Mattel, the makers of the doll, announced the new line with a story in Timeheadlined “Now can we stop talking about my body?” I did not expect Barbie to be a movie about Ken — and more importantly, a movie Ryan Gosling steals with such glorious aplomb that I can’t even be that mad at him for it. Along the journey, people made their own versions of Barbie. Hima Sailaja, an Indian fashion designer, draped a teenage doll in different styles: there’s a Jhansi Lakshmi Bai doll, one that wears loose dungarees and another that goes to work in a simple salwar kameez. Twenty-four-year-old Haneefah Adam recently came out with Hijarbie, a Barbie in a hijab, for Muslim girls to have a stylish role model. The Middle East offers the Fulla, a conservatively dressed Barbie, Pullip is the rage in Korea, and the Sara and Dara dolls promote Persian culture. But Barbie stays one step ahead of that thought, because it’s all leading up to an expert commentary on how little girls will always realize, sooner or later, that the real world is run by men, and that its Kens have more power than its Barbies. And once Gosling’s Ken makes it to Reality, he realizes this too, and he goes full men’s rights activist, transitioning from Barbie’s placeholder boyfriend into one of the most fascinating antagonists in modern pop cinema.

If you love playing new and old Barbie games, then you’ll probably like many of the games in these categories:Someone thought that Kareena Kapoor Khan’s character ‘Pooh’ from ‘Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham’ and Rani’s character ‘Tina Malhotra’ in ‘Kuch Kuch Hota Hai’ can also be added to the list of desi Barbies. Arya, who played with the Sindy and Barbie dolls herself as a child growing up, never thought she would play the character on screen. According to her, the power of the toy combined with the reach of TV and films that have long formed an inextricable part of the everyday cultural experience—with families coming together at the end of a day to identify with their on-screen counterparts—could be a gateway to inspire conversation and even question societal norms. “TV-watching is how I grew up, coming to terms with my Indian identity in England’s Guildford,” she explains of her experience watching the British-Asian sketch comedy show Goodness Gracious Me. “For the first time, we saw South Asians, our family homes, stories about them, that allowed us to just poke fun at ourselves. It was brilliant.” Her cousins and her, inspired by the tales of the TV show, wrote their own kids’ version, building character arcs and facets. “I guess I felt seen from that. Films contribute massively to shifting culture. It should inspire conversation. I especially think young audiences will be encouraged to question societal norms and develop a more progressive and inclusive mindset on beauty and self-worth after watching Barbie.” Screen Time

In India, Barbie’s lifestyle, with her attraction to glamour and her relationship with her on-off boyfriend Ken, did not initially fit into the idea of a conventional Indian upbringing, says Nemani. “It is precisely the sexualised fiction of Barbie’s body that the Indian public repudiated. In India, hyper-sexualised depictions of females are often perceived to be obscene and are subject to censorship.” There’s a third rail that Gerwig and Baumbach scarcely dare to touch in Barbie: body image. Barbie designers at Mattel have struggled in this arena, too, as Barbie’s nonstandard but idealized body proportions have remained controversial, even as the company has introduced several variations in recent years. (They include a “curvy” Barbie, a “petite” Barbie, and a Barbie with articulated knees who can use a wheelchair.) Yes, Barbie can have every career imaginable — she can be president, even if real-life women can’t — but can she manage to rise above a size 6?

But Chawla seems to disagree. “Which child looks at a Barbie and sees it as vulgar or sexy? Kids don’t think about that. They think of the possibilities of being a beautiful and confident grown-up.” Barbie is an idea,” said Seema Chawla, the head of marketing of Mattel in India, where the new line is slated to arrive in April. “Her popularity was proof of the fact that she allowed girls to imagine what they could be. She was a fashionista, a family woman, a princess and the president. They wanted to be like her.” Priti Nemani, an attorney at law who wrote a paper in 2011 titled " A Case Study on the Failure of the Barbie Doll in the Indian Market", said, “One of the biggest criticisms Barbie faced is her hyper-sexualized physique.” However, Chawla points out that Barbie was never meant to be an Indian Barbie. “It was a part of an International series of what would happen if Barbie went to India. It was meant more as a souvenir for NRIs and tourists.” Natalie Diaz was born in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian community. She earned a BA from Old Dominion University, where she received a full athletic scholarship. Diaz played professional basketball in Europe and Asia before returning to Old Dominion to earn an MFA. She is the author of the poetry collections Postcolonial Love Poem (2020), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; and When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012), which New York Times reviewer Eric McHenry described as an “ambitious … beautiful book.” Her other honors and awards include the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from Bread Loaf, the Narrative Poetry Prize, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship.