You Totally Had "Be A Guinea Pig" On Your To-Do List, Anyway

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Hey, dudes! Feel like filling out a survey? Well, I've got one for you: childthursday is doing a sociology survey asking what race/ethnicity you'd associate with individual American Girl dolls here. A couple are surprisingly hard and got weirdly specific answers out of me, but mostly it's fairly straightforward, and you don't really have to know anything about American Girl to take the survey.* And it'll be interesting to see what conclusions she comes up with.


*Although if you are afraid of the soulless gaze of the evil idol, you may want to skip.

Comments

[ellixis.livejournal.com]

*checks it off the to-do list*

Interesting. There were some that I hesitated over, but went with the immediate answer, since it's not about conscious association so much as identification.

I do very much appreciate that there are more than two gender options in the self-identification section.

[childthursday.livejournal.com]

I am glad that you were pleased with the options. I do feel regretful for literally "Othering" people, but I struggled to find terms that were both inclusive and specific. So I tried to create a space where people could define themselves - or not, as the choice might be.

I have had several respondents express appreciation of this section of the survey, and my answer to that is mostly that I regret that more surveys don't have these options.

[ellixis.livejournal.com]

Since non-cisgender identification isn't exactly covered in formal English, and isn't in most folks' vocabulary, it would be difficult to include all other options; I don't feel that the "other" option is a bad word choice there. Since most surveys don't offer it, it's notable and makes me happy to see it. Here's hoping that more surveys will include it in future.

[childthursday.livejournal.com]

Thank you for boosting the signal! Getting a more diverse sample is great.

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

Responded! I have a rather embarrassingly hard time distinguishing race even on actual faces, but I went with my best guess.

[van.livejournal.com]

I think the whole thing probably needed a "European" choice, or something. I ended up clicking "White" for probably half of them because there wasn't a better option, but I didn't want to be like "Germanic" or whatever. I dunno. It was definitely interesting, and a little sneaky. You put a Latina looking doll in a grass skirt and put a flower in her hair and she looks Hawai'ian. Very interesting. The ones I ended up getting the most specific on were the Asians, two of which I filled as Other Asian (Korean and Vietnamese, respectfully).

[cougarfang.livejournal.com]

I was like, heyyy, didn't I see these faces before...? Clever morphing!

And I, too, got specific on the Asians XD Are you Asian too? *is Taiwanese*

[van.livejournal.com]

Ohhh, I didn't even realize there was clever morphing going on. Derp derp. That would explain why I was like "Didn't I already see this doll?" though.

And I'm not Asian, but I definitely don't think all Asians look alike. I think sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference between a Japanese and a Korean, but other times I think it's very obvious. Even if I don't know what, I'm often like "That person isn't Japanese" or whatever.

[cougarfang.livejournal.com]

There was one where I was like, shit, am I going to be inconsistent in my answer? (Which would be an interesting thing to notice, too, I guess) and I scrolled back up and was like, oh, the first one had green eyes. I'm guessing the variations were eye color, hair color and style, face size and shape, nose size/shape/turned-up-ness, clothes and accessories... that's all I noticed, at any rate.

That's even cooler, then! XD I wasn't widely exposed to different variations of Asians till I went to college; then, the Koreans nicely identified themselves for me by being "large herds of Asians who walk around campus speaking Korean to each other" and things kind of went from there. >_>;; I still find it hard to categorize white people, though (not the least because nearly everyone is some sort of "Euromutt".)

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

The "Didn't I already see this doll?" vibe could come from the fact that there are exactly seven face molds used for all the dolls (and two of those have only been used once each); everything else is hairstyle, clothes, and palette-swapping. I am guessing none of those dolls was morphed.

There were a few where I got rather specific with the European ones, which is interesting because those were usually the "less white" ones--I just realized my idea of White comes from Northern/Western Europe, and I specify others more exactly. (There was also an urge to write "Mormon" on a couple of the very blonde ones--Mormonism is not an ethnicity or a race, of course, but most of the Mormons I know are so white they glow in the dark, and it's hard to get rid of 20+ years of association ...)

[chairman-wow.livejournal.com]

Done! That was surprisingly difficult. Those dolls have so few different facial features I'm sure if I took it again I'd end up choosing a different option for half of them. >_> You weren't kidding about the soulless gaze, either. So many staring chubby plastic faces...