an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 9, July - December 2012,
ISSN 1552-5112
Barbie and the Power of Negative Thinking:
Of Barbies,
Eve-Barbies and I-Barbies
Introduction
It is easy
to see in Barbie an emblem of superficial Western well-to-do middleclass
culture imbued by the firm belief that happiness can be conveyed by social
status, money, and consumption. Marilyn Motz summarizes a large part of Barbie
criticism when writing that the main skills transmitted to young girls by the
toy involves the “purchase of the proper high-status goods, popularity with
their peers, creation of the correct personal appearance, and the visible
achievement of ‘fun’ through appropriate leisure activities” (Motz: 122). If
there is anything “cool” about Barbie it is definitely different from the
classical Urban, “funky” cool mediated by irony, play, and occasional “warm”
outbursts. Barbie-cool comes closer to the White American, Puritan cool
determined by self-control and the unequivocal suppression of feelings.
However, Barbie is not merely cool in the sense of ‘unapproachable’ and
‘distanced’; a ludic aspect enters Barbie’s cool agenda on another level.
Barbie’s freedom is almost absolute because the realization of her ideal self
is not hampered by nuisances linked to working life or motherhood realities. In
other words, Barbie is cool not because she goes against the current of
society, because she fights for something or resists, but because she pushes
the values of consumer culture to an extreme. Her uncritical mind is not aiming
at the transformation of reality, but she turns the existing consumer reality
into a game and this establishes her coolness. According to Mary Rogers, Barbie
even “takes the signs of women’s subordination – bodily preoccupations,
niceness, perky personalities in many instances – and turns them into the stuff
of success, fun, excitement, and glamour” (Rogers: 36). If Barbie was more
outspoken and uttering occasional witty remarks to show that she herself is
aware of her cynical tactics, we could conclude that she is a dandy. Even her
sexiness is attuned to the lightness of a game in which everything is serious
but at the same time profoundly unreal. This is the only pattern able to
explain the strange fact that such a “cool” adult woman could ever enter the
rooms of innocent girls who are still supposed to be cute and not cool.
Barbie is inserted in a particular “modern” play world,
which is not “modern” in the contemporary sense, but in the sense in which past
generations imagined “modern life” to be: easy going, automated, and cool.
Through Barbie, this imaginary has been conserved, played, and perpetuated by
children in the form of an unalterable ideal. Motz states that Barbie “seems
strangely a woman of the 1950s, or even earlier, untouched by feminism and the
entry of women into the work force in large numbers. She remains a conformist
whose life is centered around leisure activities” (Motz: 125). However, Barbie
has no intention to refer back to the past, especially not to her own past,
which is that of Lilli, a German inflatable sex-doll that served as inspiration
for the Barbie creators (Rand: 29). Even though her entire existence has
already been superseded many times by coming generations, Barbie remains
fundamentally future-oriented because she never has to spell out in concrete
terms what “the future” is actually supposed to be. The world changes, but
Barbie continues radiating the cool and frozen ideal of an optimistic, positive
spirit that is neither against nor in favor of progressive feminism or conservative
motherhood values but simply exists beyond
both. This is possible because Barbie has the privilege of living within
the universe of children, that is, beyond economic, social, and political
constraints. For more than fifty years, Barbie has inhabited a world of mere
potentials where all options have remained open. In this sense, Barbie’s life
represents not adult society, but “adult society as seen by children in
1. Barbie and the Power of Positive Thinking
Urla and
Swedlund find that Barbie is all about “keeping control of one’s body” (Urla
& Swedlund: 298), but Barbie is also about keeping control of one’s
thoughts. While cuteness is often controlled by parents, cool attitudes can
easily get out of parents’ control. Barbie comes in exactly here because she
offers the acceptable alternative of playful, self-controlled coolness. Motz
writes that “what might at first appear to be a sexually suggestive doll (…) is
in actuality a model of self-control, using her sexuality to attract men while
ensuring that her relationship would remain platonic” (Motz 129). The invention
of Barbie fell into the decade in which Douglas E. Lurton’s book The Power of Positive Thinking (1956)
was one of the most bestselling books. A sentence from page 1 reads indeed like
a motto coined on the Barbie project: “Adopt the positive attitude and ask for
what you want from life.” Positive Thinking is basically self-controlled
thinking. In the preface, Lurton tells the story of a bespectacled Midwestern
boy (himself) whom everybody called the four-eyed owl and who was even too shy
to ask for a free baseball cap. At some point he began thinking positively, was
successful and became – cool. Of course, this is not necessarily the cool that
everybody would identify as such, but it worked well enough to make Lurton rich
and famous. According to Motz, Lurton’s book “provides guidelines to achieving
business success through personality and social contacts. Personality (…)
replaced character as the primary measure of one’s worth. A pleasant smile, a
well-groomed appearance, self-control and conformity replaced honesty” (Motz:
134). It goes without saying that no positively thinking Lurtonian would see
herself as dishonest. But still, Motz is right. Dishonesty can be found not
necessarily in the evil character of the subject, but in her lack of
self-criticism, in her narcissism and in her auto-hypnotic self-aggrandizement;
however, she definitely will not admit it or even be aware of it.
Lurton’s cool is the “innocent” cool of positively thinking
people like Barbie.
Most important is that everything remains simple: positively
thinking people do not like to complicate things. The simpler it is, the truer
it must be. The first sentence of the preface of The Power of Positive Thinking reads: “This is a simple book.”
Understanding the power of positive thinking means to understand its intrinsic
mechanics in terms of logic. Logic is
presented as a simple structure underlying all phenomena; negative thinking
tends to cover this structure with a web of unnecessary complications that must
be eliminated by Positive Thinking.
In the 1960s the toy market would be flooded with another
toy to which Barbie is not entirely unrelated: Lego. Both Barbie and Lego are
toys that are transformable or, to use Kim Toffoletti’s characterization of
Barbie, they are “neither entirely inflexible, nor prone to dissolution.” The
emphasis of both toys is on metamorphosis and reformulation without permitting
a rupture with the established system, which should still be accepted ion a
conformist manner: “All the while, the possibility of rupture is denied by the
elastic and malleable properties of her plastic frame. Barbie is neither
unitary, nor fragmented” (Toffoletti 58). Also Lego is held together by such an
underlying “logical” structure.
The first Lego catalogues praise the small bricks as “good
toys” because in the world of Lego, play is dominated by “simple” logical
connections able to foster, but also to control,
the child’s creativity and imagination. Imagination is good as long as it is
contained within the right “logical” structure. The child playing with Lego
will never have “bad” thoughts because the inherent “healthy” and logical
character of the game will simply prevent her from having such thoughts.
Similarly, “Barbie allows little girls to dream” but only within a limited
range of possibilities (Ducille 1994: 50). In early advertisements, Lego
announces that this toy is “the simplest thing in the world.” Also Barbie is
“the simplest thing in the world” because she represents the basic, abstract
idea of a Western woman. Lego creates regular, geometrical shapes that come in
five to six basic colors. Lego creations are relatively abstract and do not
permit overly high levels of empathy and identification with the “real” thing.
After all, the young Lego engineer is not supposed to become an insane, exalted
poet-philosopher, but rather a healthy, creative and positively thinking
organizer. Interestingly, also Barbie’s main job is that of organizing. Both
Barbie and Lego depend on the modern ideal of the trained humanists who is
neither bohemian nor technocrat, but manages to rime a minimal amount of theory
(“logic”) with the requirements of practical life. Barbie girls and Lego engineers
are useful people functioning within well-established contexts. Neither is
supposed to transform the world, but
they may turn the world into a game whose space is highly controlled.
Fifty years later, it looks as if Barbie is related to Lego
more than ever because Lego has invested in the highly flexible and bendable
Bionicles of which Barbie might indeed be a precursor. Toffoletti calls Barbie
a “transformer” (58), the toy that can turn from a truck into a robot. Though logic is simple, it is also a matter of
science. Indeed another trait that Lurton’s book shares with Lego is that both
are so eager to adopt a “scientific” outfit. At the same time it is necessary
to introduce a good dose of play into the business of Positive Thinking because
it should not appear as dead serious. A convenient way of doing this is to say
that once the logic has been
understood and applied it will work like magic.
The logic-magic paradigm represents one of the most fundamental strategies of
Positive Thinking. A search on Google Books reveals that the word ‘magic’
appears at least twenty times in the book. It is also prevalent in Barbie and
Lego.
Lego
Bionicle
At first sight it looks as if Barbie anticipated Lego’s
later competitor Playmobil but the contrary is the case. True, Barbie is a
ready-made doll conceived for role play and so are the Playmobil persons.
However, Playmobil has a clearly traditional orientation contradicting the
futurist spirit of Lego with its spaceships and healthy technology as well as
that of Barbie with her exalted visions of a frozen and futurist modernity.
Playmobil specializes in traditional values like farms, Blackforest houses, and
post offices and is therefore nostalgic towards a past that Barbie never thinks
of. Playmobil offers no ideology whatsoever, not even the most basic and
“logical” one of Positive Thinking. In a word: Playmobil is not cool because
mere role play without any underlying ideology or logic (sometimes called
‘style’ or also ‘lifestyle’) will not make
you cool.
Playmobil
The link between Barbie and Lego has been further developed
within a body of research where one would perhaps not expect it. The German
sociologist Iris Osswald-Rinner analyzes the rhetoric of sex-guides for couples
from 1950 to 2010, dividing the sixty-year time span into distinct periods,
each of which puts forward characteristic “scripts” that can be derived from
the sex-guide culture of the époque. There is the “Sleeping Beauty” script from
the 1950s and the “Adam and Eve” script from the 1990s. Osswald-Rinner baptizes
the phase from 1977 to 1989 the “Barbie and Ken are Playing in Legoland” script
because it seems that sex has here been transformed into a creative adult game.
In this game Barbie and Ken are exempt from the norms of reality and can discover
their unique and personal sexuality and individual morals (Osswald-Rinner:
150). Osswald-Rinner is inspired by Barbie’s and Ken’s basic nakedness as well
as by their physical abilities and agility since they have joints that can be
turned hundred-eighty degrees (158-60). She justifies the association with Lego
with the fact that different sex-game components (foreplay, postponement,
interlude, etc.) are supposed to be “put together” just like Lego bricks. The
protagonists of the Barbie & Ken script are not only encouraged to combine
different elements and techniques but also to engage in “reasonable”
discussions about their projects. Barbie and Ken think always positively, see
sex as sport and accept all advices to stay healthy (no smoking and a good diet
are recommended). While the Sleeping Beauty protagonist from the 1950s could
still vaguely suspect her sexuality to be a dark and incontrollable power, for
Barbie the world contains no mysteries. Everything is under control and she can
even be advised to be more egoistic. Once the libido and the self are
established as clearly defined facts or bricks, sex becomes creative play
following logical rules that can be bent but not broken.
2. Barbie and the Power of Negative Thinking
It has been said above that Barbie’s
initial cultural environment of the 1950s is superseded, but that her abstract,
positive spirit could subsist in altered contexts, even in those contexts that
put forward more “negative” forms of thinking. There is a big difference
between Barbie herself and the ways in which Barbie can be played with, used or
applied. One reason why Barbie could survive for such a long time within the
world’s cultural imaginaries is that her stable essence invites subversion. Tap
her positive power, adapt it to your own “negative” purposes and you will have
powerful art, powerful countercultural expressions, powerful ethnic or
political agendas, powerful feminisms…
2.1. Eve-Barbies
When
Barbie becomes “negative” she turns into Eve. Art Barbies, Feminist Barbies,
and Ethno Barbies are Eve-Barbies. Eve-Barbie is no longer innocent but
something negative has penetrated her thinking. Eve-Barbie has abandoned all
playful attempts at organizing the dream of “modernity” and instead indulges in
lengthy phases of creative reverie. A certain drunkenness and romanticism from
which the original Barbie had always been excluded determine Eve-Barbie’s modes
of experience. The game of life consists no longer of putting together
logically coordinated experiential bricks. Instead, Eve-Barbie is able to
perceive her life in the form of fluent sequences. Bendable self-control is no
longer the word of the day but the focus has shifted towards imagined
transgression. Eve-Barbie is looking for “real” or at least imagined
adventures. This does not mean that she has turned into her ancestor Lilli, the
vulgar (and not very bendable) sex doll and the adult male’s pet. Eve’s model
of coolness comes closer to the classical Urban idea of cool: uncool is now
everything which is boring, self-reproducing, and conventional. This “positive”
and uncool world needs to be transgressed by imagining another, more exciting
life that offers different associations and different contents. While the
original Barbie contented herself with transcending an existing reality by
turning it into a perfect game without changing reality itself, Eve-Barbie has
evolved from an athletic player into a spiritual dreamer: instead of excelling
in her own perfection she is actively searching for her most authentic self.
Eve-Barbie’s freedom remains absolute, but since she has lost her innocence,
she cannot enjoy her freedom in the same lighthearted way as did the original
Barbie. Eve-Barbie changes the world by creating her own world. The original
Barbie was purely bodily, equipped with not more than a dull brain programmed
to think positively, which made her merely able to exalt the real world through
the power of Positive Thinking. Eve-Barbie on the other hand, is truly cerebral
and wants to think or dream her world;
and in order to do so she has to look for various inspirations. Eve-Barbie is
no longer the self-referential and narcissistic playgirl but she is there for
Adam who is dreaming with her.
The list of Barbie Art or “Altered Barbie
Artwork” is quasi infinite and most of them present Eve-Barbies. Barbie Art
probably started with Andy Warhol’s painting “Barbie” (1985) and
developed further from yard art (described by Jeannie Banks Thomas in her book Naked Barbies, Warrior Jones, and Other
Forms of Visible Gender) to subversive installations that turn Barbie into
the murderess of several Kens (see the work of photographer Mariel Clayton).
Artists inspired by Barbie include Peter Max, Kenny Scharf, Peter Engelhardt,
Jim Dine, Donald Baechlor, David Salle, Carol Peligan, Jennifer Barlett and
Robert Stern. What is striking with regard to most art that includes Barbie is
that in these installations or pictures, Barbie’s frozen smile and positive
power persist and radiate, though, or just because they have been introduced
into “negative” environments.
Peter Max,
“Futuristic Barbie” (Oil on canvas, 1994)
Carol
Peligan, “Icon” (mixed media, 1993)
Robert
Stern, “Colossus of Barbie” (Plaster, sand and wood dolls, 1998)
Counterculture has always found Barbie very inspiring as is
best shown by Erica Rand’s book on Barbie’s
Queer Accessories (1995). According to Rand, Barbie “has some features
particularly conducive to lesbian reappropriation” (
Barbie is empowering not only here. In
Third Wave feminists continued inserting Barbie into a
combative “Girls Can Do Anything Boys Can!” agenda. Characteristically, it did
not take Mattel long to wrench this ideology from the feminist context in which
Eve-Barbies are fighting for concrete things and to translate the political
program into the more abstract “We Girls Can Do Everything” slogan, a sentence
that could come right out of The Power of
Positive Thinking. In the thus entitled Barbie promotion video, girls are
shown as athletes, astronauts, and scientists and seem to obtain everything
they want (what do they actually want?) through play and a generally positive
Barbie attitude.
2.2. Ethno-Barbies
Ethno-Barbies
are another kind of Eve-Barbies though also here Mattel has done everything to
reconvert them to the original Barbie status, as will be shown below. Let us
first look at those Ethnic Barbies produced not by Mattel but by “local”
manufacturers. Most ethnic Barbies have a religious agenda and are designed to
suit an Islamic lifestyle. Razanne, Fulla, Jamila, Laila, Salma, Sara, and
Saghira represent counter-cultural attempts at producing Muslim Barbies as
alternatives to Western Barbies. The Japanese Jenny and Licca dolls are among
the few examples of “locally” produced non-Muslim
ethnic Barbies. Another one is the very recent Chinese Yue Sei Wawa doll
launched by Shanghainese Oprah-style talk show host Yue Sei
When the original Barbie was launched in
Much more than Japanese Barbies, Islamic Barbies pursue an
outspoken “anti-ideology” because they want to contradict Barbie’s “Western”
hedonistic and decadent lifestyle. Islamic Barbies wear the hijab (headscarf) and some come with the
traditional abaya and sometimes even
with a prayer rug. Trying to escape western ideologies of consumption and moral
laxness, these Barbies are different from the above mentioned Eve-Barbies: they
do not really claim the right to exist within more “negative” spaces determined
by critical (as opposed to
“positive”) thinking, but have been dogmatically equipped with their very own agenda of Positive Thinking.
Islamic Barbies are not really ethnic or counter-cultural, but are merely religious.
Anne Meneley thinks that “encapsulated within Chador Barbie’s form are two
icons of the ‘oppression of women’ that were built on other stereotypical
forms. [First] Barbie doll is an icon of sexualized, commodified femininity,
associated with the West. [Second] the chadored woman is an icon of masculine
control of woman’s sexuality” (Meneley 217). I would rather conclude that here
one form of Positive Thinking has supplanted another one or that one form of
civilizational progressionism has replaced another one: Lurton’s Positive
Thinking has been replaced with religious correctness and piety. Strictly
speaking, culture (ethno-culture,
counter-culture or any culture) cannot exist here. The spontaneity, critical
thinking and irony that artistic, counter-cultural, and feminist Eve-Babies
strive for in order to escape all
premeditated forms of Positive Thinking has necessarily been cancelled within
those enforced religious contexts. These Islamic Barbies are Eve-Barbies that
have been forced to play the game of innocence whose rules the original Barbie
never had to learn because she was innocent
– and this in spite of her coolness. In this sense they are no Eve-Barbies at
all. The original Barbie radiated the naïve innocence of a positive thinker and
could exalt and exaggerate the consumer world without ever becoming vulgar.
Muslim Barbies on the other hand, need to be protected from the vulgarity of
this world as well as from their own inherent potential vulgarity through a
veil and are asked to follow the rules of a religious life that is deemed more “positive.” Those imams do not
understand that the original Barbie is
the purest woman on earth because she simply exists beyond good and evil.
At some point Mattel recognized the commercial potential of
ethnic Barbies. In the early 1980s, Black, Hispanic, and Oriental Barbies were
introduced, and by now the number of Mattel-made ethnic Barbies is impressive.
In 2009 Mattel launched the so-called “Ghetto Barbie” who is styled in Hip Hop
fashion. However, just like the imams who commodified Muslim culture or even
religious sentiment (Shirazi: 11) by creating a religious Barbie, Mattel
commodifies the ethnic aspect of Barbies by eliminating any trace of negativity
still able to testify of cultural authenticity. This does not mean that this
commodification is superficial; far from it - as it is not limited to a change
of skin color: many ethnic Barbies are manufactured from specially designed
face molds that attempt to insinuate ethnic facial features. Still Urla and Swedlund
believe that Mattel reduces cultural difference “to surface variations in skin
tone and costumes that can be exchanged at will [and that] ethnicity is tamed
to conform to a restricted range of feminine beauty” (Urla & Swedlund:
284). Also Ann Ducille criticizes, in her book Skin Trade, Mattel’s attempts to make
ethnic Barbies “authentic” when writing: “Today Barbie dolls come in a rainbow
coalition of colors, races, ethnicities, and nationalities, [but] all of those
dolls look remarkably like the stereotypical white Barbie, modified only by a
dash of color and a change of clothes” (Ducille 38). Also Amina Yaqin writes
that the “Indian Barbie” sold at Indian airports is an Indian or South Asian
Barbie who is essentially American in body and “plays at being Indian through
dress and performativity” (Yaqin: 178). Even more radically, Radha Hedge
perceives the Indian Barbie as “an orientalist fantasy of white femininity,” as
an “artifact,” a “portable tradition,” or a normal Barbie with “added
Indianness” (Hegde 2001: 131).
In spite of Mattel’s efforts to engage in more than mere
changes of skin color and the adding of some ethnic clothes, those Barbies
persistently yield the impression that Barbie’s Caucasian identity persists and
that ethnicity has here merely been commodified and marketed. The reason is
that Mattel has turned ethnic culture into a positively oriented aspect of a
logic that comes along in the form of the rules of capitalism and
commercialism. It is possible that Mattel silently hopes that this logic will
have “magic” effects and eventually install something like “ethnic
authenticity;” but so far the magic does not seem to have worked. Instead it
appears that the negativity of culture with its ethno life, internal
contradictions, dreams, and timely inconsistencies has been turned into a
harmless variety of itself, strictly determined by a boring formulaic logic of
Positive (commercial) Thinking. Still, all critiques issued by the above
authors reconfirm the idea that the original concept of Barbie is able to
survive many cultural or political contexts at least as long as the doll is
manufactured by Mattel. Hedge finds that Barbie “survives as an icon of
whiteness and femininity wherever she travels” (132). What survives is not
really Barbie’s racial type but the concept of Barbie as a self-referential,
positively thinking girl able to turn any reality into a game and for whom all
options are constantly open. What those critics see is, in my opinion, Barbie’s
radiating positive ego which lives beyond any
authenticity because it is purely self-referential. Positive thinking does not
strive for authenticity of any kind but wants to exalt authentic reality. It offers a critical approach neither
towards the real self nor towards the real Other, but instead it creates an
absolute reality in the form of a game. In
The religious authorities who approved the Islamic Barbies,
on the other hand, clearly took the Barbie-spirit out of Barbie because they
did not add a dose of negativity to this toy. They erased one form of Positive
Thinking and replaced it with another one. In the end, they created neither a
Barbie nor an Eve-Barbie.
3. The Future: Barbie becomes Virtual
Barbie is
bendable and highly flexible in a physical as well as metaphorical sense and in
the form of Eve-Barbie she can function in various contexts. It is possible to
push this model further and suggest, as does Toffoletti, that “the ambivalence
of Barbie’s plastic body anticipates a posthuman form that displaces signs of
the body to a space outside of a fixed signifying practice, so that they may
circulate as pleasures, possibilities and potentialities” (Toffoletti: 60).
Barbie’s transformative power reaches a climax when her body is inscribed in
the logic of genetic transformation and, even more radically, when she is no
longer real but virtual. Her realness has always been a matter of exaltation
and Toffoletti believes that “rather than bound to an established system of
meaning, she is a precursor to the posthuman; a type of plastic transformer who
embodies the potential for identity to be mutable and unfixed” (50). According
to Marc Sagoff, posthumanism announces that “the whole world can now be viewed
as a vast Lego Kit inviting combination, hybridization, and continual
rebuilding. Life is manipulability” (Sagoff 2005: 88).
It happened to Lego so why should it not happen to Barbie?
In 2000, Lego launched the Bionicles, who are sleek and stylized robots or
posthuman cyborgs similar to those artificial creatures projected by the
scientists Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in the 1960s. Cyborgs live in a
typical AI universe in which the boundaries between humans and machines are
fuzzed. With this step “back into the future,” Lego retrieved a retro-vision of
the future that is also part and parcel of Barbie’s essence. From the beginning
Barbie had incorporated something non-human into her self-definition because of
her unrealistic measurements. What consequences will this have within a more
“futurist,” posthuman context?
Barbie is derived from the inflatable sex doll Lilli and in
spite of the radical modifications she underwent there is one feature that she
has been sharing with her vulgar ancestor all the time: her inner emptiness.
Barbie has a hard shell while Lilli is soft; nonetheless, both contain only
air. The Japanese director Hirozaki Kore-Eda shows in his film Air Doll (2009) a man who has married an
inflatable sex doll, lives with her and talks to her. The air doll has cute
features such as big eyes. The film’s theme is that of the emptiness of people
who are living in the inhuman environment of modern cities. Once the air doll
has turned – through some magic trick – into a living person, she discovers
that many people around her are just as empty as herself, are lonely, have fake
relationships, and are substitutes for the “real thing.” The film shows that
Barbie’s sex doll past is not merely vulgar but can be linked to an explicit
criticism of the modern world. These dolls do not manage to fill themselves
with some “negative,” concrete, authentic or ethnic content but simply remain
“positively” empty. They do not manage to become Eve-Barbies.
By Way of Conclusion: Is the “I-Barbie” the Future?
What will
the “cool” Barbie be like in the future? She will be an I-Barbie. In a world
where some sort of Positive Thinking recurrent in a form of scientific optimism has delivered us to the civilizational
‘beyond’ of genetic engineering and the virtual existences of Second Life,
“emptiness” acquires new dimensions. Second Life, just like a world in which
living organisms can be genetically engineered to perfection, are no longer
concerned with ethno-cultural realities and authenticities. Theoretically,
today even ethnicity and gender can be artificially (genetically) fabricated.
Second Life is an online virtual world in which users can interact with each
other through avatars and choose their gender and race, among many options.
What does this mean for Barbie? Any Barbie living in this world will no longer
need to look for herself (as did the
Eve-Barbies), but she can simply find
herself in the form of an autonomous, pre-fabricated being; and most probably
she will find this cool. The problem is that this purely positive form of being
is cool but empty: it is not filled with any “negativity” issued in the form of
a critical attitude towards reality, it has no spontaneity or irony, but is
based on the unconditional acceptance of a (virtual) reality. In this world
Barbie will become as a sort of absolute ‘I’, which is the reason why we should
call her “I-Barbie.”
In the words of Toffoletti, Barbie “acts as a ‘bridging’
figure between debates surrounding gender and representation, and posthuman,
post-gender figurations because she displays aspects of both the modern and
postmodern cultural condition” (50). It goes without saying that I-Barbie no
longer needs any Adam. Having pushed the self-referential, narcissistic
features of the original Barbie beyond all limits, I-Barbie can join a
posthuman virtual reality that is more easy-going and automated than any
reality has ever been before. The I-Barbie does not love a real Adam but, in the best case, fantasizes about an ideal Adam. The truth is that she loves
only herself and because of this, she has become more Barbie than ever. Already
the original Barbie could not be bothered by the vicissitudes of reality; it is
thus not more than consistent that her most futuristic version, the I-Barbie,
will live in a perfect universe in which nobody can strive for anything because thinking has become reality.
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 9, July - December 2012,
ISSN 1552-5112
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