Pretty in Patriarchal Pink: Barbie’s Genitals and the Grimm Fairy-Tale Horrors of Abject Motherhood

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) purports to be a feminist film by the director’s admission. Yet underneath the phantasmagoria of pink plastic and profemale pronouncements, Barbie reinscribes patriarchal ideologies with its reactionary insistence that women’s lives derive meaningfulness largely through motherhood, even as this motherhood emerges as abject—a central contradiction of patriarchal oppression also emergent in literary fairy tales. Using Kristeva’s Powers of Horror as descriptive model, the following shows how the movie reproduces fairy-tale paradigms of abject motherhood and consequently reinforces the patriarchal ideologies identified as disempowering to women to undermine the raison d’être of the Barbie doll’s existence.