"I want to be just like you": Barbie Magazine and the production of the female desiring subject

Drawing on Foucauldian notions of power relations, I argue in this paper that Barbie: The Magazine for Girls (hereafter referred to as Barbie Magazine) acts as a site for the operation of disciplinary power practices. Barbie Magazine seeks to organise, normalise, and categorise the bodies of its young female readers, presenting appropriate gestures, acts, appearance, behaviour, and adornment. The Barbie doll becomes the essential tool for the fulfilment of an appropriate female subject: there is a conflation between becoming female and owning a Barbie, or lots of Barbies. The ultimate aim is a subject positioning and understanding of the desiring self in which the body of the young girl is intimately linked with the appendage of the Barbie doll. Readers of Barbie Magazine are not just learning about domesticity but about becoming acculturated as properly female through living life like Barbie. This promotion of the Barbie lifestyle represents a colonisation of the bodies of young girls by the artificial, sterile, and stereotypical.