#anyway off to read ‘the feminist killjoy as cultural critic’ chapter of sara ahmed

[adirectorprepares]

okay here is my review of the barbie movie: (alison bechdel’s mother voice) it does not cohere. i’m kind of offended that i feel the need to expend more thought and energy on understanding it than that, but here we are.

i think the most prominent idea that stands out to me is the interaction between sentiment and doll play (ie an affect studies reading). because there are some facets that play together in interesting ways:

— the centring of emotion as part of a political project (see the lawyer at the beginning saying that she doesn’t feel the need to separate her emotion from her reason and that this makes her more powerful - emotional gestures affording material power). cf the role of emotion in theories of dolls and children’s culture: the idea of dolls training girls in emotional gestures, something that historically both confines white women to a subordinated position in a domestic sphere *and* gives them a position of racialised power (robin bernstein talks about how historically american dolls positioned young white girls not as a mother, but as a *mistress*).

— the idea of emotion as a virus that can contaminate a body and/or a body politic. gloria’s emotions seeping into barbie and rendering her “defective”, physically and internally. patriarchal gestures as a literal virus against which barbies and kens in their fantasy land have no resistance (signalled via the infamous Indigenous peoples and smallpox line).

— critical responses to the movie being dominated by emotion and a sense of belonging / representation politics. “i felt seen by a movie for the first time”; “men wouldn’t get it because it’s not for them, it understands *me*, and critics who don’t feel an emotional sense of belonging and connection to it don’t have an epistemological right to comment on it”

then we have the discursive appeals to reality and authenticity. the central meaning most people in the (very bleak) tag seem to take from the movie is that gender roles are performative (which plays with the movie interpreting ‘types’ of barbies as a kind of aesthetic gestus, a gestus of being rather than of doing) - and that the *solution* to the problem of performative gender roles is to be your authentic self - which crucially involves letting yourself ‘feel’ your emotions, rather than trying to mediate them. ken’s arc is based on him ‘acting out’ because he can’t properly process his emotions about barbie not liking him; his solution at the end is to properly and openly process these emotions, to acknowledge them as real rather than trying to hide or sublimate them. (the ken war is silly and doesn’t solve anything; barbie and ken’s ending conversation is real and does solve things.) see also the fact that feeling ‘real’, complex emotions as part of barbie’s journey to becoming human, the maker rather than the made thing - kind of aligning with elaine scarry in the idea that humans make things to deal with and ameliorate scary or complicated emotions, crucially substituting emotional pain for scarry’s physical pain. (but becoming a real human woman at the end is also physical and embodied - see the other infamous line about the gynaecologist.)

i don’t….really know where i’m going with any of this, and like i said i don’t feel it would be a particularly productive use of my time to try and assemble a proper reading. but…..something something american tradition of sentimentalism and emotional cohesion vs troubled or unsettled or uncaring emotional responses. (something something i am still, somehow, expected to *care* about ken. something something i somehow still feel like i’m being trained in emotional gestures of womanhood.) something something unfortunately for greta gerwig i believe the only way to meaningfully comment on barbie is a two-hour lesbian sex scene between gloria and barbie heavy on the power play. idk.

#anyway off to read ‘the feminist killjoy as cultural critic’ chapter of sara ahmed #barbie