Abstract
I consider the role of fluidity in Barbie (2023) as a mode of exploring femininity and ecological connections through embodiment. Barbie's relationship to fluid changes throughout the film. She learns to drink, learns to cry and thus, I argue in this article, slowly moves from plastic to flesh by opening into fluidity. Through attention to the fluidity inherent within the very definition of plastic, as well as the necessary taking in and leaking out of fluid exchange within the body, the plasticine world of Barbie, positions fluidity as a vital object of power within both feminine embodiment and feminist spaces. Using Barbie's relations with embodied fluidity through its plasticine solidity, I develop the notion of fluid relations to highlight the labour of our fluid interactions as well as their environmental tendrils. For feminist theory in the age of the Anthropocene, this article highlights the ways that biological, fluid relations take labour, leave traces, happen across shifting membranes and are both altered by and alter all they touch. Through this reading, I argue for a reinvigoration of our reading of bodily fluids in relation to a feminine excess within our embodied material world. But I also suggest that such a reinvigorated fluid reading must not forget our environmental relations: the fluidity at the heart of the plastic and the plastic at the heart of fluidity.
The material life of Barbie offers complicated questions. While purportedly offering girls a range of imagined futures and ways of seeing themselves, Barbie has also, as feminist critics have long pointed out, participated in a hypersexualised capitalism that values material goods and that suggests only a single possible and acceptable body. Moreover, Barbie the commodity participates in overconsumption, another plastic toy filling our landfills, while encouraging the amassing of more and more clothing and accessories for Barbie herself. Though Barbie, as of 2016, comes in a variety of different body types and sizes, the simple fact of Barbie is, at the very least, fraught because of and through her material existence. Her proportions, her accessories, the very plastic that makes her: Barbie in the material world has a lot to wade through. And wade is the correct metaphor here. Barbie (2023) presents the paradoxes of Barbie's position as an icon of femininity through a careful crafting of Barbie's iconic material world. Barbie specifically centres Barbie's growing humanity through her relation to fluid – what she drinks, how she cries and how her body relates to the world around her. In so doing, I argue, Barbie offers us a new way of thinking about the tenuous relations between embodied fluidity and plasticity in our current moment.
The attention that Barbie encourages the viewer to place on the fluid body relies on the materiality of its world. Within the film, the relation between the clearly human portrayal of Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) and the material objects of her world crafts the very doll-like landscape in which we settle. Stereotypical Barbie, while human sized, inhabits a world with the same proportions of a Barbie doll and its accessories. She, for instance, appears to be too big for her Barbie car according to real car standards, particularly as she is driving into and out of Barbie Land; when the car stops suddenly, the tumble which it – and the characters within it – takes is the same that a child's crashing plastic Barbie jeep would take. So, too, are the proportions of the Barbie Dreamhouse carefully crafted to evoke the proportions of the toy, so that Barbie can cross the whole home in just a few steps; that very Dreamhouse, built 23 per cent smaller than regular human dimensions, lacks walls and otherwise echoes the physical attributes of the toy. Even outside of the cinematic world, the movie's materiality echoes: its making, for instance, caused a global shortage of the exact shade of Barbie pink paint used to craft their world (Malle 2023). 1 Through its interest in duplicating the material reality of the toy even as it extends into the bodies of its actors, the Barbie movie does not sidestep the knotty material questions that Stereotypical Barbie presents. Rather, the movie doubles down on them through its careful relation of Stereotypical Barbie to her environment through embodiment – a relation that, as I argue in this article, is fundamentally crafted through a growing awareness of the role of fluidity within the Barbie realm. Within the film, as I discuss here, Barbie journeys across fluidity through the acts of crying and drinking. This movement from a fully solid world into one that interacts with fluids provides a space for us to consider the necessity of fluid embodiment as well as its perils in a plasticine age.
Many feminist scholars have explored the role of fluidity within feminist embodiment and being. 2 In considering the fluid trace of Barbie's theorised embodiment, I bring together scholars of the plasticine such as Heather Davis (2022) and Kimberly De Wolff (2017) and feminist scholars of embodiment and environment such as Samantha Frost (2016) and Nancy Tuana (2008) to consider the implications of embodied fluidity in an age of the plasticine. By leaning into the fluidity inherent within the very definition of plastic, as well as the necessary taking in and leaking out of fluid exchange within the body, I consider Barbie as a mode of exploring femininity and ecological connections through embodiment. I theorise how the plasticine world of Barbie, as illustrated through the film, positions fluidity as a vital object of power within both feminine embodiment and feminist spaces. The film makes careful use of the movement from solidity to bodily fluids, specifically as mediated through Barbie's tears, as well as through Barbie's process of learning to drink. Barbie journeys from one kind of embodiment (marked by a lack of need for physical fluidity) into another (marked by its relation to change through liquidity). In the process, what is represented back to us is the body's vital interrelation with the fluid. This interrelation pushes us to think both about the plastic Barbie-the-object – itself a kind of solid-fluid – as well as about the fluid form that the human body, particularly the body marked female, takes: a fluidity that requires taking in and making waste, that requires fluids to be taken in, let out and lived with. That is to say that in the film, Barbie moves from plastic to flesh by opening into fluidity. The Barbie we see in Barbie Land lives alongside the idea of the fluid; however, she has neither any need to nor any possibility of letting that fluid in. Showering and swimming exist as ideas but not actual possibilities, as the shower water is invisible and the ocean's waves are solid. Stereotypical Barbie can neither take in fluid nor submerge herself within it. But throughout the film, that changes, particularly as she learns to drink and cry. Through the film's attention to these acts, Barbie's journey highlights an embodied fluidity that can both take in and let out.
Such fluidity further necessitates and shapes vulnerability, a vulnerability that requires and allows for feminist forms of community. In other words, Stereotypical Barbie theorises for us a vital attunement to what exactly is exchanged within embodied relations across flesh and environment. But that attunement is also inherently and intrinsically related to her plasticine form, allowing us to better understand the way that the fluid relations that the film brings out for us are inevitably situated in a world in which the space between plastic and body is increasingly closing. Plastic is, after all, definitionally fluid. Davis, in her Plastic Matter (2022), uses the definition from The Story of the Plastics Industry, an informative booklet published by the Society of the Plastics Industry in the early 1970s: any one of a large and varied group of materials consisting wholly or in part of combinations of carbon with oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and other organic and inorganic elements which, while solid in the finished state, at some stage in its manufacture is made liquid, and thus capable of being formed into various shapes, most usually through the application, either singly or together, of heat and pressure. (Masson 1973: 6; cited in Davis, 2022: 2)
Plastic is both form and matter, fluid and solid inextricably linked; as I discuss, it is also both object and the world we live in now, its molecular dispersal saturating our world.
Using Barbie's relations with embodied fluidity through its plasticine solidity as a central figure, I develop the notion of fluid relations to highlight the labour of our fluid interactions as well as their environmental tendrils. For feminist theory in the age of the Anthropocene, this article highlights the ways that biological, fluid relations take labour, leave traces and are both altered by and alter all they touch. Taking in and letting out – the two often simultaneous acts of fluid relation – happen across shifting membranes, and what world we take in, take into or let out within also shifts in its plasticity. This brief theorisation of fluidity is structured like the fluid trace I am interested in. It follows the flows within the film – the sip, the tear, the membrane – as well as their discontinuities, moments that engage with bodily fluid without engaging with bodily fluids. In so doing, this article functions as a series of brief vignettes or thought experiments traced from the film's fluid edges. Methodologically, I follow the path of the film's liquidity to demonstrate and enact the non-simple fluid engagement: to sit next to the body and look for the moments when its boundaries drip into or out of fluid. By so considering fluid relations within this piece, I argue for a reinvigorated reading of our bodily fluids as a feminine excess within our embodied material world. That the body both takes in and lets out in fluid relation highlights the ways that the body is and must be in excess of itself. The body must labour to take in and let out and negotiate such processes across its own shifting, unfixed material self. But I also suggest that such a reinvigorated fluid reading must not forget our environmental relations: the fluidity at the heart of the plastic and the plastic at the heart of fluidity.
Sipping slowly: taking in as fluid measure
Stereotypical Barbie (like all the Barbies, all the Kens and Allan) lives in a dry land. We are shown this repeatedly throughout the film. She begins her dry day by hopping into a dry shower and pouring imaginary dry milk from a dry carton. The pour is real, though: she lifts the milk carton up and down, watching the invisible milk come out. She then holds her cup above her mouth, drinking the way a child gulps an imaginary beverage. This is a small detail, but one that repeats throughout the film. Stereotypical Barbie's malfunctioning begins with her dry and invisible milk invisibly curdling and the dry water in her dry shower turning cold; it is her relation to imaginary fluid that first denotes that something has gone wrong. Highlighting the importance of fluid relations for the film's project, throughout the film, she has to learn how to drink, in moments sometimes of kindness and sometimes of discomfort. Though Stereotypical Barbie's world is dry and solid, in short, her interactions with it belie a knowledge of fluidity. Pools, ocean waves, milk, showers: all these things exist in Barbie's world, even though that world is solid, dry, stable. Environmental, visual fluids, like the waves, become solid, while fluids like milk and water from the shower – fluids that have a bodily purpose and that highlight the body's need to imbibe and excrete – are rendered invisible, marked only by their containers. Like plastic itself, the fluid here is turned to solid, either in itself or in its container.
Once Stereotypical Barbie leaves her own dry world, she must navigate the Real World's realities. Among those realities is the necessity, or at least possibility, of drinking. Much is made through the film of her inability to drink. Other characters repeatedly offer her beverages in varying forms of hospitality. While surrounded by men in the Mattel CEO's office, Stereotypical Barbie attempts to drink real water in the way she is accustomed. This fails; she douses herself with her first drink. ‘I’m not used to these cups having water in them’, she says and laughs. Although she is less visibly ill at ease than she is at the beginning of her journey to the Real World, clearly this is a specific kind of moment meant to highlight the scene's discomfort. While the audience can read the context of the all-male office, and thus see legacies of patriarchy in the structure of a moment of humour in which a woman – a Barbie – does something seemingly foolish and naïve while surrounded by men and laughs to make them feel more comfortable, this is Stereotypical Barbie's first such moment. The men laugh, too – but we are in the midst of Stereotypical Barbie's interaction with the Real World, and she is coming slowly to know the kind of laughter that puts her as a woman at the centre of the joke. It is not incidental that this humour surrounds Stereotypical Barbie's inability to manage her body's fluid relations; her body here is too messy, too leaky, too unmanaged. Even while not yet able to take in fluid, Stereotypical Barbie's body is a leaky body, in Margrit Shildrick's (1997) sense. Her body teeters on the abject, reminding us of the feminine body that risks menstruation or leaking breast milk. The men's laughter reminds us that the leaky feminine body does not belong in the patriarchal space.
Shortly thereafter, as she is being chased by those same CEOs and other men in suits, Stereotypical Barbie shares a cup of tea with the ghost of Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), her creator. This scene, softly lit in a vintage kitchen, provides a pause from the harsh and solid shock of the world that Stereotypical Barbie has awakened into, which has previously been marked almost entirely through angularity and contrast – the very square cubicles that she is chased through, for instance, and the sharp visual contrast of Stereotypical Barbie, in her neon and pink outfits, against the people and places of the previously explored environments of the Real World. In this quiet moment, we no longer see Stereotypical Barbie as anomalous and alone. Rather, she is welcomed into this environment, visually and through the scene's action. The hospitality of this offered drink differs starkly from the water scene just a few moments earlier. In this soft, quiet pause, Barbie is slow and methodical in her sipping. She asks if Ruth finds it weird that she cannot drink tea. We hear the clinking of the teacup in this silent pause. Ruth responds in a kind of non-response, with quiet kindness. Within this part of the world, in short, there is room for Stereotypical Barbie to sip slowly, to experience some relation with the fluid. It is important that this moment centres that quiet sip. Beyond simply the contrast between the slowness of the one and the sharpness of the other – the soft lit space where Stereotypical Barbie may learn and change versus the harshly lit space where Barbie must be willing to be the butt of the joke – these moments ask us to think about what it means for us to take in, to accept, to alter, as a part of our fluid relations. A willing vulnerability comes in the viscous and visceral porosity that comes with swallowing; a drink, as innocuous as it might seem, becomes a part of our body, which is in fact no small thing. As such, learning to drink highlights the varying forms of vulnerability within fluid relations: a vulnerability to (as in the scene in Mattel) and a vulnerability with (as in Stereotypical Barbie's careful sip).
Achy but also good: leaking out as fluid opening
Stereotypical Barbie's misadventure at Mattel headquarters comes shortly after her arrival in the Real World, where she recognises, for the first time, rejection. Though the other Barbies had suggested she would be met as a hero by the Real World's girls, her encounter with Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), the teenage girl she incorrectly believes to be playing with her in the Real World, illustrates the naivety of this idea. While she had believed that the Barbies had created a utopic world in which girls and women could do anything, she discovers that the Real World, particularly its purported feminist project of female empowerment, is imperfect and incomplete. Sasha and her friends inform Barbie not only that the world still functions through patriarchy but also that Barbie-the-object ‘represent[s] everything wrong with our culture’. As Sasha informs Barbie, ‘You set the feminist movement back fifty years. You destroy girls’ innate sense of worth and you are killing the planet with your glorification of rampant consumerism’. This somewhat ironic revelation of the critiques of Barbie-the-object that many feminist audiences would bring with them sets in motion Stereotypical Barbie's eventual quest, as she describes it to Ruth at the end of the film when choosing to become human, to ‘make meaning, not [be] the thing that is made’. But in this moment, Stereotypical Barbie is heartbroken by this revelation and its shattering of the world she believed existed as well as her role in it. This revelation, and her resultant despondence, pushes her into the Mattel office.
This first rejection and recognition of the Real World's imperfection is devastating. But it is not what brings Stereotypical Barbie her first tear, which comes in an earlier scene. Upon arriving in the Real World, she searches through her mind to find the girl who is playing with her, feeling the size of human emotions and experiences. She sits on a bench with an old woman at a bus stop, watching the rest of the world go by, notably open to their experiences – laughing at the joy coming from the playground, crying in response to the intensity of human fights and unhappiness. The first tear that appears is slow. It drips down her face, leaving a single, solid line. It is singular, the only tear we see. As Stereotypical Barbie says later of her crying, ‘First, I got one tear, and then I got a whole bunch’. At first, though, she remains with the single tear, which the camera lovingly admires. ‘That felt good’, she says in response to her tear. ‘Achy but good’. It is notable that Stereotypical Barbie's first tear is not about her own heartbreak, or even her realisation that the world is less utopian than she had believed. Rather, it is about an empathetic mode of openness in which the large range of human emotions overwhelms Stereotypical Barbie, resulting in that very human tear.
As the movie goes on, and as we observe more of Stereotypical Barbie's tears, we see her most human features. While Robbie remains beautiful, she also transforms from doll to human. Particularly as we move towards the film's climax, Robbie becomes something other than plasticine: porous, with textured skin that illustrates her humanness. It is not just through their tears that this transformation into porosity operates – but those tears are one central figure through which it does occur. While the tears are markedly glamorous – that is, there is no mucus accompanying them, no full loss of control – they are also simple, stripped down. The wetness of these tears is a vital issue to the camera, to the story we are being told. Stereotypical Barbie, for instance, cries after the Kens have taken over Barbie world, while she hides out with Weird Barbie (Kate MacKinnon) and the rest of their group of outsiders. The camera provides a lasting glance of her eyelashes and the tears that linger there. We see such moments repeatedly in the film, the tearstained cheek, the real droplet. There is a materiality to the act of crying; that is, rather than simply crying as an action, we have crying as a noun, with wet tears that trace their ways out of eyes and into the world. Tears here have paths. They exist and remain. They linger.
That tear and its movement engages what Laura Marks (2000: 186) calls ‘haptic visuality’, wherein ‘the eyes themselves function like organs of touch’. Through its attention to first absent and then increasingly present fluid, the film repeatedly evokes embodied sensations focused on and across our membranes. As viewers, we sense the gaps of fluidity, filling it in with our tactile relationship with liquid. As such, the process of watching the film crafts a sense of our own embodiment, our own fluidity, our own porousness. We are called upon by that mediating tear, which moves Stereotypical Barbie as a doll into Barbie as a fleshy human. The tear tracks and trails down from the eye. These tears linger, they evaporate, they glisten. They get trapped in eyelashes. But tears also reabsorb. The close attention to Stereotypical Barbie's skin as she cries cannot help but activate our perception of the sensory elements of our skin; in watching her cry, we remember the feeling of the tear rolling across, down and into our cheek. That haptic sense is important because Barbie-the-object has no eyelashes for tears to get trapped in. Were a Barbie doll to cry or be cried on or simply have some water drip upon her, we would not sense it entering her porous skin. Depression Barbie, featured later in the film after Ken's takeover of Barbie Land, has been crying – but she is marked by permanent makeup stains, not any changing state or trailing moisture. The very materiality of Stereotypical Barbie's tears highlights their status as sites of relation. The very moment of osmosis – the reabsorbing and dissolving tear – illustrates for us the multiplicity of embodied porosity. The tear leaves the body, enters the skin but also the air and the ground and leaves a trail on the skin that is momentarily there and not there. Such fluidity reminds us that expelling and taking in are linked in a way that is hard to pull apart. What part of the tear's fluid fully leaves the body, and what part reabsorbs through the skin? When does a tear become something other than the self? These questions are unanswerable, but they draw us to the role of osmosis, of both letting in and letting out, in fluid relations – there is no moment we can freeze outside of that osmotic relation, but rather a recognition that what leaves the body might also return, both the same and changed. It is not, in other words, only the environment to which we fluidly relate.
Restoring the membrane: fluidity and separation
To this point, I have traced Barbie’s engagement with drinking and crying. But these fluid interactions take place across boundaries, and I now follow Stereotypical Barbie's fluid traces through the figure of the membrane, which here I think of in relation to the cellular membrane. Cellular membranes are first called to mind during Stereotypical Barbie's early malfunctioning, when she begins to develop cellulite. Cellulite is a marker of the less-than-solid nature of the body, as its visible bumps along the surface of the skin appear due to fibrous connective tissue pushing down and against fat cells. Fat cells themselves are strange things – white fat is made up largely of single fat droplets, with less division on the level of membranes within the cell than we see in other kinds of cells. Lipids, solid at some temperature and liquid at others, are defined in no small part by their unwillingness to mix with water when put together. They do not form a solution but rather a mixture, to reach back to our collective high school chemistry classes. They are in this way strangely tied to fluidity, willing to become a part of a fluid while remaining unchanged on a chemical level. Cellulite bursts at the solidity of the body, removing any dream of uniformity and reminding us that what is beneath is not singular, not solid. Feminist scholars such as Elizabeth Wilson (2014), Samantha Frost (2014) and Linda Birke (2000) have emphasised the tendency by theorists to engage with the body but not its anatomy – the body as material and idea but not as flesh. Cellulite and its lack of uniformity does not just turn us to anatomy but also reminds us that what happens beneath the skin is complicated, uneven: sometimes fluid, sometimes solid, sometimes neither or both.
The bodily membrane represented by Stereotypical Barbie's cellulite reappears in the broader geography of Barbie Land. While what separates Barbie Land from the Real World is repeatedly, especially towards the end of the film, referred to as a portal, earlier in the film, including when we are first introduced to it, it is called a membrane. The word ‘membrane’ appears on the sign for Barbie's going-away party, for instance: ‘Bon Voyage to Reality and Good Luck Restoring the Membrane That Separates Our World from Theirs So You Don’t Get Cellulite!’. Though the term shifts within the film, that it is first a membrane illustrates an important difference between portals and membranes. A portal generally suggests wholeness – you walk in through one end of a portal and exit elsewhere through its other side (see: Hall, 2024). It is a doorway, one that suggests wholeness and stable movement; this fantasy of movement that crosses space while leaving the body uninterrupted and solid is why portals are a mainstay of science fiction.
The less often-used concept of the membrane, on the other hand, brings us away from geography and space and into embodiment. A membrane implies osmosis, opening, even the possibility of bursting. Something held within, but not wholly – a version of what Nancy Tuana (2008) might call viscous porosity, neither fully solid nor liquid, both open and resistant to its opening. Samantha Frost (2016) describes the cell membrane as not a seamless and solid wall of molecules [….] The fluidity of the cell membrane suggests that there could be a fair influx and efflux of molecules across the membrane. Indeed, a cell relies on and exploits this porosity. There is a constant and continuous diffusion and traffic of substances into and out of cells. However, not just anything can pass through the cell membrane [….] Rather, cell membranes are selectively permeable, which means that they are constituted to enable the flow of select molecules in and out of the cell as required by different reactions. (2016: 65)
To return to Barbie Land, it is no small thing that what separates it from the Real World is referred to as a membrane, not just a portal. The fleshiness of that membrane evokes fluidity, suggesting that our connections are not simple but visceral, viscous, as Tuana would call them. In other words, the work of becoming interconnected – of first voyaging between Barbie Land and the Real World, and thus of Barbie becoming fluid – is embodied labour, work of selectivity and interchange. Fluid connections happen at all times; however, as Tuana highlights, those connections are neither simple nor equal. Through the engagement across that membrane – a membrane that, it turns out, cannot in fact prevent cellulite, despite the going-away sign's promises – Stereotypical Barbie finds herself inevitably brought into relation with the work of the fluid and its possibilities. The membrane operates itself like the very cellulite with which this section opens, suggesting the movement and shifting of what lies within and across that very space. The membrane moves; it too is fluid, changing.
Fluidity discontinued: bodily fluids beyond the tear
Despite the film's central quest towards fluid relations that I have highlighted here – fluid that is taken in and then let out through and in relation to bodily membranes – Barbie's fluidity is also clearly limited. The fluids that exist, while not neat, are often lacking the messiest parts of that fluidity. If we return to Barbie's tears, for instance, we might consider what they are not. I am and have always been an easy crier, and so I feel like I know the act well. When one cries, it is not just tears that emerge. It is the feeling of something caught in the throat. It is clear mucus running from one's nostrils. To cry is to engage in the exchange of bodily fluids and to call upon others: the wetness of tears, the altered feeling of the throat, the wetness of the runny nose. The crying body feels split open, liquid. Barbie, for all of her despair, retains wholeness in her tears. There remains a certain absence. Barbie cries, and the camera pans over her wet tears, which sometimes catch in her eyelashes or actively absorb into her skin. But there is no mucus in her tears; the crying remains aesthetically pleasing, open but only to a certain extent. Despite the materiality of Stereotypical Barbie's tears, there are limits to the kind of fluidity the film opens itself to.
For instance, while Stereotypical Barbie moves into the possibility of fluid relations with the world, what Barbie's closing visit to the gynaecologist implies is unclear, as, in addition to not drinking or crying, the Barbies do not menstruate or urinate. As viewers, we might imagine that this visit suggests this more fluid form of the feminine body, a form that does, indeed, bleed. But the film pulls away before showing us these possibilities (for an alternative reading, see: Winters et al., 2024). This ambiguity makes sense, as abject bodily fluids – or rather, their absence – are played for laughs within the film. When Barbie's feet become flat – moulded wrongly – she slowly crawls off to hide before showing them to the other Barbies, who react with immediate horror, exclaiming ‘Flat feet! Bleergh!’ while dry heaving. The physical comedy here is high, but also specific; it is worth noting, for instance, that the Barbies chastise Rival Ken (Simu Liu) for joining in their collective dry heave horror too enthusiastically. The body horror here is, in many ways, doubled because of the lack of liquidity. That the Barbies and Ken are heaving as if to expel vomit, but have nothing to expel, is noteworthy, uncanny. The Barbies are again framed as aware of the possibility of bodily fluid, even though they have no access to that form of openness.
But some Barbies (largely the discontinued ones) do imply a necessity of the fluid. While some of the film's discontinued dolls reflect political or cultural rhetoric 3 – poor Earring Magic Ken (Tom Stourton) – others travel on the wrong side of the uncanny valley. Barbie Video Girl Doll (Mette Narrative), a surveillance cyborg with a video camera embedded in her body, presents a disconcerting combination of flesh and machine that makes the doll itself the accessory to the child at play; the doll's body is both the object and accessory, violating primary rules of how Barbies function. And Midge (Emerald Fennell), perhaps most troublingly, makes us too aware of the relationship between human flesh and doll body. While in the film we only see Midge as a somewhat odd neighbour, the doll itself is a worthwhile reminder of the uncanny space of the fluid here. Midge's pregnant body is most closely aligned with ivory and wax anatomical Venuses crafted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 4 Lift Midge's belly and find the uncanny surprise of a foetus – even more disturbing since the foetus could be removed and played with in a kind of fluidless proto-c-section. As an audience, we are meant to be largely repelled by the idea of Midge. There is no form of Midge that seems palatable; either her bloodless and fleshless birth is appalling, or we are faced with thinking about bodily fluids in a way that is both disconcerting and messy. This is a children's toy, after all. Similarly, Grow-With-Me Skipper (Hannah Khalique-Brown), who grows breasts at the raise of an arm, also disturbs: her boundary-breaking solidity, again, hits an uncanny valley we would rather not linger within. Perhaps more palatable (and thus not discontinued), though still uncomfortable, is Weird Barbie's pet dog who leaves faeces trailing behind him. 5 Like so many dolls in the Baby Alive tradition – dolls first introduced in the 1970s and still in production today, which eat plastic food and then fill their diapers – their digestion became something uncomfortable, too close. What they eat comes pouring out, only to be redigested and excreted again and again as a form of play. It is no wonder that the only dog we see in Barbie Land has been relegated to defecating again and again across the floor of Weird Barbie's home.
While embodied fluidity generally remains outside of the realm of Barbie Land, Barbies do sometimes engage in admissions of porosity. Weird Barbie mentions that she engages in a seaweed soak. Though smell would seem to exist only outside of Barbie Land, given that it is reliant upon particulate matter and a chemical sense, Stereotypical Barbie has bad breath while she is malfunctioning, and the musty basement smell of Weird Barbie is noted by more than one character. I would argue that these points do not function as mistakes or inexplicable paradoxes but rather point to the ways that Barbies as items and playthings are not separate from the world themselves. The long cultural history of plastic has, as Alison Clarke (Clarke 2001: 41) notes in her study of the history of Tupperware, often led to an erasure of the processes involved in the making of plastic, which she notes has often been described ‘in terms of beguiling alchemy’. But plastic is not alchemy; it is labour and material that relates to and leaves a mark on what surrounds it. So, too, though Barbies as objects – like plastic itself – seem inert, they are engaged in the world itself on a material and molecular level. They can smell and have smells, and, though we might not notice it, they too take materials in; we might think of Weird Barbie's makeup, evocative of the accidentally permanent makeup jobs done with pens and markers to many of our basement-lurking Barbies at home. They also can expel; consider the slow breakdown especially of older Barbie dolls, much to the challenge of toy archivists (Macchia et al., 2022), as well as the planetary and embodied interminglings with plastic matter that Barbie-as-waste is a part of. In other words, the materiality of Barbie-the-object, and Barbie's plasticity, cannot be removed even from Barbie Land; plastic both leaves traces behind in the form of micro-plastics and ocean pollution and takes back in the environment that surrounds it.
Plasticine solidity: finding our fluid futures
The work of feminist theory is a work of meditation, of sitting with, and thus I have spent this piece sitting with Barbie's liquid relations. What Barbie introduces, I have argued, is paradoxical: a return to the flesh through fluid, but through a fluid that is also plastic; a marking of the human body's interconnectedness through plasticine absence, in which we cannot tell what is hard and what is soft, what is fluid and what is solid. Through this reading of the embodied fluidity of Barbie, I have argued that the film not only makes evident the centrality of a fluid relation between body and world, self and other, in a feminist becoming; it also highlights the labour that holds together those relations. The film's fluidity is mediated both by objects – the cup and bottle and the act of drinking – as well as by Barbie-the-object herself (the liquid-solid that is the plastic that the doll is made of). But such fluidity is also, due to the nature of Barbie as a doll and cultural concept, unknowable, a trace of what Caroline Rae (2022: 63) refers to as ‘uncanny waters’, with the term uncanny describing both water's unknowability and its recursive, hauntological structure. If Rae's uncanny waters highlight material exchanges through bodies, histories and ecologies as mediated through bodies of water, then Barbie's uncanny and unknowable excess might lie in her very plastic nature and its histories of fluid and fossil, the petrochemicals and flesh that her journey through fluidity engages.
Barbie-the-film seems largely to want to forget Barbie-the-object's plastic, not to mention the plastic waste created by her manufacturing and disposal. While much of that idea of waste lies outside of the scope of my argument, we might still sit with the ways that plastic and fluid connect through the film. Davis, writing about a series of artworks that consider our plasticine present and futures, notes that the ocean has become a particular site for the anxiety of plastic relations. She suggests that ‘[t]he collision of these two worlds [plastic and ocean] also highlights the hydrophobia of plastic—the ways in which oil and water are anathema to each other yet, under the conditions of petrocapitalism, are forced into this relation, in which fossil fuels return to the oceans from whence they came’ (Davis, 2021: 549). If Barbie is plastic, then, so too is she the trace of fluidity, as plastic is definitionally a series of polymers that can take another form and that are moulded in their fluid state into something solid. Barbie's particular kind of plasticity signifies multiple things. Barbie-the-object differentiates itself from other dolls in part by occupying a space between soft and hard – she is not, like the baby dolls at the beginning of the movie, hard and immovable; neither is she Gumby, all rubber and motion. Her arms and torso are hard while her legs are slightly softer, with bent knees that sometimes slightly flex. Other Barbie dolls, designed for gymnastics or yoga or dancing, may be jointed or otherwise built to move, but Stereotypical Barbie is hard until she is soft, soft until she is immovable. This is also true of the film version of Stereotypical Barbie, whose movements, particularly in emotionally important moments, evoke those of the doll. When Stereotypical Barbie gives up after the Kens have taken over, she sits herself in the position that Barbies sit in – long legs forward, body carefully balanced upward – then teeters over on her hip, her torso and legs not shifting in their alignment. Anyone who has played with a Barbie knows this move intimately, and the frustration that comes when trying to sit that Barbie up in perfect balance. Like Weird Barbie's splits, the film's Barbie bodies are intimately familiar in their poses made flesh by the film. In other words, the film's Barbie is indeed plastic: the product of a mould, a fluid that has been shaped; we may forget it at times, but we also cannot, nor does the film ask us to.
I have asked here what the intersection between Barbie's plasticine solidity and the fluidity of the feminist body tells us about our own embodied, and increasingly plastic, selves. Some piece of an answer might come in thinking about our own lived interactions between plastic and fluid selves. Kimberly De Wolff (2017) writes about ethnographic work observing and volunteering with a marine institute studying plastic's interaction with sea creatures. She describes scientists separating plastic matter from organic to understand their connections, leaning on cases in which there is an ambiguity in that separation – a jellyfish with plastic embedded in its tentacle, sea creatures who had turned plastic into a part of their habitat in complex ways – as a way of pushing on rhetorical constructs of plastic as always a harmful other, separate from organic life: Plastic is lively and already entangled with all kinds of bodies; plastic vital to everyday human life also becomes vital to and with other forms of life regardless of human desires. The persistence of these plastic entanglements shows the need for acting as if humans are, and will always be, connected to the ocean and how we come to know it, whether through the materials we produce or the actions we take in seeking to control them. (De Wolff, 2017: 43)
What reading Barbie through fluidity allows, then, is a re-theorisation of our fluid, plastic forms. Barbie is flesh, and flesh is porous. Its porosity reflects and is supported by its connection to liquid, to blood. The movement of blood through the body is the body. The film, using language directly from Mattel, suggests that all women are Barbie, and Barbie is all women. While what we as viewers do with this message may vary, one aspect of it is incontrovertibly true: like Barbie, we too are made up of plastic. Plastic is liquid solid. Flesh, at the same time, is plastic; plastic is flesh. If Barbie is all these women – all of us – and all these women – all of us – are Barbie, then so too are all of our fluid identities wrapped in a plastic becoming, literally and figuratively. Davis notes that ‘[p]lastic microparticles circulate through our bodies; nanoplastics penetrate our cell walls. Its chemical by-products have been found in everyone who has been tested. The world is now plastic’ (2022: 3). And as Stacy Alaimo reminds us, ‘[t]he exposed subject is always already penetrated by substances and forces that can never be properly accounted for’ (2016: 5). We are impossibly wrapped up in our relations with microplastics, with pollutants, with the environment of the times in which we live. Microplastics are in even the clouds (Xu et al., 2024); microplastics’ scalar fluidity means that there is no place without them, no body that does not have a molecular relation with plastic. How do we theorise fluidity in these fluid times, making room for our plasticising bodies without simply defining body and not-body or recalling some invented and idealised pure prior state?
Barbie helps us with these questions through its messy imperfections and its engagement with fluid relations. Though as humans we are all already porous and fluid, coming to understand our nature as beings who take in and remove across shifting membranes reminds us that this natural fluidity does not come without labour. A theory of feminist fluid relations, then, might highlight that work while also noting fluid's messiness – our bodies labour to take in what we take in and remove what we remove, whether we would like to do so or not. Fluid relations, I argue, are vital to engaging a feminist theory of the body's vulnerability and openness, both wanted and unwanted, additive and harmful. I want to be clear that I am not arguing for some sort of unquestionable embrace of our chilling plasticine ecology. But, as Malin Ah-King and Eva Hayward argue, ‘bodies are lively and rejoinders to environments and changing ecosystems’ (2014: 8–9). The fluidity that I theorise here suggests that we cannot live in a world or a body that is closed off, that denies its relations: ‘[w]hatever futures await us, we are the future organisms that we are becoming’ (Ah-King and Hayward, 2014: 9). It is only through an awareness of those fluid relations – of the challenges and labour of our fluidity, our vulnerability, our excess, our opening – that a feminist future can be born. By showcasing the work of learning to live with that vulnerability in a plasticine age, I suggest that Barbie presents the ‘achy but good’ necessity of coming to know that fluid relation. Barbie theorises a reality in which the embrace of our faltering, struggling, engaging fluidity, which is neither pure nor natural but simply is, comes to the core of our relating beings.
