Behold The Barbie: Education, Power and Symbology

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Recommended: Conformity broken down

Embodied within the image of the ideal is the dynamism between empowerment and conformity. Within the sphere of conformity the masses become a "collective coercion of bodies" Thus, the state has possessed the mind in order that it might possess the body. Humans, therefore are willing agents, since the body has been shaped or as French philosopher Michel Foucault would explain "in the form of habits and behavior…the body [is] subjected to training" This training often happens without conscious knowledge, or even if there is knowledge of it, the practice remains because of its beneficial qualities of order to the larger society as a whole. Additionally, the more that the individual conforms unwittingly to the will of the state the more docile that they become due to the "formation of a relation that in the mechanism itself makes it more obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely"

Speaking of power becomes difficult because there is the tendency to still create a duality in which power becomes the a negative force in a dualism of good versus evil. It is not that power is moral, but rather that it is prevalent—so much so, that there is no escaping it. This exposition, therefore, is a mere statement of where power lies (which often is in the hands of the state), but power will continue to exist, whether it remains with the state or not, power could be compared with the law of conservation of energy because power like energy, is never destroyed but rather continually transferred in an infinite loop in which a “binary…of the powerless and the powerful…struggles to gain more power as mapped out by movement from the former to the latter, resulting in a simple inversion of the previous formation.” Without any sort of recogniti...

... middle of paper ...

...rt/barbie/barbie.html.

Toffoletti, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls, 60.

Toffoletti, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls, 61.

Kilbourne, Killing Us Softly 3.

Napier, “The Distorted Barbie.”

Toffoletti, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls, 60.

Napier, “The Distorted Barbie.”

Toffoletti, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls, 61.

Toffoletti, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls, 60.

Toffoletti, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls, 61.

Toffoletti, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls,

Dennis Hall and Susan G. Hall. American Icons: an Encyclopedia of the People, Places, and Things That Have Shaped Our Culture. (Westport: Greenwood, 2006), 174.

Gladwell, The Tipping Point, 162.

Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Boston: Back Bay, 2002), 162

Toffoletti, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls, 3.

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 194.

Barthes, Mythologies, 97.

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