Cyborg Barbie: beyond boundaries

Barbie, the unattainable ideal. As a child, she sneaks into our minds and manipulates our thoughts in a charming way. Her body symbolizes the perfection and beauty of the female body and becomes a luxury item driven by the capitalist machinery. With various expensive products, we are supposed to love ourselves, but in the end, we are only partially satisfied. The endless machinery tries to conform the body to an unattainable ideal and the illusion is artificially maintained that only through this can we experience acceptance and true love. But what if we could playfully bypass this manipulation and free ourselves from the playground of perfection? What if we could create a new play(ground) where we can accept and love ourselves as we are? What if we could playfully change the norm and break the rules of societal expectations? In my illustrations, I show how Barbie is reinvented and how perfection is shattered. Her body breaks away from the norm of beauty and a new re-appropriation of the body begins. The metamorphosis takes its course playfully, and new things emerge, different from what was expected. Is it beautiful? Strange? A new beauty ideal? The desired "reality" dissolves, and a playground for the love and acceptance of our own bodies and those of others emerges.The cyborg Barbie embodies this change, the fusion of human and machine, nature and technology. She breaks with the binary conception of gender categories and symbolizes a "blown-up" identity that is no longer based on binary categories. Through this fusion, she becomes an icon for equality and fusion. My illustrations show this new kind of feminist consciousness and action that moves beyond essentialist notions of gender and identity. They break with traditional dualistic thinking and develop a new form of identity and politics based on diversity, hybridity, and connection. A new world emerges, in which the cyborg should be seen as a new form of identity and political subjectivity.