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Transcript of barbie presentation --
The Representati
on of Female Body
The Barbie Doll
A Little Girl’s best friend...synonymous of perfect body
• Western ideal of beauty
• Perfect Plastic
• Plastic: Can hold any shape and can reproduce the tiniest of details. Makes perfect what nature makes approximate.(M.G Lord)
• Can Barbie’s body be naturally achieved?
• Tiny waist: promotion of anorexia?
• Over the years, Barbie did not grow older but did somehow gain weight to become more life-like.
• Importance of the issue of Barbie’s weight. Controversy of “Barbie Slumber Party” sold with bathroom scale set at 110 lbs (49kg).
• With such mensurations, Barbie wouldn’t be able to conceive a child. Moreover, the doll has never been anatomically correct despite being fashionable correct.
• Barbie had many jobs, but never had a mother role as such, and never got married. However her best friend “Midge” got married to Alan with whom she had 2 children : Ryan and a unnamed child featured in the “Happy Family” collection. In this story, Barbie is portrayed as the “baby doctor”
• Barbie, instead promotes the image of the modern woman, the career woman.
• Recent ranges of Barbie doll such as “Pink” portraying her almost as a bimbo girl.
What representation of womanhood does she give?
Universal ideal of beauty?
• Contested view of beauty
• Western representation of perfect body with no taboo, opposed to eastern view of woman and repression of the body.
• Barbie Totally Stylin’ Tattoos: good or bad image to give? Is Barbie an influential model? As Bordo suggests, body has almost become a simple commodity.
• Fulla Doll (or Islamic Barbie): clothing covers her from head to toe. Different ideal: “promoting good virtues for little girls”.
• Plasticity of postmodern paradigm.
• Desire for perfect body as the sign of normalisation in the modern society. Body no longer customised
• Body standardised along icons such as Barbie or Madonna
• The society does not seem to put any limit to the transformations of the self. According to Bordo, media encourages the audience to “choose” their body
• While technology used to be designed to replace malfunctioning part of body, it is now used to redesign the self
• Body is then materialised.
• Influence of Barbie on girls: Kids Beauty Pageants.
Susan Bordo and the cultural plastic of the female body