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1. The central thesis of the Barbie movie is that the truly dangerous people are not those who pursue power for its own sake, but those who pursue power as a substitute for the love and respect that they want but cannot obtain.
2. Sarah Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology takes the "orientation" in "sexual orientation" very literally, conceptualizing the "straight lines" of family inheritance and reproduction. To be queer is to deviate from that straight path, to challenge the social order, to need to do some new wayfinding for yourself onto trails that maybe don't exist yet. I think the idea that being "weird and ugly" grants a kind of immunity against being brainwashed by the patriarchy connects to that in interesting ways.
3. There's a chapter in How to Read Donald Duck by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart (a postcolonial critique of Disney in general and the Donald Duck comics in particular) that talks about the strange zero-reproduction world of Disney, where there are a lot of nephews and a few nieces but no sons or daughters. I wonder how their ideas relate to the strange almost-zero-reproduction world of Barbieland, where one person is pregnant but nobody ever gives birth.
4. Does the movie actually bear up to this level of analysis? I don't know, but it's fun to think about when you have to drive an hour in the dark and the rain, and I'll take it.
2. Sarah Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology takes the "orientation" in "sexual orientation" very literally, conceptualizing the "straight lines" of family inheritance and reproduction. To be queer is to deviate from that straight path, to challenge the social order, to need to do some new wayfinding for yourself onto trails that maybe don't exist yet. I think the idea that being "weird and ugly" grants a kind of immunity against being brainwashed by the patriarchy connects to that in interesting ways.
3. There's a chapter in How to Read Donald Duck by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart (a postcolonial critique of Disney in general and the Donald Duck comics in particular) that talks about the strange zero-reproduction world of Disney, where there are a lot of nephews and a few nieces but no sons or daughters. I wonder how their ideas relate to the strange almost-zero-reproduction world of Barbieland, where one person is pregnant but nobody ever gives birth.
4. Does the movie actually bear up to this level of analysis? I don't know, but it's fun to think about when you have to drive an hour in the dark and the rain, and I'll take it.