Becoming Weird, Becoming Woman

By Jaeda Calaway.
She stands with hands raised to each side, crayon marks on her face, an ill-fitting dress with paint stains, and hair haphazardly cut short. She is “Weird Barbie.” She offers “Stereotypical Barbie” a choice represented by the shoes she holds. A pink high heel represents the past Stereotypical Barbie seeks to restore without thoughts of death, cellulite, or flat feet. A brown Birkenstock represents the journey ahead where she leaves Barbieland for the real world. This is not really a choice: one must go forward; one cannot go back. Weird Barbie, like popular understandings of a shaman, knows the path to the otherworld and unfolds it to others.
Weird Barbie and Stereotypical Barbie are inversions of each other. Stereotypical Barbie is conventionally pretty, feminine, and heteronormative, traits that pervade Barbieland. Towards the end, nearly every Barbie has paired off with her Ken. Weird Barbie, however, played by queer actor Kate McKinnon, is queer-coded by her short hair and her Birkenstock preference, playing upon stereotypes of queer women. She has no Ken, but brings her dog everywhere. Yet this is gender without genitals; sexuality without sex. As Barbie says to the construction workers in the real world, she does not have a vagina; Ken does not have a penis. The future of Barbieland – after Stereotypical Barbie leaves it forever – shows no concern with marriage, sex, or reproduction. While they pair off, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage (Matt. 22:30).
Stereotypical Barbie is the center of Barbieland: all the parties happen at her dreamhouse. Weird Barbie lives on the periphery. She became weird because girls played too hard with her: coloring, painting, cutting, and burning her. She is a unique case before Stereotypical Barbie of actions in the real world impacting Barbieland: “on earth as it is in heaven” or vice versa. Weird Barbie contorts; always doing the splits and somersaults, she cannot walk straight. Her “weird house” – unlike Stereotypical Barbie’s pink dreamhouse – is a 60s-style psychedelic rainbow. She speaks colloquially, unlike Stereotypical Barbie: “What’s cookin’ good lookin’?” She alone has sexual knowledge: in a surprising aside, she says she would like to see Stereotypical Ken’s blobby non-genitals, whereas when Ken wants to stay the night with Stereotypical Barbie, neither is sure what they would do. She is also “Weird Barbie” because all the Barbies call her “weird” behind her back and to her face; it is a slur that she has come to own: like “queer” in the real world.
Because of her queer relation to the rest of Barbieland, Weird Barbie sees things as they are and guides others to transformation. While everything seems perfect, a Barbie can “malfunction.” That means she must see Weird Barbie. She heals their malfunction; like a shamanic healer, she diagnoses and then sends them on a journey of self-discovery. Having experienced more than any other Barbie, she has wisdom, knowledge, and cunning – the ability to strategize against the Kens – contrasting the naivete of the other Barbies and Kens. None had malfunctioned as much as Weird Barbie until Stereotypical Barbie. Malfunctions and weirdness reveal the cracks of Barbieland’s utopia, where not everyone truly fits.
Stereotypical Barbie and Weird Barbie also mirror each other. Both are white and blonde. Weird Barbie was once the most beautiful Barbie, but as Doctor Barbie says, “And now she is fated to an eternity of making other Barbies perfect while falling more and more into disrepair herself.” Her fate is tragically ironic, a contrapasso with no sin to punish. Stereotypical Barbie fears she will become Weird Barbie. Weird Barbie says this will happen if she fails in her quest. When Stereotypical Barbie is at her lowest – lying face-first on the ground – she says to Weird Barbie: “I’m like you now, ugly and unwanted.” They have both been touched and changed by the real world. They have fallen from perfection, but gained wisdom (Gen. 3:6).
Weird Barbie and Stereotypical Barbie are immune to the mind-numbing effects of patriarchy – as are Allen, and discontinued Kens and Barbies; that is, those who are marginal, expendable, or touched by the real world. As Stereotypical Barbie says, “You can be either weird and ugly or brainwashed.” When the patriarchy brainwashes the other Barbies and the Kens rule over them, the Barbies suddenly express desire for their Kens (Gen. 3:16). In the film, expressing desire for Ken and Ken ruling is brainwashing or even infection; in Genesis, it is a curse in the expulsion of Eden. In both, patriarchy displaces an apparent utopia. Weirdness allows one to see that the status quo is not inevitable; it allows one to imagine other possibilities. What marks Weird Barbie, Stereotypical Barbie, the discontinued Barbies and Kens, and Allen, is that they understand things change: change is scary, can make things worse (as patriarchy proves), but is full of possibilities.
Weird Barbie becomes integrated into Barbieland when President Barbie offers her a post in her cabinet and Weird Barbie takes sanitation. She remains eccentric yet included. While weirdness enables alternative possibilities, Stereotypical Barbie expresses a trans yearning, dismantling Weird Barbie’s non-choice at the end of the film While Stereotypical Barbie could become Weird Barbie in her fall from perfection, instead she forges an alternate transformation. Stereotypical Barbie accepts a future death and becomes the woman she somehow already was.
When speaking to Ruth Handler in a blank space, Stereotypical Barbie asks whether becoming human is “something that I just discover I am?” In the final scene, having become a human woman – Barbara Handler – in the real world, she goes to her first gynecologist appointment. She has transitioned and acquired a vagina. She walks into the building wearing pink Birkenstocks, blending Weird Barbie’s choices in her own way. To merge Beauvoir’s phrase – “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” – and Barbie’s slogan – “you can be anything”: you can be/come ordinary, you can be/come weird, and you can even be/come a woman.
Jaeda Calaway (she/her/hers) studies ancient Jews and Christians through the entangled lenses of trans studies, queer theory, posthumanities, and critical spatial and temporal theories. She received her Ph.D. in Religion from Columbia University. She is the author of The Christian Moses: Vision, Authority, and the Limits of Humanity in the New Testament and Early Christianity (McGill-Queensland University Press, 2019); The Sabbath and the Sanctuary: Access to God in the Letter to the Hebrews and Its Priestly Context (Mohr Siebeck, 2013); and co-author with Hal Tassig, Maia Kotrosits, Celene Lillie, and Justin Lasser of The Thunder: Perfect Mind: A New Translation and Introduction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). She currently teaches at Illinois College.