From a toy to a tool: the reception of Barbie and cultural ambiguity in contemporary Pakistan

Abstract

Barbie (2023) garnered enormous international box office success, stirring arguments about women's empowerment in popular media and academic circles. This article investigates the challenging reception of Barbie in urban Pakistan, where its global success and partial screening ban sparked debates about cultural values and identity. The study investigates the socioeconomic, religious and gendered aspects of Pakistani audiences’ diverse reactions to the film. By analysing viewer reactions and the implications of the partial ban, the study offers insights into the subtle and often unclear processes by which culture and values are established. It reveals how negative perceptions of Barbie serve as markers of national identity, while acknowledging that some women find the film relatable and significant. This analysis contributes to scholarly discussions on the sociocultural impact of transnational media and the ongoing construction of cultural identities in Pakistan.

Keywords

anti-fandom Pakistan patriarchy popular culture women

In the weeks following its release in July 2023, the Hollywood movie Barbie (2023) achieved massive historical success on the international box office, stirring debates about women’s empowerment in popular media and academia alike.¹ The movie became a controversial topic in urban Pakistan because of its worldwide popularity, a partial ban on screening and the film's theme of women’s empowerment. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting mandated that film distributors and cinema owners had to secure a ‘no objection’ certificate from the Central and Regional Boards of Film Censors before screening any national or international movie. The main controversy in Pakistan arose when the movie was cleared for release by the national censor board but failed to get the regional certificate from the censor board of the largest province of the country, Punjab (Express Tribune, 2023; Janjua, 2023). The social space of Barbie's cinematic release and viewers’ commentary reflect the cultural ambiguity that prevails in everyday discourses. Through an analysis of the partial ban on Barbie's screening and the responses collected from Pakistani viewers, I argue that the contrasting expressions of disdain for and approval of Barbie are related to socio-economic class, religion, the status of women and a slippery concept of nationhood. By situating this popular movie within the specific context of its cinematic release in a particular patriarchal society, my research reveals the complex and often ambiguous ways in which ‘culture’ and ‘values’ are constructed and negotiated by Pakistani audiences. While a negative stance towards Barbie is viewed as an important marker of national identity, the research also highlights how some women still find the movie relatable and meaningful. By discussing the complex dynamics of Pakistani audiences’ interactions with Barbie, this article adds to the current scholarly discussions concerning the sociocultural effects of cross-border media flows and the dynamic processes of cultural identity construction.

Drawing upon scholarship in fan studies (Hellekson and Busse, 2006; Jenkins, 2007; Booth, 2010; Hills and Greco, 2015; Reijnders and Zwaan, 2016 ), I argue that the Barbie fandom in Pakistan is distinct because of its ability to accentuate the opposing elements that construct cultural ambiguity in the society. Studies have postulated that this cultural ambiguity was created by the religion-based demarcation of national identities in the subcontinent, which was later extended and amended during various military regimes in the country to include elements of language and dressing (Saeed, 2009; Kirmani, 2015; Habib, 2018). An examination of the narratives within and outside the movie helps in developing an understanding of the ambivalence woven around the definitions of values and morality in the urban centres of a postcolonial, patriarchal and religious country. I argue that a component of popular mass media, such as the Barbie movie, can be utilised as a tool to highlight aspects of social behaviours that are otherwise difficult to define. This article begins by establishing the position and utility of Barbie as a popular historical event, outlines the social space of its cinematic release and the socio-economic and cultural background of its viewers and examines the collected responses of viewers to show the nuances of cultural ambiguity in Pakistan.

The Barbie event

The present article considers Barbie as a popular cultural event, scaffolding the premise with Sven Jockel and Thomas Dobler's theorisation that defines an event movie as a ‘must-see’ cultural phenomenon. Jockel and Dobler maintain that an event movie has three distinct features: it relies on high-concept marketing and follows a blockbuster concept; it uses transnational media corporations to benefit from the industry's macro structure; and it ‘functions to satisfy different audience groups that are differentiated both by region and media’ (2006: 85). Barbie is more of an historical popular event movie than many other popular movies because it carries the legacy of the commercial, and controversial, success of the toy with the same name. Bryant W. Sculos writes that one of the reasons behind the extraordinary audience engagement with the film is the massive marketing campaign for Barbie, which is ‘built on generations of Mattel's advertising for the Barbie doll’ (2023: 1). The white-skinned doll with straight blonde hair called Barbie has enjoyed the position of a fashion and beauty icon across the globe for more than sixty years (Nisa and Adi, 2023). The Barbie dolls have been criticised for their distorted representation of a slender adult female body with a prominent bosom that will negatively impact the young girls who play with them (Goudreau-Riopel, 2020; Schick et al., 2011). When the doll was criticised for promoting the idea of a woman who modelled herself as a desirable object, the toy company started introducing dolls fashioned after women who were doctors, engineers or astronauts, among others (Uncu, 2019). Barbie dolls are criticised in Pakistan usually for their Western outlook and their shape that resembles an adult female body, because these characteristics promote an unIslamic lifestyle to young Muslim girls. Rabia Sohail, Raheela Naz and Nazir Ahmed Malik (2014: 6973–6974) recommended that the Pakistani government take steps to create awareness about the ‘harms’ caused by Barbie, which include a dissatisfaction with their physical selves in young girls and promotion of an unIslamic dress code. They advocated a nationwide replacement of Barbie dolls with Fulla dolls that wear Islamic dress and do not represent an adult female body. However, Barbie dolls are very popular in the country and there is a huge market for fake copies as well as related merchandise such as bags, dresses, hair accessories, books and stationary items.

Because of the global fame of the toy, Barbie became a historical popular event rather than a simple blockbuster. An ‘event movie becomes a must-see that everybody seems to be talking about’ (Jockel and Dobler, 2006: 85), and Barbie was a ‘must-see’ with an extraordinary potential to spark heated debates in online and offline social spaces, globally. While the legacy of the toy provided the movie with an already established market of diverse audiences in different regions of the world, the timestamp of its cinematic release was also significant. Tithi Bhattacharya notes that the movie was an instant success because it ‘returned films to their original primal function: to soothe and entertain’, for an audience facing the aftermath of a pandemic, wars and local and global political unrest (2023: para. 3). Another factor that made Barbie an historical popular event is its place in feminist discourse. Some critics, like Harriet Fletcher, see it as a ‘feminist utopia’; on the other hand, some, like Bhattacharya, maintain that the movie lacks a genuine discourse about women’s empowerment as it does not focus on the critical relationship between toxic masculinity and capitalism. Pakistani writer and columnist Bina Shah (2023) praises the movie as the first ever ‘feminist blockbuster’ but notes that the success of the movie or the toy does not turn Barbie into ‘a magic weapon that can change the world’. The historical popular event of Barbie became more than a debate on feminism and gained added nuance when it reached the entertainment landscape of Pakistan.

The Pakistan film industry has been facing a steady decline for the past few decades. A huge number of cinema houses have closed as local productions are unprofitable, Bollywood movies are banned and Hollywood movies have a very limited audience (Ahmad, 2018; Shabbir, 2020). Barbie was shown in select Pakistani cinema halls, which are mostly located within high-end shopping malls in city centres but sometimes exist independently in upscale residential housing societies. I examine Pakistani viewers’ reception to Barbie by examining the responses of participants who responded to this study’s specifically designed survey. The survey aimed to obtain insights into the distinctive cultural reception to a globally successful Anglophone movie in a non-Anglophone country, which may facilitate an understanding of cross-cultural media consumption patterns. The survey responses show that fifteen out of seventy-five viewers from Lahore watched Barbie in a cinema house, while five out of ten from Islamabad did so. Only two viewers based in Karachi watched the movie at home. Viewers who did not watch Barbie in cinema houses used illegal streaming websites that they mentioned in comments with phrases like ‘watched free online’, ‘watched on a dodgy website’ and ‘phone website’. People in Pakistan mostly access entertainment and educational content through illegal websites for a variety of reasons, such as limited finances and bans on platforms that the government declares to be against Islamic values or the spirit of nationalism. Reviewing the role of media in Pakistan, Muhammad Ahmed Qadri, Suwaibah Qadri and Naseem Umer (2016: 94) note that religious leaders in Pakistan have impacted media by promoting blasphemy laws that limit freedom of speech, while upholding religion as a key aspect of national identity. Moreover, the four eras of dictatorship in the country have significantly impacted the media practices and regulatory laws, channelling the narratives towards a nationalist ideology (Qadri et al., 2016: 97). In recent years, the number of cinema houses has decreased, and many have been converted into banquet halls that people rent for wedding ceremonies and other family events.

The movie was not dubbed into the national language Urdu or any other regional language, so the target audience of the movie comprised English-speaking Pakistanis, who belong to the elite and upper-middle class. English is used for all official purposes in the country and is associated with bureaucracy, political power and financial success (Rahman, 2004; Mahboob, 2023). In this niche social space, tickets for all shows of Barbie were completely sold out for the first two weeks of its release in Karachi, which is part of the Sindh province, and women went to watch it wearing pink dresses (Shah, 2023). However, the movie was suddenly banned in Punjab after the beginning of its public screenings, and the provincial censor board did not provide any clear reasons for its objections (Farooqui, 2023). The partial ban, the linguistic medium and the women-centric theme took Barbie out of the limited social circles of the movie's target audience and started a national debate on Islamic values, culture and the status of women (see Gu, 2024, for a reading of how the film was interpreted and received in China).

The Pakistani spectators of the Barbie event

Barbie provides a unique opportunity to reveal the complexities of various social and cultural issues in Pakistan. I surveyed individual audience members to ensure that those voices were included in the discourse. The survey followed the methodology outlined by Pramod R. Regmi et al. (2016) for data collection through dissemination of the questionnaire through Google Forms. The survey was anonymous, obtained informed consent and observed ethical considerations. It consisted of four closed questions to gather demographic information on the sex, age, location and educational qualifications of the respondents. It also included the following open-ended questions:
Did you watch Barbie in a cinema house? If not, then where and how did you watch the movie?

Did you like the movie? Do you think this movie can speak to the Pakistani audience?

Is there any ‘objectionable content’ in the movie? Please give a short comment, if possible.
The first question was designed to collect information about the channels selected by viewers in different cities of Punjab where the movie was banned. In a country where official public screening of movies has always been a complicated phenomenon, citizens have acquired an uncanny ability to find illegal streaming platforms, and other sources of piracy, through which they gain digital access to banned content. The other two open-ended questions in the survey were based on the ongoing Barbie discourse on social media, in workplaces, at family gatherings and on national television.²

The survey was circulated electronically through the author’s public accounts on Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) and through extended networks of friends, students and peers in various cities. It had a user-friendly layout, and the responses were limited to one-time access with a registered email address to avoid multiple responses. The web-based online survey methodology allowed rapid access to respondents across the country during the window of time when the movie was screening and the corresponding national debate was at its peak. The survey ran between 20 September and 30 October 2023 (the final date was chosen when responses became repetitive and the movie started to fade away in the urban national online and offline discourses). In forty days, 134 responses were collected. Nine responses were removed because the participants were Pakistani nationals living outside the country, leaving a total of 125 responses (Figure 1). The geographic distribution of the participants was recorded and then further sorted into groups corresponding to the closest city with a cinema house that screened Barbie (or would have screened it if it had not been banned). This resulted in labelling smaller cities like Kasur and Sheikhupura as Lahore, which is the city nearest to them with a cinema house that showed Barbie. The first of the open-ended questions captured location data that was outside this pattern. The recorded answers that are shared in this study have been corrected for grammatical and spelling errors, without changing the structure of the sentences.

Figure 1.
Demographic data of Pakistani viewers of Barbie.

Out of 125 respondents, ninety-eight identified as female, twenty-four as male and three preferred not to respond to this question. The data are skewed towards women, the age bracket of fifteen to thirty years old, graduates and residents of Lahore. The participants were given the option to leave the survey at any point and were provided with the complete contact information of the researcher. The responses were not collected in Urdu or any other regional languages because the movie was only available in its original English version. The demographic information of viewers of Barbie is different from the regular cinemagoers in Pakistan, who are mostly men, residents of small cities and villages, with limited or no literacy and a preference for formulaic movies in regional languages. As Abeeha Aamir Butt notes in her research on the classist cinema audiences in Lahore, local Punjabi films are mostly played in working-class areas while Cineplexes are associated with ‘the bourgeois and predominantly foreign films’ (2020: 112). Using semi-structured interviews, Butt shows that after the Islamisation instigated by military regimes, lower middle-class cinema houses were no longer safe places for women and were ‘associated with “cheap” men looking to loiter’ (2020: 117). From my sociocultural perspective as a resident of Pakistan, where I am well-acquainted with the classist structures of society, it is evident that the audience of Barbie was predominantly comprised of individuals from the elite and upper middle classes. This conclusion is based on the fact that they have chosen to watch an Anglophone movie for their entertainment and reside in areas where women can freely attend cinema screenings.

Previous studies on Pakistani cinema and the entertainment industry have pointed towards the prevalence of cultural ambiguity, especially with reference to the representation and presence of women. Wajiha Raza Rizvi (2014: 74) notes that Pakistani cinema billboards showcasing beautiful curvy actresses in revealing costumes are not vandalised by religious groups, but advertising billboards and posters that carry images of modern women, wearing very modest clothes, are smeared with black paint or torn apart. Rizvi notes that actresses working in films are usually uneducated women, who are often (erroneously) associated with sex work, while the advertising industry models have a liberal appearance, reflected through their ‘body language and English speaking skills’ (2014: 74). Revealing costumes on actresses on billboards do not have the ability to offend religious adherents or threaten their agency in a way that a liberal woman's image would (Rizvi, 2014: 75). Sameer Ahmed, Muhammad Tahir and Muhammad Salman Bhatti describe the history of association between the performing arts and prostitution in South Asia where ‘respectable women’ refused to act on stage and courtesans took up the vocation. One main reason for the decline of film and theatre production is the consistent ‘bracketing of women on “display” — either in the workplace, on the streets, or on stage — with sex workers, prostitutes and women of “loose” morals’ (Ahmed et al., 2022: 387). Here, I connect the elaboration of the association between women on display and loose morality back to Rizvi's analysis, wherein she maintains that in the broad context of Pakistani society, sexually expressive women are labelled as ‘sluts’ but in the local movies they are projected as the main ‘object of the gaze for the common cinephile’ (2014: 94). The gaze of the common cinephile differs from the taste of the Pakistani elite, who prefer the ‘western bourgeois ethic and culture’ of entertainment (Rizvi, 2014: 94–95). I extrapolate the arguments of Rizvi and Sameer et al. to argue that Pakistani nationals’ response to entertainment is complicated by their attraction towards foreign works, their cultural ideas of religion and a very ambiguous nationalist discourse.

Barbie highlights the friction between the many layers of ambiguity in the entertainment landscape of Pakistan. The film has made its mark in a country where the target audience for the national film industry are the cinephiles belonging to the lower socio-economic classes with a complicated religious schema, the audience for Hollywood English movies is the urban elite and upper middle class and the most popular form of entertainment in Pakistan is Hindi cinema, regardless of class boundaries. In her study on the popularity of Bollywood movies in Pakistan, Shahnaz Khan (2011) notes that these movies are seldom screened in public because of the strained relationship between India and Pakistan, and people watch them on pirated DVDs. Barbie's usefulness as a tool for revealing Pakistan's current social culture lies in its potential as an historical popular event that links media popularity with deeper questions of identity and the social self of an individual. Even though the viewers of this movie belong to the elite and upper middle class, have high levels of institutional education and are mostly women, they gave contrasting and ambiguous responses regarding culture, values and women’s empowerment.

Barbie and cultural ambiguities

The responses in my study show varied levels of cultural ambiguity which can be grouped under three overarching categories of nationalism, religious beliefs and women’s empowerment. In the first category, I understand nationalism as the way in which individuals identify with their nation and use that identity to dissociate themselves from other nations. In Pakistan, nationalism is closely connected with history, religion, culture and politics. Saadia Toor (2005: 319) describes the struggle of the power elite to create a comprehensive idea of nation for Pakistan after the end of British colonial rule, which was different from Indian Hindus and closer to the larger political Muslim community. According to Toor, ‘cultural nationalism’ works in Pakistan as an effective part of ‘anticolonial national struggles’, infused with religious solidarity and the kind of ‘emotive force’ and ‘passion’ that is required to support the idea of a nation (2005: 318–319). Qadri et al. (2016: 93) point out that the Pakistani nation correlates national identity with the idea of ‘protection’, which is inextricably linked with military power and the state religion. For the Pakistani nation, the armed forces are the defenders, Islam is the national religion and Urdu is the national language. The emphasis on Islam as a major pillar of national identity has led to an ‘an alliance between the custodians of Islam (i.e., the religious leaders) with the military, the civil bureaucracy, and the intelligence services’, which then leads to censorship of the media (Qadri et al., 2016: 94). The responses included in the nationalism category in my study reflect the complex interplay of religious beliefs, women’s empowerment and the multifaceted and often contentious nature of cultural identity in postcolonial Pakistan.

The category of nationalism consists mostly of the responses to the second open-ended question in the survey (Did you like the movie? Do you think this movie can speak to the Pakistani audience?). My analysis reveals that out of the sixty-eight respondents who did not like the movie, fifty-four either gave very short answers that consisted of three or four words, such as ‘No, I don’t think so’ or ‘Noooo, a big NO’, or replied with the single word ‘No’. The remaining fourteen respondents who gave longer answers took their cue from the word ‘Pakistani’ in the second question and related it to what they called ‘culture’ and ‘values’. For example, one respondent (female, graduate, 15–30, Lahore) wrote ‘No. It is not Pakistani culture. How can we relate to western dresses and dance?’. Another respondent (male, postgraduate, 45–60, Lahore) noted, ‘I am not sure. These are not our values and culture. Just westernized bullshit to give us wrong ideas. Movies must have culture in them’. These respondents can be understood as anti-fans, and their anti-fandom affords them a distinct form of social capital that is rooted in their nuanced grasp of cultural ambiguities, which enables them to maintain a higher moral ground. I understand social capital in the context defined by Pierre Bourdieu (1986: 247), who describes it as the aggregate of actual or potential resources associated with an individual's possession of a stable network of relationships. This network grants the individual ‘credentials’ and entitlements based on mutual acquaintance and recognition (Bourdieu, 1986: 247). For Pakistani anti-fans, criticism of Barbie serves as an affirmation of their membership of a morally superior group of socially conscious and enlightened individuals. They eagerly participate in this event to reinforce the strength of their national code of morality, and to establish their place in the hierarchy of social respect. Studying the spectrum of the dislikes, distaste and hatred in anti-fan cultures facilitates an understanding of myriad emotions like fear, admiration and envy in participatory cultures formed around an artwork, a celebrity, a book, sports and so on (Gray, 2003; Hellekson and Busse, 2006; Theodoropoulou, 2007). The anti-fandom of Barbie in Pakistan has many layers that scaffold an understanding of the various strands of cultural ambiguity in the country.

In the answers to questions on Barbie and in their everyday lives, urban educated Pakistanis in the study used the word ‘culture’ to define the ambiguity around their exclusionary ideas. Yousaf Saeed (2009: 239) writes that one of the biggest post-partition challenges for the newly created state was to define a national identity that was very different from the ‘Hindu’ India. Similarly, Sheema Kirmani states that a frequently asked question since the inception of the country in 1947 has been ‘What is Pakistani culture?’ (2015: 4), and that as yet no one has been able to provide a satisfactory answer. She connects the crisis of identity in Pakistan with the lengthy martial law of General Zia-ul-Haq that started in 1977 and situates the predicament in the ‘tussle between the adoption of modern, democratic values and submission to unchanging orthodox ideals’ (Kirmani, 2015: 4). Kirmani notes that to separate their cultural identity from India, the authorities in Pakistan view the performing arts like dance and drama with ambivalence and disregard; they have promoted a new modern nation state that does not share her cultural heritage with other postcolonial nations and have turned to an ‘ambiguous and uncertain rhetoric of Islam’ (Kirmani, 2015: 5–6). Kirmani's argument reinforces Toor's (2005: 321) point, highlighting the inherent contradiction in the concept of the Pakistani nation, which arises from the tension between territorial nationalism and the imagined community of Muslims beyond the nation's borders. Critics have thus sought to trace the causes of cultural ambiguity in Pakistan, often attributing it to issues of nationalism and religious confusion, and my study attempts to clarify this ambiguity further by analysing the responses of Pakistani anti-fans of Barbie. Respondents of the study linked their dislike of the movie to its lack of culture but were not able, or did not feel the need, to share what they meant by culture. Some responses to the third open-ended question (Is there any ‘objectionable content’ in the movie? Please give a short comment, if possible) and the second question can be placed in both the categories of nationalism and religion. For example, one respondent (female, 30–45, graduate, Karachi) said, ‘Our culture and our Islam gives all rights to women. But Barbie is not anti-Islam’. A Lahore-based viewer (female, 15–30, graduate, Lahore) gave a vehement reply: ‘Barbie is fun, and I really liked it. We have toxic man culture. But it has the western LGBT thing, so I am not sure if it is okay to watch. In Islam’. The inherent ambiguity of the idea of culture can be linked with the religious beliefs of the respondents. The conflicting responses in the survey demonstrate the potential of a popular event movie to highlight the social complexities of the meaning-making processes of faith in a postcolonial, patriarchal country with a long history of military rule.

Scholars like Kirmani have often gestured towards the cultural ambiguity in Pakistan and its connection with the postcolonial history of the land and a vague religious narrative. Islamic narratives contribute to a distrust of India and help in shaping national beliefs through a framework for understanding the world and guiding moral and ethical values, influencing individuals’ perspectives on politics issues, social norms and personal conduct (Rizvi, 2002). Toor (2005: 319) maintains that the ideas of Pakistani nationhood and culture are vague, and the postcolonial history makes ‘nation’ a site over which claims to political identity and representation are contested, which reinforces the Muslim claim of belonging to one ummah. In one of the most detailed answers to the second open-ended question, one respondent (female, 30–45, postgraduate, Lahore) said:
No. I don’t think it's relatable. The movie in its feminist agenda ploughs ahead with a women led all world concept. However, it goes on to show a world where men have no role at all, and women are mean to them. So, it is patriarchy, but in reverse. I am thinking of our culture and values and Barbie is the exact opposite. There is no concept of equality in the west.
The comment reflects the historical influence of religion and politics on the construction of a national identity in Pakistan. The concept of feminism is generally considered anti-Islamic and a threat to Muslim family systems because it teaches women to be disrespectful. Various national Islamic societies lead organised protests against feminist initiatives (Tarar et al., 2020: 255). The respondent further stated that:
[the] glory of one generation comes at the expense of the other and they are fine with it. The problems and questions that the movie raises in the beginning are never solved till the end or even a hint of a satisfying explanation is given. So, for me it was a poorly written film that just relied heavily on a couple of jokes, none of which were funny in the actual film. Still, better than the Indian movies. A better gunah.
The concept of sin (gunah) is associated broadly with the leisure activity of watching movies, but the association intensifies if the movie is produced in the land of the national enemies. The respondent used the words ‘culture’ and ‘values’, which have become part of the everyday discourse on the freedom of women and religion, and nationalism. With all its faulty production and a ‘feminist agenda’ that felt wrong to her, the viewer still considered it to be a better sinful activity than watching an Indian movie. We can see here the challenges in terms of the desire for entertainment and the urge to filter forms of entertainment because of an undefined religious nationalism.

Previous studies have noted that discussions and analysis of fandoms can highlight ambiguous identity construction in individuals, which is related to their specific contexts. Anastasia Seregina and John W. Schouten (2017) underscore the significance of fandom in resolving identity ambiguity. Extrapolating from Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital, the authors look at identity as a ‘complex project’ in the context of contemporary culture and emphasise that ‘to explore the lives of individuals with ambiguous identities and deficiencies of cultural capital, we must grasp what it is they are lacking and in what social context’ (Seregina and Schouten, 2017: 110–112). The Barbie fandom, and anti-fandom, in Pakistan is especially useful for analysing the ambivalence constructed around the idea of women’s empowerment in society. The famous line from the monologue of Gloria (America Ferrara) in Barbie is that ‘It is literally impossible to be a woman’. Similarly, it is impossible to define what women’s empowerment means in Pakistani culture and the conflict is clearly visible in the viewers’ responses collected for the present study. Out of the sixty-eight anti-fans of Barbie, twenty identified as males and forty-eight as females. The comments of female anti-fans show that their idea of women’s empowerment is complicated by their postcolonial, patriarchal, nationalist and religious context.

In their responses to the second and third open-ended questions, the anti-fans emphasised that Barbie presented the wrong idea of women’s empowerment. They wrote that ‘woman can work and be truly independent only if they follow Islamic value, not Western agendas’ (female, 45–60, graduate, Lahore), and that ‘They are educated and have jobs and careers, but our women don’t dress boldly like Indians so [the] West thinks that we are backward’ (male, 30–45, graduate, Karachi). On the other hand, fans of Barbie appreciated the representation of ‘female camaraderie’ (female, 15–30, graduate, Lahore), felt ‘happy to see women thinking about things other than marriage’ (prefer not to say, 30–45, Lahore) and said that they ‘absolutely love the thought that women can be anything and do all things’ (female, 15–30, undergraduate, Karachi). Among the fifty-seven fans of Barbie, fifty identified as females, four as males and three preferred not to say. The viewers’ responses to the third question show that the fans appreciated the movie for its women-centric content while the anti-fans found the same content problematic. For example, an anti-fan wrote that the content of the movie is objectionable because:
the cultural norms, specially in context of dressing and having male friends or boyfriends do not match our values. Women don’t become powerful if they can wear barely-there dresses or have affairs with anyone they want. I watched the movie because the Government banned it, and they are right. We don’t want our women openly talking about vaginas and not dressing like Muslims. (Male, 45–60, postgraduate, Lahore)

The respondent's inclusion of the idea of having ‘affairs’ or free sexual relationships in his comments, which is not part of the movie, reflects the ways in which Barbie's anti-fandom grows and becomes an event. The respondent's desire to gain the social capital linked with the event of Barbie encourages him to insert aspects that are not included in the movie.

The responses demonstrate that women’s empowerment is an ambiguous concept in Pakistan, which approves of education for women but draws a complicated map of social behaviour for women that restricts their freedom based on a set of vague outlines of culture, values and Islam. The anti-fandom of Barbie is predominantly located in the urban centres, where women have more freedom of expression and movement as compared to the rural areas, which shows the negative impact of cultural ambiguity on the existence of women in a patriarchal society. One respondent (female, 15–30, postgraduate, Lahore) gave detailed replies to the second and third questions. She found the movie relatable and reflective of the current position of women in Pakistani society:
Yes, I believe it is very much so. Many of the monologues in the movie especially one spoken by America Ferrera just about explained the typical need to be everything for everyone in a woman, which I’ve seen a lot in Pakistani women as well. You must be a doctor and then come home and make perfect roti for your hubby who won’t help you with the dishes because men don’t do that. The issue of being judged more harshly than men in every sphere of life, of being too harsh upon us with an impossible standard we have for ourselves as women is something that many Pakistani women know intimately, be it as wives, mothers, daughters or working women.³

The comments of the fans connect the movie with the conflicting parameters of social acceptability, and the views of anti-fans show that the idea of women’s empowerment is related to religion, nationalism and patriarchal social structures. Previous research on female empowerment in Pakistan has noted the low social status of women, the cultural barriers that repress women, stereotypes of subordinate women and the dire need to boost women's self-esteem and social mobility. Pakistan is among the countries with the greatest genderdisparities, with women being controlled by men in all aspects of life and menholding most high-level positions of power. A study shows that the widespread devaluation of women's education and the long-standing patriarchal norms have severely limited young women's opportunities for personal and professional advancement, contributing to the country's poor human development ranking (Hussain et al., 2022). My analysis focuses on the nuances of the complicated construction of the identity of a socially acceptable Muslim Pakistani woman. It is important to understand how the urban, educated and socio-economically privileged class in the society follows vague codes of gendered conduct that target women.

Conclusion

This article argues that responses to Barbie have the potential to expose cultural ambiguities in Pakistani society. The movie elicited responses from participants that revealed their deeply ingrained misogynist views, which they might not have otherwise expressed so openly or in such detail. Furthermore, the anti-fandom reflects the depth of the marginalisation that even privileged women experience every day in the country. The anti-fans’ usage of vague determinants such as culture, values and the broad denominator ‘Pakistani’ indicates the ambivalence that stems from of postcolonial history, religious beliefs and nationalism, and governs the urban social landscape of the country. The significance of Barbie lies in its efficacy as a tool to call attention to various aspects of a culture and a society that are otherwise difficult to pin down.

Footnotes

Notes

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