“Families, Friendship, and Feelings”: American Girl, Authenticating Experiences, and the Transmediation of Girlhood

The history of the American Girl doll is discussed. The American Girl stores, located now in 19 US cities with four boutiques at Indigo and Chapters stores in Canada, serve a unique function in American Girl's transmedia complex. While American Girl items may be purchased online or by catalog, the stores offer not only a lushly conceptualized shopping environment but a host of authenticating experiences. Visitors to American Girl stores can eat lunch side-by-side with their American Girl doll, participate in a book club and crafting session, view a new American Girl movie, or attend a workshop on doll hairstyles. American Girl has built a doll empire by deploying transmedia branding, narrative, and authenticating experiences. Historicizing the American Girl brand within the context of girlhood and the rise of consumerism, reveals the brand's contemporary entanglement of play, authenticity, and girlhood within systems of late‐capital brand management. Fundamentally, the complex multiplatform narrative work of American Girl presents a framework through which consumers, both girls and adults, can understand and experience an idealized girlhood—one that is intimately bound to practices of consumption and capitalist exchange and legitimized through the process of collection.