If These Barbies Could Talk. The Prostitute Behind The Saint

From a sociological point of view, the Barbie doll can be represented through a threefold conception: she is a pop icon, a symbol of feminism or, conversely, an emblem of the globalization of markets and the commodification of the female body. From an educational point of view, Barbie represents not only a plastic archive of the images of femininity and fashion that have taken place from the late 1950’s to the present, but a ‘politically correct’ product that, in recent decades, has espoused, in a logic of profit or solidarity, various movements of social inclusion. Barbie has transformed her own ‘body’ into that of a disabled person, a woman with Down Syndrome, a woman affected by alopecia or vitiligo. The subversive aspect of Barbie, nonetheless, is that she was not made, like many toys for little girls, for the purpose of educating motherhood, but with the goal of socializing little girls to an adult femininity, however worthy of the ‘best party’. Beginning with a brief analysis of patriarchal archetypes of femininity – the virgin, the mother, the prostitute – this contribution turns to the socio-political value of Barbie. Generated from a doll model (Bild Lilli) representing a miniature prostitute, Barbie gave little girls back their ‘sexual bodies’. Not a virgin, not a mother, no longer a prostitute: Barbie is a redeemed sinner who, from the iron male grip, puts herself back into the hands of little girls and restores their power to self-determine.