Barbie, Dressed up in Laplanche

There's more than one answer to these questions

Pointing me in a crooked line

And the less I seek my source for some definitive …

The closer I am to fine

In late July of 2023, flocks of people dressed in hot pink started appearing everywhere, coming to and from movie theaters, with an exuberance that had gone missing in the pandemic and post-pandemic epoch up until then. They were dressed up to see Barbie, a film directed by Greta Gerwig and written jointly by Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, which had become a cultural phenomenon in the span of weeks.

Barbie is undeniably about gender, immediately evoking assumptions about its contents with its title. Like the toy from which the movie derives, the ideas in the film can be “played with” on multiple levels. Arguably, the film's power (which has inspired a gleeful fandom and equally fervent hostility in its reception) is its ability to stimulate debate about the core frameworks of identity that exist in all of us. Among many other interpretations, Barbie can be understood as a dramatization of the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche's theory of gender (2003), which is centered on the developing child's relation to the adult world. Here I will use the film as a scaffold to talk about his ideas, dressing Barbie up in Laplanche. Of course, readers are free to play with his theories however they want.

Before we get to the film, we have to talk shop. Laplanche provides us a way of thinking about gender as a part of human development that is simultaneously universal, culturally informed, and to some degree unique for each individual. His theory begins with the idea that humans are meaning-seeking creatures, or “hermeneuts.” That is, we are naturally compelled not just to survive, attach, seek pleasure, reproduce, and so on, but to try to make meaning of our experiences. In Laplanche's view, we use any interpretive means available to pursue this aim, from the

communicative bodily gestures we develop in i