Deconstructing Barbenheimer: a feminist analysis of gender and the representation of nuclear war

This article's investigation of Barbenheimer demonstrates the importance of feminist engagement with memes. More specifically, it navigates nuclear weapons politics through visual narratives, online participatory culture and fragmented senses of humour, underscoring the significance of popular culture as a reflector and producer of the social world. As everyday knowledge about nuclear weapons becomes increasingly fragmented and intertextual, scholars must turn their attention to the politics of the anecdotal and accidental. Nuclear weapons have a narrative power that exists external to the weapons themselves. These narratives are shown to construct and reconstruct popular imaginings about nuclear weapons and war; their beginnings, middles and ends. Recentring nuclear weapons and war around the Barbie film makes visible those gendered and militarised discourses that may otherwise be backgrounded or normalised. We should encounter those broader questions of feminism and militarisation with attention to the fragmented aspects of world politics; the parts of politics that live and breathe, move and bend, confront and challenge us. The Barbiefication of the images of nuclear war make visible the characters, settings and plot of nuclear weapons as they exist in the popular imagination. The making and sharing of memes demonstrates those aspects of the nuclear story that seem fixed, as well as those that can be edited, distorted and played with. Discourses of gender and militarism exist not only within the ‘high’ politics of technostrategic defence planning or policymaking but also as fragments of humour, sentiment and affect scattered across the internet and approached as play – not politics.