Making Sense of ‘Autistic Barbie’
Mattel introduces, 67 years after the original article, Autistic Barbie.
“The autistic Barbie doll features elbow and wrist articulation, enabling stimming, hand flapping, and other hand gestures that some members of the autistic community use to process sensory information or express excitement,” Mattel announced.
The dolls, dressed in loose-fitting, purple clothes to reflect the autistic community’s alleged comfort-over-aesthetic sensibilities, come with such accessories as fidget spinners and noise-cancelling headphones.
“The doll is designed with an eye gaze shifted slightly to the side,” Mattel explains, “which reflects how some members of the autistic community may avoid direct eye contact.”
Is this a joke?
The description conjures up an image of a stereotype in miniature. One could see Dan Akroyd introducing it, maybe after Bag O’ Glass, in a Saturday Night Live skit on inappropriate toys or Sal from Impractical Jokers following up Q’s Toilet Soldiers with Autistic Barbie.
Given the large number of autistic children, perhaps it becomes a popular birthday party gift?
Mattel actually spent 18 months designing the doll in collaboration with the Autism Self Advocacy Network (ASAN). In other words, it passes muster with people within the autistic community. Given the large number of autistic children, perhaps it becomes a popular birthday party gift?
And Barbie, a fashion icon, follows the fashions. She changes every so often.
The doll first bent her knees in 1966. Dimensions shifted ever so slightly over the years. By 2016, Mattel offered petite, tall, and curvy Barbies as fat acceptance and body image became de rigueur causes. As women increasingly went to work, so did Barbie: as a zookeeper, astrophysicist, Mountie, surgeon, and dozens of other professions.
“We followed the trends,” Carol Spencer, an early Barbie designer, confessed to the Today show several years ago. “Barbie was to change as we changed. So, in that regard, we kept her up to the minute with whatever was happening, whatever was popular, that the children could have interest in.”
Some of the doll’s iterations more accurately reflected what the adults could have interest in.
Four years ago, Mattel marketed its first transgender Barbie. Down Syndrome Barbie and Barbies with hearing aids, wheelchairs, and prosthetic legs arrived around the same time. Now comes Autistic Barbie.
A Black Barbie and an Asian Barbie, given both the immediately recognizable differences in features and the market for such a variation, seem understandable. Do autistic children recognize themselves or Autistic Barbie as autistic?
The question stems from ignorance rather than a desire to make a rhetorical point.
Growing up during the 1980s, I had never heard of the term “autistic” to describe another kid. I’m not sure if that derives from children using other, often mean, names to describe their peers who exhibited what we now identify as autistic behavior, because the condition affects more people in the 2020s than it did during the 1980s, or if a push incentivized by government handouts encourages parents to obtain such a diagnosis for their child (teachers and social workers have alerted me to such schemes, the rarity of which, I do not know).
It all remains quite mysterious to me. So, too, does Autistic Barbie.
We live in a curated world where cable television delivers news catered to the preferences of the viewer, the internet nudges interest in songs, books, and articles based on an algorithm’s analysis of past choices gleaned through cookies, and the supermarket offers choice overload on seltzers (lime? cranberry lime? raspberry lime? lemon-lime?) and much else.
In this context, Autistic Barbie seems not a curiosity but an inevitability.
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