A Queer History of the Cabbage Patch Kids

Did a doll change the world?

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…