Weird Barbie and Gender Fluidity : Destabilizing the Binary through Performativity

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Authors

Ruiter, Charlotte

Issue Date

2024-11-01

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Thesis

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en_US

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Abstract

Barbie, a 2023 comedy film directed by Greta Gerwig, follows the stories of Stereotypical Barbie’s and Stereotypical Ken’s journeys to the real world after the utopian perfection of life in Barbie Land begins to malfunction. Much literature has focused on Barbie 's journey to finding herself as a human or Ken’s relationship with masculinity, but one relatively unexplored character is Weird Barbie. This project focuses on Weird Barbie’s character, played by Kate Mckinnon. I argue that in Barbie, Weird Barbie provides audiences a case study to examine how gender may be performed within various hierarchies, and how binary systems of gender work to regulate gendered performance. I use Judith Butler’s framework of performativity to exemplify how gen der is portrayed in the Barbie movie and to provide commentary on the value of gender performance subversions to denaturalize the gender binary. Further, I posit that the film begins a conversation on the dysfunction of the gender binary but does not fully complete it. I expand upon disgust, compulsory heterosexuality, and philosophical themes in the film to offer a possible direction for next steps for feminist film and undoing the gender binary.

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38 p.

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U.S. copyright laws protect this material. Commercial use or distribution of this material is not permitted without prior written permission of the copyright holder. All rights reserved.

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