Greta Gerwig's Barbie: Popular Culture, Cinema, and Gender

This volume brings together an international array of contributors to analyse Greta Gerwig's unprecedented success, Barbie (2023), exploring how a film released in a moment of industrial crisis for Hollywood became the highest-grossing film directed or co-directed by a woman.

Uniting scholars from Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, France, Turkey, the UK, and the USA, this volume provides a set of essays that reflect the complexities of what is, in many ways, a fable for our times. Greta Gerwig's Barbie: Popular Culture, Cinema, and Gender opens with a chapter on the current state of the film industry. Further topics include: the treatment of American girlhood; fashion and feminism; the auteur director; post-indie cinema; queer identities; masculinity; the politics of race, class and gender; contemporary feminisms; consumerism; and the ecology of plastic. As such, the book offers a detailed and nuanced perspective on a benchmark film, produced and distributed by an industry in crisis--the brainchild of a significant director whose star is on the rise.

Author: Hilary Radner
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 05/14/2026
Pages: 336
Weight: 1.6lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.20w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9781350523968