“Either You’re Brainwashed or You’re Weird and Ugly:” Beyond Binaries and In Defense of “Playful” Scholarship

By Alexiana Fry.
I had the pleasure of recently presenting alongside several others at a conference called “Barbie and the Bible: Conversations in Pop Culture, Gender, and Theology,” put on by Fuller Seminary and the University of Dayton. In preparing for the event, I packed all of the pink I had—which admittedly was not challenging to do—and braced myself for potential commentary on my outfits as excessively in-theme, rehearsing the line that I had “theatre kid energy” to use in case I would be collegially teased. I, thankfully, did not have to wield my defense mechanism of self-deprecation. Leading up to my departure, while nothing was said directly to me, I perceived (perhaps hypervigilant-ly due to consistent experiences of such) that the body language I was receiving surrounding conversation about this two-day escapade had everything to do with how “unserious” and therefore, less intelligent, less scholarly, even a waste of time the affair would be. What could Barbie do for biblical scholarship? Although Barbie is plastic, who gets to define what “real scholars” are made of (or made for) in this field?
The dialogue surrounding the (false) binaries constructed in biblical scholarship is not new and remains pervasive. The “pure” historical-critical method is deemed normative and, on the opposite end of the spectrum, everything else is denigrated as biased, incorrect, and not-(as)-good. The irony is not lost on me that the Barbie movie itself is entirely curated around essentialized gender binaries and the power struggle between them. As the title of this short post hints, Stereotypical Barbie defeatedly explains how one is viewed in the new land of Kendom, and the parallels in real-time are not too laughable. Either you yield to the masculine-coded historical-critical approach or deem being further subordinated and feminized, devalued, and relegated to the sidelines; it’s just natural.
Much like the consensus of those at this conference surrounding the Barbie movie, the answer isn’t that we invert the binary but that the binary itself does not work. The papers offered covered a broad spectrum of approaches to both Barbie and the “Bible,” from archaeological to literary—even the two papers covering comparisons of the movie to the book of Esther were not the same—and the many seemingly opposing epistemologies and theories created unprecedented, generative conversations in every following Q&A. Although even the queer characters in Barbie followed fairly standard gender performances, this conference betrayed the silos of scholarship to demonstrate the possibility and even playfulness of interdependence, of transdisciplines—in part because we knew we would not face any potential negative reaction or defensive posturing in this space. More specifically, the space demonstrated what could happen when we did not feel the need to perform a particular plastic persona of “scholar:” We impressed each other by being ourselves. We may dismiss some of our humanity when we stay relegated and confined to such hegemonic strictures of “what is” in our mojo-dojo-casa-house departments.1 The binary continues in khaki-clad grip, but it doesn’t have to stay this way.
Dare I say it: this conference was fun, even silly. I couldn’t help but consider the words of Sara Ahmed, where she talks about how one way of being a feminist killjoy is to rebel against the supposed normative requirements of being. In discussion on affect, she brings up the concept of silliness: “Silly originally meant blessed, happy, or blissful. The word mutates over time: from blessed to pious, to innocent, to harmless, to pitiable, to weak and feeble.” Even more could be said about the problematic binary of weak and strong. Who does it actually serve if silly cannot be seen as substantive?2 The politics and policing of what “real biblical scholarship” must look like and how one should behave—a blatant performativity—belies the supposed universality of those claims. The field and our world are well overdue for a transition that equitably values the vastly diverse ways humans are human. If this is just a silly fantasy, I’m happy to keep playing.
Alexiana Fry is a postdoctoral researcher (“Divergent Views of Diaspora in Ancient Judaism”) and teacher at the University of Copenhagen. Her first book, Trauma Talks in the Hebrew Bible: Speech Act Theory and Trauma Hermeneutics, was published by Lexington Books in late 2023. Her next book will be released by SCM Press, tentatively titled Esther Keeps the Score. She remains highly caffeinated and attached to her velcro pugs, Cortado and Toast.
Notes
- It must be said that Barbieland is also inequitable; the Kens are even unhoused. This cute parallel could keep going further, in that the “men-extenders” (in the words of Ken, “At first, I thought the Real World was run by men, and then for one minute I thought it was run by horses, but now I realize that horses are just men-extenders. So are cars, buildings, airplanes, EVERYTHING! Everything exists just to expand and elevate the presence of MEN!”) in our field are not only institutions but also the wielding of terms to discount other approaches, as said in the previous paragraph, like anachronism.
- Many thanks to Meghan Henning for this thought.