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By Root 753 0

and class, to invent the "woman" she is today. "Growing up in the inner city I wasn't a part of what you might call 'society,' " she told me. "And I always thought that I was born in the wrong social sphere—the wrong social class. I should have been a debutante. I should have been going to a Seven Sisters school. I should have been jet-setting to Milan and dining with heads of state and living a very Audrey Hepburn sort of life—far from my life in the projects, in Watts." Although she couldn't afford authentic Mattel outfits, she made clothes out of found objects and scrap materials—ball gowns and coronation dresses—inspired by her other childhood fascination: English royalty.

Some say drag queens perpetuate demeaning stereotypes of women; others argue that by caricaturing stereotypes of gender, they subvert them. What's interesting about both positions is the assumption that "femininity" is something quite different from actually being a woman, just as "masculinity" has little to do with actually being a man.

These days, for human beings, gender identity can be something of a morass. Nearly two decades ago, in an essay on "Primary Femininity," psychiatrist Robert Stoller used the term "core gender identity" to refer to a child's concrete sense of his or her sex. Stoller took into consideration the fact that the biological sex of a child and its gender were not always the same. Developmental geneticists had discovered that without some exposure to fetal androgens, anatomical maleness could not occur—even in a child with XY chromosomes. Likewise, with the wrong sort of exposure to fetal androgens, a fetus with XX chromosomes would develop as an anatomical male. Then there were the hermaphrodites for whom sex assignment at birth was completely arbitrary. For those of you who are counting, we are up to five sexes now. But because society only recognizes two, children who were not clearly boys or girls were nonetheless placed in one of those categories. And, ideally, their "core gender identity" developed in accordance with the decision that the attending physician made in the delivery room.

Today, the trendier gender theorists argue that the assignment of gender is by definition imprecise. Because of the limitations of the binary system, all gendering is "drag." "Drag constitutes the mundane way in which genders are appropriated, theatricalized, worn, done," Judith Butler writes in "Imitation and Gender Insubordination." "Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original," she argues. What the so-called genders imitate is a "phantasmic ideal of heterosexual identity."

Regardless of whether this "ideal of heterosexual identity" is "phantasmic" in people, however, it seems pretty real in Barbie and Ken—or maybe Barbie and G.I. Joe, since Ken, in response to research showing that pronounced male secondary sex characteristics scare little girls, has lost his macho edge. Barbie is a space-age fertility archetype, Joe a space-age warrior. They are idealized opposites, templates of "femininity" and "masculinity" imposed on sexless effigies—which underscores the irrelevance of actual genitalia to perceptions of gender. What nature can only approximate, plastic makes perfect.

Heterosexual men use pornographic renderings of the Barbie archetype for sexual fantasies, just as children use the actual doll for make-believe. Although Barbie looks like an adult, children wield power over her—in much the same way that a male viewer, through projected fantasy, wields power over the female object in a pornographic image. In her short story "A Real Doll," A. M. Homes picks the scab off this relationship and probes it through the musings of her narrator, a boy who is "dating" his sister's Barbie. This involves making the doll complicit in his autoerotic escapades—"the secret habits that seem normal enough to us, but which we know better than to mention out loud." Rape her, fondle her, feed her Valium. Masturbate into the hollow body of her boyfriend. Barbie will never squeal.

In writing the story, Homes was interested not only