Astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz would much rather talk about space than American Girl dolls. But an uncanny resemblance between the real-life scientist and a recent toy from the Mattel-owned company has dominated many of Walkowicz’s conversations since American Girl’s 2018 Girl of the Year descended from Good Morning America’s studio ceiling, met by an adoring crowd of young girls dressed in blue astronaut suits.
Walkowicz’s inbox and social media profiles were soon inundated with notes from surprised friends and peers, who were amazed by the many visible details the doll had in common with Walkowicz’s distinctive public image: The doll sports a similar purple streak of color in its hair, holographic boots, even a near-identical first name, Luciana. (The doll’s surname, however, is Vega.) Some were at first convinced that Luciana was simply the younger, official doll version of the real-life Lucianne. One longtime friend glanced at the company’s January/February 2018 catalog while flipping through her mail.
“She spotted what appeared to be me on the cover,” Walkowicz recalls. “She called me, ‘Please tell me how this happened.’” Walkowicz had no answer other than: “Oh my god, it’s me.”
“It was not just the superficial details of this doll,” they tell me in one of the only interviews they’ve granted on the subject. “It was also career details.” They tend to keep busy with other projects: They rank among the most widely seen figures in science today. As a TED Senior Fellow and an astronomer at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, Walkowicz’s many lectures reach an audience of millions. They often touch on two prominent themes: the ethics of Mars exploration and findings from NASA’s Kepler mission, which focused on a northern region of the sky with the constellation Lyra at its center. Vega — a name Walkowicz has publicly uttered many times — happens to be the brightest star in that constellation.
American Girl describes the Vega doll as having “a head for science” and a “heart set on exploring Mars.” To Walkowicz, it all seems to go beyond mere coincidence. “That I am aware, there is no one else who works on the Kepler Field and Mars exploration at the same time — except for this doll, apparently.”
Discussions with the company were unproductive, says Charles Lee Mudd Jr., Walkowicz’s lawyer. Mudd filed a federal trademark lawsuit for his client in late April. In the complaint, Walkowicz alleges the toymaker copied their likeness without authorization. The lawsuit requests that Mattel, American Girl’s parent company, stop selling the doll.
“The message seems to be, go out, make a unique identity for yourself in STEM, be creative and we’ll turn around and steal your identity from you,” Mudd says.
The lawsuit outlines several instances when American Girl employees and consultants were exposed to Walkowicz’s research before the Luciana Vega doll emerged. Designer Rebecca DeKuiper and several of her colleagues reportedly attended a 2014 lecture at the Monona Terrace Convention Center in Madison, Wisconsin, located less than 10 miles from the company’s offices in the suburbs. At Monona Terrace, Walkowicz once again spoke about the Kepler mission. In October 2016, American Girl doll consultant and NASA scientist Ellen Stofan appeared at the White House Frontiers Conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where Walkowicz also spoke; one month later, American Girl filed a trademark for “Luciana.”
A Mattel PR responded by saying that they could not “comment on pending litigation,” per corporate policy. The company has a long record of headline-grabbing lawsuits and a legal department known for advancing litigation against artists and musicians. “American Girl takes great pride in creating original characters for girls,” a representative said in an email “We take any allegations to the contrary extremely seriously and intend to defend the case vigorously.”
If the lookalike doll wasn’t enough of a headache, the fact that it’s marketed so heavily as a cisgender girl has caused misgendering migraines for Walkowicz, who had begun opening up publicly about being nonbinary when the doll was released. “This character is so clearly using my identity,” they say. But with the doll drawing so heavily on their public persona, they say the doll’s deliberate femininity and popularity reinforces “a version of me that is also not accurate.”
For Walkowicz, the case underscores some of the lesser-known tensions in being openly nonbinary within STEM fields.
When the Luciana Vega doll was released, it earned glowing press as a “role model encouraging girls to reach for the stars,” per a news article in CNN, one of many positive stories following the doll’s release. Such coverage described the doll as a part of the broader cultural impetus to inspire young women to pursue careers in fields like astronomy, where structural barriers, stereotypes, and sexism have long kept white cisgender men in the majority while locking out many women, especially Black women and women of color.
Walkowicz has long advocated for women in astronomy. But as they’ve navigated their social transition, they’ve also found that kind of advocacy work can sometimes lead to the erasure of people who do not neatly fit the cisgender binary. When they showed up on set in 2018 to film a public service campaign for the Ad Council, Walkowicz was excited to support the mission of inspiring middle school girls. They didn’t know, however, that they would be assigned a pronoun — the ad’s tagline reads “She can STEM. So can you.”
In the weeks since the American Girl lawsuit was filed, they say the persistent misgendering in the media has become “a source of anxiety.” Nearly every news outlet — from the Associated Press to The Daily Mail to the Wisconsin State Journal — has misgendered them, using “she/her” pronouns and referring to them as a “famous female astronomer.” It’s an unfortunate reality for many trans and gender diverse people, who often face undignifying coverage in mainstream media.
“There is this fundamental tension within the field where people want science to be more inclusive but sometimes actually end up exacerbating exclusionary concepts, ideas, ways of categorizing people that are not helpful,” they tell me.
Walkowicz acknowledges that these endeavors often brush over the nuanced stories of trans, gender diverse, and queer STEM professionals, who occupy so very few seats at the table of powerful scientists. Walkowicz says they’re often the only nonbinary person at consequential board meetings and on conference speaking schedules. At the same time, Walkowicz emphasizes they are “very much in support of” elevating the stories of women leaders as role models.
Unsurprisingly, the company promotes Vega as its first STEM-themed doll, and it’s one of many “firsts” American Girl has marketed in the past two decades: The 2020 doll, for example, is sold as the first Girl of the Year with hearing loss; the 2019 version is a chef-in-training who’s diagnosed with a food sensitivity; and the 2017 doll overcomes her stutter through dance and poetry. In 2017, the company also introduced Logan, its first doll marketed as having a male gender.
It’s not inconceivable to imagine American Girl revealing a doll akin to the gender-neutral Barbie that Mattel debuted last year, as a part of the company’s ongoing attempts to diversify its doll line — efforts that have been celebrated for bringing greater representation to the politics of playtime as well as criticized as begrudging and profit-driven moves meant to prop up the company’s lagging sales.
That’s why, in addition to seeking compensatory, punitive, and other damages, Walkowicz hopes the pending lawsuit might teach American Girl executives a lesson about consent.
“It’s a really bad example for little kids,” Walkowicz says. “I can’t think of anything less empowering for gender minorities in STEM than having your identity taken without your permission and used to sell a commercial product.”
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