A Queer History of the Cabbage Patch Kids
Did a doll change the world?
Published in
10 min readJul 12, 2021
One of the strangest features of the 1980s, the strangest decade ever, was a craze for a doll. Everyone wanted a Cabbage Patch Kid.
But why? The doll is “weird or unnatural, even unattractive or ugly,” as Daniel Acuff puts it in a 2010 book, What Kids Buy and Why.
It wasn’t feminine—or masculine? Looking through the history of the Cabbage Patch Kids, I wonder if I’d choose the word—queer.
The story was that a young sculptor from Georgia named Xavier Roberts had designed it.
That a young Southern man was sewing, and selling dolls, was already a bit unusual? Xavior was always identified as a ‘bachelor’.
He was born in 1955. A 1984 book, William Hoffman’s Fantasy: The Incredible Cabbage Patch Phenomenon, noted that Xavier’s father died when he was five. His mother went to work in a textile factory.
