Publisher's Note From My Little Pony to Batman, from Lego to Nintendo, the toys that children play with make sense of the world. Should boys play with guns? Should girls play with Barbie dolls? What exactly are they -- and we -- being sold? In an increasingly global media culture, toys are both consumer products and playthings, revealing a complex relationship between capitalist economics on the one hand and child psychology on the other. Dan Fleming's provocative and wide-ranging analysis challenges the accepted orthodoxies on the gendered and cultural meanings of toys. He argues that today's toys have the suppressed capacity to escape the very stereotypes of gender and power which they apparently reproduce.