By Emma Weidmann | Arts and Life Editor
The women’s and gender studies program is hosting “Living in a Barbie World: A Panel Discussion” on Oct. 10. Three Baylor professors will discuss the movie of the year: the glittering phenomenon in pink that is “Barbie.”
Dr. Leslie Hahner, graduate program director in the department of communication, is one of the three panelists for the discussion. She specializes in pop culture and teaches a graduate course in rhetoric and cultural studies. Hahner said Barbie — the movie and the doll — is a “cultural touchstone” that is both a childhood staple and the object of much debate.
Hahner said she was struck by how the film flipped the typical romantic comedy narrative when it came to the relationship between Margot Robbie’s Barbie and Ryan Gosling’s Ken. According to Hahner, this gives a fresh perspective on the decades-old franchise.
“To give us a dark comedy, that allows us to think about Barbie in a new way — that Barbie is now a philosopher, not just a doll that we play with,” Hahner said. “And the other aspect I loved about the movie is that mother-daughter relationships were a heavy element of the theme. That was a really deep and powerful message about how we relate to our mothers and our daughters.”
Dr. Mia Moody-Ramirez, chair of the department of journalism, public relations and new media, is also on the panel and had different thoughts on the Barbie-Ken dynamic.
“They kind of show them pushing away relationships, pushing the men away and actually kind of mistreating them until the end,” Moody-Ramirez said.
What Moody-Ramirez said she appreciated about the film was its diverse depiction of Barbies, including a Black president Barbie and a vast array of gender identities, races and sexualities.
“The movie actually went against those traditional stereotypes that you think of when you think of Barbie,” Moody-Ramirez said. “Within the movie, the women are the leaders. You have a woman who’s the president of Barbie Land, and so they’re all in leadership positions, and that’s a positive portrayal, on one hand.”
Moody-Ramirez brought up one concern critics of the doll often raise: the rampant consumerism Barbie promotes among young girls.
“Barbie has the Corvette. She has the Malibu house. She has all these things,” Moody-Ramirez said. “It’s teaching girls at a very early age that by buying things, it can make them happy.”
Another common bone to pick with Barbie, according to Moody-Ramirez, is the warped sense of body image it has a history of imposing upon women. With Barbie’s long legs and miniscule waist, generations of girls have grown up comparing their flesh-and-blood bodies to Barbie’s plastic perfection.
A National Institutes of Health study suggests that while the body image perception of girls who played with thin dolls didn’t differ significantly from that of those who played with more average-sized dolls, “girls ate less after exposure to the thin dolls than after exposure to the average-sized doll.”
Dr. Lenore Wright is the third panelist for the discussion and explored these ideas in her book entitled “Athena to Barbie: Bodies, Archetypes, and Women’s Search for Self,” which examines the “vexed nature of being a woman” in the face of body image.
Hahner said Mattel’s efforts for body and ethnic diversity in the dolls are an attempt to grow the brand as a “space of imagination” where all girls can see their futures reflected in Barbie.
“Mattel has made a great deal of money off of this film, enough that they’re able to launch a number of new product lines,” Hahner said. “So, I think that’s something to watch, but that shouldn’t deter us from still using our imaginations and opening up our horizons. … You can have an old Barbie that your mother used to own and still use that as a space of imagination.”
“Living in a Barbie World: A Panel Discussion” is open to all students and will take place from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. on Oct. 10 in Draper 152.
