Fashion dolls, including three-dimensional ones, had been popular with youth for centuries. For her part, Barbie was modeled to some degree on the famous German comic/burlesque doll “Bild Lili”-but Barbie also represented a set of discourses about adolescent girlhood and will always be referred to in the feminine, rather than neutral, pronoun. Although the figure of the girl caught between childhood and womanhood, and positioned in that way as both an ideal and a problem, developed its recognizable contemporary form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its visibility dramatically expanded with new and more widely disseminated forms of popular culture after World War II, with the teenager continuing as one of the dominant icons of the United States in the 1950s. Barbie appeared in the wake of this massively popular concretization of the idea of the teenager, the teenybopper, and the teen.
Unlike previous incarnations of the fashion doll, Barbie was crafted for long-lasting play, for which her fashion accessories would always be secondary to the doll herself. In this sense, she resembled the new post-World War II consumer, around whom proliferating commodities could endlessly circulate. Unlike the previously more popular baby dolls, Barbie was not a game about motherhood, but a game about gender in a broader sense, where-like the ideal of the teenage girl-she is a participant in the debates about gender roles that emerged after the women's suffrage movements and amid ongoing changes to women's labor practices.
If Barbie is thus a product of political and popular cultural changes that reached a degree of institutional stability in the United States of the 1950s, she is also a product of technological and transnational economic changes following World War II. She was always a global product in some sense. Although first seen at the 1959 American Toy Fair, Barbie's mass-produced form was molded in Japan. Even more significant, the history of Barbie's production parallels the expansion of transnational commodity marketing that established not only the manufacturing, distribution, and sales of the dolls themselves, but also the gender norms Barbie spoke to.
Barbie's American-ness is not just about maps of ethnicity dominated by idealized whiteness, and maps of gender dominated by commodity circulation on the one hand and the open-ended process of youth consumption on the other, but also about factories. The raised plastic on Barbie's body traces a history of exploitation and “modernization”: from “Made in America” to “Made in Japan,” and then on to Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, and ultimately China. From the beginning, Barbie was produced in durable plastic from advanced molding techniques in a compact and thus portable 11.5-inch format. Each of these elements of Barbie's design brands her as something unique-something that could not have worked at any other time. Most important, Barbie's changing form (as much as her changing representation of gender) demonstrates that if Barbie is a product of her time, she is a product not just of 1959, but of all the times and places in which she is and has been produced.
