Abstract
The Barbie doll has jostled alongside feminism for the past sixty years, and has been read both as emblematic of women's independence and as symptomatic of patriarchal oppression. With somewhat murky origins – copied from the German Bild Lilli doll, which was a joke doll aimed at the (largely male) adult market – Barbie's first couple of years were marked by legal cases around copyright and patents. Marketed with modest expectations initially, it is now one of the most successful toys from the latter half of the twentieth century, with well over a billion dolls sold. Launched in March 1959, on the cusp of the second-wave feminist movement, the adult, white, blonde and extremely thin Barbie (at least in its traditional and stereotypical incarnations) became the global export and unofficial face of American toys for girls – and of normative modes of American femininity. More recently, a multimedia franchise has been developed across films, television, video games, board games, social media, books, clothing, theme parks, accessories and toys, making Barbie one of the clearest successes of the expansion of the American children's toy market into international mass production. A live-action Barbie film was planned well over a decade ago, first announced in 2009 and variously attached to names like Diablo Cody, Amy Schumer, Anne Hathaway and Patty Jenkins. When Greta Gerwig was announced as the director – after the critical and commercial successes of her bildungsromane Lady Bird (2017) and Little Women (2019) which centred on the interiority and self-actualisation of young women – the visibility of the project increased, and with it the promise of its feminist credentials. This Special Issue responds to the explosion of public discourse that preceded, accompanied and followed the film's release, offering a variety of directions for unpicking the cultural politics of Barbie's relationship with gender, technology, capitalism, embodiment, genre, law, childhood and more.
In the year before the film's release, Warner Bros. ran a high-profile, global and highly expensive marketing campaign (estimated at US$150 million) which ensured a ubiquity of pink reminders (Rubin, 2023). Trailers and teasers, an array of partnerships with brands, and wide-reaching social media strategies secured the embedding of the film into the cultural consciousness of its would-be audiences. The Barbie Selfie Generator website exemplified the crucial intersection between planned marketing and audience-generated content that characterised the campaign, as it encouraged viewers to produce their own images by inserting themselves onto backgrounds that mimicked the film's promotional posters (https://www.barbieselfie.ai/uk/). The editable tagline ‘This Barbie is limited edition’ resisted parodies: any use of this phrase, even critical ones such as announcing that ‘This Barbie won’t be purchasing any’ of the pink products released to advertise the film (Dixon, 2023), contributed to the intended effect of the campaign by raising awareness of the product. Using feminism to market products, and the marketing of ‘feminism’ itself as a product, constitutes what Andi Zeisler (2016) calls ‘marketplace feminism’: in blurring the boundaries between ‘intentional’ and ‘organic’ advertising, and in the explicit or implied linking of pink objects and images to notions of girl power, Barbie proves a useful case study for considering feminist readings of capitalism and branding (Carroll Hudson, 2024). This is only one in the interdisciplinary range of approaches that the Barbie movie phenomenon invites. In this Special Issue, an array of critical frameworks from different disciplines is deployed to consider a wide range of aspects of the film, its production and reception, its anticipations and after-effects and the political and cultural histories with which it intentionally or inadvertently engages.
Barbie was released on 21 July 2023 in the United States, with most other countries’ release dates between the 19th and 21st of that month. The concurrent release of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer (2023) gave rise to the Barbenheimer phenomenon, which significantly contributed to promoting the film. In this Special Issue, two articles find productive insights in the Barbenheimer entanglement. In ‘Deconstructing Barbenheimer: A Feminist Analysis of Gender and the Representation of Nuclear War’, Emily Faux discusses the implications of this coupling for gendering narratives of nuclear war in the public sphere; in ‘Love Must Imagine the World: Quantum Mechanics in Barbie’, Stuart James Hall elucidates how Barbie's references to quantum physics and preoccupation with the value of knowledge about a hidden world align the film with Oppenheimer. Beyond the Barbenheimer phenomenon, the attention that has been given to Barbie is indicative of the cultural investments that the film has carried since before its release. These investments are evident in the controversy around the lack of Academy Award nominations for Gerwig, as Best Director, and Margot Robbie, as Best Actress. The criticism of the Oscars snub (voiced by prominent figures such as Hillary Clinton) was read as highlighting the hypocrisies of white and neoliberal feminism; for instance, political commentator Matt Bernstein (2024) stated that ‘i loved Barbie and wish it had been nominated for more oscars. but on the topic of gender issues: women in gaza are currently using tent scraps as period products. i hope you can hold a similar level of outrage for them’. Considering too how the majority of the disappointed public failed to celebrate the women of colour who were instead nominated (Hibberd, 2024), this moment of the Barbie discourse became emblematic of the shortcomings of a certain kind of mainstream liberal feminist position.
Feminism is of course an explicit topic of reflection in the film itself, caught in layers of parody and self-referentiality. The film's texture of allusions, and its investment in constructing semi-isolated set pieces and privileging jokes, cameos, or products over narrative logic, makes for a text that lends itself to both the disassembling of recognisable Barbie elements to be reused elsewhere, and the assembling of heterogenous interpretations such as the ones included in this Issue. Theories of transmediality and adaptation can help us to understand the Barbie movie as functioning like a ‘fluid text’ similar to superhero movies that exists across multiple paratexts, fan-generated media and material forms, from plastic to pixels (Marazi, 2020). For instance, the video to advertise the 2024 Oscars repurposed recognisable Barbie costumes, sets, props and lines from the film, blurring boundaries between characters and actors. In the advertisement, Kate McKinnon is in costume and introduces herself to Jimmy Kimmel as Weird Barbie, while Ryan Gosling wears movie merch and is referred to as Ryan. In the video, after Weird Barbie and Kimmel have travelled through setscapes containing images of the other nominated films and actors, Gerwig's deployment of feminist concepts (both serious and ironic) is referenced too: America Ferrera appears and delivers a version of her ‘It's literally impossible to be a woman’ monologue from the film to explain the apparently complex binds of being a good Oscars host. This is followed by Gosling screeching in shock when he discovers that Gerwig has not been nominated for the Best Director award. The use of the film's most-quoted scene and the playful response to the establishment not acknowledging Gerwig as director demonstrate Barbie's ability to re-incorporate public narratives about itself. Managing to simultaneously legitimise and minimise the hardships of Oscars hosting as compared to being a woman, but also to reference the outrage about the nomination snub without either condemning it as hypocritical and trivial nor endorsing it as a serious feminist concern, this piece of media exists as one of the many extensions of the movie that continue to refract and revisit the meanings and messages of the Barbie brand.
In considering the relationship between such media extensions and the Barbie text itself, the latter's classification as an adapted screenplay by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is highly pertinent in terms of thinking about women's voices. Barbie's relationship to an existing toy invited comparisons with The Lego Movie (2014), which was classed as an original screenplay by the Academy. Discussions weighed up issues such as how Mattel toys, unlike Lego toys, have character traits and narratives associated with them, although these traits and narratives are not as firmly defined as is the case with more typical instances of an adapted text (Burke, 2024; Davis, 2023). These debates point to Barbie pulling at the seams of the categories we use to determine the boundaries of invention and notions of an ‘original’ story. After all, Gerwig's is not the first Barbie movie. Since 2001, Mattel's entertainment division has produced 43 animated feature films (Orr Vered and Maizonniaux, 2017). While many are original concepts, some of them, such as Barbie as Rapunzel (2002) or Barbie in a Christmas Carol (2008), are themselves adaptations, inserting characters like Barbie and her sisters within stories not owned by Mattel. While the 2023 film never references its (original and adapted) predecessors, it does engage extensively with the history of Mattel's dolls. In this Special Issue, Helen King's ‘“Never the Twain Shall Cross”: Scripts of Children's Play and Adult Desire in Barbie’ suggests that the film invokes and disrupts scripts of play that are imagined to pertain to the dolls, but does this in service of self-actualisation narratives for the adult characters that have little to do with children's actual interactions with toys. If the question of originality becomes a matter of recognising authorship, it is also worth considering that, while much was made about Robbie's exclusion from the Best Actress nomination list, her role as producer of the film and the authority over the text that comes with it has been largely invisible; this raises questions, alongside Gerwig's prominent presence as the film's director and the complex context of her co-writing the script with her husband, about female authorial agency and women's voices in Hollywood.
Many articles in this Special Issue highlight prominent intertextual entanglements that, while not necessarily making the case for the film's status as an adaptation, reveal its capacity for cultural resonance. Ruth Connolly's ‘Innocence and Experience in Barbie’ and Stacy Gillis's ‘A Proposal in Plastic: Jane Austen in Barbie Land’ locate Barbie within longer narrative traditions about power, knowledge and social regulation, respectively the pre-/post-lapsarian tradition and the Regency Romance. Gráinne O’Hare's ‘“You Can Stay If You Want, as My Bride Wife”: Mapping Barbie Land onto Bachelor Nation’ explores how the film can be read as an intertext for popular reality television romance. These various cultural narratives are absorbed by the movie, re-branded with Barbie's distinct aesthetics and logics, and re-circulated to inform our collective understandings of gender and storytelling. Engaging audiences’ capacity to recognise tropes and characters invites the kind of participation that was vital in the marketing of the movie. From dressing up in pink to go to the cinema to being invited to remember key moments of Barbie media discourse referenced in the Oscars advert, audiences are continually encouraged to ‘play with’ the story and its characters. Questions of self-production and the making of identity through a viewing experience of Barbie are raised by several articles in this Special Issue. Darby Babin's ‘Genderqueer Reflections on Weird Barbie’ reads Weird Barbie as queer collage that can never be fully re-appropriated by Mattel as product, existing as a result of the unpredictable creative destruction of children's play, as a locus of projection for the gendered experiences of viewers and as linked to McKinnon's star persona and mainstream lesbian cultural references. Sara di Caglio's ‘“First I Got One Tear, and Then I Got a Whole Bunch”: Fluidity and Plasticine Solidity in the World of Barbie’ is similarly interested in probing connections between screen and world, positing a fluid relation between the characters’ (im)permeable corporeality and the materiality of viewers’ bodies. These extra-textual connections function to locate Barbie within far wider material and histories than those of the Barbie doll.
These reflections should not be confined to the American cinema screen, as Barbie's global popularity is evident in the US$809 million grossed at box offices outside of North America, heralding a world-wide return to in-person viewing after the 2020 pandemic. Several pieces in this Special Issue discuss the film's reception outside of Anglophone markets: Fangqing Gu's ‘Lost in Translation: Barbie and Subtitle Discrepancies in China’ comments on the impact of translation choices on the film's feminist messages, while Javaria Farooqui's ‘From a Toy to a Tool: The Reception of Barbie and Cultural Ambiguity in Contemporary Pakistan’ speaks to the intersection of the global and the local through an analysis of audience reactions in Pakistan. On a larger scale, Justin Bonest Phillips and Damian Scarf's ‘Big Data Barbie: Barbie Discourse on Facebook and Instagram’ offers a wealth of data on global Barbie-related posts from Meta platforms for further interpretation. One conclusion that can be drawn from this data is that discussions about political controversies may have been less prominent than it appeared in the wake of the film's release, with the majority of Barbie's social media mentions being celebratory and/or aimed at selling products or driving engagement for accounts. It is clear that Barbie's critical stance against an explicitly named ‘patriarchy’ aligned the film with mainstream feminism in a way that prompted right-wing and conservative groups that define themselves in opposition to feminist ideas to voice their strong dislike of the film. In this issue, Julie Estlick's ‘Ken's Best Friend: Masculinities in Barbie’ identifies the departures from models of hegemonic masculinity in the characterisation of the Kens and Allan that might be responsible for eliciting these hostile reactions. Provoking a range of affective and political responses across the ideological spectrum, Barbie has been cast alternately as ‘too feminist’ and ‘not feminist enough’ – and the articles in this Special Issue help us to understand this paradoxical effect.
Despite what right-wing critics may suggest, the film's description of female-dominated Barbie Land as utopian is clearly ironic. In this Special Issue, Robyn Timothy's ‘Barbie Land as Cyberfeminist Utopia’ argues that Barbie Land may be a feminist utopia not because women have power over men (as some commentators insist) but because this world blurs binary distinctions upon which normative constructions of gender rest: human/machine, mind/body, empowering/disempowering. Far from settling on what should or should not happen in the Real World, the script's comedic approach becomes a way of carefully negotiating corporate agendas and feminist aims, finding a way to have one's cake and eat it too. The film's voiceover, for instance, begins by outlining the empowering fantasy of the brand: ‘Because Barbie can be anything, women can be anything. And this has been reflected back onto the little girls of today in the Real World. […] Thanks to Barbie, all problems of feminism and equal rights have been solved. At least that's what the Barbies think’. Even if this gentle mocking of Mattel were meant as a critique of how feminist narratives are co-opted by those in power, anti-capitalist liberation cannot be meaningfully articulated from within the brand's own territory. Instead, the script displaces Barbie's failure to ‘solve problems’ onto the fictional dolls themselves, who are portrayed as naively thinking they are heroes in the Real World. When Stereotypical Barbie encounters a group of high school girls in the Real World, they deliver a brutal awakening by revealing how the doll has been making ‘women feel bad about themselves’ since she was invented. The preposterousness of Barbie being blamed for structural societal problems – as she protests that she does not ‘control the railways, or the flow of commerce’ – is a joke that functions to obfuscate how some of the young women's accusations, such as that Barbie is ‘killing the planet with your glorification of rampant consumerism’, could be legitimately levelled at Mattel. Because the film refuses to or is unable to settle on matters such as these, it has attracted a broad spectrum of praise and critique from those invested in feminist work.
The final line of the movie is indicative of how feminist readings of Barbie can produce a range of sometimes incompatible interpretations. As it is read variously (in this Special Issue and beyond) as a re-instatement of biological notions of womanhood, a subversion of these biological notions or a blurring of the boundaries between the two, each of these gestures can either constitute feminist critique or be its target. For example, in this Special Issue, Della J. Winters, Courtney Grimm and Raveena Bola's ‘“I’m Here to See My Gynaecologist”: Reproductive Justice and the Deleuzian Becoming of Barbie’ reads this final scene as holding more liberatory potential than the overt neoliberal feminist empowerment narrative presented in the rest of the movie. These and other feminist quandaries, such as the tension between serious art and guilty pleasures, are stirred up by Barbie. The articles in this Special Issue show the potential inherent in this mainstream cultural product to raise questions about matters that have considerable real-world import. For instance, Ruth Houghton, C.R.G. Murray and Aoife O’Donoghue's ‘Kenstituent Power: An Exploration of Feminist Constitutional Change in Barbie’ considers how the film prompts reflections on the securing of private property, citizenship and the public sphere; and Jul Jeonghyun Parke's ‘I Would Rather Be a Cyborg than a Barbie: Hyperfeminine Nostalgia and Patriarchal Futurity in Barbie’ discusses how Barbie Land's aesthetics are puzzlingly divorced from, or even hostile to, technology and its enabling effects. It is in the coalface of popular culture that can be found the most widely consumed renditions of cultural politics, and the articles in this Special Issue use Barbie as a catalysing vector to think about the relationship between feminism and popular culture. What place does feminism have in popular culture? And what can popular culture reveal about feminism? As these questions are bounded geographically and epistemologically by contested parameters about ‘whose’ popular culture and what ‘kinds’ of feminism, the varied – and at times controversial – reactions to the film speak to an uneasiness about the political being popular and the popular being political.
Barbie is a film acutely aware of its politics, and in some ways it works to subvert and satirise in advance any ideological readings of itself as text and as product; at the same time, it is a film produced by a late imperialist capitalist system, which innately reifies and commodifies consumption and inequity. Weird Barbie may have meta-referentially exhorted us to not ‘think about it too much’, but it is too late now – we have thought about Barbie far too much to stop here. Serious consideration of the negotiations within, and the effects without, of popular fictions allows us to see how a text such as Barbie, like pink, has the ability to ‘go with everything’, enabling both capitalist agendas and challenges to patriarchal power structures.
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A final note on the order and structure of this Special Issue. Feminist Theory has a long-standing tradition of including shorter essays as part of its Interchanges section, which are intended to be provocations upon a theme. This Special Issue includes shorter pieces, but they are woven throughout the normal running order of articles: the pieces lead to/from another in polyphonic conversation, rather than being separated out by length. Finally, we want to end with gratitude and enthusiasm. Over 130 colleagues from around the world contributed articles for consideration, and we had to make some difficult decisions. We thank all those who contributed their pieces for allowing us into your thoughts on Barbie, and we particularly thank the contributors in this Special Issue who met the accelerated timeline of less than a year (from the call for submissions to going to print) with generosity, aplomb and care. You are all more than Kenough.