138: Courtney: Friendship Superhero and American Girl Consumer

Dolls of Our Lives

Allison Horrocks and Mary Mahoney

Society & Culture, History

4.9 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 1 April 2024

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's 1986, and Courtney Moore's summer break is off to a great start. After participating in Hands Across America, she's ready to hit the arcade, read her American Girl catalogue, and make new friends, including a boy named Isaac. But Courtney faces unexpected challenges when she hits the books that fall. When others learn that Isaac is HIV positive, he is forced to leave Courtney's school. For this episode, we brought in an expert to talk about Courtney's ensuing public health campaign and what someone her age would have known about the HIV crisis in the mid-1980s. Our special guest Myrna Moretti, a PhD Candidate at Northwestern University, also gave us great insight into how Courtney consumes technology, '80s arcade culture, and the real queer-led activist movement that fought for a cure for HIV/AIDS.

Special Note: As we shared in the introduction, we have decided to end the show after covering "Meet Isabel and Nicki" on our next episode. We are so grateful for five wonderful years with this amazing community of listeners! We will keep the Discord community active and hope it continues to thrive (we love being part of it ourselves!) and will not produce a Patreon episode in April.

We will be recording the final episode soon and would love to share your messages and answer a few questions. You can share messages and questions with us here: https://forms.gle/uzDk7A9DpScA5RvK8

We will also post on Instagram to collect messages and questions there.

Thank you again for enriching our lives, and this show, beyond measure.

Resources:

Here is a lecture by Dr. Cait McKinney referenced by our guest, Myrna: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHjXxV16So8&t=2006s

You can find episodes, resources, and a link to our merch store on our website: dollsofourlivespod.com

Order our book: Dolls of Our Lives: Why We Can't Quit American Girl

Order our audiobook: Dolls of Our Lives: Why We Can’t Quit American Girl (Digital Audio)

Check out books we mention at our bookshop.org storefront.

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome everyone to Dawes of our lives. This is the podcast where we're reliving the American Girl series book by book. I'm Mary.
0:07.3	I'm still Allison. And we wanted to come to you before we bring on our very exciting guest to talk about Courtney friendship superhero because we actually want to talk about the show itself.
0:18.5	Yeah, so we started this show really over five years ago, but for the past five years we've been
0:24.6	digging back into all of the historical characters and I hate to say it we have run
0:29.7	out of timeline we've run out of timeline we've run out of all the historical characters.
0:34.1	And you know, when we started this show,
0:36.3	we never could have imagined what it would become
0:39.9	and all the great stories that we would get to tell and all the stories that you would share with us.
0:44.8	And at the beginning, it was our hope to cover all the historical characters.
0:50.7	And now that we've come, you know, shockingly to our own lifetimes in terms of historical
0:55.8	characters, we're realizing we're approaching the end of the historical character stories
1:00.9	and you know, we've realized that this might be a natural point for us to you know just end the chapter of our story with the show as well.
1:09.0	Yeah, we started back with Felicity we took you you through Kirsten Addie. We colored all of our original
1:16.5	Samantha, Molly. We even branched out. Someone pointed out that we weren't even
1:21.1	sure of Neneas name five plus years ago because that wasn't part of our historical experience.
1:26.0	We've gone through Mary Ellen that was a trial. We did melody, Julie, we're covering Courtney,
1:31.5	Rebecca, Kit, Kaya.
1:33.8	If I've left anyone out, I'm so sorry, this is like an award speech at the Oscars and you can tell us,
1:38.8	but it's really been a pleasure to kind of get into all these girls world but we've gone over 300
1:44.7	plus years and that's where that's where American girl has chosen to end so
1:49.5	until they buy the rights to tell our life story,
1:52.5	which I think is any day now.
	...

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