I have spent a considerable amount of time over the past year thinking about, engaging with and researching American Girl. In this time, I have struggled to form my own judgments of American Girl and I remain unsure of what standards apply to American Girl. As a for-profit company, American has no responsibility to fulfill any moral or educational requirements. Ultimately, like many of the girls and women discussed in this thesis, I am ambivalent. There are many aspects of American Girl that appeal to me, and others that I don’t like at all. It is complex, contradictory, and difficult to judge.

            My relationship with American Girl began when I was a child who owned a Bitty Baby, and later, Josefina. Like many American Girl customers, I have fond memories of playing with my doll, and poring over the endlessly enticing catalogue of dolls, furniture, outfits, and accessories. I remember the excitement and anticipation that accompanied any visit to the American Girl doll store, and the overwhelming desire these visits produced.

            I haven’t played with my American Girl doll for years, but I have recently visited an American Girl Place store. Visiting the stores is still an overwhelming and exciting appearance. I no longer want everything I see when I visit the American Girl Place stores, but I am still delighted by the sheer variety of products made by American Girl. I also enjoy the wonderfully unapologetic and absurdly detailed doll and girl centric themes that dominate the store. There is something great about the seats for dolls that American Girl has included in all the women’s bathroom stalls. I visited the American Girl Place in Boston in September to have breakfast at the cafe with my roommates, and we were very happy to find that there were “loaner dolls” available to sit with us while we ate. Everything about the stores, from the doll hair salons, to customizable t-shirts customers that come with a matching shirt for a doll is over the top. The elaborate details in the stores make them exciting. It is clear upon entering that the stores are unapologetically dedicated to girls and their dolls, and that still overwhelms and delights me.

            I also appreciate the Historical Characters and their stories. There was something so smart about associating books with dolls and thereby appealing to girls who can have both. But more importantly, I do think that girls who buy the Historical Characters and Girl of the Year dolls and are otherwise uninterested in reading might make an exception for the American Girl doll books. And I think it is a great thing if American Girl gets any girls reading. I also like that American Girl offers historical fiction about girls. Women and girls are often left out of the historical narrative, so I am glad that the brand works to reinsert their stories.

            I am disappointed, however, by the content of some of these stories. Many of the academic articles I read about American Girl criticized the stories. I have many of the same problems with the brand as the scholars who wrote these articles. I have mentioned several times that the Felicity series erases and ignores slavery. When I reread the Felicity books for this thesis, I was disappointed to find that they devoted so much attention and importance to a horse’s freedom but did not extend this treatment to actual human characters. Enslaved characters are only casually mentioned, and cannot be understood as such unless the reader already knows that colonial America included slavery. This omission is important, and perpetuates nostalgic views of colonial America which was in actuality a fundamentally unequal society.

            I also wish that there were nonwhite Historical Characters and Girls of the Year. Like the women who frequently pointed it out in comments on the American Girl articles, I am disappointed that none of the main Historical Characters have been Asian-American. It also is unfortunate that the only Latina and American Indian Historical Characters live in isolated communities. It is fine to include these narratives, but they can also be reductive when they are the only stories offered. I am similarly disappointed that nine of the twelve Girls of Today that have been offered by the company so far have been white.

            Inevitably, this thesis reflects some of my own judgment and analysis of the American Girl brand, products, and meanings. But this project isn’t about that company’s creations. It is about fans of the American Girl company, and their myriad cultural productions related to the brand. I have shown that the women discussed in my thesis are active and critical consumers. They girls on AGTube and the previous doll owners who write and publish blog and magazine articles about American Girl actively analyze, and criticize American Girls’ products and characters. They display devotion to the brand but they also express disappointment. More importantly, they also actively create their own additions and alterations to the American Girl brand.

            As they comment on, change, and add to American Girl’s content, fan fiction writers, AGTubers, event hosts, and article authors also actively alter and reshape brand meaning. These meanings vary, as different groups work with different aspects of the brand and tell different stories. The resulting brand meanings are related, but not identical to American Girl’s original, carefully controlled product. Furthermore, these brand meanings are constantly contested as American Girl and its many fans continue to comment on and create new products.

            As a student of American Studies, I have been trained to bring together a variety of media and methods in my analysis. This training was particularly useful as I embarked on this thesis. My exploration of the American Girl brand and production by American Girl fans, has brought me into conversation with scholars who write about marketing and branding, race, gender, and identity, popular culture, children’s literature, new media, fan community and production and museum interpretation. The texts that I analyzed ranged from fiction written by young women to stop motion videos, from buzzfeed articles to conversations with museum interpreters. I have attempted to bring together all of these literature and texts into a cohesive whole, and to shed some light onto the American Girl brand, and the women and girls who alter its meanings as they consume. Because my focus is on American Girl, I have grounded my analysis in scholarly work on the company, which I hope to have shown is limited.

            In their introduction to Fan fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet Karen Hellekson and Krisitina Busse argue that

the community-centered creation of artistic fannish expressions such as fan fiction, fan art, and fan vids is mirrored in the creation of this book, with constant manipulation, renegotiation, commenting and revising, all done electronically among a group of people, mostly women, intimately involved in the creation and consumption of fannish goods.[1]

My work, researching and writing this thesis, similarly mirrors the work of my subjects, though in different ways.  Like the girls and women discussed in the preceding chapters, my product is grounded in American Girl (and in my cases literature on American Girl), but I have combined this central content with my own thoughts, and with other media. This product has been influenced and shaped by preceding work, but the ultimate product is unique and contains new meanings. Like the fans discussed in this thesis, I have brought content created by American Girl, and literature on American Girl into new contexts, and repurposed and altered this content to explore and understand my own interests. I hope to have shown that this new context is relevant for others who share these interests.