Reimagining Disney Princesses with racial diversity: From Tumblr to D-Tech

A couple of weeks ago, a young woman named Lauren reimagined the white Disney Princess characters as women of color, posting recolored images of them on her Tumblr blog. Her inspired designs quickly made their way around the blogosphere. Responses ranged from supportive (“I love this!“) to perplexed (“This was done because…?“; “But why?“); from grateful to critical (including requests for more inclusivity); and, sadly, from defensive to exclusionary (people of color “should come up with their own princesses and heroes“) and clearly racist.

I wrote a little about the Disney Princess franchise and race earlier this year, when I noticed that in the Disney Store’s 2012 redesign of their Disney Princess dolls, Disney westernized Mulan’s dress and lightened Pocahontas’s skin. So when the Huffington Post Live asked me to be their expert guest on a segment called “Black and Brown Princesses” about the reimagined Disney Princess characters from Lauren’s Tumblr, I was happy to oblige.

Although I have my criticisms of the Disney Princess franchise in general, I do think it’s important for young girls to see characters on screen and elsewhere in popular culture that look like them. I’ve been doing academic research on the Disney Princess phenomenon for a while now, and I’ve heard about the heartbreaks caused by Disney’s predominant whiteness: The little black girl who came home from first grade from first grade in tears because her classmates said she couldn’t be a princess. Their reason? She wasn’t white. (This was pre-Tiana.) The little Latina girl who would brush and brush her tightly curled hair, completely frustrated that she couldn’t smooth it out so that she would look more like a princess. (New princess Merida is the only one without silky smooth straight hair.)

While conducting field research for my book, Growing Up With Girl Power, I also saw firsthand how important diversity in dolls and other products is to pre-adolescent African-American girls. For example, as I mentioned previously, the racial diversity of Bratz dolls was really important to the African-American girls in my study. For them, the diversity was often much more important than the dolls’ skimpy fashions, which have resulted in a lot of negative publicity for the brand. The girls also cared tremendously about whether popular characters like Dora the Explorer and those from The Proud Family were represented on toys and other products with the same skin tone as they had on television. (I remember that a beach towel depicting Dora with the wrong skin tone had been a serious affront.)

As these girls and I talked and talked about how few characters looked like them, I found myself remembering being a young girl and wanting nothing more than a doll that had brown hair and brown eyes, like me. Unfortunately, in the late 1970s/early 1980s, these were almost impossible to find, as my mother can attest: she had to hunt high and low to find a single brown-haired doll whose eyes were brown, not blue. When I shared this memory with the girls, they were surprised. “How rude!” one said.

That’s one of the brilliant things about the “My American Girl” dolls. Although they are prohibitively expensive for most families (sigh), girls can customize the dolls to have whatever skin tones and hair colors they’d like–just like Lauren did with the Disney Princess images on her Tumblr blog. Of course, there’s little diversity in actual facial features, which is an ongoing problem in the doll business: even when racially and ethnically diverse dolls are available, their facial characteristics typically reflect white beauty norms. In the essay “Dyes and Dolls: Multicultural Barbie and the Merchandizing of Difference,” scholar Ann duCille famously criticized such dolls for being merely “dye-dipped”–brown versions of their white counterparts.

In this context, a new experiment from Disney is fascinating. As of this week, children ages 3 to 12 who are visiting Walt Disney World’s Downtown Disney Marketplace* may order custom-modeled 7″ Disney Princess figurines made to look like them. Just like them. As in, modeled after images taken via 3D scans of the children’s own faces.

The price is about the same as an American Girl Doll, but thanks to the 3D technology, these new “D-Tech Me” princess figurines won’t just have the children’s eye and hair color; they’ll also have their noses, cheekbones, lips.

The service is being offered for a limited time–”at least through Thanksgiving,” according to one Disney rep (see comment #12 here), but not much longer. The characters available are Ariel, Aurora, Belle, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Snow White, and Tiana. (Sorry, Mulan, Pocahontas, Jasmine, and Merida!) The sample images are diverse: Ariel, Rapunzel, and Snow White all have darker skin and dark brown to black hair, Aurora is a redhead, and Tiana is a fair-skinned blonde.

I have to agree with The Business Insider that the samples images Disney has shared so far look pretty creepy–a little too “uncanny valley” for my taste. And I’m not sure why three of the four characters of color from the Disney Princess franchise are being excluded as choices in the first place; it seems a little insensitive to me. (Anyone have thoughts on that?) But I don’t agree with Marketplace that the figurines are a sign of the apocalypse.

Although the Disney Princess franchise teems with stereotypes about girlhood, femininity, physical appearance, and race (and although I strongly dislike that the girls’ heads will be as large or larger than their waists on these figurines) the reality is this: Little girls are growing up in a princess-obsessed girls’ culture, and feeling excluded hurts.

By letting any girl see herself as a princess–well, at least any 3- to 12-year-old girl whose parents can bring her to Disney World and afford to pay $99.95 plus shipping and handling for a figurine–Disney has taken another small step in the right direction. I’ll be curious to see whether the experiment catches on.

*Some reports have stated this service is available at Disneyland, but a Disney rep on the Disney Parks web site has clarified that the D-Tech Princesses are only going to be available in Walt Disney World in the Downtown Disney Marketplace.

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Order my book, Growing Up With Girl Power, today!

I’m delighted that my book, Growing Up With Girl Power: Girlhood On Screen and in Everyday Life, is now available from my publisher, Peter Lang Press! Won’t you buy a copy?

You can order from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or directly from PeterLang.com. Orders placed now should arrive by the end of February.

Here’s a synopsis:

For more than a decade, girl power has been a cultural barometer, reflecting girlhood’s everchanging meanings. How did girl power evolve from a subcultural rallying cry to a mainstream catchphrase, and what meaning did young girls find in its pop culture forms? From the riot grrrls to the Spice Girls to The Powerpuff Girls, and influenced by books like Reviving Ophelia and movements like Take Our Daughters to Work Day, Growing Up With Girl Power charts this history. It considers how real girls who grew up with girl power interpreted its messages about empowerment, girlhood, strength, femininity, race, and more, and suggests that for young girls, commercialized girl power had real strengths and limitations–sometimes in fascinating, unexpected ways. Encompassing issues of preadolescent body image, gender identity, sexism, and racism, Growing Up With Girl Power underscores the importance of talking with young girls, and is a compelling addition to the literature on girls, media, and culture.

Professors: Are you considering assigning Growing Up With Girl Power in one of your classes? Request a free desk copy here, and check out my book’s companion website–it’s full of great content to prompt class discussion. If you adopt it for your course, I would be glad to visit or chat with your class via Skype. Email me for details!

Challenging our assumptions: Is there anything good about Bratz?

Bratz dolls came back on the market this fall. They’d been out of production for a few years while their maker, MGA, fought a legal battle with Mattel. MGA emerged victorious—and critics everywhere shook their heads. What good can come of girls playing with sexy toys—toys that the American Psychological Association has singled out in a report [pdf] as contributing to the sexualization of girls?

I am no fan of Bratz. A few years ago, at the height of their popularity, I witnessed little girls’  delight in Bratz “fashionable” clothing—their revealing, age-inappropriate styles.  One girl asked her eight-year-old friend, “Do you wish you could dress like the Bratz dolls?”

Her friend replied longingly: “Oh, I do!”

Ugh.

But.

Children are full of surprises—and while I was conducting research for my book, Growing Up With Girl Power, I spent a lot of time with girls. Enough to experience the unexpected.

One afternoon, a group of girls shared their Bratz dolls with me. And much to my surprise, as their play got underway, they decided to ignore the dolls’ clothing completely. The reason?

They were using the dolls to “play slaves.”

As their collaborative play unfolded, these girls–who were African-American–acted out a chapter of U.S. history, focusing not on the dolls’ sexy clothing, but on their skin tones.

I was blown away.

Their white dolls were slave owners and underground railroad conductors; the black dolls were runaway slaves, empowered by Harriet Tubman.  And as they played, the girls imagined that they had “raggedy clothes.”

This kind of play was possible for one important reason: Bratz dolls featured more racial diversity than the other dolls the girls owned.  Even though the dolls directed children to focus on fashion, the girls in my study had enough agency to use these dolls in a way that MGA never imagined. In this instance, at least, diversity trumped too-sexy fashion play.

To me, this experience presents an important reminder to parents, educators, and critics: In addition to critiquing children’s popular culture, we need to spend time with children, exploring how they play and watch media. It’s important to get as full a picture as possible. Children have agency–and witnessing this process in action won’t necessarily mitigate our concerns, but it might challenge some of our assumptions.

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P.S. Don’t think for a minute that the Bratz dolls’ racial diversity vindicates the brand. I’m not happy that Bratz are back in the market, even if their marketing team has promised they’ll be more “wholesome” this time around. Sorry, but girls wearing bustiers in the new Bratz ads? Please. I’d rather see an affordable line of dolls that are racially diverse and non-sexualizing gain success.

Parents: Any suggestions on good, affordable, diverse alternatives to Bratz?