Summary
Contents
Subject index
This book uses one of the most popular accessories of childhood, the Barbie doll, to explain key aspects of cultural meaning. Some readings would see Barbie as reproducing ethnicity and gender in a particularly coarse and damaging way - a cultural icon of racism and sexism. Rogers develops a broader, more challenging picture. She shows how the cultural meaning of Barbie is more ambiguous than the narrow, appearance-dominated model that is attributed to the doll. For a start, Barbie’s sexual identity is not clear-cut. Similarly her class situation is ambiguous. But all interpretations agree that, with her enormous range of lifestyle `accessories', Barbie exists to consume. Her body is the perfect metaphor of modern times: plastic, st
The Making of an Icon
The Making of an Icon
Barbie exemplifies corporate success in today's global marketplace. Her longevity, expanding markets, and worldwide appeal account for why she shows up in Forbes and Business Week as well as the business pages of the New York Times, London's The Times, and other newspapers around the world. Barbie is an icon of corporate ingenuity in an era of downsizing and restructuring as well as global competition. According to Mattel's president and chief executive officer Jill Barad, Barbie is nothing less than a “global power brand.”
Such success scarcely happens overnight. One measure of Barbie's slow emergence as a cultural icon is the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, which indexes hundreds of magazines. From 1959 through 1979 the Reader's ...
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