The Anthropometry of Barbie: Unsettling Ideals of the Feminine Body in Popular Culture

Selection from text:

"On the surface, at least, Barbie's strikingly thin body and the repression and self-discipline that it signifies would appear to contrast with her seemingly endless desire for consumption and self-transformation. And yet, as Susan Bordo has argued in regard to anorexia, these two phenomena - hyper-thin bodies and hyper-consumption - are very much linked in advanced capitalist economies that depend upon commodity excess. Regulating desire under such circumstances is a constant, ongoing problem that plays itself out on the body" (Urla, 1995: 298).


I included a photograph from the J.Crew website. First of all, the women shown on this website are all very thin. I think this is interesting, because it gives us the idea that only women who are extremely thin can wear these clothes. I also included a picture of a "Japanese Barbie" that I found on the internet. The article quoted above explains the transformation of the "fashion barbie" to all the other forms of modern Barbies that have developed over the past fifty years. However, this Japanese Barbie does not really look Japanese. In fact, it looks very similar to the original Barbie. The ad above is a mac makeup advertisement; it is interesting to me how she looks exactly like a Barbie doll.

Sources:
Urla, Jacqueline, and Alan C. Swedlund. 1995. The Anthropometry of Barbie: Unsettling IDeals of the Feminine Body in Popular Culture. In Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture. Terry, Jennifer, and Jacqueline Urla, eds. Pp. 277-313.
http://www.jcrew.com/catalog/category.jhtml?navAction=jump&id=cat210186 (August 2007)
http://images.google.com/imghp?tab=wi (August 2007)