Am I Kenough? (Barbie and) Ken’s masculinity in process

ABSTRACT

Whilst the Barbie movie (2023) has been recognized as a feminist success especially for women, it has important – yet often overlooked – insights for masculinities and men. What might a movie about ‘becoming' have to say to the Kens of today and their masculinities, often considered ‘fragile' and ‘in crisis’? In this essay, I argue that Barbie is a work of Kellerian process theology. This is particularly enlightening for understanding gender and masculinities. In asserting that, in this movie, masculinities are in-process, or in-becoming, I show how Ken’s masculinity is actually part of a co-creative discernment process with the Other (Barbie), in which gender is negotiated and explored. Using beginnings as my framework, I will show how masculinities ought not be yet another aspiration of an idealistic incarnation of a hegemonic Ken but be recognized as already in an ongoing creational process, relationally and yet uniquely performed.

KEYWORDS:

• Barbie
• Ken
• masculinity
• process theology
• theological anthropology
• Catherine Keller

Acknowledgements

With thanks to those who have dutifully read and given feedback on this essay, including Charlotte Thomas, Melissa Dickinson, Alexiana Fry, David Tombs, and Karen O’Donnell.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I do not consider myself a process theologian, nor has my previous work been explicitly influenced by process theology. Nonetheless, as a constructive theologian, I find the work of many process theologians illuminating and helpful, particularly with regards to understanding gendered bodies and the notion of becoming.

2 A philosophy most famously attributed to the work of Alfred North Whitehead, especially Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology.

3 This is, by no means, a bad thing. Critical and constructive studies of masculinities have emerged out of feminist and queer scholarship. They are, often, committed to the same cause. See Larsson, “Reinventing the Wheel?”.

4 Cynthia S. W. Crysdale argues that a responsible theology of redemption must involve taking personal account for sin, both in terms of our own victimization by it and our responsibility for it. This tension, between crucified and crucifier, and victim and perpetrator, is important to recognize. See Crysdale, Embracing Travail: Retrieving the Cross Today, 20–5.

5 Wright, Athena to Barbie, 94.

6 Steinberg, “The Book of Barbie: After Half a Century, the Bitch Continues to Have Everything,” 261.

7 duCille, “Dyes and Dolls: Multicultural Barbie and the Merchandising of Difference,” 279.

8 Moore, Boys Will Be Boys, and Other Myths, 122–23.

9 Neverson and White, “Muscular, Bruised, and Sweaty Bodies … ,” 45.

10 Butler, Gender Trouble, 34.

11 Butler, 45.

12 Butler, Frames of War, 3.

13 Cornwall, Constructive Theology and Gender Variance, 52.

14 As Cornwall states, ‘physical sex is both irreducibly part of and ultimately insufficiently representative of womanness' in Cornwall, 345.

15 Connell, Masculinities, 65.

16 Connell, Gender and Power, 140.

17 Connell, 107–11.

18 Messerschmidt, Hegemonic Masculinity, 55.

19 Cornwall, Constructive Theology and Gender Variance, 348.

20 It is interesting, however, that Barbie visits a gynaecologist in the final moments of the movie – does the climax of her becoming depend on her sex? Is the implication here that womanhood is dependent on particular reproductive organs or, instead, simply that humanity is sexed (not necessarily how). See Cornwall, “Sex Otherwise.”

21 Fisher, “Moving Masculinities,” 2.

22 I define masculinity through malleability and sculpting in Moore, Boys Will Be Boys, and Other Myths, 9–10.

23 Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, 54.

24 Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, 137.

25 Keller, On the Mystery, 48.

26 Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming, 128.

27 Cornwall, Constructive Theology and Gender Variance, 10–1.

28 Cornwall, 259.

29 Keller, From a Broken Web.

30 Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse, 70.

31 Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming, 96.

32 Even the naming of Barbieland and Kendom, as well as of Barbie’s Dreamhouse and Ken’s Mojo Dojo Casa House, holds power. It is the power of naming that Elizabeth Johnson draws on, arguing that the being ‘robbed' of the power to name is to submit to receiving naming by those who oppress and dominate. See Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse, 27; Keller, On the Mystery, 63.

33 As done in Steinberg, “The Book of Barbie: After Half a Century, the Bitch Continues to Have Everything,” 254.

34 Aguirre, “Barbiemania! Margot Robbie Opens Up About the Movie Everyone’s Waiting For.”

35 I queer the binary characterization between Adam’s dominion over creation or his service to it in Moore, “A Godly Man and a Manly God: Resolving the Tension of Divine Masculinities in the Bible,” 77.

36 In the patriarchal setting of his Kendom, Ken and Barbie become ‘a stereotypical male ego and feminine dependency, a separative Adam and a soluble Eve’ (Keller, On the Mystery, 63.).

37 Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth, 25.

38 For more on the relationship between masculinities and sin, see Moore, “Resisting Sin: Seeing Masculinities and Violence Through the Cross.”

39 Keller makes this clear: creation from chaos is not a binary of good and evil, but a potential of beginnings and becoming, from which good and evil can emerge. See Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming, 91.

40 Thatcher, Vile Bodies: The Body in Christian Teaching, Faith and Practice, 244.

41 Keller, On the Mystery, 10.

42 Keller calls this interconnectedness of all created things in the act of creation the ‘genesis collective', in Keller, 62.

43 Keller, 50.

44 Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, 188.

45 O’Donnell and Cross, “There Is No ‘After’ with Trauma.”

46 Yakalı-Çamoğlu, “Barbie.”

47 Keller, Intercarnations, 36.

48 Keller, On the Mystery, 115.

49 O’Donnell, “What Does It Mean to Be Human?,” 610.

50 Keller, On the Mystery, 111, 115.

51 Keller, 116.

52 Genesis meaning ‘becoming’ in Keller, 46.

53 Beginning and origin are not synonymous, according to Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming, 58.

54 Coleman, Making a Way out of No Way, 52.

55 Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming, 180.

56 Rand, Barbie’s Queer Accessories, 101.

57 Aguirre, “Barbiemania! Margot Robbie Opens Up About the Movie Everyone’s Waiting For.”

58 Keller, Intercarnations, 82.

59 Higgins, “From Manipulation to Co-Creation: Whitehead on the Ethics of Symbol-Making,” 171.

60 Toffoletti, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls, 68.

61 Isherwood, “This Is My Body,” 131.

62 Similar to Keller’s process thinking, Barbie grieves the life before but also sees the pain, grief, and own mortality of what is to come. It is this tension of anticipation of a life’s precarity that makes it grievable, according Butler, Frames of War, 15.

63 Keller, On the Mystery, 87.

64 Keller, 64, original emphasis.

65 O’Donnell, “Performing the Imago Dei,” 13.

66 Isherwood, “Incarnation & the Rupture of Everything in All Time?,” 32.

67 Keller’s work fails to recognize the particularity and specificity of God’s revelation in the person of Jesus Christ. Whilst a panentheistic approach is compelling, the rejection of Jesus as God incarnate (in an especially different way to the rest of creation) is problematic when trying to remain within the bounds of Christian tradition.

68 This Christic Barbie, however, is one of self-centred self-actualization. I would rather suggest, as above, that God is revealed most fully in the Jesus Christ through by God’s incarnation of overflowing and outpouring self-giving love, something that is somewhat absent in Keller’s panentheistic and pancarnational Christology.

69 Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming, 56.

70 Moltmann, The Crucified God, 165.

71 Perhaps Barbie becomes the Divine Feminine, a reversal of the classic phrase ‘if God is male, then male is God’ in Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation, 19.

72 I find more compelling the work of Cornwall who encourages an anti-chronological eschatological approach, bringing the future into the present and living as if God’s Kingdom has come about. See Cornwall, Constructive Theology and Gender Variance, 272; Cornwall, “Asking About What Is Better,” 385. This still recognizes the art of co-creation in which humanity participates bringing about God’s Kingdom, whilst holding in tension God’s ultimate responsibility of realization. As hinted above, Kellerian pancarnational and panentheistic theology can become too individualistic and, in turn, divinize the human.

73 hooks, The Will to Change, 17.

74 hooks, 18.

75 Moore, Boys Will Be Boys, and Other Myths, 1.

76 ‘Kindom’ was first used by Ada María Isasi-Díaz in seeking a relational, communal understanding of God’s Kingdom beyond models of power and hierarchy. See Isasi-Díaz, Mujerista Theology.

77 Keller, On the Mystery, 97.

78 Ibid., 130.

79 Ibid., 130.

80 Ibid., 130.

81 Ibid., 10.

82 This resonates with Sam Sanchinel’s argument that declaring ‘I am’ in gender identity has a holy potential of affirmation. See Sanchinel, “The Godly ‘I Am’ of Trans Identity.”

83 Cornwall, Constructive Theology and Gender Variance, 211.This motion is exemplified by the forward and backward journey of Barbie and Ken between the two Worlds – it is not just geographical travel, but motion that is suggestive of a particular journey of self-discovery and theological anthropology.

84 Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse, 71.

85 Douglas, Resurrection Hope, 118.

86 Keller, On the Mystery, 52–3.

87 Rose, Theology for the End of the World, 205.

88 I am currently exploring the differentiation of Kingdom and Kendom, and interrogating their theological underpinnings, in a forthcoming chapter provisionally titled ‘Thy Kendom Come: Masculinities, Patriarchy, and Ken in the Barbie Movie. Graham Adams imagines alternative, liberative constructions of God’s Kingdom in Adams, Holy Anarchy: Dismantling Domination, Embodying Community, Loving Strangeness.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Will Moore

Will Moore is an ordinand at Westcott House in Cambridge, a PhD Student in Theology with the Cambridge Theological Federation and Anglia Ruskin University, and a Research Associate for the Centre for the Study of Bible and Violence, Bristol.