Book Reviews

that in which many of the adults reading
this book engaged as children. It is noteasy to re-create. I listened and laughedwhen a playground developer, years ago,in Canada, explained the expensive engineering and certification process his company completed to have logs, rocks, andstreams certified to meet national safety
standards. On this front, Tai’s book has
set a path for those who have not yet seen
the way through the policy and standards
forest. Follow along, learn from the casestudies, and get excited about the learning and growth opportunities for children.
Most impressive for the reader are
the book’s layout and the easy-to-follow
narratives of the development and management of five adventurous playgrounds
across three nations. The selection ofplaygrounds featured help demonstrate
the range of opportunities for designers and developers to build for idealized
outcomes: physical challenges, risky play,creative and constructive elements, exploration, and the levels of supervision andparent involvement that may be needed.
Is there a tree fort already built, or would
your city by-laws allow for moving parts
that kids may use to build their own structure? Will water be involved and interacting with other materials (think streams,mud, and messiness), or are there shrubs
along walkways to keep everyone on thedurable surfaces and out of the naturalspaces? This book sets up readers well
to begin answering many questions thatwill arise and helps in decision making.
As these case studies show, some areas
will allow freedom for nature-based playand some will replicate natural elements
to represent nature. Tai also provides key
references throughout the text for thoseresearch areas readers may be most interested in exploring.
Ultimately, Letting Play Bloom provides a refreshing spin on the intersection of child development and outdoor
play and should serve to inspire, instruct,and stimulate readers to bring nature andrisk into child play spaces.
—Nevin J. Harper, University of Victoria,
British Columbia, CanadaDoll
Maria Teresa Hart
New York: Bloomsbury, 2022.
Introduction, conclusion,acknowldgments, and index. 176 pp.
$14.95 paper. ISBN: 9781501380860
In summer 2023, in response to the Barbie
movie, the American cultural zeitgeist tooka sudden interest in the deeper meaning of
our unofficial national doll. The world wasbuzzing with curiosity about who designs
and sells the iconic doll, what kinds of play
it invites, the gender identities encoded
in its molded body, and its impact on thesocialization of children. Maria Teresa
Hart’s Doll, a 2022 addition to Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, also begins
with Barbie and then takes the reader ona journey to explore these same questions
about other dolls of the past, present, andfuture. Each chapter examines the history
and sociocultural implications of a typeof doll: porcelain bisque, American Girl,celebrity look-a-likes, and virtual avatars.
Peppered with personal anecdotes andpunctuated by a critical feminist lens, Hart
provides a highly accessible introduction

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AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AYto the field of doll studies.
As a lifelong collector, Hart is nointerloper in the doll space. She sprinkles her cultural analysis with humorous
memories of doll conventions during her
childhood in the Northern Virginia suburbs and a sentimental story about a special doll found at a flea market on a visit
to family in Santiago, Chile. To establishthat doll play can be fun and must also betaken seriously, Hart balances memoir andcultural critique, moving fluidly between
the two genres. Her childhood as a Latina
growing up with a love for Victorian porcelain dolls is given the same weight as her
adult recognition that play with such dolls
has historically been a “rehearsal for a lifetime of class-signaling” (p. 49).
Dualism is also at the core of Hart’s
thesis. Rejecting a popular tendency toview dolls through either a feminist orcelebratory lens, Hart argues that dolls cansimultaneously serve as tools of socialization through which we learn dominant
ideologies about gender, race, and social
class and as landscapes in which children(often girls) can explore various identities.
A short monograph, Doll offers a broad
sweep covering more than a century ofdolls and thirty years of scholarly research
and analysis. In her first three chapters on
Barbie, porcelain dolls, and American
Girl, Hart does not chart new territory
as much as she provides a well-crafted
literature review about how these dolls
communicate cultural expectations andvalue systems around femininity, race, andsocial class. The chapter on celebrity dolls
adds new insight, bridging celebrity studies and doll studies, as the author unpacks
the desire to own, hold, embrace, and preserve our cultural idols. Hart discusses

how various types of dolls—paper, baby,fashion, and wax—allow us to pull celebrities off the screen and into the home, challenging the temporality of beauty, youth,and fame. The final chapter on avatars suggests that as we create virtual selves, suchas bitmojis (personal cartoon avatars oremojis) and online game characters, we areengaging in a new form of play in which
we are becoming dolls—constructed replicas of humans. Although Hart provides athoughtful examination of the self and its
digital avatar, this chapter felt out of place
in a book about physical objects of play.
Hart recognizes doll makers often
intentionally use their wares to transmit norms and expectations. However,she positions toy companies as generally“responding to cultural moments rather
than creating them,” claiming they areoften “late to the party” when it comes tosocial change and equality (p. 9). Here, thebook perhaps leans too heavily into thenotion of dolls as reflections of our socialworld rather than as objects that constructthat world. In one example, Hart notes thata titular Black Barbie did not hit the market until the 1980s, two decades after thecivil rights movement. She brushes aside
the fact that Mattel released the poorly
named “Colored Francie” in 1967 and aBlack doll named Christie, whose backstory positions her as Barbie’s friend, in1968. There were many problematic elements to these dolls, including and beyond
nomenclature, that are explored in Ann
duCille’s (1994) classic essay “Dyes andDolls: Multicultural Barbie and the Merchandising of American Culture,” about
how the Barbie brand has manufactured
and sold Blackness. DuCille’s work demonstrates that Mattel was not simply

Book Reviews

responding to society; the company wasinvolved in the cultural centering of whitefemininity and the commodification ofBlack identities. We might also consider
that by establishing Christie and Barbie’sfriendship in the late 1960s—while schooldesegregation was still being battled in thecourts and white flight from cities was on
the rise—Mattel also challenged racist
ideologies by constructing an opportunity for children to imagine cross-racial
friendships. Doll narratives and doll playcan be complicated and messy; more than“vehicles through which [ideologies] aretransferred and internalized,” dolls areoften the landscape in which and throughwhich these ideologies are constructed
and negotiated (p. 10).
For those new to the considerationof dolls as objects to be taken seriously,
Hart’s review of the field, interwoven withfeminist analysis and personal anecdotes
of doll collecting and play, offers a solid
introduction.
—Emilie Zaslow, Pace University, NewYork, NY

The Privilege of Play: A Historyof Hobby Games, Race, andGeek Culture
Aaron Trammell
New York: New York UniversityPress, 2023. List of figures,preface, introduction, conclusion,acknowledgments, notes, index, andabout the author. 240 pp. $30.00 paper.
ISBN: 9781479818402
We generally understand games and play

as a universal aspect of social interaction.
And, although we usually consider playas the province of children, Western society has embraced the notion of “youngat heart” to emphasize how an appreciation of play and interaction with games
can transcend developmental concepts
associated with age cohorts and be a component of the lives of many. However, as
individuals age, responsibilities and expectations creep in, limiting how much time
we can spend on play. Further, with theexpectation of responsibility, activities
that we characterize as gaming and playcan be construed as frivolous, counterproductive, or illustrating a lack of maturity. Following this logic, it becomeseasier to stereotype and normalize those
who might see themselves as participating in gamer culture as socially inept,disconnected, and “nerdy”—stereotypes
that began to emerge in the late twentiethcentury. The common idea of the adult
gamer came to mean mostly white men
who were apparently able to devote inordinate amounts of time to exploits surrounding gaming and play. Individuals outside
the typical gamer stereotype—women,ethnic and racial minorities, and othergroups—became harder to “see” as adultpurveyors of games, encouraging the useof terms like “girl gamers,” “Black gamers,”and “gaymers” to synthesize these otherpopulations within the social category ofgamer.
But is there, in fact, more to this? In
Privilege of Play, communication scholar
Aaron Trammell theorizes a deeper relationship between gaming, adulthood, andthe social realities that exist in Westerncultures. The book builds on Trammell’sgroundbreaking work found in various

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