The Barbie doll from the Mattel, Inc. brand is one of the best-known global toys both for its sales success and for its cultural connotations. It is a stereotype of beauty in Western aesthetics and a representative icon of North American pop culture; a symbol of North American imperialism, with its gender values ​​and its heteronormative, racist, sexist and classist criteria.

Its introduction into the field of arts is an incontrovertible symptom that the doll has become an artistic fetish, endowed with aesthetic and symbolic value, which circulates in museums and galleries, as well as at auctions where it reaches high prices that collectors pay. for the acquisition of the coveted trophy.

The sociocultural implications of the phenomenon, revealed especially by American researchers and academics, many of them feminists, show the impact of this fetish on the public and private life of the society that saw it emerge at the height of the consumerism of the American way of life.

This book recovers feminist criticism of art, gender studies and the sociology of art to clarify the implications of the phenomenon in the artistic field and in the cultural toy industry, as well as its social repercussions based on the generic connotations of the doll as an icon of North American society and its patriarchal values.

In opposition to the narcissistic spirit of postmodernity, which promotes the cult of images by disseminating stereotypes of femininity banally alienated from the androcentric gaze, feminist cultural intervention in the field of visual arts makes visible the social unrest generated by these technologies. in order to promote a sustainable visual culture through dignified and egalitarian gender representations.