“She’s everything”: feminism and the Barbie movie

Abstract

Hyped, discussed, and anticipated: Barbie is surely the film of the year. Even before its premiere at the height of the summer blockbuster season, the Barbie movie had achieved a level of public celebration and saturation that is uncommon in twenty-first century media culture. Today, buy-in for Barbie can still be witnessed in the proliferation of online memes, cross-promotions official and unofficial, and huge box-office profits. Barbie is also significant for being the highest-grossing feature film by a single woman director, an important achievement given Hollywood’s marginalization of women in directorial roles, and the film has also been explicitly described as a feminist movie by its producer and star Margot Robbie and director Greta Gerwig. As Gerwig explains, “It’s feminist in a way that includes everyone.”1 This introduction posits Barbie as both a landmark film and a way of measuring feminism’s place in popular discourse. The authors consider whether Barbie is the best evidence yet of the popularity of fourth-wave feminism in integrating feminist discourse into the mainstream, or simply another co-optation of feminist ideas. They also investigate the film’s negotiation of issues affecting contemporary women, including the cultural meanings of femininity, women’s aspirations and limitations, intersectionality, and the manosphere.