"Difference That Is Actually Sameness Mass-Reproduced": Barbie Joins the Princess Convergence (Report‪)‬

The Disney princess line began in 1999 with the unlikely premise of lumping eight princesses together as a single brand to be marketed, despite their differences of race, centuries, and even species. Out of this disparate assortment of characters grew an even more widely varied line of merchandise. Snow White, Jasmine, Belle, Pocahontas, Mulan, Ariel, Cinderella, and Aurora can now be found, together or in select groupings, on clothing, video games, lip balm, books--altogether, more than 25,000 different products (Orenstein). Theorists of children's culture call this convergence, and note that it is hardly accidental (Goldstein, Buckingham, and Brougere 2). Integrated marketing means that companies simultaneously release related products in multiple formats, from digital to print to collectibles. These expanded, interdependent products cannot be examined in isolation, for "every 'text' (including commodities such as toys) effectively draws upon and feeds into every other text" (Goldstein, Buckingham, and Brougere 2). Like the incongruous group of princesses that began it all, the sudden explosion of princess material can best be managed as one unit, one grand text to decipher. Princess culture includes a vast array of material objects and media representations, but also marketing rhetoric and weighty expert studies of children as consumers. In addition, even the most fragile-seeming princesses carry the weight, not just of Disney's constructions, but also of the hundreds of years prior of princess folklore, all strangely intermixed with contemporary notions of beauty, body image, and race. The princess text, then, binds together a complicated, interrelated web of texts, some of which appear to contradict each other.