The power of play: a social and cognitive analysis of children’s narratives about women through barbie dolls

Abstract

Considered a cultural artifact (Almeida, 2006), the Barbie doll has undergone significant transformations in its representation, incorporating greater diversity in physical attributes, ethnicities, professions, and contexts of inclusion, thereby reflecting contemporary social changes (Rolim, 2020; Sarinho Júnior, 2023; Prochner, 2024). In this context, as a development of my master’s research (Rolim, 2020), this doctoral thesis addresses the scientific need to investigate such changes and their implications, going beyond the analysis of the doll’s physical attributes and the packaging that accompanies it. Thus, grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday, 1978, 1985), in the Appraisal System (Martin; White, 2005), in Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff; Johnson, 1980; Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff; Turner, 1989; Lakoff; Johnson, 1999), and in complementary studies within Cognitive Linguistics, such as those focusing on Frames (Bateson, 1972) and embodiment (Johnson, 2017), this study aims to investigate children’s interactions during play with Barbie dolls and their subsequent reflections on this experience. The goal is to examine whether and how such interactions indicate, through the children’s discourse, elements of women’s empowerment, particularly in the four dimensions of power proposed by Charlier and Caubergs (2007): power over, power to, power with, and power within. The research also examines the conceptual metaphors and metonymies used by the children and their impact on the formation of perceptions about social roles and the diversity of female bodies. The purpose is to understand how children’s cognitive faculties articulate their feelings and reactions toward the woman represented by Barbie, who embodies, in her figure, representations of real adult women, and how children are shaped by their accumulated life experiences, even at an early age. Based on a qualitative and interpretive approach, the investigation was conducted with elementary school children in a quilombola school in the city of João Pessoa, in the state of Paraíba, recognized for valuing Afro-Brazilian culture and promoting the inclusion of historically marginalized groups. The specific objectives included: i) identifying the processes, based on the System of Transitivity (Halliday; Matthiessen, 2014), in children’s narrative discourses about power and empowerment derived from their experiences during play with Barbie dolls and in their subsequent reflections; ii) interpreting the most prominent processes in children’s narrative discourses, both during play and after it, about power and empowerment, using the evaluative mechanisms of the Appraisal System (Martin; White, 2005), by examining clauses according to the actions, events, or states in which the participants are involved; iii) identifying, from a cognitive perspective (Lakoff; Johnson, 1980; Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff; Turner, 1989; Lakoff; Johnson, 1999), through cross-domain mapping, the conceptual metaphors present in children’s discourses during play and in their subsequent reflections, with particular attention to discussions of power and empowerment, while also examining the role of conceptual metonymies; iv) examining, from a cognitive perspective, how the metaphorical patterns in children’s narrative discourses, both during play and in later reflections, construct their perceptions about Barbie and about women; and v) discussing how the four levels of power outlined by Charlier and Caubergs (2007) are linguistically configured in children’s narrative discourse, from both social and cognitive perspectives, with the aim of understanding how playing with Barbie dolls, considered empowered (Rolim, 2020), can promote struggles for representation, respect, and inclusion regarding the diversity of women and their roles in society. The research corpora consist of: i) discourses emerging from the spontaneous interactions of eight (08) female quilombola children while playing with Barbie dolls, who were divided into two groups, namely Group 1: children playing with Barbie Career Dolls (representing varied professions), and Group 2: children playing with Barbie Fashionistas (dolls representing physical or intellectual disabilities reflected in their bodies and clothing); and ii) discursive reflections on this experience, obtained through a focus group conducted using a carefully designed script with questions aimed at thematizing empowerment during and after the play experience. The analysis of the children’s discourses indicated that they demonstrated a deeper understanding of the meanings they attributed to their lived experiences, both socially and cognitively, when reflecting on the role of women in the context of empowerment and in broader social discussions, though this understanding was built gradually and collectively throughout the play sessions. These discourses thus provided analytical support for addressing issues such as autonomy, diversity, inclusion, agency, representation, and respect for different types of female bodies, including aspects related to disabilities, as well as other categories that emerged from the data analysis. Finally, by integrating social and cognitive perspectives, the analysis provided important and academically necessary empirical evidence on how cultural objects, such as Barbie, can promote women’s empowerment and encourage values of equity and respect for diversity from early childhood. Regarding the linguistic-analytic theories adopted, I observed that the convergence between Systemic Functional Linguistics and Cognitive Linguistics enabled me to understand, through the analyses presented, how evaluative language and embodied experiences intersected in the children’s discourse to produce new symbolic meanings.