Is the "Barbie Snub" Discourse the Pink Pussyhat of 2024?
When we speak in the name of feminism, are we doing it for all women?
Every time award nominations drop, a Twitter hot take gets its wings (I refuse to call it X). The nominations for the 2024 Oscars, which dropped this past week, were no exception. It is a stacked year and some exciting noms. including, Justine Triet’s first Best Director nomination for Anatomy of a Fall and Lily Gladstone, a Native American woman, nominated for Best Actress for Killers of the Flower Moon. Of course there were several notable snubs—I have still admittedly not recovered from Charles Melton’s in particular—but the focus quickly shifted to two women, Barbie’s Greta Gerwig and Margo Robbie. And, in the rush to call out anti-feminism over these snubs online and through articles, the conversation left out a whole lot of women in the process.
I understand how it doesn’t make sense for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie to receive a Best Film nomination and not the Best Director (although there’s a history of this very thing happening). Or having the Supporting Actor and Actress Categories filled by Ryan Gosling and America Ferrera respectively, but not having the film’s namesake, Barbie played by Margo Robbie, in the Best Actress Category.
I think there is this propensity to react to Oscar slights—perceived or otherwise—against women as anti-feminist, especially for a blockbuster movie that was unapologetically fem. and made for women. Barbie is such an easy “snub” to shoot off a pithy one sentence tweet, gif, a still from the movie reformatting America Ferrera’s speech to fit the moment, or an Instagram post, like Hilary Clinton did.
The problem with all of this is it completely ignores the women who were recognized and showed no interest in the WOC who were snubbed. One could argue that maybe women didn’t see their movies (truly that is an entirely different conversation). But in a rush for a viral moment or a slight that maybe felt personal, we centered white feelings and white feminism over Feminism. We didn’t take a pause and consider who we might be leaving behind. We forgot the intersectionality part of “intersectional feminism”.
It reminds me that we’ve learned so little