‘Never the twain shall cross’: scripts of children's play and adult desire in <i>Barbie</i>

Greta Gerwig's Barbie (2023) is deeply invested in the liberatory and transformative potential of children's play. Children's play in Barbie is the site of self-actualisation for adult women, whereby the subversive potential of Barbie-play facilitates nostalgia, self-discovery and choice for the film's adult protagonists. This move towards self-actualisation is core to Barbie's feminist ethic, which I argue is a type of ‘commodity feminism’ that reasons that such female empowerment can be marketed and purchased. The invocation of the playing child throughout Barbie, accompanied by scant representations of actual playing children, is central to this ethic, performing what Jacqueline Rose calls a ‘mystification of the child’ as a product of adult desires and anxieties. In Barbie, children's play is a blank screen onto which can be projected adult female desires for self-actualisation, concealing concomitant anxieties about the role of capitalist patriarchy in this commodity-feminist project. Drawing on Robin Bernstein's conception of dolls as ‘scriptive things’, I explore how Barbie and its doll characters script forms of play. I demonstrate that the rhetorical power of children's play can be co-opted into feminism and corporate capitalism alike, and used to disguise the uneasy but often very profitable marriage between the two.