Greta Gerwig’s Barbie
Popular Culture, Cinema, and Gender
Greta Gerwig’s Barbie
Popular Culture, Cinema, and Gender
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Description
This volume brings together an international array of contributors to analyse Greta Gerwig's unprecedented success, Barbie (2023), exploring how a film released in a moment of industrial crisis for Hollywood became the highest-grossing film directed or co-directed by a woman.
Uniting scholars from Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, France, Turkey, the UK, and the USA, this volume provides a set of essays that reflect the complexities of what is, in many ways, a fable for our times. Greta Gerwig's Barbie: Popular Culture, Cinema, and Gender opens with a chapter on the current state of the film industry. Further topics include: the treatment of American girlhood; fashion and feminism; the auteur director; post-indie cinema; queer identities; masculinity; the politics of race, class and gender; contemporary feminisms; consumerism; and the ecology of plastic. As such, the book offers a detailed and nuanced perspective on a benchmark film, produced and distributed by an industry in crisis––the brainchild of a significant director whose star is on the rise.
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Foreword: If you love Barbie … This movie is for you … If you hate Barbie … This movie is for you …” by Hilary Radner
Introduction: “Barbie Land,” Contextualizing Greta Gerwig's Barbie by Hilary Radner
Part I: A Fragmented World - The Cultural Moment
1. The Barbenheimer Phenomenon and the Post-Pandemic Streaming-Era Movie Industry by Thomas Schatz
2. Jo, Meg, Beth, Amy, and Barbie: White American Girlhood in the Work of Greta Gerwig by Patricia White
3. Fake Feminism and Strident Pink Spectacle: Fashion, Celebrity Culture, and the Marketing of Greta Gerwig's Barbie by Pamela Church Gibson
Part II: The Greta Gerwig Touch - A Contemporary Auteur
4. Greta Gerwig: From Indiewood to Conglomerate Hollywood––New Iterations of the Contemporary Auteur by Alex Dickie
5. Barbie, Irony, and Post-Indie Cinema by Claire Perkins
6. “Authentically Artificial”: Embodying the Self in Barbie by Suzanne Ferriss
Part III: Identity
7. Queer Barbie, Weird Barbie, and Greta Gerwig's Many Queer Kens by Sarah E. S. Sinwell
8. “What Was I Made For?” and “I'm Just Ken”: The Musical Binary of Barbie by Amy Skjerseth and Dylan Young
9. “Barbieist vs. Oppenheimerist”: A Gender-based Reception Study of Barbie in Turkey by Melis Behlil, and Ruken Dogu Erdede,
10. Deeper into Ken: The Accessibility of Ryan Gosling by Michael DeAngelis
Part IV: The Polemics of Barbie
11. Barbie, Feminism, and Consumerism: An Incoherent Combination by Geneviève Sellier, trans A. Fox
12. The Politics of “Always'' and “Never”: The Monologue Heard Around the World – Race, Class, and Gender in Barbie by Bruce Isaacs
13. Barbie, the Feminist Mattel Ad by Rebecca Stringer
14. Plastic, Kitsch: Ecologies of Barbie Land by Seán Cubitt
Afterword by Rebecca Stringer
Appendices
Greta Gerwig: Biography and Filmography by Alex Dickie with Frédéric Dichtel
Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023): Summary in Three Acts by Hilary Radner and Rebecca Stringer
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
Product details
| Published | 25 Jun 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Paperback |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 336 |
| ISBN | 9781350523968 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 37 colour illus |
| Dimensions | 234 x 156 mm |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |

























