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Brookfield further explores the brandincorporating postmodern theories ofnostalgia and the meanings of objects. She
finds that many of the women who playedwith American Girl Dolls as children havecome to understand the irony of nostalgiaand materialism.
From discussions of Barbie and Modular to Black Barbie and Nicki Minaj, thesecond set of essays examines doll productions and performances. “Homemade
Identities: Girls, Dolls, and DIY” by April
Renee Mandrona was one of the morecompelling pieces. Mandrona uses textuality (the study of the relationship between
material culture and social meaning), integrating her girlhood self, to examine thedoll-making activities of girls. In providing a brief history of craft movements,
she reminds readers that the making of
handmade items provides women witha “form of self-determination that could
be achieved through physical labor of allsorts, and a newly discovered malleabilityof the corresponding feminine identities
of various domestic items” (p. 97). This isa perspective remarkably different fromthe mentalities of the evolving middle
class in nineteenth-century America.
Doll making was a means of domestic
economy and morality, especially as parents felt these values at risk with the riseof commercially manufactured fashion
dolls. Mondrona’s research suggests that“through the making of handmade dolls,
girls can be brought more fully into production of knowledge at the level of objectcreation” and this might “enable girls to berepositioned as more active participants(cultural agents) in the creation or re-creation of meanings enacted by dolls and,ultimately, girlhood identities” (p. 99).

The DIY movement serves as a source ofempowerment.
I was hesitant to read, “An Afternoonof Productive Play with Problematic Dolls:
The Importance of Foregrounding Children’s Voices in Research” by Rebecca
Hines because the introduction discusses
Bratz, a line of fashion-forward rebel dolls
by MGA Entertainment. Since their introduction twenty years ago, when Bratz dolls
successfully rivaled Barbie, the American
Psychological Association accused thedolls of being “associated with an objectified adult sexuality,” and Professor of Law
Orly Lobel wrote You Don’t Own Me: HowMattel v. MGA Entertainment Exposed
Barbie’s Dark Side. What more could besaid about Bratz dolls? Hains successfully
expands the conversation about girls andBratz dolls by examining how Black girls
in her study used Bratz dolls to explore
race and history.
The addition of a study that incorporates LGBTQI resources in relationship todolls may have enhanced the discourse.
Still, overall, Forman-Brunell organized
a valuable collection of essays that demonstrate the emerging scholarship in girlhood studies. Dolls play a significant rollin the lives of girls and young women andare an artifact rich with meaning.
—Michelle Parnett-Dwyer, The Strong,Rochester, NY

Who’s in the Game:
Identity and Intersectionality
in Classic Board Games
Terri Toles Patkin
Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company,

Book Reviews

Inc., 2021. Preface, introduction,
chapter notes, bibliography, and index.
273 pp. $55.00 paperback. ISBN:
97819476676913
Contemporary academic work focusedon today’s “board game renaissance” often
examines what Stewart Woods (2012), inhis book Eurogames, calls hobby board
games—“radically different” games thathave “evolved outside of the mass market”
or are considered “specialist” (p. 20). Thisis, perhaps, not surprising, given that any
academic field (especially ones like gameor media studies; see my own 2021 Board
Games as Media) concentrates on exemplars that reflect key advances in the fieldrather than more popular fare: for example, we write about the TV series Mad Men
as television par excellence instead of Twoand a Half Men as television par common. Is it any wonder that hobby games
like Catan or Pandemic become fodder for
new academic work on board games? They
demonstrate groundbreaking game playand exemplify the field.
But games and media scholars should
not throw out the mass market for the specialized, as Terri Toles Patkin’s Who’s in theGame? articulates: “If you want to understand a culture,” she writes, “take a lookat the games people play” (p. 19). Using
research undertaken with the Center for
Popular Culture Studies at Bowling GreenState University as well as The Strong
National Museum of Play, Patkin argues
that “board games are texts through which
we express our culture” (p. 2). Using massmarket board games—and, specifically, thehistorical shifts in game art across different
iterations of Candy Land, Chutes & Ladders, Clue, Guess Who, The Game of Life,Monopoly, Operation, Payday and othercommon games—she “concentrates ongames as material objects” (p. 3). And thegames that most people play are not hobby,
specialized, or eurogames—they are bigbox store, mass-market board games.
Who’s in the Game ultimately does
exactly that: it examines how shifting
representations in mass-market board
game art reflect (or do not reflect) changing paradigms of identity and culture overthe past hundred years. Patkin’s expertisein rhetorical analyses of popular culture isin full effect. After the first chapter, whichuses the term “Gameland” to describe
the connection between board games
as a popular medium to changes in cultural ideology, chapters tend to focus on
one particular aspect of identity: gender(chapter 2), sexuality (chapter 3), race andethnicity (chapter 4), religion and morality(chapter 5), age (chapter 6), ability (chapter 7), and social class (chapter 8). Chapter 9, on “Intersectionality and Identity,”
brings everything together in a “multidimensional intersection of those facets ofourselves” (p. 197). Minus the first and last,
each chapter follows a similar structure: it
opens with a short description of why eachidentity facet is important and how it haschanged over time. The chapters then offer
example after example that demonstrate
how mass-market board game art reflects
this identity facet. The focus in the bookis centered entirely on the game aesthetics
themselves, not game play, game players,
or game designers.
This dedicated focus is both a strengthand a challenge of the book. On the one
hand, Patkin’s deep dive into the historical development of game art is incredibly
instructive: the chapter on race and eth-385

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nicity, for instance, is (predictably, sadly)
horrifying for both the images that used tograce the art of our most popular games
but also for how far we have yet to comewith truly equitable representations. Chapters on gender and sexuality are equallyshocking (and equally predictable, forcultural studies scholars). I could imagine pairing the bulk of the chapters in thisbook with more contemporary versions ofthese games in the classroom as a discussion tool or having students engage in similar rhetorical analyses of the mass-market
games they have in their own homes. As
ever, it is important to reflect on the way
particular representations affect people,
and Patkin’s discussion over a range ofidentities helps reinforce the influencethat any popular culture product—massmarket board games included—can haveon players’ conceptions of themselves.
On the other hand, the narrow focus
on game art often remains (if you willpardon the pun) superficial, and at times
I wonder how some of the claims would
stand up under ethnographic methodologies. Do players always play games the way
the box art intends? Popular culture studies argues that readers are always active,
creating their own meanings from theirexperiences with popular culture. So,
while Mystery Date undoubtedly presents a sexist, outdated image of girlhood,sexuality, and dating, do its players always
unconditionally accept this type of play?
I suspect there is more player resistancethan what Who’s in the Game assumes.
The exception to this critique is thefinal chapter 9, which contains the meatof the book’s analysis. Tying together thedifferent “identity” areas from the otherchapters, “Intersectionality and Identity”

delivers a thoughtful, nuanced inquiry onsocial identity, marketing, popular culture,sociology, and play. While it concludes thebook, readers would benefit from reading
it first and then going into each middle
chapter for specific examples of topics thatparticularly interest them.
Finally, the book would also havebenefited from some images, especiallywhen discussing the specifics of gamecharacters’ changing over time (I suspect
this largely falls on the publisher rather
than the author). However, the wealth ofmaterials that Patkin was able to examine
is a boon for game and media scholars,
and her tireless focus on the importanceof mass-market games—the most popularand most played games in our history—in
the cultural landscape is a crucial step forward in developing an understanding of
this board game renaissance.
—Paul Booth, DePaul University, Chicago, ILThe Race Card: From Gaming
Technologies to ModelMinorities
Tara Fickle
New York: New York University
Press, 2019. List of figures and tables,
introduction, acknowledgments, notes,bibliography, index, and about theauthor. 288 pp. $30.00, paper. ISBN:
9781479805952
Tara Fickle’s The Race Card: From Gaming
Technologies to Model Minorities unearths
the ludo-Orientalist logics that structure
not only Asian racialization, but game playitself. Fickle defines ludo-Orientalism as