar opposite lie a collective who feel that Barbie threatens the moral institutions that govern the individual and replace these moral beliefs with that of materialist ideologies. Essentially, the individual as a consumer who willingly negotiates his/her identity with the material goods they purchase replaces the individual as a moral being. These oppositional readers believe that it is important to share their experiences with other like-minded (interpretive community) individuals.

Livingstone suggested that audiences responsiveness comes in three significant ways: relevance, realism, and relativism. This fan community uses relevance because, according to Livingstone, they make “connections…with one’s own life” (p. 351). This in turn must relies on the realistic component of what they respond to—Barbie. It is mportant for the audience to contextualize the reality (Livingstone, p. 351) of Barbie because they will then redefine their culture based on their interest. Lastly, relativism provides the audience with increased ability to foresee and consider ways in which they formulate their texts. The audience responds polysemically, according to Fiske and Livingstone. One particular interesting fact here is that this audience does not share the same experiences that Kitzinger (1998) concludes. Because this audience responds with different experiences, this audience is diverse because an interest in Barbie can stem from a number of factors.

The difference between interpretation and reaction is that interpretation is the result of assigning denotations and/or connotations about text or an object which forms codes/conventions of critical analysis. These fans engage in the discourse of interpretation rather than reacting to undermine Barbie completely. These individuals react non-physically and with intellectual and formal discussion. However, the reaction from Mattel is nothing but intellectual, simply legal.

In her essay, Brown (1997) outlined the way in which conservative leaders attempted to reconfigure her image to suit a more acceptable position of power. For the conservatives, her appearance showcased weakness and required the attitude of masculine assertiveness to emphasize her strength. Meanwhile, feminine activists were pushing forth a more feminized political leader. This evidently resulted an the prenuptial disagreement about how Hilary should look like and subsequently led to the difficulty of controlling the very image of Hilary since audiences were going to decode very differently anyways.

For Brown (1997), it was clear that political powers may not necessarily be able to perform their will as they please. Clearly, there were crevices in the way that corporations and political systems governed society, particularly in intellectual property. Popular icons and brands cannot completely be pulled away from these cracks in the system, the “leaking” hegemonic powers that seek to control all facets of knowledge. Because of these uncertainties in maintaining intellectual property, fans feel that it is their opportunity to extrapolate on issues that corporations seek to avoid.

What is particularly interesting is the way in which the critical Barbie community is able to re-locate the ideological values of Barbie. Much like the way Doss (1999) described the way the Elvis fan community reconstructed the image of Elvis in velvet paintings, this Barbie critical community is reconfiguring the image of Barbie to recapture their childhood moments. However, the Barbie critical community is reprogramming the ideological foundations that Barbie rests on out of their disgust for it whereas the Elvis fan community in Doss’s (1999) essay were doing this because of their love for Elvis.

Producers feel that their intellectual property is a part of their image and they feel that it is threatening their intellectual property once fans engage in intellectual activities. Essentially, fans feel that they have a stake and should be able to control some of the things that they consume. Producers feel that their trademark is being questioned and their intellectual value to their texts while fans feel that those textual creations that producers provide them are theirs for analysis. Mark Napier is an individual who attempts to shine light on the abundance of Barbie dolls in society and feels that Mattel’s Barbie is the construction of an ideological normativity, for example:

There are certain things we all should know about Barbie history. When an icon carries this much weight in a society, it becomes so present, so commonplace that it becomes almost invisible, taken for granted. When this happens we have to dredge our collective memories, to see what awareness we can dislodge. (http://users.rcn.com)

Pick any icon. Barbie is a perfect subject for an inquiry into symbols. She is nearly ubiquitous, crosses international and religious borders. She is available to children and so is a part of their education and growth, and she is a product of the contemporary commercial image making industry, in some ways the same industry that produced the images of Ronald Regan, Kate Moss, Nintendo and the Persian Gulf War.

What stories does this icon tell? (http://users.rcn.com)

Therefore, Mattel’s intellectual property becomes a sight of interesting discussion about the dependency of Barbie in American society. Mark Napier is a highly intelligible and remains ideologically aware of the conditions which wrought the success of Barbie and the ideological values its inscribed in. So for Napier to negotiate this dependency with hyper-consumerism, he repositions Barbie’s values and Mattel’s intellectual properties into a discussion about the dangers of carrying and relying on such symbols. For Mattel, they find it threatening that Napier would write these remarks and would not want the general public to be educated about the dangers of this “ubiquity” that Napier describes.

Mattel Inc. does not realize that “fandom diversifies…[as] it moves from cult status to the cultural mainstream” (Jenkins, 2000, p. 161). For Jenkins (2000), fans engage in intellectual discourse over the internet as it is the new more readily accessible form of communicative inquiry. Mattel’s decision to censor certain texts like The Distorted Barbie is met with a lot of challenges against other equally hateful Barbie websites.

Conclusion:

The Barbie critical fan community is very interested in the ideological investments that society has made over time with Barbie. These investments are the ones that Mattel Inc. wishes to maintain, but are in direct conflict to the shared experiences that fan communities online wish to expound upon. Mark Napier is an exceptional example of this struggle to extrapolate the reasons behind the success of Barbie in The Distorted Barbie. As an arena of ideological struggle, Mattel Inc. and Barbie haters worldwide find that their questionable statements to the dependence of Barbie in childhood must be deconstructed. Napier feels that children are being given the ideological necessities of “making it” it in this world (hyper-consumerist sensibiities), rather than attributing an affective enjoyment of the world itself. Even though textual reproductions may seem horrid, they are taken to be parodies that Mattel Inc wishes to terminate. Essentially, Barbie is a great example of where producers and audiences engage in discourse, for it is an arena wrought with legal disputes, cease and desist letters, and physical condemnation of a curse they call “Barbie”.

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