A proposal in plastic: Jane Austen in Barbie Land

I read the references to the Regency Romance in Barbie (2023) as key moments in the film's challenge to heteronormative structures of romance and marriage. Diplomat Barbie (Nicola Coughlan) and the Depression Barbie advertisement set up the premise of the film in terms of women's voice, women's self-actualisation and – with its claiming of selfhood – a rejection of heteronormative structures of romance as being one of the primary modes of defining women's role and function. The film's fundamental joyful unwillingness to detach from the unserious – while at the same time foregrounding and then rejecting the heteronormative marriage plot that is indispensable for the Regency Romance – brings us back to the unserious and to laughter as a mode of resistance to capitalism and the patriarchy.