Feminist multimodal analysis of the dancing scenes of Barbie 2023: Recontextualization as the 1960s and female self-directed individualism

Abstract

This paper conducts a feminist multimodal analysis of the dancing scene of Barbie, a movie released in 2023, within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis, to explore effective feminist discourses recontextualized as in the 1960s with Barbie introduced to the world alongside second-wave feminism (SWF) as a critical context contributing to feminist discourses. This paper examines the audio aspect, the song Dance the Night, and the visuals i.e., relations between characters and viewers, and interaction among characters in dancing. With van Leeuwen’s Visual Representation of Social Actors, this paper leverages grounded theory to initiate inductive content coding for the multimodality. The findings are multifold. Visually, viewing Barbies with more close shots from the frontal angles at the eye level from signifies equality, focus and empowerment in self-directedness. Interaction among characters incorporates inclusiveness by Barbies’ diversity in races, body figures and conditions, etc., and their internal exclusive dancing with their own autonomous agency exercised. Kens mostly function as facilitators of Barbies’ centralization and uniqueness symbolizing SWF’s universal womanhood. The 1960s witnessed females’ anxiety against traditional norms. In the audio aspect, therefore, the lyrical discourse reinforces female independence by emphasizing “dancing the anxiety away” and “taking risks to be her own self”.