‘You can be anything?’ Reimagining disability and doll representation in the Global South

This article examines how disability is represented, portrayed and marketed through the popular culture icon, Barbie. Barbie celebrated her 65th birthday in 2024 and the iconic doll has come a long way to include disabled people as part of global commodified culture. Barbie’s portrayal of disability has evolved – from her school friend Share-a-Smile Becky in 1996, to Barbie herself as a para-Alpine skier in 2021, bearing the doll’s classic slogan ‘You can be anything!’ inside the pink cardboard box. Despite the criticism of the doll’s hyperfeminized appearance and glamorization of disability and medical conditions, the evolution of Barbie reflects the changes in disability narratives through toys as a form of popular culture. Through the lens of critical disability/feminist theory, we investigate how Barbie, through changing portrayals of disability, shapes attitudes towards disability. We ask this question: how do toys introduce disability as part of human diversity and disability activism, to challenge the medical discourse on normative bodies, in the Global South? We include the Global South perspective by reflecting on previous disability studies in the region and interviewing Indonesian young adults to discuss how disability is understood and communicated through toys and representation.