The crisis in scholarly publishing

Public Interest, Fall, 1997 by William C. Dowling

Until one day last February, I thought I had a pretty good understanding of what is now generally called "the crisis of the monograph" - that is, the drying up of resources for intensive studies of small but worthwhile subjects in favor of trend-driven publishing. Such publishing is favored today by some leading university presses, on subjects formerly associated with punk rock lyrics or supermarket tabloids or the Oprah Winfrey show. As an eighteenth-century scholar I had myself published several specialized literary studies, and as co-owner of Winthrop Press, a small part-time publishing operation based in Princeton, New Jersey, I had learned a good bit about the economics of book production. The one thing I hadn't done, as it happened, was actually lay eyes on any example of the new trend-based scholarship.

Nor did I have any intention of doing so on that day in February. I had gone up to Micawber Books, our most dependable local purveyor of "serious" titles, in search of Aulus Gellius, a new study of the Noctes Atticae by the British classicist Leofranc Holford-Strevens. I knew it was a long shot. The book is published by the University of North Carolina Press. I had seen other UNC titles on their shelves, but even Micawber seldom carries anything as specialized as studies of minor second-century Latin authors. It wasn't there. I special ordered the book and, the weather being chilly and the afternoon gray, fell to browsing in Micawber's recently expanded section on Gender and Cultural Studies. This was my awakening. I stood there reading for an hour, by which time I saw that I would never understand the crisis in scholarly publishing until I had at least attempted to understand how this section of the bookstore had come into existence.

The book I took home from the cultural-studies section that day was Barbie's Queer Accessories, written by Erica Rand, a "dyke activist" - the phrase comes from the back cover - who teaches art history at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. It was published by Duke University Press. In the months since, I have read a great number of works in gender and cultural studies, but nothing I have read since better exemplifies the new trend-driven scholarly publishing than Barbie's Queer Accessories. To read it through is to see why, for better or for worse, the traditional scholarly monograph is on its way to extinction.

Barbie's queer accessories

To begin with, Barbie's Queer Accessories is written in the quasi-autobiographical mode that has become the trademark of so much writing in cultural studies. It is difficult to resist its note of personal engagement. Rand begins with the story of how her interest in Barbie dolls arose, almost by accident, from an otherwise wholly routine incident. A friend had sent her the latest copy of their favorite lesbian sex magazine, and while leafing through its pages, Rand came across a photograph of a woman inserting a Barbie doll - "feet first" - into her vagina. Here, Rand saw instantly, was something more significant than a mere bit of lesbian pornography. She loved the photograph, and she immediately wanted to teach it to her students in art history and women's studies.

Yet there was a danger. In a world still swayed by homophobic attitudes, a Barbie-in-the-vagina photo might be taken as an immature or sophomoric gesture of "transgression" rather than an occasion of serious intellectual analysis. "I worried," as she puts it, "about inserting a Barbie dildo into the heterosexist context of the university classroom." In this moment of pedagogical perplexity lie the origins of Barbie's Queer Accessories as a work of scholarship. For as Rand consults colleagues and friends about the problem, the question of the Barbie dildo drops into the background - she does eventually introduce the photo into classroom discussion, and nothing much happens - while Rand herself begins to get widely known as someone with an interest in Barbie dolls.

The ostensible subject of Barbie's Queer Accessories is what in cultural studies is called "counterhegemonic discourse" - "the Barbie features that," as Rand puts it early on, "make her seem to resist the free play of accessorizing signifiers" - but a reader soon understands that Rand's heart isn't in the talk about counterhegemony and accessorizing signifiers. The real subject is the book itself: how it came to be written, what Rand went through in writing it. Thus, for instance, Rand's account of how her early research as a Barbie scholar took the form, very often, of simply gathering anecdotes:

My friends told me about how they had loved or hated Barbie and about what they had done with and to her - how they had turned her punk, set her on fire, made her fuck Midge or Ken or G.I. Joe, or, on occasion, gotten the much advertised "hours of fun" by following Mattel's directions. People I hardly knew who heard of my interest were anxious to tell me their Barbie tales.

The serious intellectual substance of Barbie's Queer Accessories always has to do with personal experience. Rand does undertake a dutiful review of Mattel's own "official" history of Barbie, but this is quite unabashedly journalistic filler, the sort of thing one might find in a magazine article about the toy industry. The moments at which the writing comes alive - the reason, one sees, that the editorial board at Duke must have been drawn to it in the first place - are those in which Rand talks about her own personal involvement with Barbie dolls. Consider her extended account of a dollhouse-like "environment," Barbie's Dream Loft, originally created for Rand by an artist friend. As restaged by Rand herself, the scene features two dolls, a blonde Barbie and a Chicana Barbie, in a "top/bottom dyke sex scene" in which the latter plays the dominant role: "She stands bent over blond Barbie with a hand on blond Barbie's butt, a hand moved now and then to suggest alternately spanking, anal penetration, and the more run-of-the-mill hand-to-vagina activity generically known as finger-fucking." The intellectual substance of the Dream Loft section lies in the way Rand is able to turn her own sense of inner conflict to the purposes of serious cultural analysis: