Barbie Indian Doll (styles may vary)

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We’re seeing more brown faces on mainstream television, and even better, storylines featuring lead characters with decidedly south Asian themes and actors of south Asian origin.

Combined with the sweeping wave of south Asian faces on our TV screens, it’s not hard to assume that a permanent change (for the better) is on the horizon. Most of us even owned Barbie dolls and dressed them like elder sisters and also took them around as kids and adults too. Within this struggle, she also locates the thematic foundations of her wider poetic project, the overarching narrative continually spiraling back to a family and culture made violent by European exploitation. While we all enjoyed playing with the dolls, watching a movie on the quintessential Barbie dolls never crossed our minds.Indian parents…” she begins explaining the trials of any creative pursuit in a traditional Indian home. Image Source Who wants to see Sonali Bendre make a comeback with an Indian version of the Barbie movie? Her identity is hers,” Mutyala introduced the doll on her Instagram in March earlier this year, a collaboration between Live Tinted and Barbie Style (Mattel). Since people were so desperate to see desi celebs as Barbies, online fashion police Diet Sabya curated a list of female Indian celebs as Barbies and gave a funny twist to their characters. When we award the Polygon Recommends badge, it’s because we believe the recipient is uniquely thought-provoking, entertaining, inventive, or fun — and worth fitting into your schedule.

She’s forced to trek into the harsh world of Reality only because somewhere, someone is playing with her while experiencing such intense existential angst that their emotions are reaching Barbieland and drilling into Barbie’s psyche.But the background and reality is of course all blood, sweat and tears, and disproportionate inequalities. None of the non-thin Barbies react to this point, because they don’t quite work in a narrative that has to simplify all the social and gender issues it raises, at least if the credits are ever going to roll. Throughout When My Brother Was an Aztec, we find an array of figures from Diaz’s personal mythology that explore similar types of fictive truths. Barbie has done well for herself since she debuted at a toy fair in New York in 1959 in a black and white zebra-striped swimsuit. A year later, the company rolled out the Expressions of India Collection in which Barbie’s dress and jewellery were altered to introduce the Roopvati Rajasthani, Mystical Manipuri and Sohni Punjab Di dolls.

In India, hyper-sexualised depictions of females are often perceived to be obscene and are subject to censorship. It’s more than enough that it unravels so many of America’s masculine anxieties of the moment, and that it does its job backward and in high heels. Our TV habits were mediated with feminism in mind, too; I watched and rewatched She-Ra: Princess of Power on VHS, but I barely knew He-Man, whom I considered as irrelevant as Ken. Whenever the movie is joking about the patriarchy and the very idea of the men’s rights movement, it sings.

Along with My Little Pony, Cherry Merry Muffin, and (prized above all) my extensive collection of She-Ra action figures, my mother gave me and my sister Barbie dolls for “imaginative play,” something Mom encouraged just as much as she encouraged us to play video games — for hand-eye coordination and for our potential careers in STEM, naturally. The Grandmother/Woman with No Legs, stricken with diabetes, who “Feels she’s lost part of her memory the part the legs knew/best like earth,” provides an image of Native suffering at the hands of modernization and forced assimilation.

The film’s comedic yet incisive commentary on toxic masculinity is its strongest throughline, as it infects Gosling’s Ken, and eventually all of the rest of Barbieland’s Kens and Barbies.In an interview ahead of the film’s release, Gerwig had confessed to being terrified of accepting the top job of directing Barbie’s on-screen persona. Barbie the movie has been asked to perform the same impossible trick — and just like I still feel a sentimental attachment to Barbie, I feel an overwhelming fondness and admiration for the movie’s daring attempt to make it work.