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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 | 16 Apr 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 336 |
| ISBN | 9781350523975 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 37 colour illus |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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Radner and Stringer have assembled an impressive global roster of contributors to provide a breadth of perspectives on the cultural phenomenon that was Greta Gerwig's Barbie. Collectively, these authors provide fresh ways of interpreting the film – and its filmmaker's – industrial, creative, political, and sociocultural impact.
Alisa Perren, Professor, Department of Radio-Television-Film, University of Texas at Austin, USA
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Given the phenomenal global success of Barbie (2023), it is not surprising that leading film and media scholars have come together in this superb collection to dissect the film, the franchise, and the phenomenon. Under the expert editorship of Hilary Radner and Rebecca Stringer, Greta Gerwig's Barbie emerges as a major scholarly achievement!
Yannis Tzioumakis, Professor of Film and Media Industries, University of Liverpool, UK
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Greta Gerwig's Barbie: Popular Cinema and Contemporary Feminism is a triumph-a smart, incisive, wide-ranging, and global assessment of the knotty problem of Barbie as indie-blockbuster, IP, single-use plastic commodity, and as a troublesome yet enduring avatar of imperial, corporate, American girlhood and feminism(s) released into a churning global media and political landscape.
Kathleen A. Feeley, Professor, Department of History, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Redlands, USA
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Radner and Stringer bring together an esteemed group of international scholars for a rigorous examination of the biggest commercial female-driven blockbuster in Hollywood history. By grappling with questions of authorship, identity, and representation as well as industrial context and cultural impact through a multifaceted feminist lens, the collection makes an important argument for Greta Gerwig's Barbie as the defining film of its era.
Courtney Brannon Donoghue, Associate Professor, Media Industry Studies University of North Texas, USA
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Like the movie that spawned it, this collection of essays is smart, savvy and witty. I had almost as much fun reading it as Barbie and Ken no doubt had in the privacy of their camper.
Catherine Lumby, Professor of Media and Communications, University of Sydney, Australia
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This collection offers an incisive exploration of Barbie and its global, cultural impact. With a stellar slate of contributors exploring the film from a diverse array of perspectives, the book gets at the heart of the contradictions and complexities of films made for women by women in the contemporary media landscape. It is sure to appeal to both Barbie's fans and its critics.
Michele Schreiber, Associate Professor of Film and Media, Emory University, USA

























