Barbie, un estereotipo tóxico

The Barbie doll of the brand Mattel, Inc., is one of the best known global toys both for its sales success and for its cultural connotations. It is a stereotype of beauty in Western aesthetics and an icon representative of North American pop culture; a symbol of North American imperialism, with its gender values ??and its heteronormative, racist, sexist and classist criteria. Its introduction in the field of arts is an incontrovertible symptom that the doll has become an artistic fetish, endowed with aesthetic and symbolic value, circulating in museums and galleries, as well as in auctions where it reaches high prices that collectors pay for the acquisition of the coveted trophy. The sociocultural implications of the phenomenon, revealed above all by American researchers and academics, many of them feminists, show the impact of this fetish on the public and private life of the society that saw it emerge at the height of consumerism of the American way of life.In this book the feminist critique of art, gender studies and the sociology of art is recovered to clarify the implications of the phenomenon in the artistic field and in the toy cultural industry, as well as its social repercussions from the generic connotations of the doll as an icon of American society and its patriarchal values. In opposition to the narcissistic spirit of postmodernity, which promotes the cult of images through the dissemination of stereotypes of femininity banally alienated from the androcentric gaze, feminist cultural intervention in the field of visual arts reveals the social malaise generated by these technologies in order to promote a sustainable visual culture through dignified and egalitarian gender representations.