“It’s Amazing What a Girl Can Do” Neoliberal Girlhood, Disability, and Charity in Our Generation Dolls

Robin Bernstein uses the phrase “scriptive things” to describe material artifacts that, if read using archival knowledge and historical context, offer insights into the actions of humans who interact with the object and the ways that those actions may be prompted or scripted. By reading the toys, visual designs, and texts of Our Generation (OG) dolls as “scriptive things” (to follow Bernstein), she aims to investigate what kind of imagined reality OG invites us into when we play with their dolls. In particular, the author is interested in the heavy-handed and often contradictory politics of class, race, cisness, and disability entangled within OG’s imaginings of girlhood. In this article, she shows how OG engages a discursive production of a neoliberal girlhood formulated by middle-class whiteness, cisfemmeness, and ableism, discussing how this neoliberal girlhood governs representations of disability and emerges through the language of charity. This analysis offers insight into the discursive relationships formed between girlhood, disability, and charity under neoliberalism.