Race and religion…in ‘Barbie’
"Do you guys ever think about dying?" Stereotypical Barbie's mention of death at a vibrant party in Barbie Land wreaks havoc on the "feminist" utopia, leading the party to come to an abrupt pause and Stereotypical Barbie to begin exhibiting signs of imperfection. In what seems to be an avowedly secular setting divested of churches, mosques, and temples, death is perhaps the only remnant of faith in Barbie Land.
Death in Greta Gerwig's 2023 film Barbie signifies the limits of human imagination, as well as the material creations manifested from it. Barbie Land's perfection, premised upon a wilful ignorance of death, allows the party to go on forever—until it does not. The party, both figuratively and literally, stops when the mention of death arises.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. This intentionally left-unexplored space is the elephant in the room, causing the world of Barbie to be self-reflexive. Death is not only the death of one Barbie, but it also delineates the borders of what is humanly possible. Justice, as articulated by and in Barbie, stops at this border.
To be sure, justice in Barbie is multidimensional. Through its exploration of feminism's many manifestations and contradictions, Barbie tells a story of a series of human attempts to create a just society not grounded in or directed by a transcendental, higher authority.
While Barbie, in the end, suggests that the march for justice, as signified by the concept of gender equality, should go on, there is also a recognition that humankind cannot fully replace divinity simply because the former is mortal. "Humans only have one ending," Ruth, the maker of Barbie, tells Stereotypical Barbie before proclaiming that "ideas live forever."
Apart from this fundamental and seemingly unsolvable problem with secular notions of justice, Barbie does not leave much room for exploring religion's role in Barbie Land. In fact, Barbie Land is conspicuously secular in the strictest oppositional sense in which the word may be juxtaposed with religion. However, an investigation into this supposedly secular space reveals that Barbie's secularity carries within it a Whiteness problem.
The objection that would leap up in one's mind at the suggestion that Barbie's secularity is racist is that, well, Barbie is racially inclusive: it features Black, Brown, and Yellow characters. However, the problem with the inclusion of people of colour is exactly that: inclusion. The people of colour are included in the White space.
As explained elsewhere, Barbie and her partner Ken are named after their maker's children, Barbara and Kenneth, both of which are household names in the White Judeo-Christian Anglophone world. Stereotypical Barbie and Beach Ken, the protagonist duo of the movie, are archetypical White.
The fact that Stereotypical Barbie is White speaks volumes about the race relations in the film. Not only are the rest of the Barbies relational to Stereotypical Barbie, but they are also subject to a process of White-isation, even if an incomplete one, before their inclusion in Barbie Land.
In short, the problem is not limited to the issue that Stereotypical Barbie is White, but also that Barbie is Barbie, and not Aisha, Rihanna, or Seeta.
That Barbie and Ken represent the neutral space that is Barbie Land tells a story of secularity in which Whiteness redeems itself in secularism. According to this logic, if the protagonist duo were Seeta and Ali, that would violate the sanctity of Barbie's neutral secular space.
In Barbie, the neutral secular space is a repackaged Whiteness where White Christian names are the norm and Buddhist, African, or Japanese names stand as obscene violations. This is a recurring theme across many social texts originating from and/or influenced by the West, positing the West—including its faith traditions and their relics—as the neutral and secular, and others—often including even ethnic identity markers like names—as religious, thus jeopardising the so-called neutral public space.
So entrenched is White-centrism in Barbie that no character of the film was given a non-White name. Inclusion of characters of different races—itself problematic, given it privileges the White space as The Space in which everyone else is asked to fit—is amenable insofar as those races shed all their specificities, sans their diverse skin colours which help reinstate the supremacy of the White space by obfuscating the racial hierarchy upon which it is founded. Extending this line of thought a bit further, Barbie is not solely about the contradictions inherent to the feminist movement, as many commentators have claimed. It is equally about the endemic Whiteness problem in which the movement is mired, even though it attempts to be reflexive and inclusive.
Barbie's conspicuous secularity reeks of Whiteness. In its attempt to erect a neutral space, it has only doubled down on racism by making it more sophisticated and palatable.
Md Ashraf Aziz Ishrak Fahim is a graduate student of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar. Reach him at mdfa48907@hbku.edu.qa
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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