Disability Access in Barbieland Holds Up a Sober Mirror to Our World
As an immuno-compromised disabled person, I might have waited until Barbie showed up on a streaming service. But, once I heard the movie featured a wheelchair using Barbie, I decided to take the trip to the theater despite the complexities involved in getting (and being) there.
I’m used to disappointment where Barbie is concerned. Christmas 1991 was a disaster in my house thanks to Mattel. My parents could not acquire the complete Shani doll set which featured Black Barbies of various skin tones: Shani, Asha, Nichelle, and Jamal. Seven-year-old me vowed to write Christmas lists in July forevermore to avoid those so-called “sold out” stores my parents complained about.
Grown up me knew Barbie would not feature Shani, but I needed to see how it would feature another version of me: Barbie using a wheelchair. I’d been told her appearances were brief. She appears twice in the campy film: first, bedecked in a shimmering gold pantsuit performing several 8-counts lasting about one minute during a massive dance number and, at the end, on the periphery when Barbies gather after their triumphant legal victory (spoiler alert) over the Ken-imposed patriarchy.
Grown up me did not expect much more than that, but little wheelchair user me is disappointed. The professor in me who studies disability and race had a more complex response.
Barbie proliferates as many meanings as she has playmates, so director Greta Gerwig (who co-wrote the screenplay with partner Noah Baumbach) had a difficult task in appealing all the doll’s and playmates’ various lives. The movie satirizes Barbie apologetics, meaning it both performs what Barbie was meant to mean even as it critiques the ways Barbie has historically missed its own mark. As with any satire, the critique is not solely about what is up for ridicule (hello patriarchy and Ken’s friend Allan!), but critique also surfaces when a topic receives nary a scoff.
Leaving something unremarked upon in a satire implies the idea is too sensitive, too serious, or the writer just can’t find the funny. That’s where wheelchair using Barbie dwells in Barbieland.
She remains where most real-world physically disabled women are imagined to be and often are: on the margins. She is present as part of a representational effort, but ultimately relegated to the periphery. Viewers can hardly see wheelchair Barbie in the final scene unless they’re looking for her. In this way, the movie leaves physical disability out of the satirical frame.
As Mattel has with Midge, Sugar Daddy (!), and Growing Up Skipper, the company missed the mark vis-à-vis physical disability. Mattel partnered with Toys R Us in 1997 to create Barbie’s friends, Wheelchair Becky who later became Share a Smile Becky and then was discontinued. They also introduced a wheelchair using Barbie in 2019, but the dream house could not fit Barbie’s wheelchair in the elevator. The Barbie movie alludes to accessibility when Barbie floats from the top floor to her car, but the imaginative world of play does require some realistic prompting.
The wheelchair itself does not make disabled Barbie too precious, but rather the structures of Barbie’s world are not set up to accommodate a physically disabled Barbie, which feels like a very familiar problem, especially to anyone who needs ramps, curb cuts, elevators, widened doorways, and legislation more robust than the ADA.
Thinking in terms of the social economy of Barbieland, the mostly absent wheelchair using Barbie indexes another facet of life as a disabled person, especially in the wake of the pandemic: social isolation. This Barbie is not part of any beach scene. Maybe she does not have a wheelchair that can handle the sand. They are expensive. She is not pictured as part of the sexual economy from which the other Barbies are rescued, an uncomfortable reflection of disabled women’s experiences.
She can’t even participate in the Barbie revolution because weird Barbie’s house is at the top of a hill, has a ton of stairs, and no visible elevator. I wonder what it might have been like to have the wheelchair using Barbie as part of the able-bodied Barbies’ opening montage with Lizzo singing in the background. Or, what if she was part of the empowered beach scene? Little wheelchair using me might have deployed her to rolled over a Ken’s feet for good measure.
Certainly, Gerwig and Baumbach incorporate mental health into Barbie’s world as Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) faces depression, another less immediately apparent disability. As I discuss in my book Black Madness :: Mad Blackness, depression (like other forms of mental illness or cognitive disabilities) has the power to reorient how we tell stories. Within the movie, a promotional montage features Barbie wearing dirty, shapeless clothes, doom scrolling, and watching the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice with a permanently sad face. In the theater, this garnered squawking laughter. The joke landed, for them, likely because it sends up the rampant capitalism driving Mattel’s most famous product. But, the joke also lands because depression is only funny when there are people to talk you through it. Less funny if Barbie uses her clothes and bedding to put up visual and psychological barriers to entering her dream house. But, that’s too much like Proust Barbie.
Barbie champions the power of play to introduce children to ideas that allow them to envision more possibilities for their lives. In the Shani dolls commercial, a white girl also plays with the Black Barbies demonstrating that they have wide appeal. The casting attempts to revise the infamous doll test of the 1940s where Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark used four dolls — identical except for color — to test children’s perceptions of race. Their conclusion was that all the children’s perceptions were influenced by the wider world, which taught them that the white dolls were more beautiful, good, and smart.
A new Barbie line features dolls with prosthetic limbs, vitiligo, wheelchairs, and hearing aids. It is my sincere hope that a new version of the doll test will not duplicate the Clarks’ results vis-à-vis perceptions of disability. Maybe the hundreds of thousands of people catching even a glimpse of a wheelchair using Barbie would deter that. Grown up me is squeezing little wheelchair using me’s hand gently saying “I hope so.” But, the Barbie brand’s sunny optimism belies the flawed reality of access in the idyllic pink world of Barbieland and beyond.
