GoldieBlox Goes to the Movies: Revisionist Narratives of Media History and STEM Futurity

International Girls Studies Association (IGSA) / University of Notre Dame / Feb/Mar 2019

In 2014, maker of girls’ STEM toys GoldieBlox released a kit called “GoldieBlox and the Movie Machine.” The kit includes a storybook in which the titular character Goldie and her friends save their local film festival by constructing a giant zoetrope—an adaptation of the optical toy developed in 1834. Accompanying instructions invite girls to build their own zoetrope operated by a belt-and-crank mechanism and to create and showcase their own animations. A companion mobile app extends the hands-on experience to the digital realm.

 Appropriating the zoetrope in the service of girl-focused STEM play, the GoldieBlox set inserts Goldie into accounts of media history and do-it-yourself (DIY) play—discourses in which girls have not always enjoyed high visibility. It does so in order to imagine a present and future characterized by girls’ equitable representation within STEM fields. Building upon scholarship on media toys aimed at girls, such as Mary Celeste Kearney’s work on “Pink Technology” (2010), this paper examines the role of gender in the marketing and imagination of contemporary optical toys, considering the possibilities and limitations associated with the means that toy companies have employed to target girl markets. The frequent reproduction of optical devices in STEM and STEAM toy kits, such as the GoldieBlox set and Tinker Crate’s “Awesome Animation” kit not only challenges the assertion that such devices are “dead” precursors to the cinema, but also inserts girls into cultural narratives of technological innovation and media production in surprising ways. This paper offers an assessment of both the revisionist histories and future projections that these toys engender.