Barbie's Dark Continent

“‘Vagina.’” There, I've said it. ‘Vagina’—said it again … It's scary saying the word. ‘Vagina.’ At first it feels like you're crashing through an invisible wall. ‘Vagina.’ You feel guilty and wrong, as if someone's going to strike you down. Then, after you say the word the hundredth time or the thousandth time, it occurs to you that it's your word, your body, your most essential place. You suddenly realize that all the shame and embarrassment you've previously felt saying the word has been a form of silencing, eroding your desire, eroding your ambition.”

One of the most radical themes of Greta Gerwig's 2023 movie Barbie is Barbie's awakening to desire, reflected in the character's conscious choice to become human at the end of the film. In her conception, the doll Barbie was fashioned according to the cultural and psychological norms of canonical American femininity: a shapely Caucasian blond, whose body befit the perfect drag, with large breasts, narrow waist, long legs and preternaturally arched feet for the unnaturally angled shoes that called attention to her legs (just as they accent the legs and encumber the gait of real life women). She was, in other words, fashioned according to that image of womanhood which arouses desire in others (erotic in men, envy in women). Moreover, the doll Barbie completed her performance of femininity as the passive object of the other's gaze in her smooth and sexless crotch. Absent any hint of what Sigmund Freud famously referred to as “the dark continent”, Barbie was all surface and no scary depths. As an eternally youthful beauty, her skin-deep perfection contained no mystery, withheld no secrets, and would not die. Significantly, Barbie possessed no hunger of her own.

Early on in Gerwig's movie, Barbie surprises herself and her Barbie tribe with her sudden expression of ambivalence. Psychologically, that ambivalence appears in unbidden thoughts of death. Physically, Barbie suffers a co