She’s a Barbie girl in a reversal utopian world

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) subverts neo-traditional romantic comedy expectations and pushes gender constructions into a reversal utopia, inverting a societal construct to highlight its absurdity. Appealing to more progressive, critically-minded contemporary viewers, Barbie Land centres on women leading in politics, professional careers, and social life. While the film may humorously laud this as an ideal for women, it ultimately argues that unequal opportunities for men and women are unjust, whether in Barbie Land or the United States. Barbie aligns with reversal utopian literature such as Annie Denton Cridge’s Man’s Rights; Or, How Would You Like It? (1870), one of the first feminist utopian texts written by an American woman. In Man’s Rights, men complete domestic and child-rearing duties, but without the need for such responsibilities in Barbie, men are left without any meaningful work. However, both texts feature men seeking increased rights, and ultimately, progress is made, suggesting the same is possible for women in our reality. Considering this text alongside the film highlights the latter’s combination of utopian elements with comedy, pushing genre boundaries. It also demonstrates an impulse to highlight injustice through an absurd reversal and defamiliarization, in turn highlighting the preposterousness of the injustice in our reality.