去年看完Barbie写了个长篇大论，感觉给我懂完了，今年稍微提高了一点儿自己的知识水平，借着学校作业的功夫瞎写了个essay表达了一下我的看法。好像xLog有自动翻译功能，懒得翻译，就直接贴在这里了。

Barbie, Brand Culture, and Me in Neo-Liberal China

Barbie (2023), directed by Greta Gerwig and licensed by Mattel, is released by Warners Bros in 2023. The film is an enormous hit, grossing $1 billion in box office receipts (Chavez-Dreyfuss, 2023). At the time, there are a lot of online controversy regarding the film's feminist message. Some are praises of the feminism message embedded in the film, some are turning the message into digital populism against the male audiences. This phenomenon sparks my interest in researching the history and current state of feminism in China. I refresh my understanding of the gender culture in my country and realize the significance of the film in contemporary neoliberal China. In this research essay, I will introduce the film Barbie about how it simultaneously promotes two types of female agency, a micropolitical level of feminism to end domination, and a liberal, non-threatening form of feminism. Then, I will present a brief history of women’s position in China, and how the current system of gender in China, in the age of globalization, gives male like me an identity with unrealistic expectation of hypermasculinity under euro-centric patriarchy, while simultaneously portrays female as an identity yearn for the hypermasculinity male with neoliberal consumer culture. Finally, I will describe why this specific system of gender is problematic under consumer culture and introduce a solution of storytelling with embodiment at personal level that is based on from China’s indigenous culture.

Barbie and Its Two Perspectives on Female Empowerment

The story of Barbie took place in two worlds, the fake Barbie Land, and the so called “real world”. Ken or Barbie are the names given to people in Barbie Land. After considering death one day, a Barbie and a Ken made the decision to go to the "real world" in order to resolve the issue. Ken finds out about patriarchy in the real world and rebuilds it in Barbie Land. Barbie learns what it's like to live a normal life and collaborates with Barbie Land's owners to rebuild Barbie Land. Barbie visits a gynecologist in the real world at the conclusion of the story.
The film itself and its marketing portray Barbie Land through two lenses. The film itself criticized Barbie Land as a system without hope and future, while the marketing team describes Barbie Land as a place of female empowerment. The film starts by describing Barbie Land as a dystopian world that solves all problems. At 00:03:08, the narrator says, “Because Barbie can be everything, girl can be everything,” not the other way around. Barbie becomes the cultural icon of solving systematic gender oppression, because the narrator states that “this is reflected on the girls in the real world. Thanks to Barbie, all problems of feminism have been solved.” However, at the end of the sentence, the narrator adds “at least that is what the Barbies think (2023),” indicating that the real world is not perfect. The introduction further reveal that the Barbie Land is a patriarchal society, and the Barbies is the upper social class. Barbies controls the government and constitution, while Kens does not have any political rights. The filmmaker portrays this problematic patriarchal society further with Barbie’s depression. According to Real, there is a “cultural cover-up about depression in men (1997, p. 21),” which discourage boys to express their emotions. Giving in to the pain is equals to a humiliating defeat. Barbie, as the upper class, experienced the same depression when she had the “flat feet.” She feels depression, fear and shame. As an outlier in her gender class, Barbie starts to question her existence, which ultimately led, in part, to her departure from Barbie Land to the real world. The film itself thus challenges the cultural basis of systematic oppression. As hooks defines, feminism should have a focus on eradicate the domination in Western culture, so that self-development can take over imperialism (2015, p. 26). Barbie feels her struggles as an upper class in a Western patriarchy society. She refuses to participate in such system, although she has more human rights than Kens. Barbie chooses a new lifestyle for herself, or in hooks word, “actively engages participants in revolutionary struggle (2015, p. 30),” rather than participating in a “political commitment that reflects the class nature (hooks, 2015, p. 29).” Contrastingly, the marketing team at Warner Bros, which is the production company of the film, ignores the sarcasms from the director. They treat the movie as a pre-packaged role for women as they search for identity. They put the same human size pink packaging boxes which MATTEL uses to trap Barbie in the cinema, inviting women and girls to take pictures in them, as shown in Appendix A. On Warner Bros’ social media account, they frequently mention the sentence “you can be Barbie… or Ken,” and “Barbie invites you to the Barbie Land.” These marketing materials later leads to a series of digital populism in various social media platforms such as Douban, as shown in Appendix B. Warner Bros invites girls and women in China to co-operate in their feminist strategy with the non-threatening activism by hooks (2015, p. 23). Through the marketing that essentialize gender, the film becomes an icon of liberal women’s social protest, which support white supremacism, capitalism and patriarchal class structure (hooks, 2015, p. 19).

History and Problems of Feminism I Experienced in China

The reason I think Barbie is important in my home country China is because the cultural phenomenon it causes on social media partially reflected the problems of China’s feminism under globalization. With the current state of globalization and westernization in China, I am concerned about the cultural shift and the future of feminism. The neoliberal shift in the society makes Chinese people, especially younger male and female, a political subject under patriarchal, euro-centric brand culture. Under this patriarchal masculine culture, both male and female are placed unrealistic expectation, and the more subtle, grassroot indigenous culture on gender representation is declining.
The idea of feminism is relatively new to China. Chinese society has a long pre-modern history that lasted more than 2000 years (Zheng, 2016, p. 2). The Confucian society under the old feudal system is a patriarchal class-based system (Kim, 2021, p. 3). Women marry a man to get room and board in the husband’s home (Zheng, 2016, p. 20). In the 19th century, the western cultures including feminism reached China through western missionaries. During the 1911 movement that ends the old feudal system, the Confucianism traditions about patriarchal gender roles in families are challenged (Chow et al., 2004, p. 163). With the communist revolution in the Maoist era, the traditional gender division of labor is challenged. The new government guarantees that men and women have the same rights on personal dignity (Zheng, 2016, p. 6). In this era, the gender-blind Marxism perspective is encouraged, which focus on problems such as class differences and uneven distribution of economic and cultural products (Zheng, 2016, p. 17). However, although the party state claims that all inequalities in the society are solved by the socialist transformation, there are still inequalities rooted in the society. The household registration system prevents rural residents, which makes up most of China’s population, migrating to cities that has better social benefits and education. As a result, the traditional Confucianism patriarchal families are still present in China, especially in rural area. Combining with the one-child policy that “reinforced the sexist idea that women are as less than a human, and hence justified the exploitation of women (Zhang, 2014, p. 24),” girls are sometimes abandoned, and women in the rural area may not have proper education or human rights. The emphasis on gender is heavily used for state-building purpose to serve an ideology about socialism, preventing people from relating the inequality to more significant class differences.
In the 21st century, the party state’s priority is economic growth. I was born in 2002, which is the period many people refer to as China’s globalization. At the beginning of 21st century, the Chinese government demonstrates interests for foreign investment and economical exchange, which leads to the transition to a market economy. With the economic growth across the country, many citizens, especially urban residents like me, are exposed to consumer culture and western values. There is a cultural shift that prioritize the euro-centric colonial culture, which emphasizes the masculinity under neoliberalism. According to Zhang, neoliberal culture emphasizes on the independent entities who compete in a free market. People must mobilize their reasoning ability to maximize their interest under neoliberal culture. However, only male under Eurocentric patriarchy are identified with reason and the femininity is associated with desire and needs of body (2014, p. 29). For China, the government needs an image that is powerful and advance that fits the Eurocentric patriarchy in the global free market. As an example, during the 2008 Olympic, the gold medal winner Liu Xiang’s athletic prowess is broadly covered in the Chinese media, showing the sportsman holding the Chinese flag. On the one hand, this image signifies a national body for China in the global market economy that is strength and tough, which is very different from the indigenous culture that value a literary, delicate and “feminine” style male embodiment. On the other hand, the widespread masculine embodiment of Asian male in media combined with imported western values, sets new expectations for male in China under a euro-centric masculine framework (Zhang, 2014, p. 30). When me and my male friends were in primary and middle school, we are educated by the society and peers that we should be physically and emotionally strength enough to be manly. Boys fight over each other to show their physical strength in their small communities, and the more literary and emotional ones are marginalized and bullied. This western masculine embodiment also raised problems in the female community. Since the cultural shift also marginalized female bodies, the traditional Confucianism patriarchal view of female integrates with western patriarchy. Based on my observation in popular media and discussion with my friends, women are still at a relative low position on the social ladder, despite their opportunities of receiving good education and employment. To improve their social status, they are encouraged to marry a masculine male body under western ideology, while at the same time being a virtuous wife under Confucianism ideology to meet the traditional standards.

Problematic Consumer Culture Towards Gender, and My Personal Solution

The cultural shift gives rise to neoliberal consumer culture. Many western and local brand start to picture a perfect female identity. According to Banet-Weiser, neoliberalism privileges a “brand strategy” in the production of goods and resources, while simultaneously designing identity, difference and diversity (2020, p. 42). Like Barbie’s liberal message of “female empowerment”, the brand culture evokes choices and individual agency as the “defining tenets of feminine identity (Radner, 2011, p. 6),” and achieve self-fulfillment through purchasing and consuming goods. The designed identity sometimes leads to commodity activism, which put the consumer at the “consumer-citizen” position, and asks consumers to empower themselves as individuals through “votes” and “choices”, and becoming a citizen of the brand’s nation (Banet-Weiser, 2020, p. 47). However, commodity activism does not have the same capabilities of encouraging political action in China because of the government. According to Wallis and Shen, because of the current rejection of gender-blinded Marxism of the Maoist past, and new ideology under globalization, gender is governed by the authoritarian government (2018, p. 379). Instead of “freely” choosing identity, Chinese women are only allowed to feel empowered in a self-optimistic way (2018, p. 386). Eventually this system of gender causes a lot of depression among my generation. One of my male friends are frequently worried that he is not manly and masculine enough to meet the standard, and a female friend once told me that she thinks female has very little power in the society, and the only way out may be finding a “sugar daddy.” These opinions are not rare among both urban and rural men and women. In some cases, the struggles evolve into digital populism and boycotts. I think this is the reason many female audiences of Barbie in China only understand or forced by the authoritarian state to only understand the second message from the film’s marketing and having an expression of disgust towards the male population.
From my perspective, the way of solving this problem is storytelling. Currently, non-bourgeois males like me are caught in a very awkward position. On one hand, some women ask for more power and resources from us, because they think it’s the men that oppress them. On the other hand, If I, who is in a relatively higher social class, don't do something about it, women in general will only be more oppressed under the mix of euro-centric colonial and traditional Confucian patriarchy. Even worse, it is nearly impossible to speak out publicly about the system of oppression under an authoritarian government. Consequently, instead of a grand narrative that empower or persuade people, I should focus on the personal narrative as an act of resistance (2013, p. 17), as stated by Battiste. The story of growing up among my generation is a great starting point because our experience very obviously reflects problems in contemporary China. By comparing stories between each other, we get an overview of the composition of power between the current gender system. By comparing these stories with our parents and our grandparents, we will understand the history of the development of gender oppression. Since the stories are personal, the oppression system can be destructed in a decentralized way with the spiritual source’s guide. The indigenous culture, or spirituality in Battiste’s word, helps us reject the patriarchal masculinity in the euro-centric culture, while the feminism message embedded in the western ideologies such as Barbie helps us reject the “virtuous women” narrative in traditional culture.

Conclusion

To be concluded, my home country China has a long history of systematic gender oppression. With the imported western culture in the age of globalization, Chinese people receive more serious oppression with unmeetable expectations. Barbie as an imported film serves both as a medium of consumerism “female empowerment” and a source of resistance. I believe that western feminism combined with indigenous culture can guide me and the current generation through the systematic oppression.

References

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Real, T. (1997). I don’t want to talk about it: Overcoming the secret legacy of male depression. Scribner.

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Zhang, C. Y. (2014). Deconstructing National and Transnational Hypermasculine Hegemony in Neoliberal China. Feminist Studies, 40(1), 13–38. https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2014.0013

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