#queer barbie

[arms-full-of-hyacinths]

a very special shout-out to Allan for existing

[bi-dykes]

of COURSE Barbie was fruity in A Fairy Secret, she had rainbow wings and was wearing a pink purple blue dress <3 she was a bi fairy icon. Raquelle too

[barbietronix]

Model: "Carmen", an early wave fashionista I rebodied from a signature looks Barbie. Everything she wears is by Daddy Mattel. I customized her outfit with my own jewelery to give her outfit a more 90's Gianni Versace/Christian LaCroix vibe. Very photogenic, this one. I have her cosplay as my interpretation of Vampire Jubilee, from Marvel. She is quite the stem (femme + stud). She'll eat your heart out, then wipe her mouth on your sleeve.

[bardass]

but the hot take that y’all aren’t ready for yet is that all the barbies and kens in barbieland are asexual. when ken suggests that he stay over because he and barbie are quote “boyfriend/girlfriend” and she asks “to do what?” and he says “…i honestly don’t know” it’s because they may be a reflection of stereotypical human relationships in the real world, but they lack any of the substance beyond the superficial. this is supported when barbie explicitly states that she doesn’t have a vagina and ken doesn’t have a penis (despite ken’s insistence that he quote “has all the genitals,” okay intersex king). therefore if neither barbie nor ken have genitals and presumably no sexual organs or biological functions (such as the need to eat/drink/bathe with real water/etc. as shown in the film), then none of the barbies or kens should experience sexual attraction or desire, just like they don’t experience most of the human emotion spectrum (perhaps making an exception for weird barbie in this case, who remarks about wondering what “plastic blob [ken] has got going on in those shorts” to paraphrase. i really don’t have an answer for this one, maybe she’s bisexual or maybe she’s just being weird. who’s to say). ergo (at least prior to main barbie becoming human and having her vaginoplasty surgery), she and the rest of the residents of barbieland are canonically asexual by default and any sexualized projection onto them are merely that: projections. that all being said, barbie can be anything, including an ace homoromantic non-binary trans woman. in this essay i will—

[unwashedace]

Now available for pre-order in my Big Cartel shop!

[merp-blerp]

I know I'll sound kooky for saying this, but I suspect that Barbie & the Diamond Castle was queer-coded on purpose. I mean this so seriously. There were probably hundreds of people working on this movie. You're telling me none of them were queer? So many queer people have worked for Mattel. Maybe a person (or people) working on this film wanted to make a queer Barbie movie as a form of self-expression or what have you, but couldn't explicitly do so because it was 2008 and that would've been seen as inappropriate for a family film (still could be seen that way 🙄). So they got as close as they could with Diamond Castle.

Just the essence of this film is so sapphic. Alexa and Liana live alone together, away from whatever town might be nearby. They see nothing more important than their relationship with one another and Liana says that Alexa "knows me better than anyone else in the entire universe" (it's almost like no one else in this medieval world could know Liana that well, maybe because she's gay and the only person who could safely know that is Alexa) and "I feel like a part of me is gone" after they fight and she believes their relationship might be over.

They get what looks like male "love interests" on the surface, but they don't actually behave like couples. The girls butt-heads with them a lot as if it'll be an enemies-to-lovers type of romance like Annika and Aidan from Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus, but it never really becomes romantic. They don't even imply a happily ever after with the twins (whatever their names were, no one cares), they go back home together without them in their lives, at least not majorly. I think the fact that they don't have male love interests is the crux of this whole theory. The boys' existence is enough for kids and even adults watching to believe there's a straight romance in this film, especially if you've seen other Barbie films and know the formula, but there isn't. The movie just has male characters who take interest in the girls in a completely one-sided infatuation, heteronormativity does the rest when it comes to the audience thinking there's a romance with the boys.

Alexa and Liana's relationship is the most important aspect of the movie; the entire story is about their relationship, not their relationship with the boys at all, which separates Barbie & the Diamond Castle from other Barbie movies from this time, which all had hetero-romances in one way or another. This is probably why so many sapphic kids who grew up with it, like myself, loved it so much.

All these factors together just make me wonder if the queerness was intentional on someone's part.

Even if you bypass the queer interpretation, it's really refreshing to have a story that's about female friendship and that's it. No forced or unforced romance, just a story about girls and their friendship(s). There's no issue with romance, but also there's no issue with a lack of romance as well. That kind of message is hard to come by, even in more "adult" media.

(As a bit of a sidebar, the only queer aspect to this film that is surely coincidental to me is Alexa and Liana's dresses looking like the lesbian and bi pride flags. Liana's dresses do share a color scheme with the Emily Gwen lesbian flag, but that particular lesbian flag wasn't in existence till 2018, ten years after this movie was released. By association, I assume Alexa's dresses having the colors of the bi flag is also a coincidence, even though that flag was created in 1998 before this film. It is very cute how that turned out, though.)

[imaginarylungfish]

so i think what's compounding my disappointment with the barbie movie is coming to terms with the fact that mainstream society is just still not ready for explicit queer themes.

therefore, my hopes for bakudeku, togachako, or satosugu (all ships with clear queer subtext) becoming explicitly canon have been dashed.

i'm seeing that even if the media as a whole is progressive, it's still not progressive enough for explicit mainstream queer representation. we are still relegated to our lgbtq/gl/bl categories. we are still outcasts.

i'm feeling a tad bit hopeless that queer subtext will mostly be just that--subtext (at least for a good while longer).

but s/o to explicit queer representation from more mainstream media though! i'm thinking along the lines of schitt's creek.