Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Schalk, Sami

Titel

BeForever?: Disability in American Girl Historical Fiction

Ist Teil von

• Children's literature (Storrs, Conn.), 2017, Vol.45 (1), p.164-187

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Rowland sought to create high-quality dolls which girls could befriend (rather than emulate or mother in the cases of Barbie and Cabbage Patch dolls, respectively) and which, through stories, would connect girls with history in interesting ways (Chuppa-Cornell 107). [...]American Girl was created, starting with just three dolls/characters, each with their accompanying six-book series (written at a fourth to fifth grade reading level) and a collection of text-related accessories for girls and their dolls, all sold by mail order catalog. [...]while many in disability studies would identify Maryellen as a character with a disability, it seems less likely most children reading the books would identify Maryellen as disabled and fewer still would identify clear connections between disability and ableism in the past to disability and ableism today as readers can do with Joy’s narrative. In the AG BeForever line, fuller integration of disability would require a shift in the narrative form of the series. [...]2002 with the publication of the Kaya series, the AG historical fiction books all followed the same six-story format.13 Schlosser argues that “By having each character go through the same progression of stories, American Girl sends the message that these girls, despite differences in geography and history, are not, as the catalog asserts, unique. [...]the form of the new AG BeForever Journey books assumes nondisabled girls as the norm and thereby ends up “interpellating the [assumed] ‘able-bodied’ child reader into a prevailing ideology of normalcy” (Kunze 315).