Performative resistance and aestheticized conflicts: Barbie’s ambivalent feminist practice

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This article examines the film Barbie as an embodiment of the ambivalence of Western popular feminism. The article argues that Barbie demonstrates two forms of ambivalence – performative resistance and aestheticized conflicts. Defining performative resistance as the tendency of cultural products to articulate progressive ideas while integrating oppressive ideologies into their world-building and diegesis, the article focuses on three aspects of performative resistance demonstrated in the film: its simultaneous celebration and critique of consumerism and normative feminine beauty, its ambivalent attitude toward the patriarchal logic of domination and its inclusion of people with disabilities and people of color as part of its ableist and postracial ideologies, showing that the film’s progressive statements often conceal its incorporation of oppressive ideologies. Defining aestheticized conflicts as cultural products’ representation of conflicts and power struggles in a pleasing and appealing manner to create a happy and harmonious atmosphere, the article examines the aestheticization of diegetic conflicts between Barbies and Kens, among Kens, between capitalists and consumers, and between capitalists and workers, finding that the film’s exposure of conflicts paradoxically contributes to their weakening, and downplays both gender and class conflicts. Through a textual and critical discourse analysis of Barbie, the article hopes to show that regressive elements in Western popular feminist discourses can be intimately intertwined with progressive ideas and often reinforce, reproduce and perpetuate themselves by masquerading as progressive, suggesting that Western popular feminism may be entering a new phase in which structural problems are increasingly obscured by their exposure.