“Are You Watching <em>The Godfather</em>?”
Authors: Joseph Kaela , Cook Tanya , Karkanias Alena 
Published: June 2024

Introduction
In the film Barbie, Stereotypical Ken “only has a great day if Barbie looks at him”. Ken’s identity is based on Barbie’s approval, that is, until he garners the approval of other Kens by reshaping their collective identities under the patriarchy. The Kens’ patriarchal collective identities are demonstrated in part through their participation in popular-culture fandoms. They mansplain The Godfather and Stephen Malkmus, demand their Barbies be “really invested in the Zack Snyder cut of Justice League”, and sing Matchbox 20’s “Push” at the Barbies “while staring uncomfortably into [their] eyes for four and half minutes”. It would be easy to write these moments off as jabs at stereotypic masculine interests. The film's criticism, however, is not only the merit of these interests, nor a declaration that only men care about them. Rather, the critique of patriarchal collective identity is shown in the way these interests are shared through competitive, affirmational fandom. Affirmational fandoms are fandoms built on knowledge of canon, with fan identity typically expressed through competition around mastery of explicit, official knowledge. Affirmational fandoms have historically been thought to draw more men-dominated fan bases (Correa-Chávez, Kohfeldt, and Nguyen 1), as they lend themselves to the kinds of hierarchies inherent in patriarchy. Transformational (or transformative) fandoms, on the other hand, are thought to be more popular among women and gender-diverse fans and show less interest in pure canon ideation, instead utilising the source material to create something entirely new (Jenkins 47-8). In this way, transformational fandom is similar to how Barbies themselves are intended to be played with. This article will explore how Barbie illustrates the differences between affirmational vs. transformational fandom, textually and metatextually, and how patriarchal and binary approaches to fandom ultimately disempower everyone, including those who identify as men.
Affirmational vs. Transformational Fandom
The term “affirmational fandom” was first coined by Dreamwidth user obsession_inc in 2009 to distinguish fan culture which seeks to reiterate a creator’s intended meaning of a work. Participation in an affirmational fandom is demonstrated through steadfast devotion to canonical knowledge, and adherence to rules inherent to the creator’s own worldbuilding. In affirmational fandom, knowledge of canon is treated as important capital, often traded between fans as a way to best one another in a competition of who knows the most about niche topics. Specifically, fans participate in what sociologist Bourdieu describes as cultural capital (knowledge) that leads to building social capital (networks). Since this type of fandom positions the creator as the master authority on interpretations of works, fans are able to weaponise their own mastery of the text and alignment with the creator's intentions in order to create a social structure within the fandom that is intentionally exclusionary and hierarchical. Moreover, since many popular works have male creators, largely due to systemic inequities in the film, television, and written fiction industries (“2021 Statistics”), this hierarchy also mirrors patriarchy in its unchallenged centring of men’s perspectives and thus its overall appeal to men as fans (Busse).
Suzanne Scott further criticised this centring of creators as ultimate authorities through her deconstruction of the "fanboy auteur" (44). The fanboy auteur is someone who functions as both content creator and fan, thus manufacturing an even greater divisiveness between production and the everyday consumer by stratifying the fanboy auteur into a separate category of fan that most other fans cannot achieve. Scott (47) draws upon the Foucauldian notion of textual discourses and the role of the author, or “author function” (Foucault 75), to describe how a fanboy auteur reinforces the status quo by maintaining an exclusionary fan identity, as opposed to allowing the author to fully step back from the work so that it might be interpreted and reinterpreted, vastly, through a diversity of lenses. Foucault argued that the authorial role is, as are most things, socially constructed through public discourse, as is the definition of authorial power (76). In other words, by defining something in media, one has power over it, and that power can be used to discipline who gets to use, understand, and engage with said media as an artifact. As is often seen in patriarchal social structures, the fanboy auteur has overwhelmingly benefited not just men, but white men specifically (Salter and Stanfill).
Affirmational fandoms stand in stark contrast to transformational fandoms, a concept popularised by Henry Jenkins in his book Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Jenkins described a transformative process that fans guide texts through, which prioritises meaning-making and imagination over canon, or creator, in fan spaces. This is often done through the production of transformative works such as fan fiction and fan art that are largely unconcerned with fidelity to a work’s creator, sometimes treating them as entirely separate from the production of fan works. While transformational fandoms still exchange cultural capital to build social capital and maintain a sense of hierarchy at times, they do so with a much lower bar for entry that is more accessible to otherwise marginalised fans.
In addition to accessibility, transformational fandom has been thought of as a more feminist fandom due to the disproportionate presence of women in transformational fan spaces and their disproportionate engagement in fan labour through the creation of content such as zines and archival fan fiction (Correa-Chávez, Kohfeldt, and Nguyen). Importantly, there are ways in which this labour is exploited by male-dominated industries as a means to signal diverse representation, as opposed to actually including diverse representation in media texts (Lowe).
Examples in Barbie
Transformative fandom is what Barbie dolls, and by proxy the Barbie movie, were made for. The film’s opening is itself a transformative work, a reimagining of 2001: A Space Odyssey, with young girls rejecting the socially rigid construct of the baby doll for the sleek new toy that defies categorisation. Like transformative works, Barbies can be anything, implying that women and girls can also be anything. As a result, we see Barbies at the start of the film engaging in a broad array of careers and interests, appearing to have a level of autonomy that isn’t quite so easily obtained by women in the real world. Because the Barbie movie also features diverse Barbies including Barbies who are transgender, size-inclusive, of various races and ethnicities, and Barbies who use devices such as wheelchairs, the film also transforms the image of women in popular media by depicting them more realistically than is typical in major motion pictures.
The shift that Barbie Land takes in the second act, when Stereotypical Ken introduces the concept of patriarchy, more closely mirrors affirmational fandoms, both textually and metatextually. Textually, the Kens are seen mansplaining various topics. Mansplaining has been defined by researchers “not only as simply patronizing and condescending, but as designed to assert the speaker’s superior knowledge, on the basis of their gender” (Joyce et al. 521). As within affirmational fandoms, through mansplaining, knowledge is used as a form of power.
Simply mansplaining, however, is not in and of itself demonstrative of affirmational fandom. For fandom to be affirmational, it must also use said knowledge as cultural capital, elevating the Kens to a place of superiority over the Barbies, as well as over one another, based on their level of higher expertise and deference to a creator. This is where Barbie goes the extra mile as social commentary – the Ken’s are not just talking about the what of these various topics, but, in the case of fandom specifically, the why of it, central to an idealised creator.
One of the clearest examples of this is actor Kingsley Ben-Adir’s Ken name-dropping The Godfather’s creators, noting “Coppola’s aesthetic genius” as well as referring to the film as a “triumph to Robert Evans and the architecture of the 1970s studio system”. This Ken is both sharing deep lore about the film’s production, as well as asserting dominance through this knowledge, sharing it only after he has belittled President Barbie for having not watched the film in the first place. Ncuti Gatwa’s Ken likewise discusses how “Stephen Malkmus really harnessed the acerbic talk-singing of Lou Reed with post-punk influences such as ‘The Wire’ and ‘The Fall’”. Neither of these are shallow, hot takes, but instead are the kinds of niche affirmational knowledge that fan studies authors describe as excess made into expertise (Zygutis; Scott).
We see this again in Writer Barbie’s discussion of having gotten “really invested in the Zack Synder cut of Justice League” while under the indoctrination of the Kens. In the real world, fans developed a cult-like devotion to the Snyder cut of Justice League after the studio released a shorter, heavily edited version of the film. The organised collective action fans engaged in to pressure the studio to release the Snyder cut (or director’s cut) represents the intersection of affirmational fandom and civically engaged fandom (Cook and Joseph 73). Instead of working toward broader socio-cultural change, however, releasing the Snyder cut allowed fans to focus on levelling up their cultural capital within fandom to pull rank, so to speak, over fans who had not seen this version. This aligns with the idea of the creator’s vision as the ultimate authority over a story – one that not only should be released, but defended as canon.
Even the repetition of Matchbox 20’s “Push”, in Barbie, is somewhat affirmational in that it is pure reproduction, right down to the 1990’s grunge singing style of yarling (“Yarling”), which we do not see repeated elsewhere in the diegetic portions of the soundtrack sung by Ryan Gosling or the other actors portraying Kens. Metatextually, we as the audience are meant to be in on the joke, meant to laugh at the Kens for posturing in this way, meant to see it as inherently patriarchal, and thus flawed when viewed through the feminist lens of the film. It is, after all, the very undoing of the Kens, as the Barbies plot to distract them by first aiming to make the Kens think they have power over the Barbies, and then, as Sasha remarks, “make them question whether they have enough power over each other”. This is accomplished by the Barbies through manipulating the Kens’ fannish appreciation for “Push”, done so by feigning interest in their Ken’s replication of the song, only to then wound their Ken’s pride by redirecting that attention to another, rival Ken. This act creates affirmational competition within the fannish display. Stereotypical Barbie even goes so far as to question the authorial voice of the song, which actor Sam Liu’s Ken misattributes to himself, instead of the actual and idealised creator. This interplay between competition and misattribution seeds disruption to the Kens’ collective power by calling into question fannish identity and fidelity to the creator such that in-fighting occurs. It is not the final domino in the chain of unseating the Kens’ power, but it is an important one that can only be accomplished by turning the competition inherent in affirmational fandom into something that can be used against fans, in this case the Kens.
How Binary Approaches to Fandom (and Gender) Do Harm
An important question the film asks is whether power should be lauded or shared, particularly as it relates to gender politics. Certainly, in the real world, we can see the harms of uneven power dynamics as highlighted by the affirmational nature of knowledge. Mansplaining, for example, has been shown to be prevalent in the modern workplace as a form of typically, but not always, gendered mistreatment, with impacts on job performance, retention, and psychological distress (Smith et al.). It has also been described as a tactic used by some neo-liberal white men as a way to re-centre masculinity and men’s voices as an ultimate source of knowledge, and thus power, in discourse on intersectional feminism, a tactic otherwise described as “covert hegemony” (Burkley 170). Importantly, these kinds of affirmational, hegemonic systems can also be upheld by people other than white men, when said systems prove beneficial to gaining or maintaining power. For example, Rouse, Condis, and Stanfill found examples of hegemony and racism in both anti-liberal and liberal fan spaces online, while Lothian and Stanfill found that even feminist fans spaces perpetuate harm to marginalised groups by the very structures built to protect some while not protecting all marginalised communities.
Barbie as a film never quite presents a conclusion to gendered power inequalities. Instead, the film acknowledges multiple flaws in the binary territories of both Barbie Land and the real world but leaves us without an egalitarian solution in either. What Barbie does do is to offer a starting point for further exploration by asking the Kens to see themselves as “Kenough”, affirmed in who they are without the need to vie for power using the affirmational tactics they practiced before.
Fandom studies has also only begun to answer questions about gender inequity. Firstly, recent research suggests that a gendered divide between affirmational and transformational fandom may exist, but not quite in the ways previously theorised. Rather than men being more likely to engage in affirmational fandom than women, Correa-Chávez, Kohfeldt, and Nguyen found that women fans were more likely compared to men to engage in all types of fannish activities, both affirmational and transformational, though women did tend to engage in transformational activities the most between the two types of fannish participation (4). Importantly, however, affirmational fandom was narrowly defined through consumption and not proliferation (e.g. reading but not producing plot analyses). Cosplay, or costuming, was also separated out into a third category of mimic fandom, using Matt Hill’s definition of the term from his own paper on the subject. While this third category constitutes an interesting approach to ways in which affirmational and transformational fandom overlap, it also somewhat negates the ways in which cosplay can itself be affirmational (rule-bound) or transformational (changed in ways that fundamentally reimagine a character). Many cosplayers, for example, gender-bend characters, or reinterpret them in ways that are transformative of canon, something that fans of Barbie have been enacting in movie theaters and at pop-culture conventions following the film’s release.
These distinctions are important when considering the impact of Barbie on affirmational vs. transformational fan practices in fan spaces, as well as broader spaces. At what point are fans participating in reproduction (affirmational) vs. reimagination (transformational)? The answer depends somewhat on context and the meaning created through the cosplay. For example, cosplay at fan conventions is occurring within a fan space, and thus meaning is made by fan communities. Barbie as a cultural phenomenon has also made its way into non-fannish transformative spaces, however, where meaning is less clear. For example, San Francisco’s 2024 “Hunky Jesus” contest saw “Jesus Ken”, a man dressed as Jesus nailed to a cross inside a Ken-style pink box, take home the win for best costume (Kura). Here, the space between fandom and other communities is blurred, and thus, so is related meaning.
Conclusion
Barbies are imaginative play, so it is no surprise that Barbie as a film highlights the differences between imaginative, transformational fandom and more rule-bound, affirmational fandom. It is also not a coincidence that those who play with Barbie dolls and those who engage in transformative fan practice are more likely to identify as women, or as having gender- and sexually diverse identities, given ways in which transformational spaces make greater room to create a more equitable world through inherent feminist critique. Imaginative play, in this sense, is a life-long process and continues to be formative for exploring facets of ourselves. Playing with Barbies, including in the Barbie film, enables individuals to understand their place in the world while simultaneously pushing the boundaries of what is possible.
Part of the genius of Barbie is that it shows how fan knowledge and practice (cultural capital) can constrain or enable personal and social growth. While the mastery and leveraging of fan knowledge under patriarchy gave the Kens a kind of power, it also isolated and limited them as individuals. Likewise, affirmational fandom can constrain and limit the potential for individuals and communities to change, grow, and explore through engagement with media when used in exclusionary ways. Importantly, affirmational fandom does not have to be exclusionary. Information can just be information. The critique of affirmational fandom is simply that it is often misused when viewed through a feminist lens. Transformational fandom, on the other hand, can challenge dominant cultural tropes, norms, and values. As Barbie demonstrates, transformational fandom has the power to inspire us to imagine better, and that power can never be put back in a box.
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