Who cleans Barbie's toilet?

bell hooks, sisterhood, and the restrictions on radicalizing in Barbie world

It’s award season and Barbie is back in the news. So I’m once again reflecting on Barbie.

When I saw Barbie over the summer, I added it to the variety of feminist world-building I’ve read or seen over the years. I thought about The Power, one of the most fascinating novels I’ve read, about women who grow “skeins” that channel electricity and reshape the world around women’s physical power to overwhelm others (read, men. Also book is better than the TV show). I thought about feminist apocalypse like The Handmaid’s Tale and other forced-birth futures like Future Home of the Living Gods by Louise Erdrich.  

Each world-building artist contends with a scenario we have to grapple with as readers as well as the narrative choices of the artist. I remember the feeling of discomfort when I watched (and quickly abandoned) the TV version of The Handmaid’s Tale, which leaves Atwood’s version, in which Christian nationalist ideology is decidedly white and invested in white futures (the “Children of Ham” are “relocated” or murdered en masse in the novel. The TV version skirts this with a multi-racial dystopia, as a way to “fix” Atwood’s white gaze. A better way to do that might have been to create a storyline that centered on resistance within these race-formed “colonies”). In The Power the biological linkage between gender and sex is front and center, which felt different at the height of #MeToo than it does in the age of rampant attacks on trans folks by Republican legislatures and parents’ rights groups.

So we have a Barbie movie shaped by the constriction of Barbie world. And in Barbie world a Black woman president and there’s a multi-racial Supreme Court. Everyone in Barbie world own a home, drives a very nice car, and seems to have a pool in their backyard. In Barbie world there is extensive leisure that coexists with meaningful work. There are no janitorial service Barbies, no fast food worker Barbies, no day laborer Barbies. In the opening montage, Barbie “cooks” by food suddenly appearing in her kitchen. No domestic labor in Barbie world, aided by the fact that Barbie is childless by choice (except for the terrifying Perpetually Pregnant Barbie).

That’s the complicated part of bringing a child’s play world to bear on adult realities. I played with Barbie’s growing up, and while I don’t have memories of that play, I am certain my dolls worked through my real world. Children’s play is like that – it assists in making sense of the world around us, understanding it in a new form. It isn’t, as Barbie would have us believe, all possibility. Play is a language that allows children to articulate their experience. Actual Barbies get divorced because parents get divorced. Actual Barbies hit each other because kids at school hit each other. Actual Barbies pick strawberries in the fields at 4 am because that’s what parents, and often kids, do too. Those Barbies may also beat up the field boss or turns in to a super hero to fight against bullies, but real life is also the basis of play.

Barbie is a movie about how women think about the world that’s possible for Barbie that isn’t actually possible because of sexism. Barbie travels to the Real World, a place that is in many ways the inverse of Barbie world, except it’s also a story about wealthy elites. Barbie steps directly into corporate America, complete with an all-white-men CEO and board, hilariously led by Will Ferrell. We’re led to believe that if the board had women, if the CEO was a woman, if the system put more women at the top, then we’d be much closer to the utopia of Barbie World, which is what we want.

Americ Ferrera’s Real World Gloria character makes this now famous speech that, in truth, did have me nodding along, even a bit emotional:

You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can't ask for money because that's crass. You have to be a boss, but you can't be mean. You have to lead, but you can't squash other people's ideas. You're supposed to love being a mother, but don't talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman but also always be looking out for other people.

“Have to be.” Have to be for what? You have to fit into these structures (thin, having money within asking, being a boss, leading, career woman) to fit into the economic world that Barbie imagines could be better if women took over. Which is wouldn’t be. It would be the same world because even with a woman CEO and board of directors, Mattel still answers to shareholders which means they will still produce products at the cheapest available cost, which means they will still exploit their labor force. There will still be working class Barbie who doesn’t think at all about being the boss, she just wants to have childcare early enough in the morning so she can get to her 4 am shift at the chicken processing plant.

After I saw Barbie, I went back and read bell hooks famous essay, “Sisterhood: Political Solidarity Between Women.” hooks talk about a sisterhood that moves beyond shared feelings of mutual exploitation by men. “Women,” she writes, “are enriched when we bond with one another but we cannot develop sustaining ties or political solidarity using the model of bourgeoise women’s liberationists.” Victimization as a shared bond is sexism – women are taught to view ourselves as victims.

Instead, hooks writes “we must define our own terms.” Our bond extends through shared political commitment to feminist movements, sharing our resources and our strength. It’s the 1980s, so lots in her writing about consciousness raising but some of that still rings true to me: “between women, male supremacist values are expressed through suspicious, defensive, competitive behavior.” Sexism leads women to feel threatened by one another. Part of our work is to name and undo this way of relating to one another. We can only build a political feminist movement if we are willing to overcome alienation from each other.

And then hooks reminds us that the feminist struggle is a radical struggle because it is anti-racist and class struggle. This is true for white women who act as “hosts” or movements inviting women of color “guests” to participate. It is also true for women of color whose work is to undo internalized racism. (In other books she’ll get deeper into the class struggle and the problem of Black elites). “Sexism, racism, and classism divide women from one another,” she explains. Special interest groups and factions weaken the possibilities for radical politics between women.

I remember when I heard that Mattel was creating a Barbie movie and I think I fake-threw my phone in disgust. But then I heard Greta Gerwig was directing I was suddenly curious to see what she could come up with. And she came up with a lot. But I also wonder how far Barbie world can take us, how far a world without working class feminism can go, and how much oppression is left behind, as invisible as Barbie’s opening scene breakfast.