By Alma Beltrán y Puga

Is Barbie feminist? Is Greta Gerwig’s script based mostly on concepts of gender equality? The film is definitely appreciated for selling a worldwide dialogue on feminist concepts and gender roles. However answering these questions is difficult. Barbie opens in a model of a feminist utopia: a world the place ladies are rulers and males servants. These inverted political gender roles are based mostly on radical feminist theories that take into account ladies’s liberation will solely be doable when feminist values, reminiscent of care and dialogue, are taken severely, and ladies in energy embrace them. Nonetheless, Barbie Land is a portrait of this feminist fantasy with an excessive amount of pink and a really fundamental liberal concept of the State: civil and political rights are the basic rights of society.

However what about social justice, or, to place it in human rights phrases, social, financial and cultural rights? A core perception of feminism is that gender is an axis of energy that constitutes roles of superiority and subordination in society by means of financial preparations, in addition to entry to civil and political freedoms.  Isn’t entry to well being care and schooling as vital as political illustration? As we go about discovering what’s outdoors Barbie Land (alias, the Actual World), Stereotypical Barbie and Ken encounter gender-based discrimination and patriarchy. Ken learns what patriarchy is meant to imply based mostly on a e-book (in all probability written by a person) and Barbie’s conventional femininity is questioned by two younger college students in a highschool. That is essentially the most we get of social justice within the film. Training confronting gender stereotypes.

Nonetheless, in our actual world, well being issues. Past Barbie’s issues of cellulite and flat ft, sexual and reproductive rights, entry to medicines, and equal therapy for folks with disabilities, weight problems, and different well being issues appear by no means to be a central a part of the film. After all, it’s a Hollywood movie and we shouldn’t anticipate a profound criticism of world well being inequality in a film based mostly on dolls. However let’s give it some thought. Isn’t Mattel (alias, Capitalism) alleged to do one thing about it? Or the Kens or the Barbies? Or the Actual People? Aren’t we alleged to be caring extra about accessible and freed from discrimination well being companies? What about therapy for prostate most cancers and HIV? And entry to vaccines? In 2023, can we actually stay in a actuality the place we don’t talk about these vital points?

Girls’s actions have traditionally been involved with gender-based discrimination in well being care, which incorporates, notably, our historic quest for reproductive justice — securing entry to secure abortions in addition to to dignified childbirth companies and contraceptives. Entry to contraception additionally consists of males and their cultural resistance to utilizing condoms. Unprotected intercourse is likely one of the fundamental drivers of the transmission of sexually transmitted illnesses and the reason for undesirable pregnancies. Girls’s actions have additionally demanded higher entry to social safety advantages, schooling, and equal labor rights.

So, on this context, is Barbie feminist? A solution to this primary query is that it has a glimpse of feminist concepts concerning gender inequality, reminiscent of within the comedy of gender stereotypes about what’s hegemonic masculinity and femininity, which nonetheless at present makes us snicker. Although some argue that it critiques Capitalism, in some methods it appears an extended industrial in favor of a (neo) liberal ordering of society and lacks a critique on what has induced historic gender disparities. On this sense, it falls in need of precisely portraying the interrelation of gender, energy, and the legislation. Since a younger viewers has been captivated by this Hollywood blockbuster, we must always analyze the social discourses behind it and the concepts of rights depicted.

In brief, we must always thank Barbie for fostering a gender-equality dialog between generations. On the similar time, after dwelling in a worldwide dystopia and attempting to outlive a pandemic, we also needs to have world well being and social justice as central matters of these conversations.

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