Hi, I’m Settler Colonial Barbie? the Heteronormative Gender Binary, Pinkwashing, and Settler Colonialism

The Barbie movie was praised as feminist and a celebration of women. People dressed in hot pink and posed inside a life-size barbie box as if sitting on the shelf of a big-box store. The plot of the movie itself involved commercialism come to life, with humans travelling in and out of a ‘girls run the world’ fantasy made out of commodities. But how feminist was the Barbie movie, and to what extent was is a critique of patriarchy? In this paper I argue that the Barbie movie reproduced settler colonial tropes of heterosexuality, femininity, and Whiteness that reflect broader international pinkwashing (Lugones, 2007; Puar, 2013) and lifestyle/commodity feminism. Settler colonialism and racial capitalism have seductive power through gender and sexuality, and the Barbie movie is an example of how capitalism consumes its own critique. Feminist critique in the movie is not only limited but it is also subsumed within consumerism and doesn’t consider liberation from capitalism or biopolitical hierarchies (there is a Black woman as president but she is a mere token in the film itself, and America Ferrera’s character is completely whitewashed). There is not substantive critique of the gender binary–Barbie world is a simple cis and hetero world, Ken’s discontinued boyfriend doll is a joke and the only non-conforming doll is labeled “weird” barbie, a condition to be fixed. The Barbie movie is a story of a nation, one told through the gender binary.

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