Kenstituent power: an exploration of feminist constitutional change in Barbie

Abstract

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie explores the influence of childhood dream worlds and toys over adult life, and the singular importance of a toy which represents an empowered woman. But this story plays out against the backdrop of deep societal challenges. That the subject matter of the film is light does not detract from its cultural significance; it enhances its reach and thereby its influence. Constitutional change, property, dissent, inequality and revolution are not the B-plot of the film, they suffuse every scene and motivate its major characters. In this article we explore the significance of Barbie Land as a supposed embodiment of a feminist utopia and the extent to which Gerwig is confronting viewers with difficult questions about authority and just governance in the Real World.

When Barbie (2023) fictionalises the Kens’ rewriting of the Constitution of Barbie Land, the campaign by the Barbies to stymie this constitutional change and Mattel's influence upon Barbie Land, it raises urgent questions about the nature of constitutional change both within the contemporary Real World (at least in the Global North) and in this fictional ‘feminist’ place. In this article, we reflect upon how political power, in the form of constituent power, permeates the film. We assess Barbie Land's constitutional processes through the lens of feminist constitutionalism, exploring how change is mediated through the material necessity of property ownership, how Barbie Land's constitutional structures correspond to its stratified society and how the film sets up a tyrannicide which would surely have to follow if the story had continued. Feminist constitutional scholars have interrogated Real World constitutional change by questioning inclusions and exclusions in constitutional processes (Irving, 2017; Rubio-Marin and Irving, 2019; Rubio-Marin, 2022). They explore feminist methods of constitutional change, and consider the extent to which constitutional processes possess the potential to dismantle fundamental heteronormative and patriarchal structures. Ruth Houghton and Aoife O’Donoghue (2020) have turned to utopian and speculative fiction to reconceptualise concepts of constitutional change. Barbie allows us to further explore the application of this speculative feminist constitutional method and to disrupt the superficiality of neat accounts of how constitutional change occurs. ¹ We first provide an account of constitutional change as articulated in liberal, Global North constitutional scholarship, before highlighting how three prominent themes within Barbie, the Barbie Dream House / Mojo Dojo Casa House dichotomy, the Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) / Beach Ken (Ryan Gosling) dichotomy and the challenge of tyranny within a governance order, interact with this constitutional theory. We explore what the film tells us about feminist projects for constitutional change, the obstacles to such change being delivered and what, as the credits roll, remains incomplete in Barbie Land's transformation. In doing so, we address the operation of feminist constituent power through the three dynamics of property, social order and tyranny, highlighting how the representation of these elements often masks the operation of deeply gendered dynamics.

Constitutional change and constituent power

That's right, in forty-eight hours, all the Kens will go to the polls and vote to change the constitution to a government for the Kens, of the Kens and by the Kens!

Constituent power, or the power of the people to adopt or change a constitution, is often connected in mainstream constitutional discourse to historical events with little real purchase in the present (Doyle, 2019: 167). The exercise of constituent power is thereby fixed to a ‘constitutional moment’ and thereafter channelled through institutional processes (Ackerman, 2000). For example, the United States’ governance order might have been directly connected to the popular will at its inception (‘We the People …’), but the longer such a governance order persists, the more remote the idea that it is grounded in the will of the people becomes. This is a convenient outcome for those that benefit from constitutional orders drawn up under the contours of the Enlightenment; the people can be a radical and disruptive force within a system of governance. In Barbie, Beach Ken appropriates Abraham Lincoln's invocation of constituent power in the Gettysburg Address (‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’) as the inspiration for his rallying cry for constitutional change. His pointed change of syntax, however, reflects how power in this new order is going to be wielded for the benefit of one group. Unlike constituted power, which concerns the exercise of governance power and its division amongst branches of government, constituent power is about the constitutional role of the multitude, notwithstanding that it took a very long time for women to be accepted as part of the multitude within Global North states (and their colonies). The Kens are not simply seeking to assert their place within the people of Barbie Land; they are attempting to become dominant. The representation of constitutional change in Barbie thereby highlights several critiques of how contemporary law and scholarship understands the exercise of constituent power: the exclusionary nature of constituency, the off-screen constitutional drafting process and the male-coded theory of revolt.

The exclusion of women from Real World constitution-drafting deprioritises their interests within these processes, but whenever women and other marginalised groups have sought to assert their constituent power, these efforts have been dismissed as mere irritants. Even where women's groups have managed to play prominent roles in contemporary constitutional moments, as the Women's Coalition did in the negotiations which led to the Belfast / Good Friday Agreement in 1998, their efforts towards societal transformation have rarely been prioritised by the mainstream political parties responsible for making new governance arrangements work (McWilliams and Kilmurray, 2015; Ashe, 2024). In constructing Barbies as potential contenders to be part of the multitude, the film highlights the limitations of the ‘we’ in ‘we, the people’. In the scenes where the Barbies are strategising to regain control of Barbie Land's governance, and in particular where they are voting to reinstate the pre-existing constitution, all the Barbies, Allan (Michael Cera), Gloria (America Ferrara) and Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) are wearing matching pink boilersuits. Here the boilersuit marks their collective resistance to the Kens’ new governance order as an oppressed group (either as de facto prisoners or as marginalised workers) – a cerise emblem of the construction of a class consciousness of the Barbie proletariat. It also invokes women's resistance to threats to legitimate governance, echoing Rosie the Riveter's war work against fascism, even if there is little sign that anyone from the working classes is involved in the Barbies’ uprising. This pink uniform signifies a unified group and thereby helps to construct a homogenous ‘people’. Expressions of diversity (albeit at the surface level of clothing) are cast aside.

Constituent power is often understood as being first iterated during the French Revolution, but using that starting point for understanding constituent power traps the discourse in a focus on revolutions and violent revolt. When the people exercise constituent power, it is conceptualised as throwing off the old constitutional order, and presented as a revolution. Alongside the French revolution, the events which led to the creation of the United States of America are frequently co-opted into accounts of constituent power (Frankenberg, 2019; Lang and Wiener, 2024). Within these accounts, the Declaration of Independence (1776) is presented as an exercise of a revolutionary constituent power. Mark Tushnet points to the image of ‘[p]easants with pitchforks’ as the classic evocation of an exercise in constituent power, through which ‘physical power and violence [is used] to displace authoritarian regimes’ (2015: fn59). In Barbie, however, the climactic Battle of the Kens on a plastic beach is explicitly not part of a revolutionary war. Beach Ken might well be riding in on a floating horse, with the crowds of Kens either side, ripping open his coat to expose his bare chest, in an apparently ironic nod to Eugène Delacroix's painting ‘Liberty Leading the People’ (1830). Pitchforks are, to surreal effect, replaced with plastic sports equipment. ² But the battle, and all this aping of revolutionary constitutional moments, serves as nothing more than a distraction, so that the Barbies can get on with the practical work of restoring constitutional governance. Linda Colley (2021) has highlighted the link between war and constituent power; she argues that constitutions in the nineteenth century, frequently grounded in glorious depictions of revolution, were employed to enhance the capacity of states to make war through the granting of more expansive citizenship rights. Men who had been granted a stake in the state through the expansion of the franchise could be reliably called upon to defend that state. The film subverts this ‘productive’ relationship between war and constituent power, to instead emphasise (and lampoon) the hypermasculinity of the patriarchy that Beach Ken has brought back from the Real World. The fuchsia Barbie Statue of Liberty overlooking the battle on the beach welcomes back the war-weary Kens, but it does not grant them constituent power.

In Barbie, the decision to rewrite the constitution, and the process of constitutional change led by the Kens, is not shown on screen; rather, the audience are informed that in the aftermath of this constitutional redrafting there will be ‘a special election to change the Constitution’. This is evocative of the lack of transparency that surrounds the foundational moments of many modern democracies, where the constituent assemblies dominated by elite men defined the governance order. Feminist constitutional scholarship continues to highlight how, notwithstanding constituent power being notionally held by the people, processes of constitutional change are still frequently the preserve of elite groups playing out their competing interests (Irving, 2017; Rubio-Marin and Irving, 2019; Rubio-Marin, 2022). The behind-the-scenes nature of the Ken-sian constitution-drafting, with the people of Barbie Land merely being able to vote on the outcome of this process, is a vivid reminder of the extent to which constituent power in the Real World has been trammelled through formal institutional processes, undermining its radical potential. These representations of constitutional change in Barbie force us, as an audience, to reflect on the constitutional processes of the Real World. They expose the shortcomings of reliance on an exclusionary unified conceptualisation of the ‘people’ and the mythical belief that the processes of ordinary democratic politics can, by themselves, radically transform the structures of a patriarchal capitalist society.

The Barbie Dreamhouse as a material necessity for constituent power

Pull up to that dreamhouse.

Got gate, heels down.

How much do you like this?

Welcome to my bedroom.

Hallway, go down

Stairs. Got permission.

Ava Max, Not Your Barbie Girl (2020)

Mattel released the first Barbie Dream house in 1962 (Bryan-Wilson, 2017: fn4), and it soon became a most coveted and aspirational toy (Lambert, 2005: 103). As a dream house, it is exclusive, literally off limits for those without the money to buy one. In Barbie, Beach Ken is often excluded from the Dreamhouse and these exclusions are apparent in the real world of children's play too, where in 1996, when a Barbie doll was produced with a wheelchair, ‘the figure could not fit into the Barbie Dream House [sic]’ (Favazza et al., 2017: 652). Stereotypical Barbie is nonplussed by Sasha's (Ariana Greenblatt) query as to where the Kens live: ‘I don't know’, she bemusedly replies. The film's turning point, at which Barbie Land is plunged into crisis, comes when the Kens take over the Dreamhouses, with Ken luxuriating in his Mojo Dojo Casa House. Ultimately, at the conclusion of the film, once the Barbies have reinstated the constitution, they are able to reclaim their Dreamhouses. This narrative valorises the role of the house in constitutional politics and constitutional change.

The house, or property ownership, plays an important role in the history of Global North's constitutional thought and practice. In most jurisdictions to experience post-Enlightenment constitutional change, property ownership became a precondition for the exercise of the vote. ³ Phrases like ‘no fixed abode’ continue to denote someone who is considered untethered to society, by virtue of not having a stable legal relationship with real property, and who will consequently face extreme difficulty in exercising democratic rights and accessing basic services (Walsh and Klease, 2004). The Kens’ quest for property in Barbie (echoing Ken dolls, not having a Dreamhouse equivalent, being stuffed into toyboxes) becomes intertwined in their political awakening; the Kens are able to vote in the ‘special election to change the Constitution’ because they have acquired the Mojo Dojo Casa House. At a conceptual level, in the political theory of John Locke, the very purpose of government is to protect private property. Though somewhat debated in the discourse, Locke's protection of private property is closely aligned with a capitalist structure for society (Waldron, 1990). Furthermore, private property and property rights are used throughout the colonial period to justify imperialist expansion: ‘[Locke's] understanding of property legitimized dispossession and settlement in conditions where land was already occupied by native populations’ (Nanopoulos, 2023: 175–176). The film's focus on property ownership, which endures, suggests that the colonial/property/constitutional nexus remains firmly entrenched.

Throughout Barbie, there is a fixation on the house. Even in Ava Max's song ‘Not Your Barbie Girl’ (which accompanies the film), pulling up ‘to that dreamhouse’ is the opening line to the first verse. In contrast, homes are infrequently explicitly referenced; even the ‘safe’ homely space of Barbie-creator Ruth Handler's (Rhea Perlman) kitchen at the end of the film is exposed as a film set. If houses are the material buildings, homes invoke families. Whilst the building of houses has historically been associated with male labour, the building of the home is considered a woman's domain (albeit men would have still dominated in the home). The home is thus a complex space for women: what can be a site of safety is also potentially a place of danger in the cases of domestic violence and abuse; a literal prison for some, and at other times a shelter (Johnson, 2014). In Barbie, the problematic nature of the concept of home as a place of safety and security is powerfully invoked by the removal of the fourth wall from Handler's kitchen. The once-desirable fantasy of the 1950s kitchen is shown to be all-too-often illusionary. The film's representation of the Dreamhouse thus reflects upon these multiple anxieties around women's relationship with the house and the home.

Women's role as being ‘in the home’ is engrained in modern constitutionalism's construction of a public/private divide (Rubio-Marin, 2022: 30). A stark example can be found in the Irish Constitution, where women are explicitly placed ‘within the home’ through Article 41.2's recognition of women's place and their ‘duties in the home’. Unlike property recognition, women's constitutional place within the home is not accompanied by constituent power, nor any specific support by the state for women. It does not denote women as authoritative within the home. Rather, it engrains women as extant only in the private home space, while men act in the public, propertied sphere. In the traditional division of the public and the private, men dominated in both spheres; within the home, the man was the head of the household. Rejecting this stereotypical gendered division, within the Dreamhouse any (and all) Barbie(s) is/are not subservient to men. Indeed, the Dreamhouse in Barbie goes beyond subverting this stereotype and further problematises this public/private divide. There is no ‘private’ space in the Dreamhouse, as Greta Gerwig has emphasised in an interview: ‘There are no walls and no doors […] Dreamhouses assume that you never have anything you wish was private—there is no place to hide’ (Malle, 2023). Ava Max's ‘gate’ might indicate the demarcation of the land owned, a sign of the property ownership, but it is a porous border given that everyone else can see straight into a Barbie's bedroom.

In the film, there are multiple instances where characters try to negotiate entry into the Dreamhouse. Beach Ken installs a saloon door as part of the transformation into the Mojo Dojo Casa House, thereby invoking the hypermasculinity of John Wayne's imaginary Wild West. ⁴ He meets Stereotypical Barbie at this threshold, drawing attention to the new reality of his possession and his ability to exclude her from this space. The swinging of the door, however, also suggests an alternative queer invitation, where the non-fixity of the boundary reflects the broader sexualities embedded within representations of the cowboy. Ironically, because of the open walls and exposed nature of the Dreamhouse, other characters do not need permission to see into the most intimate of private spaces in the home. The private is rendered public. In presenting women as dominant in the public and private spheres, Barbie can be characterised as a feminist success story. But the erasure of privacy, and the anxiety we might feel as a result of the consequent invasion of privacy, should act as a reminder of the multifarious experiences of women with the diverse constructions of the public/private divide in the modern world, as such constructions are historically and geographically contingent and context specific. ⁵ The exposure inherent in the Dreamhouse is accentuated by the contrast with Weird Barbie's (Kate McKinnon) domain. The Weird House, while nominally as open plan as any other Dreamhouse, is secluded from the rest of Barbie Land behind poplar trees and physically separated by a disconcerting number of steps for a society with no need for staircases. Weird Barbie's resultant privacy thus becomes both a concealment of her other-ness and a source of her authority.

Though symbolic of the social sidelining of women, the home has played a key role in feminist constitutional activism. Public institutions are traditionally immortalised as sites of constitutional change; the courtrooms of constitutional courts, public squares or convention halls. Feminist theory, however, has uncovered the private, and often informal, spaces in which women have been obliged to mobilise for constitutional change. Jane Rooney and Alana Farrell (2022) have documented the informal spaces and informal networks that feminists used to pursue abortion reform in Ireland and Northern Ireland. From this literature, there emerges a particularly evocative image of women organising around kitchen tables, including drafting manifestos and planning activities (Fletcher, 2015; Gago, 2020) as well as writing together (Naqvi et al., 2019). This experience is reflected in Barbie; it is in the seclusion of the Weird House that the Barbies plan their campaign to take back the constitution and Barbie Land. The Weird House is never taken over by the Kens, and it is therefore usable by the Barbies as a space to strategise. This use of the Weird House ahead of the constitutional vote is suggestive of this material necessity for space and for resources.

The material necessity of what Virginia Woolf famously called a room of one's own, or in this instance the Weird House, is only a necessity because of the capitalist structures underpinning society and the constitutional order; the Lockian commitment to private property and private ownership. The necessity of property to unlock the advantages of meaningful citizenship is exemplified in the following statement by the American anthropologist Alice Fletcher speaking about the passing of the Dawes Act of 1887, which she helped draft. This ended communal property ownership amongst Indigenous peoples in the United States and imposed norms of private ownership: ‘The Indian may now become a free man; free from the thralldom of the tribe; freed from the domination of the reservation system; free to enter into the body of our citizens. This bill may therefore be considered as the Magna Carta of the Indians of our country’ (Rhea, 2016: 103). A condition of citizenship, in 1887, was private property, but in becoming a private landowner Indigenous peoples were simultaneously stripped of their cultural traditions, lands and ways of living. The film's passing reference to Indigenous peoples and smallpox, where Gloria compares the defencelessness of the Barbies against the patriarchal takeover by the Kens to the defencelessness of Indigenous People against the smallpox vaccine, risks belittling that history and also side-steps the ways that property and law were used as a basis to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands. ⁶ These approaches to identity and property represent a road untravelled in Barbie, which remains instead a meditation on the relationship between gender and the home within the countries of the Global North (and overtly within the ‘American Dream’). The film's insistence, even to the end, that the Dreamhouse is Barbie's Dreamhouse (and certainly not shared with Beach Ken, as seen by the rebuff to his suggestion that ‘I always thought this would be our house’) might resonate as a feminist statement of women triumphing over coverture, where historical laws saw a woman's property as belonging to her husband, but it has its roots in both a small-c conservative approach to society and forms of white-centric feminism, both of which use property as a way of marshalling the franchise and renewing individual commitment to a capitalist society.

Putting the Ken into LumpKenproletariat

[Y]ou know actually my job isn't surfer.

I know.

It's not even lifeguard, which is a common misconception.

Very common.

Because actually my job is actually just, you know, just beach.

Right. And what a good job you do at beach.

Alongside its obsessions with property ownership, Barbie Land is an invocation of an overtly meritocratic juste milieu governance order. ⁷ Barbies of varying stripes dominate the institutions of governance and the professions because they are the most accomplished in each of these fields; these dolls are, as Stereotypical Barbie explains in the opening scenes of the movie, the exemplar embodiment of empowered women in these roles. Only the Barbies, to apply Henry Maine's (1886: 97–98) (in)famous quotation on ensuring the best of society wield political power, possess the ‘tension of mind’ and ‘self-denial’ necessary to act in the public interest. Barbie Land is thus simultaneously the dream and nightmare of classical liberal nineteenth-century advocates of a limited franchise. These commentators would undoubtedly approve of the best of society dominating public life, even if they would struggle to visualise women monopolising these roles. Prior to the Revolt of the Kens, however, there is no apparent need for active exclusions from decision making; everyone just knows their place or, as we discuss above, has their place inculcated by their relationship with property and professional standing. Everyone might in theory have a vote and a say in Barbie Land, but the societal order works in practice, and the populace gets to dance to Dua Lipa every night in the Dreamhouse, precisely because large sections of society do not actively participate in its governance. The dancefloor is where everyone is together, but it is not active public space for deliberation; instead, it is where the Barbies unwind (they perform for each other and the camera, rather than the Kens) and the Kens engage in toxic efforts to upstage each other. The film thus interrogates what happens to everyone else when a self-defined meritocratic elite is responsible for society's governance.

Barbie Land has the outward appearance of being matriarchal, but it is emphatically not the feminist society of its own constitutional imagination. A society of dolls in which everything is ordered and everyone knows their place is really one in which the main characters quickly reveal themselves to be deeply dissatisfied with their allotted roles. Through her connection with Gloria, the hierarchies of the Real World have intruded into Barbie's consciousness at the start of the film, and she finds herself contemplating her own mortality, or ‘malfunctioning’, as a result. ⁸ In this respect, Barbie is radical precisely because it inverts the patriarchal societal structures of contemporary Real World governance and holds up a big pink-bordered mirror to the result. Everyone in Barbie Land society who is not a Barbie denoted by role – Lawyer Barbie (Sharon Rooney); Judge Barbie (Ana Cruz Kayne); Dr Barbie (Hari Nef); Reporter Barbie (Rita Arya) – is othered within these societal and governance structures. ⁹ This is even applicable to Barbies themselves, in the case of the nonconformist or at worst unconventional Weird Barbie; deny your role as a productive upper-caste member of Barbie Land society, get cast to the margins (along with discontinued dolls such as ‘Growing Up’ Skipper [Hannah Khalique-Brown] and Barbie Video Girl [Mette Narrative]). ¹⁰ Beyond the explicit counter-cultural centre-point of Weird Barbie, Skipper and Allan (Michael Cera) can be conscious of their unenviable societal position. We learn that Skipper has previously crossed over to the Real World but that, fortunately for Mattel, she is so docile that this potential disaster was easily contained. Allan has sufficient agency to seek to escape Barbie Land and to ultimately throw his lot in with the Barbie counterrevolution. ¹¹

The Kens, however, are content to ‘Beach’, displaying no awareness of their societal status or shared interests. And why should they? They are just Ken. Barbie Land's governance order functions because of this disengagement. The Kens thus begin the film as the lumpenproletariat of Marxist theory (Bussard, 1987), completely uninterested in societal change because there is nothing to concern them beyond the beach and Barbie. The effectiveness of Gerwig's storytelling is to connect Beach Ken's character, admittedly more ripped than lumpen (if an arch Narrator's [Helen Mirren] monologue was to inject her viewpoint into the narrative at this juncture), to the listlessness prominent in so many accounts of contemporary Real World masculinity. As societal conceptions of masculinity change in response to the advances of feminism, this has contributed to the reassertion by some of what they promote as an ‘authentic’ conception of masculinity, ‘liberated from the shackles of “political correctness”’ (Gill, 2007: 158). The key scene comes towards the end of the first Act, in Beach Ken's inarticulate dissatisfaction with having to go home at the end of the party. Life is, very much, not a beach. All of the chivalric one-up-manship that Beach Ken displayed on the beach, not to mention his response to his surfboard's collision with a hard plastic sea, does not achieve the ends he expects.

Ken's accompaniment of Barbie to the Real World awakens him to his status in Barbie Land; as Judith Shklar asserts, the United States has a powerful way to make those excluded from citizenship's markers of ‘civic dignity feel dishonoured, not just powerless and poor’ (1991: 3). Beach Ken's time in the Real World also provides the sort of simple answers to the disconnections inherent in Barbie Land's identity structure and gender roles that might be expected from intense exposure to a collection of tomes such as Men & Wars, The Origins of the Patriarchy and Why Men Rule (Literally). Even Ken's sudden, and superficially ridiculous, obsession with horses as ‘man extenders’ taps into a patriarchal zeitgeist, exemplified by the horse-embossed saloon doors discussed above. Within months of the film's release, the Economist's Bartleby (2023: 60) column, with only trace elements of irony, conjectured that when its readers pictured a leader in their mind's eye (as distinct from a manager), ‘[you] may well be picturing someone delivering a rousing speech. A horse may be involved’. But this sudden immersion in the contemporary culture of the Global North, resulting in Ken's radicalisation and determination to overthrow Barbie Land's established order, speaks powerfully to the easy accessibility, and influence upon the Real World's ‘lost boys’ (Waling, 2023), of a range of recent works, perhaps most obviously Jordan Peterson's divisive classical liberal provocations (Whitham, 2021: 227–228). From monologues about The Godfather (1972) to demands for the release of ‘the Zach Snyder cut of Justice League’, the film invites viewers to recoil as an all-too-Real World hypermasculine discourse overtakes Barbie Land. ¹² Stereotypical Barbie, it is revealed, is only immune to the brainwashing effect of this discourse because she has already been subject to its effects in the Real World.

The classical liberal response to such a classically liberal dilemma as societally harmful expression is, of course, to emphasise counterspeech and the need for truth to contend with, and best, falsehoods in the marketplace of ideas: ‘the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market’ ¹³ (see: Mill, 1863: 50–58). And counterspeech is explicitly the function of Gloria's oration at the Weird House; ‘By giving voice to the cognitive dissonance required to be a woman under the patriarchy, you robbed it of its power’. But the doubt that lingers is whether counterspeech, however necessary, is sufficient, especially in the Real World. The Revolt of the Kens provides an urgent warning that the opponents of gender equality have no compunction about actively undermining women's accounts of their lived experience. Simply because Real World liberal democracies place a high value on freedom of political expression, this ‘does not mean that individuals should be free to disseminate spurious claims and target voters with deceptive messaging’ (Shattock, 2022: 3). Without such controls on the spread of deceptive content on online platforms, counterspeech is liable to be lost in the maelstrom of social media.

The Revolt of the Kens provides Gerwig's critique of a social order which relies on the depoliticised acquiescence of a large body of its populace; if large sections of a society are politically disengaged and we just leave it to the right people to run the place, then that society is on a path to upheaval (an issue which remains pointedly unresolved at Barbie's conclusion). The Real World parallels are never far away, even in long-established democracies. In 2019, at the height of the logjam around Brexit in the UK, a survey recorded 54 per cent of respondents agreeing that the UK needed a strong leader who is willing to break the rules, and 42 per cent agreeing that many of the country's problems could be dealt with more effectively if the government did not have to worry so much about votes in Parliament (Hansard Society, 2019: 5). Many of those who had already come to regard democratic politics as background noise were primed to accept post-truth explanations for profound challenges like COVID-19 or climate change. Beach Ken's bringing of the patriarchy to Barbie Land causes deep upheaval precisely because so much of the populace is so uninvested in Barbie Land in the first place. Beach Ken thus satirises the Real World's Russell Brand, Lawrence Fox and Andrew Tate, disseminating a doctrine of patriarchy intended to undermine ‘the system’, notwithstanding its own internal contradictions. He continues to spread these corrosive ideas even after he finds out that the patriarchy was not really about horses and personally loses interest. This is the film's answer to the mystery of the internal motivations of many such influencers: Ken was just in it for the clicks.

Gerwig's exploration of the relationship between property ownership, disenfranchisement and post-truth narratives probes some of the fundamental weaknesses of contemporary capitalist liberal democracy. The complacent confidence of Barbie Land is perilously undermined by Real World dilemmas. As more Barbies end up like Gloria, worn out by the contradictions of such a society and with the Kens propagating hitherto fringe ideas that they have lifted from the Real World, can the centre possibly hold? As with all good Hollywood blockbusters, the answer is yes, but only because the Kens are so easily distracted and atomised as to be persuaded to start fighting amongst themselves and forget to vote. There is a heartwarming confidence that the distrust and disempowerment spread by the Kens can be countered by people talking to each other and that information will ultimately defeat disinformation. The film, however, is more nuanced than this summary would suggest; the revolution is averted, for now. It is not simply that revolutionary energy dissipated; the governance of Barbie Land had to adapt because of the Revolt of the Kens. Some political outsiders, like Weird Barbie, are explicitly brought into the fold, and sanitation will no doubt improve as a result. But the governance base remains narrow, and the Kens (unless they find their own identity and role, at Barbie's benign urging) remain a destabilising force. But if this section has taken the governance of Barbie Land at face value, Gerwig has a double narrative in play; she confronts viewers not only with the facade of Barbie Land but also with the deeper power structures at work.

The tyranny of the dolls

Tomorrow the Kens are going to vote to change the Constitution

but we have to get there first. The final stage of our plan:

to turn the Kens against each other. Now that they

think they have power over you, you make them question

whether they have enough power over each other.

Barbie Land amounts to a tyranny and the events of Barbie can be presented as the Kens’ legitimate efforts towards tyrannicide, but what the film highlights (and many critics missed when they confused satire for misandry) is the ongoing Real World tyranny for women. Barbie not only reverses our viewpoint but also refracts it by the gradual exposure of an additional layer of tyranny, grounded in patriarchal dominance, at work behind Barbie Land. Tyrannies are created through illegitimacy, governing through the application of law, silence and beneficence. They maintain control through scale, imperialism, bureaucracy and technocracy, and are almost inevitably gendered (O’Donoghue, 2021: 107). Tyranny is attractive to would-be tyrants and their supporters because of the benefits – political, financial, psychological or otherwise – that accrue to them. Determining who benefits most from a tyranny, moreover, helps to uncover where power actually lies. From the emergence of tyranny as a recognised form of political governance in Classical Greece, it has repeatedly been intertwined with gender; in Greek antiquity women in power, no matter the legitimacy of their claim to their position, were automatically treated as tyrannical and should, much like the Barbies, be overthrown (O’Donoghue, 2021: 107–110). Some of this ethos is carried over into liberal constitutionalism's fixation with stability; from the nineteenth century onwards, women, in making demands to be heard, often came to be presented as a destabilising force. The quotidian lives of women living under patriarchal or marital tyranny frequently came to be treated as politically irrelevant. European imperialism ultimately spread these tyrannies on a global scale. Women, however, have persistently resisted these impositions, engaging in a variety of feminist forms of tyrannicide, including manifesto, protest, transnational solidarity and love. These often manifest alongside anti-imperialist or anti-racist modes, although these are not the subject of the film.

Women thereby claim constituent power for themselves, and their entitlement to overthrow an order that relies on gender as one of its main forms of oppression (see: Houghton and O’Donoghue, 2023). Barbie Land, as introduced, appears to play up to the fears in Classical Greek philosophy that women in power are inevitably tyrannical. For all their bombast, Barbie Land is marked by the political silence of the Kens. While the Barbies hold positions that presuppose high levels of education and ability, the Kens ‘beach’. When Beach Ken visits the Real World, his undereducation, and absence of an inner life, means he has no tools to interpret what is going on: he is the embodiment of the LumpKenproletariat. Hence, his immediate attraction to the patriarchy and property are ways of being heard. This knowledge and experience enables him to assume leadership on return to Barbie Land, to have a voice, to express his political opinion and, by the end, to have the beginnings of an inner life and voice. The Kens’ ‘silence’ and their attempt to ‘silence’ the Barbies, or at least make them listen, is critical to how Barbie Land unravels, and provides the seeds of tyrannicide. Legitimate tyrannicide requires not just that a tyranny be overthrown but that it is not replaced with another form of tyranny, and this is where Ken fails. Ken's use of gender as a tool of oppression does not lead away from tyranny; it merely replicates it in a new form. Ken's attraction to the patriarchy, even for the clicks, ultimately undermines his attempts to gain power; because the power he seeks is illegitimate and does not unsilence Barbie Land, it does not rid him of the oppression he feels but cannot articulate.

To prevent new tyranny emerging, an active public sphere, filled with debate, must be established (O’Donoghue, 2021: 130). An unsilencing process begins to emerge as Barbie Land becomes more disordered. ‘Weird’ here is insufficient, as weirdness in Barbie Land was contained through isolation. Disorder, however, cannot be contained as it is the whole of Barbie Land not just single Weird Barbies, Allans or Skippers. At the start of the film, both Barbies and Kens have silent inner lives. Hannah Arendt ([1951] 2017: 264) posits that the absence of an internal dialogue leads to both thoughtlessness and, potentially, evil actions. It also means there can be no active public sphere. The absence of inner life here suggests an intentionally created unthinking populace. As the film commences, there are neither inner lives nor a substantive public sphere in Barbie Land. Both the Beach and the Dancefloor exist as empty stand-in discursive performances; nothing meaningful is happening in these spaces. Indeed, they are closer to the bombastic dance spectacles of tyrannies like North Korea. What cases are heard by Supreme Court Barbie in such a society? There is no feminist kitchen table – despite Ruth Handler's (Rhea Perlman) table in the Mattel Building – at which to assert a new form of constituent power, the President is not engaged in persuading their constituents about a policy initiative, there is no unionised space to consider Beach working conditions.

The clearest sign of the ‘silence’ of Barbie Land is the literal one, the silence and embarrassment that follows when Stereotypical Barbie asks a substantive question. It was a question about death, but it could equally be about birth. Neither the potentiality of natality nor the determinism of necropolitics are possible (Arendt, 1958: 9; Mbembe, 2003). Arendt suggests that natality is about spontaneity, novelty and the possibility of new beginnings, none of which are possible in Barbie Land. For Mbembe, necropolitics determines how some in a society will live and how some will die, a form of zombie existence. But the acknowledgement of the precarity of existence and the resistance to that are not apparent on the dancefloor, merely an awakening to its possibility. Midge, the eternally pregnant doll, is after all secluded from the rest, for her confinement perhaps but also for the natality that she represents – the potentiality of an unknown future? ¹⁴ Critically, it is Gloria's inner voice that starts a process of reflection; her existentialist angst is the catalyst for what follows. As a Latina woman in the United States, whose role as secretary is entirely outside of management; it is important that it is she whose voice is the catalyst. A further example of the disruption of silence is inherent in the quip, as Writer Barbie is brought back to her senses, that ‘it's like I’ve been in a dream where I was really invested in the Zack Snyder cut of Justice League’. This nod to a ‘manosphere’ obsession reveals the Kens’ desire to have their inner life, no matter its banal triviality, recognised. If ruminations upon the Godfather or the Snyderverse are not the internal dialogues that Arendt imagines, coming from the LumpKenproletariat, the Kens’ subsequent songwriting efforts (reflecting Weird Barbie's exhortation that Stereotypical Barbie must ‘want to know’) do suggest a beginning that may lead to an actualisation of freedom.

If we return to our key question, however, neither the Barbies nor the Kens benefit most from Barbie Land's governance order. The Barbies are the ostensible recipients of another's beneficence. They have better lives than the Kens with, as discussed earlier, homes and occupations more substantive than the apparently empty moniker of Beach. Beach is the act of a beneficent tyrant, granting someone a job to make them feel important and included, but one meaningless in content even within the confines of a ‘play’ world. But the Kens and Barbies also have no inner lives, nor any history, and their political existences are entirely predicated on their gender. The Barbies’ female identities reinforce the misdirection that they are tyrants, but Barbie Land's real overlords turn out to be Mattel. The Barbies believe they are doing some good for the Real World women, and that all women benefit from Barbie Land. Yet surely this is merely the purpose they are given by Mattel to explain their world, a world that must not have always been that way; it must have a history that would have reflected the phases of Barbie in the Real World, when all the Barbies were Stereotypical Barbie. Their lives must be so, because any deviation could harm Real World women. There is a binary choice upon realisation of this reality; go back in your box, or risk the chaos that will follow. This mirrors the beneficence claimed by tyrannical rulers, or Thomas Hobbes’ social contractarianism; chaos is kept at bay by submission to the correct order (Hobbes, [1651] 1909: 172). Even as the Mattel CEO (Will Ferrell) asks to be called Mother, or Barbie earlier refers to Mattel's headquarters as the Mothership, this is not an affirmation of care in a feminist mode but rather an invocation of a provider figure for an infantilised populace. In this form of social contractarianism, in the vein of Hobbes or Locke, there is no possibility of asserting constituent power. Who benefits from the Barbies thinking this way, if not Mattel?

Tyrannies often use scale as a mode of governance (O’Donoghue, 2021: 101–103). Distance, geographical and temporal, creates a gap between those that make the laws or execute justice and those at the receiving end. The journeys between Barbie Land and the Real World where Mattel resides, and makes its profits, create a hurdle to be overcome by groups unaccustomed to seeking out answers. But the distance between real decisionmakers and the ‘people’ reinforces the tyranny. As Cicero wrote, there is a difference in justice between Rome and its uttermost provinces (O’Donoghue, 2021: 101). Mattel's excursion to Barbie Land reinforces the division; there does not appear to be any meaningful peril for the Executives, beyond prospect of potential financial loss. This is also reinforced in the Mattel headquarters, where mere employees are not supposed to get the lift all the way to the Boardroom. These are large spaces, filled with architectural hierarchies and stark colours. The exception to this is the space that Ruth Handler, Barbie's creator, occupies. This space is more domestic, more intimate, somewhere where Stereotypical Barbie can begin to address her private inner voice and take steps towards action; yet it remains a set, not a home, and Stereotypical Barbie must ultimately leave Barbie Land to establish her inner self. When she does so, Mattel's dominance over Barbie Land remains. Mattel is the ultimate beneficiaries of Barbie Land, as Weird Barbie openly admits: ‘Don't blame me, blame Mattel. They make the rules’. These are rules which Mattel creates but is not bound by; it is a rule by law system, a feature of tyranny. The suggestion that Barbie Land is a matriarchy disguises this early and explicit recognition that the whole show is, quite literally, for Mattel's benefit. The Kens and the Barbies, even at the film's end, are still seeking Mattel's permission to change their lives and society even slightly, still identifying each other as the root cause of their issues, not the real tyrants. Only Stereotypical Barbie makes a firm break for the Real World, she is the only one to actualise her freedom. Mattel's aim throughout the film is to return to the status quo ante. But any sequel would have to be about the assertion of constituent power and tyrannicide. And the tyrant to be overthrown is Mattel.

Conclusion

Weren't we supposed to vote today?

What?

To change the Constitution?!

That's today, isn't it?!

…

President Barbie: OK, ladies, let's do this.

All those in favor of letting Barbie Land be Barbie Land, say ‘Aye!’.

Barbie has attracted prominent criticism for promoting and perpetuating an intensely capitalist and ‘girl boss’ vision of feminism, but it was always looking for rather a lot out of a spin-off movie about a toy to transcend all of the structural limitations constraining it. Mattel has to be roundly mocked to be able to collect the riches generated by the film, and perhaps in the circumstances that is the best we can expect. References to ‘White Savior Barbie’ are offered as knowing acknowledgements of some of these limitations. Nonetheless, the richness of the themes interwoven into this story, and its popular reach, give it a particular value notwithstanding these critiques. Even if the nature of representation itself might have been more profoundly explored, the film exposes the need to pay attention to competing claims upon constituent power. When we continue daily to be sold contemporary capitalist liberal democracy as a governance dreamland, together with the forms of lean-in feminism that accompany and sustain it, Gerwig's account of the Real World / Barbie Land distinction highlights the issues of legitimacy, authority and meaningful representation inherent within such an order, and does so while challenging gender stereotyping.

Barbie places Mattel as the central authoritarian figure, whose beneficence towards the Barbies is ultimately the product of the profits that the dolls generate. Its claims to change the Real World are tellingly demonstrated to be untrue; the Mattel Board has no women and, as is often the case in the Real World, when this fact is raised the men on the Board resent being confronted with reality. After all, they once had a woman CEO in the 1990s and ‘[w]omen are the freaking foundation of this very long phallic building’. Feminist aspirations are, in terms, dismissed as having been fulfilled. Gerwig has stated that she does not foresee a sequel to Barbie, although given the profits it has generated, Mattel – and it, after all, makes the rules – might think otherwise. The process of constitutional change has not been completed at the film's end. Much remains open; the awakening of the inner voices within Barbie Land makes it unlikely that the Kens will return to their state of disengagement or that the Barbies will be content with continuing their lives as before, now they are more aware of the Real World. But these are equally challenges for the Real World. Barbie's exposure of the shortcomings of liberal constitutionalism thus provokes a radical rethinking of the relationship between power and processes of constitutional change.