‘In pink, goes with everything’: the cultural politics of Greta Gerwig's 'Barbie'

The Barbie doll has jostled alongside feminism for the past sixty years, and has been read both as emblematic of women's independence and as symptomatic of patriarchal oppression. With somewhat murky origins – copied from the German Bild Lilli doll, which was a joke doll aimed at the (largely male) adult market – Barbie's first couple of years were marked by legal cases around copyright and patents. Marketed with modest expectations initially, it is now one of the most successful toys from the latter half of the twentieth century, with well over a billion dolls sold. Launched in March 1959, on the cusp of the second-wave feminist movement, the adult, white, blonde and extremely thin Barbie (at least in its traditional and stereotypical incarnations) became the global export and unofficial face of American toys for girls – and of normative modes of American femininity. More recently, a multimedia franchise has been developed across films, television, video games, board games, social media, books, clothing, theme parks, accessories and toys, making Barbie one of the clearest successes of the expansion of the American children's toy market into international mass production. A live-action Barbie film was planned well over a decade ago, first announced in 2009 and variously attached to names like Diablo Cody, Amy Schumer, Anne Hathaway and Patty Jenkins. When Greta Gerwig was announced as the director – after the critical and commercial successes of her bildungsromane Lady Bird (2017) and Little Women (2019) which centred on the interiority and self-actualisation of young women – the visibility of the project increased, and with it the promise of its feminist credentials. This Special Issue responds to the explosion of public discourse that preceded, accompanied and followed the film's release, offering a variety of directions for unpicking the cultural politics of Barbie's relationship with gender, technology, capitalism, embodiment, genre, law, childhood and more.

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