“Life in Plastic, It’s Fantastic”: Barbie as a Material and Cultural Object (Bea Harvey)

Why is our culture perennially fascinated with Barbie? When your childhood is more than a decade behind you, it’s difficult to pin down her appeal. I scrolled through pages of tiny plastic high-heeled shoes on Amazon, watched clips of Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse on Youtube, and skimmed countless think-pieces on the corrosive influence of her minuscule waist on the minds of young girls. Somewhere in that vast sea of pastel pink, I began to feel like a traveler in a foreign country, trying to decipher a language I learned long ago and now retain only a few scant phrases of. I remember owning at least a dozen Barbies when I was a girl, though I didn’t refer to any of them as “Barbie.” They each had their own names, which suggests a conscious effort to de-Barbiefy them, to incorporate them into the nebulous fictional universe I constructed during playtime. I don’t remember the specifics of that universe as well as I remember the sensual experience of playing with Barbie. I remember holding her upside-down by her ankles and dragging her like a cudgel behind me, the difficulty of getting a grip on her slick plastic skin. I was the sort of kid that was convinced my toys had feelings, so I never tortured her or whacked her against a wall, but I knew plenty of kids that found a perverse sense of pleasure in doing so. I say perverse, because it’s difficult to view Barbie as an object; everyone, myself included, thinks of Barbie as a “her” and not an “it.” 

Beyond being a toy with feelings, Barbie is an extremely adaptable symbol. In her most basic iteration, she is a cheerful, squeaky-clean, hyperfeminine consumerist with an extensive and enviable resume. She can do any job, which will require a slew of accessories the size of your thumbnail. Depending on who you ask, she’s either a feminist icon and or a ditzy symbol of patriarchal oppression. She even has her own Instagram page, modeled after the pages of influencers and beauty gurus, on which she announced her partnership with M.A.C. last month. I imagine this makes her the only toy in the world with her own lipstick line. Barbie is enmeshed in a universe beyond the material world of her houses and sports cares and tulle ballet skirts. She exists within the digital space of video games, an animated TV show, a series of animated movies (which I remember genuinely enjoying) and online dress-up games, all of which hinge on her material existence but are also external to it. 

It’s difficult to clear through the vast web of cultural associations surrounding Barbie to get at the doll itself. Perhaps the easiest way to pin her down is to compare her with similar mass-produced toys. Unlike bobble-headed Bratz or minuscule Polly Pockets, Mattel at least gestures at verisimilitude with Barbie. She’s taller than most dolls at 11.5 inches, and at first glance, realistically proportioned. Her body is stylized, to be sure, but hardly outlandish. However, multiple online news outlets have created images of what Barbie would look like if she were a real woman; her head and facial features are cartoonishly big, and her waist too small. Others have compared the tall version of Barbie with the curvy version, or the petite with the wheelchair-bound model. Her body is a text, a source of anxiety for parents and media alike. This distinguishes her from the soft-featured ragdoll, whose body isn’t scrutinized or expected to teach children what adult women should look like. Barbie is burdened with a very serious task for a small piece of molded plastic. We treat her like a teaching tool, responsible for demonstrating visually what careers girls can expect, how they should dress, and how sexy or chaste they should be. 

Mattel's line of body-positive models, released in 2016

Barbie mutilated/defaced into a very creepy sculpture, a more sophisticated form of childhood iconoclasm

Perhaps when little girls reject Barbie, what they’re really rejecting is her instructional purpose. As I’ve already mentioned, plenty of children hate these dolls with a vitriolic passion. They brandish them like a weapon, deface them with Sharpies, and snip off their hair with safety scissors. These practices resemble iconoclasm, so what ideology within the Barbie-as-text are they reacting so strongly against? Perhaps its her particular brand of girlishness; hyperfeminine and pink, all soft round plastic and no sharp edges. This instructional purpose is built into the doll itself, an integral component of Mattel’s marketing strategy. In the early 1960’s, marketing researcher Ernest Dichter advised the company to “Convince Mom that Barbie will make a ‘poised little lady’ out of her raffish, unkempt, possibly boyish child. Underscore the outfits' detailing, and the way it might teach a roughneck to accessorize. Remind Mom what she believes deep down but dares not express: Better her daughter should appeal in a sleazy way to a man than be unable to attract one at all” (Pearson 233). While Dichter’s blatant misogyny may disgust modern audiences, we still expect Barbie to mold young girls, and we still use her as a vessel for all of our anxieties and unspoken desires. 

                              

A less polished and more uncanny version of Barbie 

She may teach social norms, but Barbie certainly can’t teach children about human anatomy. Beyond her unrealistic proportions, I’ve always found her face a little creepy; her painted-on eyes (traditionally electric blue) are vacant and unblinking, her mouth forever poised in a smile that doesn’t create dimples or disturb the rest of her face. In the words of one critic, Barbie is “a simulacrum of a human being, a sad grotesque: her creators gave her breasts but no nipples, flared hips but no womb, seductively spread legs but no vagina, [...] A twilight zone creature, as strange as her life-sized counterpart-the department store mannequin with the sterility of a lavender sheen on its cadaverous, blue-grey cheeks—she is an emblem of frustration and unfulfillment” (Cunningham 81). Cunningham is not the only one to find dolls disturbing. Freud cites dolls as a prime example of the uncanny, and as he points out, das Unheimliche (what we translate as “the uncanny,” but means something closer to “un-homelike”) is really just the inverse of the familiar. Barbie is both familiar and unfamiliar; she is recognizably human, and engages in activities that are familiar to most children, but her diminutive size and artificiality push her into the realm of the uncanny. It’s also difficult to talk about Barbie as a material object without bringing up plastic. Plastic in itself is a versatile symbol, indicating pliability, artificiality (think “The Plastics,” the clique of two-faced popular girls from Mean Girls), money (credit cards are often referred to as “plastic”), and American manufacturing. Barbie, like plastic, is more than a material object, and contains a vast array of cultural meanings. In a study on the material culture of Barbie, Pearson and Mullins concluded that “Barbie's profound symbolic magnetism, [...] rested upon something more compelling than her breasts, legs, or hair alone: Barbie was a career woman who symbolized genteel values, middle-class aspirations, impeccable style, and sexual self-determination” (230-231). Barbie is more than just a doll, she is a reflection of, enforcer of, or receptacle of ideology, depending on how you look at her. 

Barbie's (admittedly very cute) washer and dryer set

Reading the history of Barbie’s wardrobe and accessories provides a micro history 20th-century American feminine ideology. Barbie debuted in 1959, designed by Ruth Handler and named after her daughter Barbara. In the early 1960s, Barbie was a fashion doll that dabbled in light housework and other benign domestic activities like knitting. In the mid-sixties, her outfits changed to reflect the growing hippie subculture (psychedelic patterns, floral headbands, chunky platform heels), albeit scrubbed clean of its political radicalism. In the wake of second-wave feminism, the early 1970s saw the advent of career-driven Barbie, who eventually morphed into “Malibu Barbie” (an outdoorsy Californian with a sports car and a surfboard) as the decade progressed. Conservative resistance to the feminist movement under the Reagan administration prompted a regression in Barbie’s style. She became almost aggressively domestic; for the first time, she came with a small plastic baby as an accessory, and consumers could buy a little washer-and-dryer set for their child’s Barbie play set, though I can’t imagine what child pretended to do laundry for fun. The 80s also saw the first brand deals between Mattel and other major corporations. Barbie could express her love for McDonalds’ french fries as she waited for her clothes to come out of her tiny plastic drier. By the 1990s, she was a vessel for nostalgia, coveted by adult collectors as well as children. A resurgence in the feminist movement also brought Barbie back to the workplace, as evidenced by the first “President Barbie.”  

Barbie For President, c. 2000 (note the strong resemblance to Hilary Clinton)

This history would suggest that Barbie is a barometer for how women are perceived in a given time period. It also suggests her role as a teaching tool, which has prompted some to label her as propaganda for feminine ideology. But I would argue that it’s overly-simplistic to view Barbie as a straightforward piece of propaganda. Playtime, after all, is about rejecting dogmatic authority and vesting children with a sense of control. In other words, you can give your kid a plastic washing machine, but that’s no guarantee they’ll actually play with it. It may end up under the couch, collecting dust and graham cracker crumbs. This slipperiness is partly created by Barbie herself, whose material universe is rife with contradictions. President Barbie rubs elbows with Supermarket Barbie on store shelves, after all. Pearson and Mullins stress this point:

This amalgam of contradictory symbolisms is typical of the most compelling toys: their idealized symbolism may be uniform, predictable, and conservative, but to maintain their allure they provide some means to imagine new possibilities within (and sometimes against) dominant symbolism. Barbie socializes children, but toys discipline a child through imaginative play in which the consumer is expected to exploit the symbolic richness of the commodity (235-236). 

Psychologists even disagree on just how Barbie socializes children, and what she represents to the prepubescent mind. Some have labeled her a “transitional object,” a toy that helps the child detach from the mother. Under this theory, the girl places herself in her mother’s shoes when she plays with Barbie. She dresses the doll, styles her hair, and controls every aspect of her existence, much in the same way a mother (viewed as all-powerful by the child) controls her daughter’s life. But at the same time, Barbie is a full-grown woman, not an infant. In that sense, she can also represent the child’s full-grown mother, and cement the mother-child bond rather than erode it. 

Some critics argue that Barbie scratches an even deeper cultural itch. Most notably, M.G. Lord links her to ancient fertility figures, specifically the ancient archetype of the Mother Goddess. She is the  20th-century (and to a lesser extent, 21st-century) version of Venus. Like in ancient fertility cults, Barbie’s world prioritizes the feminine over the masculine and even exaggerates it to a cartoonish degree, much in the same way that the curvaceous proportions of Venus of Willendorf are cartoonishly feminine. Ken is an afterthought at best. As Lord explains, “The whole idea of woman as temptress, or woman as subordinate to man, is absent from the Barbie cosmology. Ken is a gnat, a fly, a slave, an accessory of Barbie” (77). Barbie, like ancient cult figures, is reproduced in myriad ways and to suit different cultural needs, and is an extremely tactile figure meant to be touched. The main difference between the two is that Barbie is mass-produced by a single-source, not to mention she's primarily geared towards children. 

Barbie next to Venus of Willendorf, a statuette from around 25,000 BCE and (arguably) Barbie's ancestress

As my understanding of Barbie shifted from dangerous propaganda to Mother Goddess, my fascination with her has never died down. I’m not even sure why I’m so invested in her as a cultural symbol, because Barbie was hardly my favorite toy. It was difficult to make her look like she was talking, because her arms could only swing up and down along one axis. I also found her size to be unwieldy; I preferred smaller toys that could stand on their own without my having to hold them up. Also, playing with Barbie had connotations that I recoiled from. A certain kind of girl embraced her, and in my more tomboyish years, I was determined to distance myself from that kind of girl. Ultimately, she was too perfect. My mother once bought me an expensive collector’s edition of Barbie that I wasn’t allowed to take out of the box, and I remember resenting this toy I couldn’t touch or play with. All Barbies had that slightly irritating quality, that touch-me-not blankness that I found a little daunting. Perhaps “blank” is the best adjective to describe Barbie, not “vacant.” Vacant implies emptiness and artificiality, but blank implies a text that can be inscribed on, a screen on which we can project whatever we like.  

Works Cited

Cunningham, Kamy. “Barbie Doll Culture and the American Waistland.” Symbolic Interaction, 

vol. 16, no. 1, 1993, pp. 79–83.

Lord, M.G. Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll. Walker & Company, 

2004. 

Pearson, Marlys, and Paul R. Mullins. “Domesticating Barbie: An Archaeology of Barbie 

Material Culture and Domestic Ideology.” International Journal of Historical 

Archaeology, vol. 3, no. 4, 1999, pp. 225–259.