LEGOfied by Nicholas Taylor Chris Ingraham

Author:Nicholas Taylor, Chris Ingraham [Nicholas Taylor, Chris Ingraham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501354045
Goodreads: 52382810
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2020-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 4.1 Hanging out at BrickUniverse. Gallows MOC by an anonymous builder. Photograph courtesy of Sarah Evans.

Encountering this MOC on the floor of BrickUniverse 2016 created a similar kind of dissonance to those Jessica Elam describes in her chapter, upon seeing a diorama of D-Day that playfully combined popular culture references with LEGOfied enactments of modern military carnage. Here, however, the dissonance isn’t between scenarios that might be physically adjacent but affectively disparate; the dissonance is between color and form. The colors are saying one thing—the combination of bright neons and soft pastels evoking any number of children’s, and specifically girl’s visual media—but the arrangement of pieces is saying something else. As a parent, Nick can imagine following his child’s eager path toward the MOC, only to then have to explain why that person is hanging there and what the person with the switch is doing. We argue that these colors, but especially the fuchsia and pale pink, are being used deliberately to create this dissonance. After all, the anonymous builder could have chosen any other colors, and done so more easily, given the relative rarity of pink pieces. The pinkness of the pink pieces in this gallows MOC is doing a very particular kind of work, insofar as pink is commonly associated with places, artifacts, experiences, and identities—whole worlds of meaning and being—that normally have nothing to do with public executions.

In this chapter, we pay close attention to pink LEGO pieces and to the surprising places they show up. Our approach here is to take three hobbyist creations that make notable uses of pink LEGO pieces. These include the gallows at BrickUniverse 2016, a fleshlight (male sex toy) posted on the subreddit r/lego, and custom-manufactured pink and purple minifig guns. By tracking the histories and original uses of these pieces across official LEGO sets, we explore how these creations mobilize the recombinatory potentials of pink pieces, in support of drastically different understandings, and performances, of gender. Call this an in-depth look at the cultural politics of colored bricks: an investigation, via three specific case studies, of the ways pink bricks are used in both official LEGO sets and fan creations we encountered both at BrickUniverse and online. With these critical analyses, we gesture toward the work these LEGO sets and hobbyist creations carry out in defining who can play with pink bricks, and how.

Gender Constructions

In following pink pieces around as they travel from official LEGO sets to MOCs, and from BrickUniverse to subreddits, we are employing an understanding of gender that bears a lot of similarities, in terms of how it operates, to LEGO itself. We see gender identities (like giant LEGO builds open to continual tweaking) as complex constructions that we both assemble and that are assembled for us. These constructions include pieces, techniques for combining them, and instructions for doing so in ways that make the construction intelligible to others. The pieces themselves might include anything from personal grooming products (Braun, Tricklebank, and Clark 2013) to domestic

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