This Barbie has melancholy feminism
Framing Empowerment and Grievable Lives
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7154285 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Scarlette Nhi Do (0000-0001-9316-0502, Australian National University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 799-805 |
| Publication date | 2025-04-03 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Feminist Media Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1468-0777 • E-ISSN: 1471-5902 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14680777.2024.2372016 |
| OpenAlex | W4400211687 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 9 |
I loved Barbie: playing with these dolls and watching the animations were my religion.With the accumulation of roughly 15 dolls (including two Kens) and a wardrobe any young girl would be jealous of, I practised womanhood in a variety of settings.But there was a critical limit to my imagination: my aspirational womanhood was imbued in, and acted out, by bodies coded "white."And so, I subconsciously learned from an early age: if I were white, I could be anything.Having lived in Australia for the past fifteen years, I can now name the fraught ways in which the white-dominated Western popular culture racialises people like me.We are those marginalised from mainstream discourses and only included insofar as we emulate the "model minority" stereotype-a proximation of the ideals that Barbie and Ken embody in their perpetual youth, health, and seamless occupation of white-collar careers.This dynamic of marginalisation/inclusion, acknowledgement/disavowal, and exclusion/ retention powers "the melancholy of race," as Anne Anlin Cheng understands its operations in Western societies.(2001) She elaborates: "Racialization [. ..] may be said to operate through the institutional process of producing a dominant, standard, white national ideal, which is sustained by the exclusion-yet-retention of racialized others" (2001, 10).My latest encounter with the dolls through Barbie (Gerwig, 2023) left me feeling similarly conscious of race and racialisation despite the diversity in the film.These characters of colour function not to challenge the white ideal Cheng describes, but to consolidate its hegemony through the rhetoric of feminist empowerment.A slightly different form of melancholy is afoot, one where white, neoliberal feminism is the discourse that acknowledges and disavows.Put another way, this melancholy systematically produces an ideal through the "exclusion-yet-retention" of Others, but these Others are not just racialised, as Cheng suggests, they also exist on the periphery of what neoliberal Western feminism deems "empowered women."In this essay, I look to Judith Butler's conceptualisation of "melancholy gender" (1995) and grievability (2016) to formulate the notion of "melancholy feminism."This framework foregrounds how Gerwig's Barbie advances a formation of feminist politic by creating conditions where
Aesthetics · Art · Empowerment · Feminism · Media studies · Political science · Sociology · Gender Roles and Identity Studies · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · History · Law · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 3 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |