And i want to thank you, barbie: Barbie as a site for cultural interrogation

So runs the introduction to Mondo Barbie: An Anthology of Fiction and Poetry edited by Richard Peabody and Lucinda Ebersole. In their introduction they situate for feminist scholars who have already begun to interrogate and revision popular culture texts associated with women the most problematic cultural icon of girlhood-Barbie. Linda Hutcheon in The Politics of Postmodernism observes, “The postmodern is seemingly not so much a concept as a problematic: ‘a complex of heterogeneous but interrelated questions which will not be silenced by any spuriously unitary answer5 (Burgin 1986, 1989, 163-64)55 (1989, 15). The “spuriously unitary answer55 that has almost universally accompanied Barbie since her birth 35 years ago, from adults, particularly women, and almost assuredly from feminists has been a flat rejection of Barbie and everything she appears to stand for: beauty, the male gaze, body, fashion, femininity, materialism, big business, and mass marketing. In this paper, we enter into this discourse and argue that Barbie exists as a perfect cultural site for interrogating the margins, borders, and contradictions of our lives as girls and women.1.