Barbie

I had the pleasure of watching Barbie when it first came out. I immediately thought of the genre of broad satire, especially visual, as in eighteenth-century Hogarth paintings and prints but with women creators. My first impulse was to laugh at the blatantly inverted world the movie creates. As someone interested in literature of the long eighteenth century—both popular prints such as broadsheets and later novels by British women—I was struck by the strategies used in the film and how they recalled some of those practiced hundreds of years ago to escape the official censor through laughter. I thought of the seventeenth-century prints depicting a world turned upside down with the oppressors at the bottom of the sheet and the oppressed at the top. 1 Stemming from this, eighteenth-century theatrical pantomimes carried the inversions onto the stage; this continues today in comic performances that use a camp style. While watching Barbie , the brashness of the blatant inversions made me gasp and laugh

Sociology · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · Theater, Performance, and Music History

• And I Want to Thank You Barbie

  Claudia Mitchell, Jacqueline Reid-Walsh et al.•The Review of Education Pedagogy…•1995

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