Butch Barbie

KEYWORDS:

• Lesbian
• queer
• film
• feminism
• intersectionality

In the opening scenes of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (Raven Smith 2023), we are welcomed to a matriarchal utopia where the Supreme Court is 100% women and car journeys come with a built-in Indigo Girls soundtrack. Here, “every night, forever and ever” is “girls’ night.” This is Barbie Land. We are soon introduced to an irresistible cast of feminist talent playing different versions of Barbie, from Margot Robbie as Stereotypical Barbie to Issa Rae as President Barbie, Hari Nef as Doctor Barbie and Emma Mackey as Physicist Barbie. “Because Barbie can be anything,” the film’s narrator (Helen Mirren) tells you off-screen, “women can be anything.” Barbies aren’t all white; most of them have jobs; some of them aren’t thin. One Barbie is in a wheelchair. There is even an individual who disrupts the surprisingly radical logic of genital scarcity by showing a pregnancy bump (there’s only one of her, mind you: “Barbie’s pregnant friend Midge” is an aberration whose name might as well be simply Not-Barbie, and who, Mirren explains, was quickly discontinued). This line-up of the range of Barbies living in Barbie Land is a miraculous display of diversity washing. The slightly incredulous narrator tells you that “all of these women are Barbie, and Barbie is all of these women.” If you follow the argument to its obvious conclusion, you might even begin to believe that Barbie is all of these women.

There are many “what ifs” that could be levelled at Gerwig’s Barbie based on an intersectional critique (spoiler: Barbie is not all women). In this short essay I’m going to experiment with just one. What if there were a Barbie who required a different kind of solidarity? What if there were a Barbie who upset the heteronormative logic of female femininity? What if there were a Barbie for whom a girls’ sleepover “every night” read not as party but as alienating promise of gendered failure? What if there were a Barbie who thought the best thing about being free from genitals was not having to share a women’s bathroom? In short, what if there were a Butch Barbie? Imagine Butch Barbie however you wish: with she or they pronouns, with or without a binder, wearing plaid or a neon beach outfit borrowed from Ken. There are of course “many ways to be butch” (Gayle Rubin 2020 [1992], 245). Regardless, imagine Butch Barbie as a hypothetical figure who pushes at and finds the limits of Barbie’s—and Barbie’s—politics of gender.

The premise of Barbie, as I understand it, is that Barbie Land may well be the ultimate vision of feminist paradise, but it can’t last forever. Indeed, it doesn’t take long for Mirren’s narrator to propel her feminist rallying cry to a climax of self-defeating absurdity: “Girls can grow into women who can achieve everything and anything they set their mind to. Thanks to Barbie, all problems of feminism and equal rights have been solved,” she continues, before providing a caveat acknowledging what viewers of course already know: “at least, that’s what the Barbies think.” Consequently, Margot Robbie’s “Stereotypical Barbie” can only enjoy the myriad pleasures of Barbie Land for a few minutes of screen time before an early plot twist intervenes: she begins to “glitch.” As soon as she is deprived not only of her bodily flawlessness (“I would never wear heels if my feet were shaped this way,” she says when her ever-ready tiptoeing feet begin to “malfunction” and flatten) but also her unerring positivity (she begins to think about death), Stereotypical Barbie realises that she must venture beyond Barbie Land to find answers. A journey to the “Real World” brings enlightenment to replace obliviousness. Befriending a bickering (and/therefore human) mother-daughter duo, Gloria (America Ferrera) and Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), Barbie discovers the cruel realities of “real” women’s oppression and begins to ponder her own. Teenage Sasha, the film’s Gen Z mouthpiece, sums it up: “Everybody hates women. Women hate women and men hate women. It’s the one thing we can all agree on.” Barbie soon realises that here in the Real World, Men with Power (encapsulated by a daringly but likely profitably self-referential send-up of male Mattel executives in suits) are The Problem™.

When Stereotypical Ken (Ryan Gosling) follows Barbie to the Real World, he discovers a new superpower: the Patriarchy. In turn, he becomes the main antagonist of the second half of the film (as well as the butt of all the jokes). In turn, a new kind of female camaraderie emerges from the discovery of man not as insipid sidekick but as sexist menace. The masterplan to save Barbie Land from Ken’s patriarchal vision is to get all the Barbies “away from their Kens.” Don’t get me wrong: the Barbies’ flippant misandry is funny and refreshing, and it is deeply pleasurable to watch women blame men for everything. But Barbie’s narrative trajectory sidelines decades of political and legal theory and activism by feminists of colour who have highlighted how “dominant conceptions of discrimination condition us to think about subordination as disadvantage occurring along a single categorical axis” (Kimberlé Crenshaw 1989, 140). Barbie’s discovery of a singular threat to female pleasure, fulfilment, and safety—the patriarchy—reads subordination through this “single axis,” unable to capture its intersectionality. Barbie Land and the Real World straightforwardly represent opposing poles of a universe that can only imagine two genders: as Barbie explains to her new human friends, “basically everything men do in your world, women do in ours.” This logic relies on an absolute conviction that the main threat to a woman’s ability to thrive is always the patriarchy, regardless of whether she is Black, trans, pregnant, or disabled (in Barbie Land, there’s no sign that she might be poor).

This is not to say that Barbie is without its subversive pleasures. Delightfully, Gerwig’s film even allows us to imagine that Barbie might be a bit gay. Heterosexual coupling is ubiquitous but utterly desexualised; when asked, Ken is “actually not sure” what it is a girlfriend and boyfriend might do together. Barbie flippantly remarks behind Ken’s back that he is “totally superfluous.” The lesbian magazine DIVA excitedly reported on fans “going wild over a lingering gaze between Margot Robbie and America Ferrera” (Ella Porteous 2023). Surely, announced Pink News, Robbie’s Barbie “is a lesbian” (Marcus Wratten 2023). Without doubt, the chemistry between Robbie and Ferrera is one of the film’s great joys. LGBTQ+ audiences have long excelled at reading between the lines, and the potential for a femme lesbian reading of the film’s manifesto of female solidarity is very satisfying. Besides, the film was described by cast members interviewed by OUT magazine as an “LGBTQ+ party” (Daniel Reynolds 2023). On the basis of the trailer alone, Vogue called Barbie a “camp classic in the making” (Smith 2023).

It is through its excessive stylisation that camp, according to Katrin Horn, is “capable of intervening in naturalized and naturalizing discourses of gender and sexuality, while granting access to otherwise oppressive systems of meaning- and pleasure-making” (2017, 15). By stylising the neon and pastel Barbie Land as a camp utopia—modelled on The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) no less—the film de-naturalises the association of femininity and femaleness, making femininity for everyone (Mia Lee Vicino 2023). There are two characters that personify the imaginative possibilities of this queer world-building. Ken’s friend Allan (Michael Cera) doesn’t quite fit in with the boys … or with the girls. Allan is shy, sensitive, tender, and immune to Ken’s patriarchal upheaval. He is also depicted as sidelined, always late to the party, mostly forgotten. Like Pregnant Midge, he is explicitly Not-Ken. And then there is Kate McKinnon’s Weird Barbie, who “used to be the most beautiful Barbie of all but then someone played with her too hard in the real world” and has now “faded to an eternity of making other Barbies perfect while falling more and more into disrepair herself.” Weird Barbie is the least gender conforming of the Barbies (albeit embodied by McKinnon more as messy punk swagger than stylised butch masculinity). But she is only that way because she was “played with” “too hard.”

Barbie casts several LGBTQ+ actors, exuberantly performs its citation of beloved queer texts, and embraces a camp aesthetic without compromise. It has the potential therefore to deliver a critique of the universalising imaginary of womanhood, but it doesn’t quite follow through. The radical politics of feminine (and femme) visibility still can’t shake off the sense that, despite a “resurgence” (Ella Braidwood 2023) in butch cultures in recent years, butch seems to remain the dowdy (at best), ugly (at worst) underside of Barbie Land’s rainbow parade. What Mairead Sullivan calls the “antistyle association of the lesbian” (2022, 16) betrays a normative logic (see also Karen Tongson 2005). What about butchness not only as an erotic but an aesthetic choice? What about the child who dresses their Barbie in Ken’s clothing? As Sally Munt writes, “butch is the signifying space of lesbianism; when a butch walks into a room, that space becomes queer” (1998, 54). And this room doesn’t want to be queer, not in that way.

In pursuing a critique of toxic masculinity, the film perhaps throws the baby (doll) out with the bath water. Once Barbie and Ken arrive in the Real World, they find it marked not only by the evidence of male misogyny but also by the drab dominance of male masculinity. Ken is in thrall to a world in which “everything is almost like … reversed.” When he returns to Barbie Land, he and the other Kens reclaim their power by mimicking the maleness of male culture tout court, from the lacklustre suit of the middle manager to the rugged muscularity of the gym bro. The result is an ironic masquerade as plainly homoerotic as any display of mutual male idolatry: the Kens’ bare-topped fighting scenes are not that exceptional when you compare them to pretty much any representation of a hyper-macho locker room. Stereotypical Ken’s performance is tenderly reminiscent of Nathan Lane’s knowingly redundant disguise in The Birdcage (Mike Nichols, 1996): when he dons a suit to play the role of a straight man, Lane’s character Albert anticipates what is thought of him: that “when I dress like this, I’m even more obvious.” But Barbie’s logic nevertheless betrays a distinct suspicion of masculinity and its effects as only-ever a tool of the patriarchy.

In Jamie Babbit’s film Itty Bitty Titty Committee (2007), the mother of a young dyke complains to her daughter that she’s “read the lesbian handbook from cover to cover and it doesn’t say anything about no make-up.” Babbit, the director of the cult classic But I’m a Cheerleader (1999), has made a career of parodying the ways in which gender and sexuality come to stand in for one another. Cheerleader offered the premise that even feminine cheerleaders can be lesbians. Around the turn of the century, these were observations and preoccupations radical enough, about the irresistible yet inadequate gameplay of so-called “gaydar.” Since then, mainstream lesbian film has become attached to femininity as the normative pathway to progressive representation. Over the last 15 years, the observable increase in lesbian characters on screen has relied on the requisite disavowal of perceived stereotypes of lesbian masculinity (see Clara Bradbury-Rance 2024). As Jack Halberstam wrote in 2011 of the quintessential text of “lesbian chic,” The L Word (Showtime, 2004–9): “the butch therefore gets cast as anachronistic, as the failure of femininity, as an earlier, melancholic model of queerness.” (95) And there’s little room for melancholy in Barbie Land.

Nevertheless, “what if there were a Butch Barbie” is a complicated demand to make, even in the form of mischievous speculation, because it risks dismissing one of the pleasures of Barbie for so many: a celebration, rather than the usual misogynist derision, of femininity. In many ways, the film quite skilfully manages to strike a balance: on the one hand critiquing sexist principles of beauty and on the other, implicitly admonishing Sasha for her careless dismissal of Barbie, whom she meanly labels a “professional bimbo.” When Stereotypical Barbie wrestles with the normative beauty standards she has newly discovered are imposed on her, the narrator delivers a scathing “note to the filmmakers: Margot Robbie is the wrong person to cast if you want to make this point.” The film’s self-referential reflexes allow it both to have its cake and eat it. Ultimately, the film celebrates the friendship between two women who are positioned as the imagined extremes of what ‘female’ gender can do and be: Margot Robbie’s impossibly glamorous Stereotypical Barbie and all too relatable (albeit utterly gorgeous) Gloria, played by the actress who made her name as the star of Ugly Betty (ABC, 2006–10). In Barbie’s final act, when Barbie takes her new friends back to Barbie Land to fight a newly emboldened army of Kens, Gloria delivers a rousing monologue about the paradoxes of womanhood. When I saw the film in the cinema, Gloria’s rallying cry for consciousness-raising elicited cheers from the audience.

The film’s final scene stridently refuses any kind of heterosexual reconciliation between Stereotypical Barbie and Ken but nevertheless aims to tie up a few loose ends in order to find peace once again in Barbie Land. Ferrera’s Gloria, spokesperson for real women everywhere, takes an opportunity to make a pitch to the Mattel CEO (Will Ferrell) for an “ordinary Barbie.” This Barbie just “wants a flattering top, and to get through the day feeling kind of good about herself.” And who can argue with that? Never mind that one woman’s “flattering top” is another’s cage. The problem with this manifesto of everyday female solidarity is that it relies on heteronormativity’s long-standing weapon: ordinariness. And ordinariness tends to go with normative parameters of gendered acceptability. How can we reimagine the compulsory heterosexuality (Adrienne Rich 1993 [1980]) that is an inevitable corollary of this film’s vision of single-axis oppression? Butch Barbie might have a few ideas.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Clara Bradbury-Rance

Clara Bradbury-Rance is a Senior Lecturer in Gender and Sexuality Studies in the Department of Liberal Arts at King’s College London. She is the author of Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory, which was published by Edinburgh University Press and translated into Spanish by Osífragos (both 2019). Clara has published articles in journals including Camera Obscura, Film Quarterly, New Review of Film and Television Studies, French Screen Studies, MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, Feminist Pedagogy and Feminist Theory. Alongside her academic writing, Clara regularly writes film reviews for Sight and Sound magazine. Clara is currently working on two new book projects: a semi-autobiographical account of ambivalent masculinities in lesbian and trans film and TV, and a BFI Classic on Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire.