BRUJAS WORLD

The Barbie brand extends ideologically from the aesthetic capital process of modeling. 

What are models ? According to the Kultur labor institute for Cultural Inquiry: “models across disciplines and fields share a fundamental characteristic: their effect depends on a specific relational quality. A model is always a model of or for something else, and the relation is reductive insofar as it is selective and considers only certain aspects of both object and model.”

The plastic takes a form, is designed and sold in relationship to human figures.

In the documentary film Skate Dreams, we learned that one of the earliest professional female skateboarders, Cara Beth Burnside, was sponsored by Barbie. In the 2004 X Games, she explains the 1-50 ratio gap between men and women’s prize money, and how their performances were scheduled so early in the day they were neither broadcasted on television or fully presented to in-person audiences. A coalition of female skateboarders eventually organized a boycott against the competition, earning them history and precedent. One of the organizers Mimi Knoop eventually publicly exited her job as the US Women’s Olympic coach almost two decades later. 

The current Barbie movie campaign is being embraced both aesthetically and politically as a fun way to celebrate femininity. The streets of New York are full of people in pink, Instagram is full of people posting mirror pics from the bathroom after seeing it with their squads. Hacking this graphic in some way, reifies the power its already built, but it serves as an intervention to call attention to the war we are facing. 

Competition skateboarding, modeling, and narrative commercial work offer conditional access to survival that enforces social discipline, standards of class and beauty, and skill that inherently exclude people.