When I was a year out of college, in 1998, the book “Adiós, Barbie” was published, and it contained an essay I wrote. The book is an anthology of young women’s perspectives on body image and identity. My essay is titled “At Home in My Body: An Asian-American Athlete Searches for Self.” I wrote about growing up biracial — Filipina and white — and having strangers try to define me by walking up and asking, “What are you?” I also talked about how I started to define myself as an athlete in college. My sport was rowing.
When I was little, I had never seen an Asian version of Barbie. Barbies didn’t look like me. And neither did most NCAA rowers — the sport was overwhelmingly white. But my teammates and I bonded over gradually realizing that what our increasingly strong bodies could do was more important than what we looked like, and I felt accepted by the group in a way I never had before. I grew more confident, owning my identity as an Asian American athlete.
Other “Adiós, Barbie” authors wrote about being Black, brown, fat and otherwise outside of the Barbie mold — having a Jewish nose, a big butt, textured hair. The book was published by Seal Press, a small feminist publisher (now an imprint of Hachette).
The book release was exciting. I was working at my first “real job” as a copy editor in northern Virginia. My co-workers noticed when it was written up in The Washington Post and brought in copies of the paper. The book was used in women’s studies classes all over the country. I was thrilled that I had contributed to an anthology that was helping other young women think about body image, race and other factors that add up to who we are and how we see ourselves.
However, a year after the book was published, Mattel sued Seal Press, arguing that it infringed on its trademark by including Barbie in the book’s title, along with the doll foot, hair brush, shoe and necklace on the cover image. Seal Press, without the resources needed to…
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