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Greta Gerwig’s Barbie

Popular Culture, Cinema, and Gender

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie cover

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie

Popular Culture, Cinema, and Gender

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Pre-order. Available 25 Jun 2026
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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 Figures
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

Bloomsbury Academic Test
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

About the contributors

Anthology Editor

Hilary Radner

Hilary Radner is Emeritus Professor of Film and Me…

Anthology Editor

Rebecca Stringer

Rebecca Stringer is Associate Professor in the Pro…

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