Editors' Comment
The Editors and Editorial Community
On Toying with Terror
It is a world transformed. Where things are not what they seem. It is the world of TransFormers ... A world of heroic autobots and evil decepticons. The Trans- Formers. More than meets the eye.
Condensed in this lyric is the thrill and awe that 'TransFormers' inspire in the very young. TransFormers (variously manufactured in Japan and Taiwan) are robot toys which, through a series of mechanical manipulations, can be transformed into weapons, cassettes, insects, dinosaurs or vehicles. Grossly classified as either good (Autobots) or evil (Decepticons), each TransFormer has a name, a species classification, a 'bio card', and 'tech specs', which numerically rank it according to endurance, strength, intelligence, courage, firepower and skill. A favorite is a sexy but evil grasshopper named Kickback. Kickback, a member of the Insecticon swarm along with Bombshell and Shrapnel, moves from being a 'creepy creature' to being a 'terrifying reigning robot'. His function is espionage, and he costs only fifty dollars. The Cold War sub-text here needs little elaboration: while the Decepticons plan to drain the earth of all her energized resources, the Autobots strive to defend the planet.
There are now more than seventy-five TransFormers. They are expensive and gendered. Young girls shy away from them, preferring to collect the rigid yet voluptuous Barbie (and the fantasized scenes with which she is packaged). Now militarized and racially diversified (see 'Miscellany'), Barbie reifies the link between sex and violence, power and ambition, body and race.
Barbie is now a transplant. Multinational toy companies, such as Hasbro (which produces TransFormers) and Matte1 (which manufactures Barbie), tap large global markets by forming joint-ventures with companies elsewhere. These joint ventures buy Barbie molds to produce the original. In Bombay, through school socials and advertising, Barbie has been linked to He-Man, that muscular 6-inch male, who commands his own world of toy subordinates, and confirms the steroics of today's wrestlers and athletes alike, a peculiar look for the slim and hungry in places like India. There the blond Barbie is parasitic on the fantasy world of Hindi film and He-Man draws allusive power from the epic world of the Ramayana and Muhubhuratu. Both are poignant signs of the modem in the contradictory world of extreme poverty and high-tech adventure. In 1989, the (US produced) TV cartoon about the TransFormers (based on and further stimulat-ing the sale of the toy), could be seen on Sunday morning just before the serialized TV version of the Mahubhurata.
The transnational flow of toys such as the TransFormers, He-Man and Barbie are not just instances of the homogenization of the world by some single (or simple) fable of masculinity and femininity, insiders and outsiders, good and evil. This flow demonstrates that toys generated by one kind of narrative, which dominates their homemarket, can be cloned and attached to other social and cultural bodies, drawing on quite different narratives of gender, power and conflict. The Indian epic tradition, even in its popular forms, has little to do with American and European preoccupations with Evil Empires, Super Athletes, Star Wars and Battles of the Stars. In India, these toys are parts of a new public mythology of strength, beauty, power and gender, in which the emergent middle class elites use Western high-tech toys to domesticate the Indian epic tradition for their cosmopolitan children, while using their disposable income to create internal distinctions In the process, Indian middle-class children are helped to construct their own narratives of good and evil, power and beauty. Indian market-researchers discovered that it was hard to 'Indianize' Barbie: dolls, as a category, seemed to be generically white, blond, and Other Objects of selfhood in the US, they are indices of otherness in India, even if they draw on visual and auditory pleasures associated with indigenous cinema and, earlier, with indigenous epics.
But what is being internationalized in the flow of toys, if not a fable of Cold War, is indeed a more subtle language of bodily manipulation and transformation. The body transformed is a ubiquitous theme in contemporary debates worldwide: expanding (surgical) technologies seek body parts (e.g., kidneys, livers and hearts) that are donated (or sold) as transplants; mind-altering drugs are increasingly the entertainment of choice; markets in child labor serve adult sexual and industrial interests; religious fundamentalisms increasingly work out their politics and morality on the body of the woman (e.g., the debate on the 'chador' for women, even in countries where Islam is not the dominant religion; the Christian contribution to the debate [in the US] on abortion, women's bodies and fetal rights; and the debate on widow-burning in Hindu India); the political ecology of famine imposes radical hunger on large populations (e.g., Ethiopia); state-sponsored genocide eliminates large sectors of given populations (e.g., the deurbanization of Pol Pot's Cambodia and the de-peasantization of Ceausescu's Rumania); modem lifestyles have provided a global landscape for AIDS, which ravishes the body before death; and the martial arts have created a bodily semiotic that links China, Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, India, the US and many other parts of the world.
In all these examples, the body is both a site and an assembly of parts, capable of dismemberment and reconfigurations, as body parts and techniques of the body move and whole groups, like refugees, find themselves displaced. It is in their capacity to internationalize the body as a bundle of transposable parts, hitched to multiple narratives, that we can see the power of toys. Meanwhile, Barbie, He-Man, the TransFormers and their myriad computer-game counterparts (including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) prepare children for the dangers of what Cornel West has recently called 'civic terrorism': racial and ethnic polarization, increased violence against women, gays and lesbians, street violence, drugs and AIDS on every street corner.1
Not all terror is international and some toys are us. Public Culture welcomes contributions on public debates around the world regarding (transnational) sources of coercion and terror (including drugs, AIDS, hunger, child labor and weapons) as well as (transnational) forms of hedonism and consumerism.
Notes
- Cornel West, "Michael Harrington, Socialist," The Nation, January 8/15, 1990, Vol. 250. NO. 2, pp. 59-61.