If Ken could see her now . . .

How does a man write about a book about Barbie? How does someone who has never been to the American or French Disney World write about the Disney experience? With his customary arrogance, of course. But it might be a defining aspect of our existence in postmodernity that a man can do Barbie and that a tourist can reach Disney without leaving Leeds. And without anything higher tech than Wordperfect 5.1. So: let us ride this sexual roller-coaster.

This roller-coaster does not seem at all like the one I have been on, the SupaLupa at Ligh****er Valley, North Yorkshire. According to the Project on Disney, Disney World (in Florida) is characterised by regimentation, packaged pseudo-information and the almost complete absence of spontaneity. This is to say nothing of Disney's "excruciatingly normative sexuality", its "ideology of global capitalism" and its "imperialist nostalgia". In perhaps the most shocking revelation of all, Project member Susan Willis witnessed only one act of play in a continuous five-day observation of Disney World - two children doing a Mexican hat dance on the stairway to an Aztec pavilion. Disney does have rides, (I am told by a friend who has visited), which are well worth the trip, but the Project never mentions this once.

Ligh****er Valley's SupaLupa is ace. In about a minute and a half you do two complete circles at about a million miles an hour; it truly is, as the leaflet tells you, a "white-knuckle ride". You wander around, you climb on things, you get wet, you sit on the grass and eat your picnic, you people-watch and delight in others' fun, you gawp at an imitation western gunfight, and you don't reflect very much on the role of guns in society. You have a good time, whatever your class, colour or academic background. Well, that is how I see it, anyway. But of course it is not as easy as it sounds, crossing genders and oceans, even with the aid of information technology.

Disney, according to the Project, is hell; not at all like Ligh****er Valley. Shelton Waldrep seemed to quite like the Magic Kingdom because it almost made it possible to fantasise, but EPCOT is the pits because "a sense of place is lost, and with it, the possibility of stories . . . EPCOT represents the monadic separation and alienation of people from each other and from themselves". Karen Klugman writes a short essay on how to make Disney bearable: take a "backside view of life", construct an "alternative ride", aim your vision "180 degrees the other way". Try as she might, most of what she sees - like Maya Angelou doing the voice-over of a history film - seems far from "alternative". But she is pleased to note many arguments about the purchase of toy guns as souvenirs. Her concluding ray of hope is the sight of the one that got away - an image of Mickey on a paper cup that had not been captured by the frighteningly efficient cleaners. (Sorry, they, like everyone else on the payroll "on property" are called "cast members".) All this is riveting reading, a clever mixture of journalistic reportage and, in the main, lightly referenced theory (ranging from Walter Benjamin, to de Certeau and Jameson, with, of course, a liberal sprinkling of Baudrillard).

But Erica Rand's Barbie book is much, much better. It starts promisingly with a reference to that fabulous feminist journal Off Our Backs, which has a photo of Barbie inserted (willingly) into a vagina, and then goes from strength to strength. Employing the same narrative style as the Disney book (slightly disconcerting to those of us unused to the folksy, first person tone of voice, which Erica Rand justifies in order to appeal to a non-academic readership), the book persistently challenges the notion that interpretations can be straightforwardly read-off from cultural artefacts.

Although Jane Kreuz notes that most critiques of Disney (including, perhaps, she self-consciously acknowledges, her own) tend to "degrade visitors to the park and cast them as an unreflective band of consumers", the Disney Project seem to have no doubt that they can tell us what is going on in the minds of the Disney trippers, or at least, what is going in to their minds. While the thoughtful Marxist feminist Susan Willis, even when she confesses to being "hypnotically drawn into Disney World's gigantic shopping mecca" despite her confirmed status as a shoppo-phobe, does not take the opportunity to analyse the complexity of the experience of consumption.

Jewish femme dyke Erica Rand, on the other hand, explains to us the multifarious uses and meanings of Barbie dolls in extraordinary detail. She describes an experience after a public lecture of trying to persuade a member of the audience that her message is not that "Barbie steals our daughters". She frequently reflects not only on the problem of conveying intended meanings, but of the fickleness (and methodological problems) of memory, scrupulously unpicking the "Barbie as dyke destiny" narratives that are presented to her by lesbian adults who remember hating Barbie when they were three years old.

Not that she is letting Mattel (Barbie's makers) off the hook. She must be right to employ Stuart Hall's point that dominant discourses work by limiting the range of possibilities that are available; Barbie in her up-to-the-minute feminist or multi-cultural forms is still firmly positioned, Rand explains, within the gender and colour codes of corporate America.

But the real strength of this book is that it does not stop at these easy conclusions. Having shown the huge variety of ways in which people of all ages use Barbie, many of which actively subvert Mattel's rubric, she asks why the doll generates so much consumer activity? Although she does not push her conclusion (that there really is something special in this doll - her sexiness) as far towards psychoanalysis as it deserves to go, her willingness to stress that Barbie's meanings are heavily dependent on the people using it, and their social contexts, is surely to be welcomed.

The other reason to admire this book is that it is quite uncompromising in its effort to re-inject political activism into cultural studies. Not only is Barbie "the art historian's dream date", she is also the site of a political struggle that will not change the world, but will make a difference. There is a fascinating (and sympathetic) discussion of Cynthia Jackson - 19 times under the knife as she has her body reconstructed in Barbie's image; a critical analysis of the activists who slash Barbie dolls; and a poignant reflection on her difficulty in deciding where to position the woman of colour in her own Barbie Dyke Dream Loft: should she be top, or bottom? This is a book that would usefully raise the temperature in any room where culture is on the agenda.

Max Farrar teaches cultural studies, Leeds Metropolitan University.