In defense of the plastic toy

Playthings and Playtimes: An International Symposium on the Material Cultures of Play, May 2024.

In this paper, I engage with two central critiques of the plastic toy. The first, anchored at midcentury, when plastics were in their heyday, is exemplified by the well-known writings of Roland Barthes, who maligned the material on the basis of its material homogeneity and gracelessness. Similar objections to plastic toys would continue into the late twentieth century, concentrating especially on toys associated with television tie-ins, such as action figures with corresponding cartoons, and the expanding quantity of ever-cheaper plastic playthings imported primarily from Asian countries. The scope and scale of plastic’s expansion, its associations with hyper-commercialism, and the transformation of the notion of cheapness into a pejorative assignation, leads to the second core critique: plastic’s ecological impact, both in terms of the health of the human body and the planet more broadly. This paper interrogates these two perspectives and their relationships, arguing that, by shifting scalar perspectives, it is possible to nuance our thinking about the plastic plaything.