“I’m Not Pretty Anymore:” Femininity and Beauty in the Barbie Movie

The Barbie movie swept across the world and became the highest grossing movie of 2023, but it is also considered a controversial film, as the public and academic discourses around it show. Can Barbie be feminist? Is Barbie feminist enough? The expectations levied against the movie come from outside of it, reflecting on Barbie’s history from 1959 until today. Barbie embodies patriarchal views of women but she also showcases the way women entered the workforce, became less reliant on men, and more independent within society. While many critics blame Barbie for unrealistic body standards and capitalist overconsumption, I argue that the doll’s evolution also reflects the way women’s roles changed over the last sixty years. The aim of this paper is to analyze the way Barbie grapples with questions of beauty and femininity in 2023, with a sixty-year-old past of constantly changing definitions of what it means to be a woman.