“And If All of That is Also True for a Doll …”

Feminist Epistemology in Barbie

Sami Seybold

There are many unexpectedly delightful moments in the new Barbie movie. Perhaps the glowing gem at its center is America Ferrera’s raw monologue about the contradictory nature of womanhood.

It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong.

With every word, you can feel the bewildering weight of this imposing social pressure accumulating. One of my friends, a young woman in her early twenties, described the monologue as “speaking to my soul.” It gives voice, legitimacy, and form to the bewilderingly burdensome reality that many of us know all too well. What a rare jewel to find at the core of a fast-paced Hollywood summer blockbuster based on a piece of notoriously sexualized IP.

Critical scholars of philosophy recognize the inherent power that comes from expressing one’s firsthand experiences with injustice. In the 1980s and 90s, formative scholars of race like Charles W. Mills and Patricia Hill Collins articulated the fundamental links between ignorance about injustice and the perpetuation of injustice. A deeply unequal social setting endures in part because the way that knowledge is created, vetted, and passed on fosters deep ignorance about the effects of that inequality and the mechanisms by which it works – even its very existence.

We see this symbiosis between injustice and ignorance in the burgeoning patriarchy headed up by the Kens. The Barbies haven’t ever known life outside of Barbieland’s pink, female empowerment bubble. This leaves them unfamiliar with, and ultimately defenseless to, what Ryan Gosling’s Beach Ken proudly describes as “the immaculate, impeccable, seamless garment of logic that is the patriarchy.” The once-autonomous Barbies become more or less brainwashed. In a happy daze, they trade jobs like president and supreme court justice for short skirts, doting on their men, and doling out brewskies. This is the men’s rights fever dream that greets Margot Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie and her human companions, Gloria and her daughter Sasha.

Black, brown, and horse cut through the once pristine pink landscape, and Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie confusion slowly gives way to horror. The strong Barbies who have always surrounded and supported her have been reduced to sexist tropes. She then discovers that Ken has transformed her Barbie Dreamhouse into a mancave, unabashedly christened the Mojo Dojo Casa House. When she confronts Ken and demands he return her house (it is called the Barbie Dreamhouse, after all), he flatly refuses. The patriarchy grinds on, unscathed.

This is all too much for Stereotypical Barbie to take in. She slumps over in despair: “I am not enough.” The eponymous icon of girl power (and, lest we forget, unattainable heteropatriarchal beauty standards and sexualized capitalism) has collided with the insidious powerlessness that the patriarchy assigns to every woman. It is agonizing, and the shock overcomes her.

This recognition of the interconnectedness between ignorance and injustice motivates feminist epistemologists’ work. They reject the classical notion that knowing is not social. Instead, they argue that coming to know is a process that is significantly influenced by one’s position in society and that society’s values.

On the one hand, people who experience marginalization firsthand have an epistemic advantage – they understand the true effects of oppressive hierarchies like white supremacy and patriarchy. If ignorance fuels injustice, then recognizing an unjust system for what it is plays a crucial role in unraveling it. Yet marginalized folks experience serious epistemic disadvantages too. Epistemic injustices are practices that perpetuate the disparity between dominant and marginalized groups by systematically excluding marginalized voices and perspectives from mainstream discourse. This exclusion can take a number of different forms. Most often, it involves discrediting and silencing people who talk about their firsthand experiences with oppression, while simultaneously extending near-unqualified trust in the claims made by people with dominant identities.

The systematic dismissal of women who speak out about sexual violence in the U.S. is a prime example of this. Her trauma is disregarded because in “he said, she said” cases – at least when he is white, rich, and powerful – she is automatically perceived to be less trustworthy (for example, acting with ulterior motives like a desire for fame). When she holds other marginalized identities like being a woman of color, she is even less likely to be seen as trustworthy.

Epistemic injustice is pervasive. This is partly because we are socialized from an early age to trust certain groups of people and not others. You can probably see how parameters that dictate whose voices deserve to be heard, and whose don’t, scaffold ignorance about oppression. In addition to more informal cultural values, there are broader formal social structures like the U.S. justice system that were designed by people with privilege to protect people with privilege. In every society, the people in power have both the motivation and the capacity to preserve the status quo. Yet it is crucial to remember that all forms of injustice can be fought, no matter how entrenched they’ve become.

Feminist epistemologist Gail Pohlhaus, Jr. argues that epistemic resources – shared language, concepts, and criteria – are essential to combatting injustice. One of their core characteristics is that they are shared. While they are derived from individual experience, they come to transcend the individual by offering a way for the marginalized community to converse about injustice together. These tools enable us to relate to and understand what we experience.

We see this dynamic dramatically unfold during Barbie’s major turning point when Gloria returns to Robbie’s Barbie prostrate on the multicolored rug in Weird Barbie’s home.

You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It’s too hard! It’s too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you. And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.

Gloria masterfully articulates, and consequently exposes, the contradictions that lie at the core of patriarchal womanhood. They might be ensconced in a logic that seems immaculate and seamless. But Gloria has lived in the United States as a woman of color. She has struggled under the weight of these radically unreasonable expectations long enough, and her insight about what they really ask of women – it’s nonsense, ultimately – helps explain the unfamiliar powerlessness that Barbie now feels.

Pohlhaus sees the development of epistemic resources as a generative, grassroots-type process in that the resources come from the marginalized community. An oppressive society’s epistemic environment is unlikely to offer any language to articulate the ways it actively marginalizes some of its members. This is because people who do not experience marginalization, and directly benefit from it, largely determine the mainstream epistemic environment. So, minoritized members develop new epistemic tools that can express what they’re being subjected to day-to-day.

According to Pohlhaus, this new language gives victims of injustice the means to “resist a distorted sense of reality” by expressing what was previously unexpressed (p. 733). This consciousness informs resistance, which catalyzes activism and change.

I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don’t even know.      

Here Gloria deftly combines empathy and lived experience to conclude that she is not alone in this struggle. This is what finally lifts Barbie out of despair.

Not only that – ultimately, Gloria’s pointed and powerful reflections on womanhood also make the uprooting of Kendomland itself possible. Her role in restoring Barbieland shows how having the right conceptual tools, the language, and the ideas is essential to both expressing and condemning injustice. She gives the Barbies the language to comprehend what they’re going through and thus the ability to resist the distorted reality that they’ve been trained to accept. When Writer Barbie snaps out of her Zack Snyder cut reverie shortly thereafter, a plan is speedily hatched. The inoculated Barbies (and Alan) will get to work deprogramming their friends by whisking them into one-on-one conversations with Gloria. Feminist epistemology to the rescue.

But lest we forget, the Kens have been brainwashed too – albeit by their own doing. Headed up by Ryan Gosling’s Beach Ken, the Kens see nothing wrong with this arrangement or its degrading effects on their disconcertingly compliant Barbie counterparts (much less on themselves).

How do we bring an end to injustice if calls for change fall on ears that are unwilling to listen? Barbie models a particularly subversive solution involving an elaborate campfire scene and the calculated manipulation of toxic male egos. I’m not sure how prescriptive this part of the film is meant to be. One of the many difficulties about overcoming oppression in the Real World is that it involves the creation of something new: we aren’t returning to a shiny pink utopia that once existed, but rather striving to construct something better and more equal than the deeply broken society we have right now.

But the Barbie uprising is instructive in at least one way that offers a firm rejection of first and second wave feminism: whatever vision we have needs to include every single woman. The Barbies, Gloria, Sasha, and Allen don’t stop until every Barbie’s agency has been restored. The consciousness-raising catalyzed by women and men who know, and share, what they’ve endured under patriarchy is a powerful antidote to the unquestioning deference and perpetual insecurity that it fosters. We can’t afford to miss out.

My hope is that the simple idea becomes as ubiquitous as the doll who inspired this film.

Sami Seybold is a recent graduate from Purdue University. She will be joining Knox College this fall as a visiting assistant professor of philosophy.

Notes:

Gail Pohlhaus, Jr. “Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful Hermeneutic Ignorance.” Hypatia 27, no. 4 (Fall 2012): 715-736.