Contribute to a Special Issue of the Pop Culture Studies Journal on TOYS!

Volume Editor: Jonathan Alexandratos

Abstract: ~500 words due by April 25th to the editor via email at jsalexan@gmail.com.

Overview:

Paper. Film. TV screen. Sound recording. Internet. These are common ways popular culture reaches us. However, while scholarship around comics, movies, TV shows, music, and online media expands, one pop culture area too often remains under-explored: toys.

Plastic and plush convey pop culture narratives by both representing stories as transmedia and achieving textuality all their own as they are separated from their source material through play. In this way, they are versatile vessels, carrying intellectual property, imaginative storytelling, physical resources, history, emotions, nostalgia, artistry, and value all at once. This positions toys as unique capsules of (pop) cultural life, begging to be unpacked, or, more appropriately, unboxed.

This special issue of the Pop Culture Studies Journal will be that unboxing. With TV docu-series like The Toys that Made Us, theatrical documentaries like Billion Dollar Babies: The True Story of the Cabbage Patch Kids, and toy shows all across the world (often streamed into YouTube through myriad Go-Pro’d personalities) showing us what toys are, it is the pop culture scholar’s task to prod what they might mean.

Already under consideration for this issue are articles on the Chinese “ugly-cute” toy fad as seen in modern cockroach plushes, narrative-building around the Rubik’s Cube as seen in Rubik: The Amazing Cube, and the effectiveness of the “You Can Be Anything” slogan per Barbie’s marketing. From this wide net, one may note an interest in hyperspecific toy niches and sweeping, popular toys. As such, this issue welcomes abstracts that go beyond cataloguing the toys of a line and urge contributors to consider:

• The intersections of race, class, gender, religion, sexuality, and other identity markers and toys
• The ways in which toy histories are told
• The textuality and paratextuality of toys
• Ways of reading toy language: “action figure,” “doll,” “figurine,” “premium”
• Locations of toys beyond the toy store: fast food restaurants, cereal boxes, movie theatres, airplanes
• The impact of toy fads and trends, especially ones beyond U.S. pop culture
• “Toyetic” media
• Representations of toys in media
• Any other expansive, inclusive area of toy scholarship that has not received its due

Contributors and Abstracts:

If interested, please submit an abstract of roughly 500 words to the editor via email at jsalexan@gmail.com by April 25, 2026. Accepted authors will be notified by May 25, 2026. Papers should be 5,000-7,000 words due by September 1, 2026.