A Medievalist in Barbieland
by Kate Koppelman
I went to see the Barbie movie with my twelve-year-old daughter. We dressed in pink. She had seen it once already with a group of friends (also all dressed in pink) but wanted to see it with me. In the theater, she leaned over occasionally to make a comment, ask a question (that opening was hard to explain in brief terms), and check in with me when I cried (yes, I did cry). We laughed together at the jokes that worked for a tween or a middle-aged woman.
The value of this mother-daughter experience was immeasurable to me — not only because it was something we simply did together, but also because I was able to look over at her as she heard the America Ferrara speech that has gotten so much deserved attention (“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”) and think to myself: I didn’t have anything like this when I was her age. Feminism was still about not shaving your legs or using deodorant — it was still a space for women older than I was, women with whom I didn’t identify at all. What a gift for her — what a treasure that I was able to experience with her.
Yet. And yet. I still went to see the Barbie movie as myself — mother, Gen Xer (and it seems the movie speaks to us in so many more subtle ways than it does to other generations), and, yes, a medievalist. That part of my brain was slowly activated as the film progressed. First by Ken’s insistent linking of patriarchy and horses (what’s a medievalist supposed to do with that, other than close-read the heck out of all those newly minted chevaliers?) and was on high alert when we arrived at the end of the film: Barbie’s triumphant moment of self-actualization — her choice (her choice!) to become real.
Pulling up to an office building, dressed in an oversized blazer with her iconic hair pulled back, one might have assumed she was going to a job interview. But she says to the receptionist, with unadulterated joy, “I’m here to see my gynecologist.” The audience cheers! Yes for (cis) female empowerment and a centering of the (cis) female body! And, again, I did cheer — for my own daughter who has entered puberty and is beginning to negotiate its ever-confusing involutions. Because even the idea of saying the word gynecologist around my own mother was unthinkable and thank goodness we’ve moved past that.
Gynecology — the branch of medicine that studies women. The OED notes that it is “loosely, the science of womankind,” a conflation of biological characteristics (genital and reproductive organs) and a far more expansive category of gender norms, expectations, and restrictions. It is a branch of medicine that today is wrapped up in some of the most oppressive, misogynist, racist, and retrograde attitudes towards women’s bodies (abortion, birth control, maternal mortality, rape, sexual assault).
We are left, at the end of the movie, being shown that Barbie will be defined, in part at least, by her now-not-deficient body — her body with, we are guessing only (and basing those guesses likely on a normative sense of biology), a vagina, a uterus, ovaries, labia, clitoris . . . a body now capable (we think) of a normative notion of genital pleasure and, perhaps, of giving birth. Were we truly at a place where we could laugh at misogyny and sexism — where we could share Barbie’s naïve thrill about her new reality, this would be a triumphant moment. But we aren’t there. We are far from there. And Barbie’s trip to the gynecologist recalls, for this medievalist, some of the wide-ranging misogyny that not only didn’t die with the Middle Ages, but that has, indeed, found new energy in our post-Roe world.
As a medievalist, I have been invited by this final scene to align Barbie with the incapacity/deficiency model of the female body. Both Aristotle, in his On the Generation of Animals and Galen in his On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body explain that female reproductive (im)maturity is both caused by the female body while also being proven by that same body. The woman menstruates, and this, according to Aristotle, is a sign of her lack: “the contribution which the female makes to generation is the matter used therein, that this is to be found in the menstrual fluid, and final that the menstrual fluid is a residue.” Because she contributes only matter, she needs the active principle of the male’s semen/soul in order to produce a child: “A woman is as it were an infertile male; the female, in fact, is female on account of an inability of a sort.”
Galen further notes that this imbalance of what he calls “perfection” is based on heat “for heat is nature’s primary instrument.” Because the woman is colder than the male, she is less perfect: “In fact, just as the mole has imperfect eyes, though certainly not so imperfect as they are in those animals that do not have any trace of them at all, so too the woman is less perfect than the man in respect to the generative parts.” Galen goes further and argues that, again, the female body is cause and proof of her own deficiency. Again, because she is cold, her reproductive organs cannot emerge on the outside of her body (as the male’s have): “For, remaining within, that which would have become the scrotum if it had emerged on the outside was made into the substance of the uteri.”
Isidore of Seville, 6th century Spanish Archbishop, whose Etymologies were cited repeatedly throughout the European Middle Ages, adds for us that the very word for female (femina) is (incorrectly) etymologically related to “the area of the thighs [femorum] where her gender is distinguished from a man’s.” For Isidore, this should remind us of the woman’s lack of strength, her passivity, and thus her necessary subjection to man. Isidore delivers what is, for me, one of the most unforgettable images of medieval misogyny when he explains, following Aristotle, that menstrual blood is evidence of a dangerous superfluity (excess fluid because of the defect in her heat) in women: “From contact with this blood, fruits fail to germinate, grape-must goes sour, plants die, trees lose their fruit, metal is corroded with rust, and bronze objects go black. Any dogs which consume it contract rabies.”
Today, in the real world that Barbie has now entered, the medieval Christian notion of female incapacity (in the form of “benevolent sexism”) has been used to support anti-abortion laws. Notions of female deficiency — especially around issues of menstruation — continue to be fodder for sexist jokes. Florida asks female athletes to provide information about their menstrual cycles on forms needed for participation in sports (though the information isn’t mandated) — using menstruation as a marker of normative femininity and thus a tool presumably to identify transgender athletes. Florida is also considering a bill that would outlaw teaching children about menstruation until they entered 6th grade — reminding us that the woman’s body and its functions — functions that are metonymically associated with the gynecologist — are open for both scrutiny and restrictive legislation.
Additionally, the female body as specimen, as object of gynecological attention, is also vulnerable to predations and sexual violence as a recent ProPublica article about Columbia University OB-GYN Dr. Robert Hadden painstakingly documents: “To date, more than 245 patients have alleged that Hadden abused them, which by itself could make him one of the most prolific sexual assailants in New York history.” The article interviews some of the women that Dr. Hadden abused and many of them share similar responses, not just to the abuse itself, but to an awareness of their own positions of powerlessness and assumed incapacity to be believed:
Nobody’s going to believe me. They’re going to say, ‘Oh, you’re pregnant, you’re having hormone changes, you have stitches down there.’ I always blamed it on my body.” –Luisa Soler
I kept thinking, I’m not going to mention anything to anybody. Who are they going to believe — a doctor from Columbia or me?” –Rosa Miolan
When Barbie arrives for her gynecologist appointment, it seems that she has become a “real woman,” and Greta Gerwig has confirmed that she sees that ending as one of “happiness and joy.” But the film conveniently closes off our consideration of the significant and ongoing hazards (the grief, the violence, the loss of autonomy) of that becoming.
When I told my daughter that I was writing this piece, she wanted to know if I was going to say good things about the movie. There are good things to be said about it, to be sure, and the backlash against it by conservative viewers illustrates that it is activating prejudices that deserve scrutiny and rebuke. But it also relies upon the systems it purports to attack in order to make its arguments — the Mattel board will make money on Gloria’s idea for an “ordinary Barbie”; Barbieland is organized using the same patriarchal systems functioning to oppress women in the real world — notably, a supreme court; Ruth Handler continues to simply haunt the Mattel offices, hidden behind a grey door in a featureless hallway on the 17th floor; and Midge, presumably, remains perpetually 6 months pregnant and enclosed behind a tiny white picket fence.
For me, its celebratory ending feels as though it ignores the still-fraught ways in which medieval attitudes towards the incapacities of the female body are linked, inextricably, to the vilification and control of female biological reproduction by a patriarchy that has proven far harder to overcome than that embraced by the Kens. As the nameless bearded businessman says when Ken accuses him of not doing patriarchy correctly: “Oh no, we just hide it better now.”
Kate Koppelman is Associate Professor and Chair of the English department at Seattle University. She regularly teaches classes on the literature and culture of the Middle Ages as well as the varied ways in which medievalism continues to structure cultural imaginings. She has an essay on Chaucer’s Griselda and the family separations at the U.S. Mexico border coming out next year in the volume Chaucer and Trauma (U of Penn Press) and is currently working on an essay that reads the Middle English King of Tars against notions of maternal agency in relation to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. You can find her previous public writing on In the Medieval Middle and in The Sundial.
