496211

2013
ICS17410.1177/1367877913496211International Journal of Cultural StudiesJohnson

International Journal of Cultural Studies

2014, Vol. 17(4) 307­–325
© The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/1367877913496211
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Article

Figuring identity: Media licensing and the

racialization of LEGO bodies

Derek Johnson
University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

Abstract
Bridging critical race studies with inquiries into media licensing and industrial cultures of
production, this research examines the ubiquitous LEGO minifigure as a significant site of identity
and power in the construction of both corporate brands and raced bodies. From analysis of
the minifigures themselves, as well as press releases, interviews, and other managed corporate
disclosures, media licensing can be understood as shaping racialized practices of representation
while also acting discursively to imagine that racialization as the work of an industrial ‘other’. This
affords LEGO a claim to a ‘pre-racial’ corporate identity that can disavow the politics of bodily
representation.

Keywords
branding, culture industries, embodiment, identity, licensing, race

Worldwide, the average person owns approximately 62 LEGO objects (Passerella and
Zansinger, 2008), and while most of those interlocking studded pieces are multi-colored
bricks, plates, slopes, and wedges, many yet are the heads, torsos, and legs that comprise
the 1.5 inch LEGO minifigure. Since 1978, The LEGO Group has produced over 4 bil-
lion minifigures, with 3.9 more supposedly sold each second (Cochran, 2008). While the
Denmark-based company developed theme parks, electronic toys, and media products in
a struggle to adapt to the changing play patterns of the 1990s (Diaz, 2008; Karmark,
2009), 21st-century LEGO promised a ‘back to basics strategy’ (Ward, 2011) in which
executives promised to ‘refocus on our core business, which is materials for open-ended
play for children’ (LEGO, 2001). The minifigure played a central role in re-articulating
this ‘core’, with advertising partner Flashpoint PR foregrounding the 30th anniversary of

Corresponding author:
Derek Johnson, Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin – Madison,Vilas Hall, 6th Floor,
821 University Ave, Madison, WI 53706, USA.
Email: drjohnson3@wisc.edu

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308 International Journal of Cultural Studies 17(4)

the minifigure in 2008 in order to re-articulate LEGO’s image ‘and build brand prefer-
ence for the decidedly low-tech toy’ (Case study, 2009). Tie-in books like Standing Small
(2009) similarly promoted LEGO through the history of its minifigures, making a single,
iconic LEGO product exemplary of the larger brand identity. Yet accompanying LEGO’s
nostalgic branding campaign were changes to the nature of the minifigure itself. Since
1999, LEGO has increasingly partnered with major media conglomerates to create
licensed construction sets based on properties like Batman, Pirates of the Caribbean, Toy
Story, and many others. In 2005, eight of the ten best-selling LEGO sets in North America
came from the licensed Star Wars theme (The force, 2006), and half of all sales came
from licensed themes by 2009 (Lego grows, 2009). Through media licensing, minifig-
ures transformed from nameless, modular, build-it-yourself cyphers to identifiable char-
acters like Luke Skywalker, Indiana Jones, and Spider-Man.
This shift warrants critical examination not just because of the market ubiquity of
the licensed minifigure but, more importantly, because the minifigure functions as a
site of discourses and meaningful cultural practices whereby culture industries literally
construct bodies as material objects of play. However small, the minifigure is – like all
embodied representations – subject to institutional forces working to regulate bodies
and give them meaning. Media licensing, moreover, both shapes the practices by which
minifigure bodies are materially constructed and serves as a powerful discourse, mak-
ing those embodied construction toys meaningful in relation to other industries and
modes of representation. Scholars have already examined LEGO in terms of a process
of ‘mediatization’ – the transformation of consumer products into popular media
experiences – through which the company has increasingly reorganized itself around
narrativized products in television, online video, and merchandise beyond construction
toys (Hjarvard, 2004; Karmark, 2009; Lauwaert, 2008). While similarly looking
‘beyond the brick’ (Smith, 2011) at the screen media narratives making LEGO toys
newly meaningful, I simultaneously consider how the licensed toys communicate ideas
about bodies as media in their own right. In a way, ‘mediatization’ suggests LEGO toys
were not always themselves media: cultural artifacts that put expressions about the
world into material and technological form. Instead, we can explore how these toys
mediate bodies, while asking how their licensed status brings logics and practices of
mediated representation of bodies from different culture industries – toys and screen
narratives – into collision.
More specifically, I am interested in how LEGO minifigures mediate bodies as raced,
how media licensing governs their racialized (and intersectionally gendered, sexed)
appearance, as well as how the notion of licensing meaningfully imagines that racializa-
tion as the province of an externalized industry sector divorced from LEGO’s corporate
identity. Numerous works have studied the toy industry in terms of its overt representa-
tions of racial diversity – with Chin (2001), Ducille (2003), and many more critiquing
‘black Barbie’, for example – but the investigation here contributes additional insight
into how branding and marketing strategies simultaneously disavow race and maintain
corporate claims to racelessness by articulating representational diversity to delegiti-
mated industrial sectors. This research first considers LEGO playsets themselves (both
licensed and non-licensed) to trace the representational norms and conventions with
which race has been inscribed on minifigure bodies. While LEGO toys always support

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open-ended play, of most concern here are configurations privileged through specific
part assortments and marketed uses – the preferred constructions of raced bodies for
which the company literally provided instruction manuals and featured in packaging and
promotional imagery.1 My interest in how these representational practices become mean-
ingful in specific industrial contexts informs the second level of analysis, where dis-
courses of and about media licensing positioned this production of raced minifigure
bodies in relation to corporate identities and hierarchies. For this, I draw upon press
releases, published interviews, customer service scripts, and other ‘managed’ disclosures
(Caldwell, 2009) through which LEGO representatives reflexively situated both licensed
representational practice and the production of race within their public performance of
corporate identity.
Uniting critical race studies with inquiries into media licensing and industrial cul-
tures of production, I ultimately identify licensing as an important site of examination
for understanding not only industry but also issues of identity, representation, and
power. LEGO’s licensed production has unfolded in a cultural context that increas-
ingly privileges post-racial, ‘colorblind’ politics and ideologies in which the impor-
tance of race – and the need to challenge the inequalities it naturalizes – comes into
significant question (Wise, 2010). At the level of licensing, then, we can consider not
only how race is negotiated in industrial representational practice, but also how cor-
porate branding strategies can disavow that practice, assign it to other industrial sec-
tors, and thereby deny direct participation in the racial politics pathologized by
post-racial ideologies. Corporate identities can be performed as transcending race
when constructed in opposition to a delegitimated, ‘othered’ realm of licensing even
further devalued in articulation to racialized politics of representation. Much as media
brands have disavowed race through alignment with notions of lifestyle and quality
(see Banet-Weiser, 2012; Fuller, 2010), this study pinpoints licensing as another
means of claiming privileged industrial identities, whereby claims to an innocence
and purity – described here as a ‘pre-racial’ brand identity – can be constructed in
opposition to a racially complicit and compromised industrial other. By pointing to
the devalued, delegitimated realm of licensing as a site of racial legibility, industry
sectors privileged in opposition – despite their continuing investment in whiteness –
can become unmarked and unraced as neutral or universal.
So what the case of the licensed LEGO minifigure demonstrates is increased, diver-
sified logics of racial representation at the same time as branding strategies have
deployed discourses of and about licensing to absolve the company of any complicity in
the politics of racial representation past, present, or future. On the one hand, licensing
changed LEGO’s practices of bodily representation by putting the minifigure into inter-
textual relationships with racialized bodies in other media. On the other, LEGO reflex-
ively deployed a public discourse about media licensing to regulate the racial meanings
of those bodies as well as the company’s corporate identity as a producer of racialized
representations. In the end, media licensing was the industrial logic that drove racializa-
tion of the minifigure as well as the discursive terrain that permitted a post-racial denial
of this politics of bodily representation, with LEGO performing a pre-racial corporate
identity in opposition to the overtly racial industrial ‘other’ imagined into being by the
idea of licensing.

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310 International Journal of Cultural Studies 17(4)

Discourses, hierarchies, and disavowals

While the articulation between industrial practices of media licensing and social struc-
tures of racial inequality is not immediately obvious, both are discursive fields that dif-
ferentially categorize, stratify, organize, and value people and practices. Each constructs
privileged positions of subjectivity by reference to that marked as different or ‘other’
outside of that privilege. To understand the LEGO minifigure body as produced and
racialized by media licensing, we therefore have to consider the post-racial discourses
that often shape the representation of race in contemporary popular culture as well as the
industrial discourses that assign value and authority to licensed production – with both
upholding specific cultural hierarchies, power relations, and structures of legitimation.
Media licensing is an industrial practice by which intellectual property owners (licen-
sors) assign rights of use to paying third parties (licensees) granted limited markets or
territories by the agreement. At the political-economic level of contracts, LEGO acquires
from Lucasfilm or DC Comics the right to make construction toys branded as Star Wars
or Batman, respectively. Yet cultural studies of entertainment media have also revealed
licensing as a site of struggle in which the work of producing culture and the professional
identities of those behind that work are often disavowed and/or delegitimated. As Trevor
Elkington writes in his study of licensed videogame production, ‘licensed adaptations are
commonly dismissed by critics and players as nothing more than cynical attempts to cash
in on hype’ (2009: 214). This delegitimation emerges equally from industrial cultures of
production as popular derision. Tracing industrial tensions within media licensing, M.J.
Clarke explains the ‘low status’ of licensed television tie-in novels, and the ‘derision’ they
are subject to, as a result of production hierarchies in which showrunners disavow the
contributions of licensed novelists to a shared narrative universe, and in which contact
between these stratified participants is minimized, despite licensed writers’ persistent
need for approval of their work by publishers and licensors alike (2009: 434). Identifying
similar occlusion of contracted, collaborative media work, Denise Mann examines how
the discursively privileged idea of centralized authorship has worked to ‘uphold the illu-
sion of the TV showrunner’s ultimate power over the TV production process both inside
the TV writers’ room and outside it’ (2009: 102).
Typically positioned as less valuable and less legitimate than a privileged center,
licensed labor is at the very least situated within a struggle to exert creative identities and
claims to legitimacy across lines of industry hierarchy. As a discursive category for mak-
ing sense of labor, the idea of licensing often disavows and devalues contracted labor,
denying it cultural capital, and challenging the authority with which that work is per-
formed (where a contractual license to create does not guarantee a moral right to create).
Meaningful discourses of and about licensing devalue the decentralized media labor that
legal and economic practices of licensing simultaneously enable. LEGO’s status as a
licensed producer of construction playsets thus situates its minifigure production within
this struggle for creative autonomy, authority, and identity within the culture industries,
where contracted labor might be delegitimized or disavowed.
To understand that licensed work in relation to race, we can similarly consider the
dominant discourses of delegitimation and disavowal shaping and shaped by social hier-
archies, identities, and embodied inequalities. In the US context, Ralina Joseph describes

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Johnson 311

the discursive terrain of the post-racial as one that frames racism as a thing of the past
(often as evidenced by the election of President Barack Obama), where further attention
to race is unwarranted at best, and overly invested in prolonging racial animosities at
worst. The problem with this logic Joseph argues, is that in denying and even making
permissible persistent stereotyping, discrimination, and violence, ‘race, racism, and
questions of power are ignored. “Post-race” is used to show that race does not matter’
(2009: 166). Michael Lacy and Kent Ono add that ‘[r]ace and racism are deflected,
denied, disavowed, minimized, and excused’ by the post-racial ideal of colorblindness
and, drawing upon Stuart Hall, they see contemporary racial hierarchies as systems of
oppression that ‘function more subtly and inferentially than overtly’ (2011: 2–3). As
these critics suggest, ideals of racial transcendence pathologize racial politics, alliances
and identities – prematurely abandoning concern for racial inequality while silencing,
demeaning, and erasing racial subjectivities and experiences. Roopali Mukherjee frames
her own study of commodity cultures and the post-racial order as an interest in ‘what is
“sayable” and “knowable” about race, and equally, what lurks as “unsayable,” and thus,
in a sense, “unknowable” within the so-called post-racial era’ (2011: 180). My examina-
tion of the LEGO minifigure body extends from a similar position, concerned with how
licensing makes race knowable – or more appropriately, buildable – in material com-
modity form, as well as the silences in LEGO’s licensing discourse in which race remains
denied.
Given that the transnational LEGO corporation often claims a specifically Danish
identity,2 not all minifigure bodies can be squarely and exclusively situated within post-
racial discourses specific to the US. Yet at the level of licensed production, LEGO shares
in intellectual properties controlled by US-based media conglomerates like Time Warner
or Disney, and reproduces narratives from Star Wars, The Avengers, Batman, and the like
shaped by post-racial ideals in their local production. LEGO’s licensing strategies, more-
over, strive for greater competitiveness in large, lucrative geocultural territories like
North America, where toy sales increasingly depend upon cross-promotional media tie-
ins. In licensed LEGO product, claims to specifically Danish or European sensibility
frequently disappear in favor of nods to these transportable media narratives. At the
intersection of globalization and licensing, then, LEGO confronts the post-racial dis-
courses that frame valued territories like the US, even as – or perhaps especially because
– racial orders differ across global localities.
In bridging scholarly critique of post-racial cultural politics with examination of
licensing in the global culture industries, we can understand how race is not just con-
structed (and disavowed) at the level of representation and manufacturing, but also at the
level of branding practice and strategy. In the post-racial condition, race is produced both
in the economic and legal arrangements of licensing, but also the cultures of production
and claims to corporate identity that manage the meanings and values of subcontracting
and other industrial practices. For LEGO, we will see that licensing has been both a
practice driving new racialized rhetorics of minifigure representation, but also a mean-
ingful site for establishing hierarchies and reimagining race as the province and respon-
sibility of some other disavowed industrial force. Licensing discourses and hierarchies
protected LEGO’s brand as race neutral even as the company expanded its market
through intensified investment in representing raced bodies.

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312 International Journal of Cultural Studies 17(4)

Figure 1.  Original LEGO `nurse’ minifigure (1978).

From yellow to light nougat and reddish brown

Although they are just children’s toys, LEGO minifigures represent bodies through iden-
tity markers of racial and ethnic difference, as well as the logics of gender, sex, class, and
any other category used to meaningfully regulate embodiment. For example, industry
analysts who see LEGO as ‘a boy’s toy’ (Chandiramani, 2003) claim that girls ‘didn’t
really like the Lego mini-figure’ due to its stockiness and non-compliance with what are
assumed to be ‘natural’ feminine aesthetics and interests (see Figure 1). ‘He’s ugly to

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Johnson 313

them and they don’t want to be him,’ suggests one analyst (With new toys, 2011).
Perceptions of gendered interest then shape production of these gendered bodies; one
2008 estimate held that only 1 out of every 19 minifigures made had been marked/mar-
keted as female or feminine via hairpieces, reddened lips, or other specialized face and
torso printing (Aronson, 2008). Minifigures are also gendered through the roles they
serve within themed playsets; nurses in the City/Town theme are most often, if not
always, marked by feminine hair pieces; knights in the Castle theme are rarely afforded
feminized faces. In 2012, LEGO introduced a new product line called Friends featuring
more hyper-feminine appeals, and in doing so refashioned the minifigure as a taller, thin-
ner ‘mini-doll’. While this significantly signaled LEGO’s market interest in girls, the
need for a different kind of human figure solidified assumptions about the minifigure as
a ‘boys’ toy’. Through licensing, moreover, the minifigure has been further articulated to
the white, male, heterosexual characters privileged in blockbuster film, television, and
comics. Licensed female minifigures have thus been few and far between; for example,
of the 17 characters in the 2012 Marvel Superheroes Avengers, X-Men, and Spider-Man
sets, only one, Black Widow, was female.
Yet while the modular minifigure design accommodated some representation of gen-
dered and sexed difference from inception, race and ethnicity posed a different represen-
tational dilemma. The standard yellow head by which minifigures came to be recognized
resisted dominant visual modes of racial differentiation based in skin color. To be clear,
race did not present an inherently greater representational challenge than gender; but
with LEGO explicitly feminizing one of its first 1978 nurse minifigures (see Figure 1),
and not similarly differentiating minifigures on the basis of race or ethnicity for at least
a decade more, we can infer a greater corporate reluctance, lack of interest, confusion, or
sensitivity about representing bodies in those terms. It was the licensing program, how-
ever, that prompted LEGO to publicly grapple with and articulate its logics of racialized
representation.
In 1999, LEGO signed an agreement to produce construction sets based on Star Wars:
Episode I – The Phantom Menace. While it was a marketing coup, this first license also
signaled LEGO’s surrender to troubling market realities. In the 1990s, toy sales increas-
ingly depended on support from film, television, and comic tie-ins, and LEGO had strug-
gled economically in this period, avoiding licensing to protect its high-end, educational
status. LEGO realized, however, it no longer had the luxury of standing outside media
licensing if it wanted ‘to keep pace with the changing desires of children’ (Chandiramani,
2003). So by 2001, other licensing agreements followed: Jurassic Park III, Bob the
Builder, and, most lucratively, Harry Potter.
The collision of licensing and racialized bodies came in 2002, when an agreement
with the National Basketball Association for the production of licensed playsets and
figures newly situated LEGO within the racial discourses marking the league. The
assumed appeal of the NBA to African Americans made some analysts read these mini-
figures as designed ‘for’ an audience other than LEGO’s predominantly White and Asian
customer base (Noonan, 2003). Equally important was the racial make-up of the league,
where 18 of the 24 minifigures represented African American players. While many
reports noted that these would be ‘the first black LEGO figures in the 71-year history of
the company’ (Noonan, 2003), deviating from the yellow norm, LEGO press releases

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314 International Journal of Cultural Studies 17(4)

Figure 2.  Female ‘Islander’ (1994), Male ‘Islander’ (1994), Male ‘Indian’ (1997), Female ‘Indian’
(1997), and ‘Ninja Robber’ (1998). Photo by author.

preferred to frame them as ‘the first time in history its minifigures will be based on real
people’ (LEGO, 2002). While LEGO Star Wars minifigures certainly evoked ‘real peo-
ple’ like white actors Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher (embodying the Han Solo and
Princess Leia characters, respectively), the non-normative racial ‘reality’ of the NBA
demanded a new representational semiotics. As ‘stars’, these performers’ bodies accrued
meaning in relation to norms of race, gender, and sexuality (Beltran, 2009; Dyer, 1986;
Negra, 2001; Studlar, 1996 ); so in gaining the right to reproduce raced, gendered, and
sexualized star bodies (whether from sports or fantasy) LEGO newly wrote those norms
onto its minifigures. Now subject as licensee to the representational ideologies marking
star bodies as white or black, racially normative or non-normative, LEGO altered its
production practices and product offerings to accommodate, conform, and – in its own
public relations language – ‘be authentic as possible’ to extant racial logics (Pomphrey,
2006).
However, this was not the first time LEGO incorporated racial difference into its repre-
sentational practice – merely a moment when existing conventions for representing differ-
ence no longer accommodated the confrontation with blackness forced by licensing. In
1989, the Pirate theme had introduced specially printed minifigure heads with eye patches,
beards, and the like. In the process, some of the mustachioed Imperial Soldiers opposing
the Pirate faction could have been read as loosely Hispanic, particularly in conjunction
with playset names like Eldorado Fortress (6276). In 1994 these racial dimensions became
more overt with the introduction of ‘Islanders’ whose lands the Pirates plundered; their
painted faces and mostly yellow bodies suggested near nakedness and the exoticized, sexu-
alized bodily difference of a colonial other. Minifigures from the 1996–7 Western theme
featured similarly painted Native American ‘Indian’ faces, and were among the first to add
noses to the familiar smiley-face design (see Figure 2). While painted faces had suggested
cultural practices of ethnic difference, these printed noses concretized physiognomic logics

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Johnson 315

Figure 3.  NBA minifigures with new race-differentiated color scheme (2003). Photo by author.

of difference among raced bodies. The 1998–2000 Ninja theme augmented minifigure
faces once more, with slanted eyebrows evoking stereotypical Asian caricatures. With
these new head/face differentiations came new torsos, legs, helmets, capes, weapons, and
accessories to connote specific ethnic, gender, sex, and class roles.
Licensing disrupted these existing visual rhetorics of racial embodiment, however, by
refusing the continued invisibility of blackness. While LEGO had evoked racial and
ethnic difference in Pacific Islander, Native American, and Asian minifigure bodies, it
did so by adding facial markers and accessories to standard minifigure heads in pigment
24 Yellow. Further modification of that universal yellow to represent blackness (however
more or less problematic) apparently could not be adequately imagined, requiring for the
NBA license a wider color palette of differentiable skin tones (see Figure 3). This move
to multi-hued minifigure bodies to accommodate dominant bodily markers of blackness
and other racial difference certainly could have happened earlier given LEGO’s long-
standing interest in racialized narrative conflict in themes like Pirates. It is probable,
however, that LEGO saw little incentive to represent blackness until prompted by lucra-
tive licensing deals – given its middle-class White and Asian market core, and likely
industry assumptions about the limited, non-‘universal’ appeal of black representations
in a global market (see Havens, 2006). The license to represent already raced star/char-
acter bodies demanded that LEGO make blackness buildable.
At issue in the NBA products and subsequent licensed themes was the potential
inability to code and decode in LEGO form those ‘black’ bodies excessively marked as
such in other media. Take for example, Samuel L. Jackson, an African American actor
who has played characters twice embodied in LEGO form (Mace Windu from the Star
Wars prequels and Nick Fury from The Avengers). Could his characters’ bodies be ren-
dered outside the dominant visual semiotics of his blackness? Film scholar Donald Bogle
reads Jackson’s career-making roles as ‘bad mother fucker’ Jules Winfield in Pulp
Fiction and Ordell Robbie in Jackie Brown in relation to (but also ironic subversion of)

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316 International Journal of Cultural Studies 17(4)

Figure 4.  Samuel L. Jackson as represented by LEGO in minifigure form: Mace Windu (Star
Wars, 2005) and Nick Fury (The Avengers, 2013). Photo by author.

stereotypes of aggressive, dangerous, sexually charged black ‘buck’ masculinity (2001:

416, 421). Less generously, Colombe (2002) reads Jackson in relation to a ‘magical
African American male’ trope, where a seemingly powerful, wise black man enables the
success of a white man (or a group of white heroes, as in The Avengers). The popular
press too frames Jackson in explicitly black terms. A 2012 New York Times feature
recounts his connections with ‘the black community’ on location, his participation in
‘black schools, black fairs, black theaters, black churches,’ and his black cultural politics
in college. The article even includes an uncomfortable fan anecdote that posits Jackson
as part of a ‘set’ with fellow African American stars Morgan Freeman and Denzel
Washington (Jordan, 2012). Against this over-determined black masculinity, LEGO did
not have sufficient semiotic power to render Jackson’s Mace Windu in yellow smiley-
face. Although the Star Wars sets launched in 1999 with yellow faces, it was only after
LEGO replaced that universal standard with the new NBA color palette in licensed prod-
uct lines that Mace Windu would appear in the 2005 Clone Turbo Tank (7261) set (com-
plete with bad ass scowl). With a new color palette, Jackson’s black body could act as a
marker of physical difference and diversity in the licensed line (see Figure 4).
Yet this acknowledgement of difference and writing of black bodies like Mace
Windu’s into LEGO’s licensed Star Wars theme had implications for those yellow bod-
ies already in circulation. As it had with Mace Windu, LEGO did not rush to produce a
Lando Calrissian figure that evoked the likeness of African American actor Billy Dee
Williams (himself raced, sexed, and gendered as a former blaxploitation star and Colt
45 malt liquor spokeperson). Despite being a major figure in The Empire Strikes Back
and leader of the attack on the Death Star in Return of the Jedi, Lando remained unpro-
duced by LEGO until the 2003 Cloud City (10123) set, four years and at least 58

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Johnson 317

Figure 5.  Lando Calrissian and the normative yellow bodies of Luke, Han, and Leia (2003).
Photo by author.

playsets into the theme. With the Star Wars theme pre-dating the new NBA color palette
by several years, moreover, the blackness of Lando, when finally acknowledged, sat in
opposition to Star Wars characters already rendered in standard LEGO yellow (see
Figure 5). Therefore, the appearance of brown-skinned Lando alongside yellow-skinned
Luke, Han, and Leia in Cloud City newly troubled and raced all minifigures, licensed
and non-licensed, by implication. If yellow could stand in for the white norm from
which Lando was marked as different, then the one or two billion yellow minifigures in
circulation were not just bodies, but also clearly raced as normative, unmarked, white
bodies.
Countering these implications, LEGO removed all yellow minifigures from its
licensed themes from 2005 onward in favor of a Light Nougat color meant to represent
white skin, with non-normative Nougat, Brown, Reddish Brown, Earth Orange, and
Dark Orange pigments offered in the case of Mace Windu, Nick Fury, various security
guards, and nameless (often nearly nude) natives, cannibals, and zombies in the Indiana
Jones, Prince of Persia, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Lone Ranger themes. While the
new color palette offered new possibilities for acknowledging and building bodies of
color, these representations remained limited, situated within these exoticized, dehuman-
izing, othered frames when they did appear. Ultimately, LEGO isolated its licensed and
non-licensed representational practices from one another and differentiated the logic of
gendered and sexualized racial embodiment at work in each. After the brief disruption
caused by Lando, the licensed realm of LEGO minifigures would support a separate
racial order of buildable blackness so that the non-licensed realm could be claimed as a
space where such black-and-white (and sometimes brown) logics were transcended via a
colorblind, universal yellow body.

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318 International Journal of Cultural Studies 17(4)

Licensing as racial scapegoat

Just as important as representational conventions were LEGO’s attempts to make these
visual strategies and market differentations meaningful through promotional, public
relations discourses that framed those practices in ideological ways. Press releases,
interviews, and customer service websites all worked to regulate the meaning of these
racialized bodies in relation to the branded corporate identity of The LEGO Group.
That regulation of shifts in representation, moreover, occurred in parallel to larger,
concerted efforts to re-articulate LEGO brand identities between 2001 and 2004. As
brand management researchers Schultz and Hatch characterize those efforts in 2001–2,
LEGO confronted a condition of brand fragmentation marked by ‘disconnected sub-
brands and endorsed brands, which together form[ed] an incoherent brand architecture
with no overall guiding principles’ (2003: 12). In response, a corporate taskforce work-
ing across LEGO’s many global divisions developed a new brand architecture to sup-
port both a centralized, universal corporate identity and a range of decentralized
stakeholders, clarifying what LEGO might stand for across heterogeneous cultural
arenas. The new strategy positioned LEGO products within categories of consumer
experience, with classic LEGO construction sets and attendant minifigures framed as
the means to ‘Make & Create’, while Star Wars, Harry Potter, and other licensed sets
became a path to ‘Stories & Action’ (Schultz and Hatch, 2003: 13). The division of
racial logics across licensed and non-licensed product, therefore, followed emerging
divisions of brand identity.
We can consider any disavowal or delegitimation of licensing – and the logics of
racialized representation articulated to it – as similarly connected to shifts in construction
of corporate identity. Studying the effects of mediatization on LEGO’s brand identity,
Esben Karmark explains how, between 1996 and 2004, LEGO tried to encompass a
whole range of ‘values related to children’s play and development’ across electronic
games and other media, and yet the overall corporate culture gradually began excluding
workers and divisions engaged in these endeavors from claims about the ‘core idea and
core business’ (2009: 112, 117). Divisions like LEGO Media, for example, struggled to
assert their belonging to that core LEGO brand identity. Furthermore, with no Star Wars
films released to drive demand for licensed LEGO toys in 2003–4, executives reasoned
that ‘over-reliance on the license based products … made the company too vulnerable
and unprepared for the market conditions in years in which no such media sensations
were forthcoming’ (Karmark, 2009: 119–20). Karmark describes LEGO’s expulsion of
screen media products from core corporate identities and strategies not as a complete
‘de-mediatization’ but instead a pursuit of ‘mediatization balance’ averse to fully center-
ing media productions in the construction of corporate brands and cultures (2009: 125).
LEGO’s two-pronged logic of racialized representation, therefore, followed corporate
tensions between core brands and decentralized processes of media licensing, offering a
mediatization balance by simultaneously enabling licensed practices and denying their
centrality to the core brand and corporate mission. The divisions and exclusions under-
girding these large-scale brand reorganizations played out at the level of racial represen-
tation and the willingness of LEGO to meaningfully acknowledge that representation
within its brand identity.

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This meant situating the explicitly raced logics of the licensed minifigure in relation
(and often, in opposition) to the core values that LEGO managers and marketers wished
to publicly associate with the brand. Particularly central to these values were self-
reflexive corporate claims to a special understanding of childhood in performances of
LEGO’s corporate identity. Former President and CEO Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen once
claimed, ‘I believe using our products can lead a mind down orderly paths into new
areas of thought and imagination. They are tools that unlock the mind’ (Richards, 1998).
From the rebranding efforts of 2001–4 came a refined company mission statement to
‘nurture the child in each of us’, accompanied by assertions that ‘[c]hilden are our role
models. They are curious, creative, and imaginative’ (Schultz and Hatch, 2003: 8).
LEGO repositioned itself as for children, but also uniquely in touch with essentialized
qualities of childhood – attuned to common-sense ideologies about childlike needs,
interests, and ways of seeing the world – very much in line with the strategies by which
childhood is often marketed in television and other media industries (Banet-Weiser,
2008). With LEGO claiming values in childhood creativity and education as much if not
more so than entertainment, many critics saw media licensing as ‘compromising’ that
branded focus (A brick too far, 2006; Cross and Smits, 2005). Thus, in 2006 new CEO
Jorgen Vig Knudstorp pushed to refigure licensing within the company’s stated values:
‘Intellectual property, whether it’s Bob the Builder or Star Wars, just provides a much
richer universe for children. That’s the beauty of linking LEGO to other properties …’
(Pomphrey, 2006). Licensing had to be situated within the preferred values of LEGO’s
brand identity.
In some cases, this also meant reframing licensing practice and industrial power rela-
tions within claims about LEGO’s traditional values, thereby defusing any threat to that
identity. In 2006, Vig Knudstorp admitted that the company ‘had lost its identity’ in the
past, but positioned licensing as a return to a core corporate purpose, rather than a devia-
tion. ‘It’s important that the licensing partners we work with provide an experience that
is on par with LEGO’s values,’ he explained. ‘We are quite particular about who we
choose to work with.’ This claim significantly reframed in terms of preferred corporate
values and identity the economic and contractual power relationships defining LEGO’s
licensing agreements. Contractually speaking, LEGO paid media conglomerates like
Disney and Time Warner for the license to produce Star Wars or Batman sets, with all
work subject to that licensor authority. LEGO performed playset design and production,
and those media licensors had power of approval over that work to ensure compatibility
with overall brand objectives. Yet corporate disclosures about the licensing process sug-
gesed contradictorily that media licensors actually bore responsibility for conforming to
LEGO’s core values and identity. LEGO denied its status as the contracted, subordinate
contributor to other companies’ brands, and suggested instead that it was the licensors
who had been permitted access to the LEGO brand. Against the delegitimating power of
dominant discourses about licensing, LEGO positioned its ‘partners’ as those who must
prove their legitimacy.
Specific discourse about licensing has also been deployed to protect the LEGO brand
from the racialized meanings opened by shifts in minifigure production. On LEGO’s offi-
cial website, questions of race and visual representation have been directly invoked in the
corporate ‘Knowledge Base’, alongside frequently asked questions about replacement

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320 International Journal of Cultural Studies 17(4)

parts, factory processes, and company history. Responding to the question ‘Why do most
minifigures have a yellow skin color?’ the institutional voice of LEGO explained:

We have chosen this neutral color in the past to avoid assigning a specific ethnicity in sets in
which there were no characters represented. In this way, LEGO figures would be universally
acceptable all over the world and fans could assign their own individual roles.

LEGO avoided naming ‘race’ as part of its corporate practice in favor of the language of
ethnicity, yet denied even complicity in that, claiming (quite counter-factually, given the
Islanders and Ninjas) a history of universalism and colorblindness, unwilling to acknowl-
edge minifigures’ participation in racial or ethnic orders. As the explanation continued,
licensing was implied as a key factor in these considerations and corporate contradic-
tions of race and ethnicity:

[h]owever, in conjunction with some new products, in which we want figures to be as authentic
as possible, such as the NBA characters, and others we plan in the future, some figures included
will now be represented in different ethnic roles to stay true to their characterization. (LEGO,
2012)

In response to similar questions on tech website Gizmodo, LEGO representatives

foregrounded licensing even more explicitly as the driving force in the production of
racial and ethnically distinct minifigures:

When the minifigure was first introduced 30 years ago, it was given the iconic yellow skin tone
to reflect the non-specific and transcendental quality of a child’s imagination. In 2002, as more
licensed properties were added to the assortment, the decision was made to introduce ethnic and
skin tones more in keeping with the actual characters and personalities who were being
represented.… However, these ethnic minifigures are only used in our licensed sets, all Lego
playthemes continue to use the generic yellow face. (Diaz, 2008)

LEGO’s invocation of a core childhood identity – where the child is both served as
consumer and emulated as role model – underwrote its imagined colorblind politics,
where the company claimed to view the world as a child might be imagined to see,
innocent and untainted by race. In this utopian vision, LEGO imagined and performed
not just post-racial corporate identity, but pre-racial: innocent as a child, pure at its
core, and non-complicit in the racial order. Only the external, industrially differenti-
ated arena of licensing threatened that childlike innocence and fantasy of pre-racial
transcendence – and so LEGO simultaneously promised the containment of that threat
to the externalized, illegitimate licensed realm, underwriting continued transcendence
and transcendent corporate identity at the ‘core’. LEGO’s public acknowledgement
and disavowal of its racial politics were limited to these very few moments, but as such
they are demonstrative of a concerted, managed attempt to offer a single branded nar-
rative. Individual emails to the company inquiring about racial representation met with
the same word-for-word, scripted responses (Hughes, 2008). While infrequent, such
statements carefully managed the politics of the post-racial in relation to the LEGO
brand.

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Johnson 321

Fan-organized spaces like the Eurobricks forums reveal how some LEGO consum-
ers (in this case, mostly self-proclaimed Adult Fans of LEGO, or AFOLs) acknowl-
edge this corporate identity work and the opposition between racial licensing and the
pre-racial LEGO ‘core’. The licensed Pirates of the Caribbean line introduced in 2011,
for example, overlapped in theme and ultimately came to replace the core, non-licensed
2009–10 Pirates products. Yet instead of thematic compatibility, many AFOLs read the
differing racial orders across two similar product lines as a potential barrier to contin-
ued Pirate building, and at the least a provocation for confronting the epistemology of
race in LEGO product. One user poll on Eurobricks asked ‘How does the POTC theme
fit into your world?’ with fixed-response options reflecting a struggle to resolve the
differing racial logics across these two types of Pirate minifigures. Some users agreed
that they would need to ‘remove the flesh parts’ from Caribbean sets to integrate them
with the existing Pirates theme; others would ‘remove the yellow minifigures’ to privi-
lege the new sets, or else retrofit their old Pirates minifigures with new licensed heads.
Others responded that they would mix minifigures interchangeably, as ‘colour means
nothing’. Nevertheless, the existence of the poll and its ability to draw multiple
responses suggest that these so-called ‘fleshie’ minifigures were not unproblematically
integrated into the LEGO core by consumers (Eurobricks, 2011). As licensed, they
were understood – as preferred by LEGO corporate discourse – to have an insulated
racial logic.
In this sense, licensing can finally be understood not just as an industrial practice but
also a discourse deployed to manage racialized meanings associated with LEGO minifig-
ures and the corporate brand as a whole. Licensing evoked a special realm of work sepa-
rate from the values or representational logics of the LEGO brand itself, distancing the
company from the very racialization in which it productively participated, and re-articu-
lating that racialization to an externalized, othered industrial force. By pointing to this
licensed other, LEGO presented itself and its core products not as the agent of a racial
order, but instead as something raceless – ‘transcendental’ and ‘universal’ – to be imag-
ined beyond those categories. Claiming to serve children and see the world through their
creative, imaginative eyes, LEGO constructed a corporate identity of purity and inno-
cence. By invoking licensing as a special space of exception to those core values where
complicity with racial politics was contained, LEGO could frame that identity as specifi-
cally non-culpable and thereby pre-racial. Important here is not that LEGO accurately
described its historical practices and ideological outlook on race, ethnicity, and social
difference in general, but instead that there was a contradiction of industrial identity
being meaningfully managed. The homogenized, ‘neutral’ 1978 minifigure could easily
be read as white by default, even compared to earlier versions of LEGO figures released
a year earlier. In 1977, LEGO experimented with larger figures, and as the name of the
Red Indians (215) set suggested, the company had already used bold primary colors of
yellow and red to make race legible – long before the more ‘authentic’ color palettes used
in licensing or the specialized face printing used to represent Native Americans, Ninjas,
and Islanders. But the discourse of licensing denied this racialized representational his-
tory, affirming through industrial opposition the universal, transcendental, pre-racial
identity that LEGO performed to legitimate its racialized representational practices in
accordance with post-racial cultural politics.

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322 International Journal of Cultural Studies 17(4)

Figure 6.  LEGO’s normative logics of racial representation. Photo by author.

Conclusions
The collision of media licensing and the embodied racialization of the LEGO minifig-
ure demands our attention for at least three reasons. First, licensing prompted new rep-
resentational strategies in the production of buildable LEGO bodies, suggesting that
industrial convergences have real impact on how embodied identities are constructed
and imagined. While LEGO did trade in racialized representations previously, its licens-
ing program reshaped those conventions. Second, licensing prompted confrontations
with representational norms that might not have been otherwise recognized or visible as
raced. As LEGO experimented with new skin tones to be ‘authentic’ to its licenses, the
normative whiteness of its yellow minifigures and the invisibility of blackness in its
‘core’ construction toys became easier to recognize. While I have focused on 1.5 inch
yellow minfigures here, the licensed representation of bodies in new material forms
might pose similar questions for the yellow skin of the Simpsons, the racial ambiguity
of anime characters rendered in mukokuseki aesthetics, or any representational practice
where normativity is disguised. Of course, LEGO’s solution to the representational
challenges of licensing ultimately preserved racial normativites and invisibilities by
disavowing the persistence of race outside of its licensed themes. Third, then, licensing
served as a discourse with which to construct industrial identities by opposition to race,
allowing LEGO claim to simultaneously pre- and post-racial identities in juxtaposition
to licensors complicit in racial logics. In allowing blackness and other forms of alterity
to be spoken, licensing was framed as the other against which ‘core’ corporate meanings
and values could transcend race, rooted in fantasies of innocent, childlike purity.
While this case highlights a need to look to toys and other physical objects as part of
the racialized mediation of bodies, it also reveals media licensing as a structure for
reframing and transforming representational logics, as well as a way to make raced, gen-
dered, sexed, and classed cultural production industrially meaningful and identifiable,

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Johnson 323

yet subject to transcendental disavowal. Not merely defined by contracts and intellectual
property, licensing is bound up in the production of identity in both material form and
corporate discourse. Licensing has allowed LEGO to secure a claim to pre-racial corpo-
rate identity that excuses its heightened investment in race in an increasingly post-racial
world. Like the post-racial, the pre-racial works here to pathologize blackness, rendering
it ‘de-raced or e-raced’ (Joseph, 2009: 165); but by enabling claims to a pure, childish
innocence, the pre-racial disavows complicitity in the racial order in favor of a fantasy of
brand and racial purity. Race sits in tension between the discursively delegitimated realm
of licensing, and a non-licensed, unsullied, mythic, core corporate identity.
To clarify, the problem with the racialized logic of LEGO licensing is not that raced
minifigures thwart a colorblind cultural utopia. Even as licensed LEGOs frequently
dehumanize non-white bodies in their marketed configurations, the existence of non-
normative minifigure bodies enables LEGO users to newly build race in their worlds of
play. Consumers need not follow the provided instruction manuals in constructing iden-
tity; they can freely mix and match parts from different sets – licensed and non-licensed
– to articulate race in their own ways. If LEGO had retained its classic yellow bodies for
its licensed products, race would remain largely unspeakable and unbuildable, diminish-
ing any claim to power and identity that could be had in blackness and other forms of
alterity positioned at the intersection of screen media and brick. Instead, the problem
with the racial logic of LEGO licensing is that the potential to overturn this normative
whiteness and recognize silencing of other subjectivities has been disavowed, assigned
to a delegitimated industrial other so that claims to colorblind ‘universal’ identities can
continue.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

Notes
1. This material is accessible at amateur archives like Brickipedia (lego.wikia.com).
2. The 2012 Town Hall (10224) playset, for example, displays the crest of company town
Billund.

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Author biography
Derek Johnson is Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of
Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. He is the author of Media
Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries (New York University
Press, 2013) and the co-editor of A Companion to Media Authorship (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).

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