Life in Plastic teases the absurdity of anti-trans beliefs. Taking a critical lens to right-wing, pseudo-feminist, and medicalized attacks on trans identity, the photo series asks what it would mean to be trans when you are a body without organs.
Dolls are symbols frozen in time. Barbie and Ken have traditionally represented core western values: consumerism, heteronormativity, and concrete gender roles (the kind that cannot exist in reality). They are intended to recall a white cisgender past that never happened. The Barbie franchise boasts the most well-known dolls in the world. Achieving this status means globalizing normative gender fantasies as universal but inaccessible to all.
How do we rethink life in plastic? Jules Gill-Peterson proposes our community develop a framework around plasticity: “the capacity of living systems to generate and take on new forms.” To Gill-Peterson, doctors took advantage of the presumed plasticity of trans children to experiment with the possibility of changing sex characteristics rather than listening to the children themselves.
Physicians now have less control over trans lives than ever. This means that adherence to gender roles is not as often required to transition. Barbie and Ken help one another transition in the photos, learning from each other as trans people free from external influence. Without clinical assessments, laws, or bigots, they choose not to reproduce existing norms. Barbie does not reject masculinity (the skateboard) and Ken does not reject femininity (cosmetics). Instead, their transness expands the horizons of gender itself. The two may switch back and forth whenever they please. Their external expression changes however and whenever they like so long as they’re happy. Their plastic bodies cannot take hormones or undergo surgery but find other ways of self-expression that are just as valid.
As society moves toward more trans representation, it is crucial we conceptualize new ways trans people may exist. At the very least, we hope this re-imagining of Barbie and Ken will upset some right-wing fanatics.