The Best Little Whorehouse in Toyland would later make an appearance at a cabaret night dedicated to stuff queer artists made in their youth. When she was still a straight-identified teenager in 1988, Woodward and her friends shot a porno “as a rainy day diversion”-on Betamax!-with multiple Barbies, plus a Ken doll fitted with a mini strap-on made of paper. Robin Woodward is a designer and theatre artist living in Toronto. In her 2010 interview with Xtra, Arsenault asserts that “I am the most real when I am on stage.” Welcome to the dollhouseĪ still from “The Best Little Whorehouse in Toyland.” In the show’s program, scholar Judith Rudakoff mused, “Is Nina a reproduction, a representation, a reflection or a reinterpretation? Perhaps a regeneration? A reinvention?” The piece variously reflects on the state(s) of embodiment, the performance of identity, and the nature of art/artifice/reality. Arsenault mused that to truly embody Barbie, she had to vacate herself for the night (hello, Ativan) and endeavour to be as plastic and perfect as possible. In her script, Arsenault plays up the central irony of being cast as a plastic doll who has been accused of “fucking up the body image” of millions of girls across generations, while she herself has been transformed by so much silicone. This marked the launch of a Barbie-inspired fashion line on the doll’s official 50th birthday. In 2010, trans artist Nina Arsenault wrote and performed a one-woman show called I B*rbie, an autobiographical account of the night she was hired to play Barbie at Canadian Fashion Week. ![]() Here’s a quick and quixotic tour through some of the gayest offerings. The signs and symbols (see Henry Giardina and Alani Vargas on Barbie and queer coding) have been there all along, and queer and trans artists have produced a plethora of interventions and inventions through the years. ![]() Unsurprisingly, Barbie and friends have been queer and queered from the outset. Spoiler alert: Barbie discourse will never die. So, are you fan or foe? Filled with BBE (Big Barbie Energy), movie tickets in hand … or uttering an exhausted “Kenough already!” and ready for the discourse to die? ![]() There are endless examples in every genre of artistic interventions employing all manner of tone and tenor to transform/translate the plastic cultural icon.Ĭue the present moment: There has been an incessant stream of memes about and dreams for what Barbie, in Greta Gerwig’s feminist hands, might be and mean. Photographer Nancy Burson’s Aged Barbie (1994) was commissioned for a book of Barbie images, but Mattel excised it from final publication.
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