"At it's best such an endeavour shows that a single artefact can shed brilliant light on that dense tangle of ideas, values and norms called culture. Thus, I set out to convince my friend that barbie has a great deal to show us about who we are, who we want to be, and who we fear we might be or become."
"Above all, an icon provides a point of recognition widely shared with other members of ones society. It means in effect never having to say Who's Barbie? or 'I've never heard of her." Icon's provide common ground. They let people experience commonality amidst diversity, shared interests amidst conflicting ones, participation in the same broad culture amidst many subcultures. In secular societies like those of North America, New Zealand, Australia and Western Europe cultural icons like Barbie fill holes once stuffed with religious symbols like the crucifix or statues of saints."
"In some people's minds and in some theoretical models cultural icons like Barbie represent the lowest common denominators of mass culture."
"A fictive icon contributes to a culture by letting members act as if something is real or true even while they "know" it is not,"
"A fantastic icon contributes to a culture by exaggerating what is actual, possible or conceivable. Such an icon invites fantasy by taking the as-if or fictive toward its outer limit. Barbie is such an icon."
"icons are what people make of them in the thickets of their own circumstances."
"Barbie's style might be called emphatic femininity. It takes feminine appearances and demeanor to unsustainable extremes."
"Femininity entails not only an appropriate appearance but also a proper demeanor centred on being nice - soft spoken, polite, helpful and sensitive."
"There are no changes that could be made in the Barbie doll or any other doll...that would not perpetuate some form of societal norms of femininity. Barbie then is not really the problem if we are concerned about how girls and women get pressured to adopt constrictive, dehumanising versions of femininity."
"The observations at hand suggest that Barbie is iconically connected with social class, most clearly through her consumption. Ultimately, Barbie may point to Americans ambivalence about class inequality and their appetite for self-help, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps thinking. At the same time Barbie is an icon of childhood compromised by post-World War II social and cultural changes."
"Less obviously Barbie's iconic status points toward the connections between the harshness of many American childhoods and the cruelties of the American class structure."
"Barbie knows neither the cruelties nor the arbitrariness of the class structure. This icon represents a classless world. In the end, however, Barbie can no more transcend the class structure than you or I can. What she does do, I think, is epitomise its ambiguities and contradictions."
"Lord (1994) implies as much when she characterises Barbie as able "to exist in several classes simultaneously."
"Barbie is an icon of corporate ingenuity in an era of down-sizing and restructuring as well as global competition."
"Above all, perhaps, toys today promote gender imagery and with it gender segregation. In the end one is hard pressed to avoid Dickey's conclusion that Barbie represents a society that values females, especially teens and young women, as ornaments, yet simultaneously offers tentative encouragement to explore non-traditional roles." (1991:30)
"Culturally, Barbie is aligned with contemporary bodies shaped by consumer markets, fantastic desires, and new technologies of the flesh. She symbolises how today's bodies defy boundaries once deemed in the constants of nature. Barbie is thus an icon of emergent, consumerist 'somatics' - a technology of the body driven by the idea that our bodies can be whatever we like if we devote enough money and attention to them."
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