Barbie and drag queens share the same dreams

William Randolph Lovelace II was the NASA Special Advisory Committee on Life Sciences chairman in 1960. He invited Jerrie Cobb, a well-known pilot and the holder of the nonstop world record in long-distance flights at the time to join what became known as The Woman in Space Program. The project was privately funded; as part of the program, Cobb and about 19 other women had undergone the exact same physical tests as the male candidates for the United States’ astronaut program. Mercury 13 was the name given to 13 women who were able to pass the tests. None of them would become the first American woman to go into space; that distinction belongs to Sally Ride, who was a part of NASA’s 1978 class of recruits and who eventually, on June 18, 1983, flew into space and broke America’s cosmic glass ceiling.

Barbie was the best. Mattel, a toy manufacturer co-founded Ruth Handler, creator of Barbie, and Elliot Handler, her husband, introduced the Miss Astronaut Barbie. This original can be seen at the Smithsonian. She was dressed in a silver suit, brown boots with zippers and matching gloves. She had a red eyeshadow, blue lipstick, and a completely beaten face. The only accessory she could not wear was the American flag. By the time Ride took her trip into space, an entire generation of girls had been imagining the same circumstance in the cosmos of their own making, with only the plastic of Barbie’s body and the synapses of their own imaginative brains.

“What Ruth did was put a doll in girls’ hands and the outfits to go with them that said, ‘You can have any career you want whether or not your current society is telling you that,’” Tanya Lee Stone, the author of The Good, the Bad, and the Barbie: A Doll’s History and Her Impact on UsA professor from Champlain College told Polygon. “She was saying that before our culture was saying that.”

Barbie became an icon of a girl’s freedom to choose, something that is not possible in real life. This is a theme shared with drag. Barbie, in this and many other ways, is a drag Queen. If drag subverts notions of gender by allowing people to dress up in hyper-feminine or hyper-masculine or even just unexpected ways, then Barbie’s goal in dressing as an astronaut was similar. Barbie sent the message in 1965 that there was no gender to going to space. Barbie also encouraged young women to rebel, by wearing her white and silver helmet.

Barbie had more than 200 career choices during her time as a toy. In 1992 she was a rapper, many years before any female rappers won Grammy awards. That same year, Mattel released a presidential candidate Barbie, a doll that preempted Hillary Clinton’s own run by 24 years. Barbie’s impressive resume plays center stage in the marketing for the upcoming movie adaptation. Emma Mackey’s character poster reads, “This Barbie has a Nobel Prize in physics”; Alexandra Shipp’s Barbie is a celebrated author. The posters include lawyer, president and doctor. The posters quickly became an online sensation, spawning viral videos that included drag spins. The video is a TikToker Michael Angelo mash-up of the poster format, with an array of jokes and stories from RuPaul’s Drag RaceOver 1.3 Million views.

Drag was not on Ruth Handler’s mind when she invented Barbie in the late 1950s, but the idea of expanding possibilities, a hallmark of drag, was. At that time, there were only two kinds of dolls available for playing: baby dolls and adult dolls. BarbiePaper dolls and the clothing they came with were thin and easy to tear. Handler wanted her daughter to have more choices when it came to dressing the dolls.

“Girls are fully formed humans and don’t want just two types of play,” Stone said. “The whole impetus for Barbie in Ruth’s mind was about the clothes, it was about the play experience. Barbie was a teeny-tiny mannequin.”

Underlining Barbie’s status as a mannequin more than a full-fledged personality was her design at the time. For some time after she debuted, the iconic doll’s head popped off to help girls slip new outfits on and off with ease. Though Barbie’s two original occupations — fashion model and bride — seem limiting in comparison to today’s bevy of options, they still represent a liberating choice compared to what came before. Barbie allows girls to imagine scenarios other than motherhood. Baby dolls were based on the idea that girls should be mothers.

Playing with possibilities is a vital part of childhood. “Imagination is so important for us as human beings,” Chris Byrne, an independent toy consultant and historian who goes by The Toy Guy, told Polygon. “Barbie play has always been about trying on new identities and looking at, Try on these clothes and see what you discover about yourself. What is the best time to buy? [you’re] doing this with an inert lump of polyvinyl chloride, it’s safe.”

Barbie operates on an ethos of “If you can dream it, you can be it,” in a way that is not dissimilar from drag. “When Barbie [went on] sale, nobody had ever seen a woman with breasts who had no husband, who lived alone and had a job,” said Trixie Mattel, whose drag is influenced by Barbie (if you can’t tell by her name), in a video for InStyle. “Groundbreaking.” Often, when a drag artist paints their face and dons an outfit, they get to dress up as something they are not. For the duration of a song lasting four minutes, they are able to be anyone: a space-alien, a bride in blush, or anything their painting skills and imagination allow. Drag artists are like Barbie, who pushed the boundaries of the possible to those watching them.

Scott Dudelson/Stagecoach/Getty Images

But while Barbie may have been intended for children’s play, there’s no denying that the doll has a long and storied history within drag culture. A fashion Barbie released in 2012 was co-designed by drag enthusiast and designer Phillipe Blond, and in 2017, artist Mark Jonathan went viral for transforming Barbie’s blank canvas into RuPaul’s Drag Race queens.

More than that, Barbie has directly inspired some of the most famous drag queens in America — with Trixie Mattel as one of the most prominent examples. Mattel appeared in an essay written for Vogue. RuPaul’s Drag RaceBefore winning season 7, you must watch the seventh episode Drag Race All StarsIn season 3 of “Drag Race”, Barbie was credited with influencing her drag. Not only did she influence her style and paint, but her business sense as well. Mattel’s drag empire includes a retro motel called the Trixie Motel as well as Discovery Plus TV shows about its renovation. “When you’re a kid and you’re playing with Barbie, you’re basically pretending and rehearsing for your adult life,” Mattel said. “When you’re a little gay boy like I was, I think I was subconsciously materializing the career that I have now with those toys. It’s really inspiring to think about.”

Barbie also has influenced many other queens. Robyn Banks, a 34-year-old New York-based drag queen who has been performing for 15 years, has memories of coiffing Barbie’s hair as a kid to match her sister’s braids. Banks’ sister, it turns out, was more into G.I. Banks preferred Barbie, while Joes favored G.I. Banks continues to collect dolls made by Mattel. She especially loves those that have female WWE wrestlers as models. She’s realized that over time, as Barbie has been updated with more detailed hair and better accessories, the doll has only become draggier.

“She has eyeshadow that’s heavier now. The only thing that’s missing is dramatic lashes,” Banks told Polygon. “I don’t think it’ll be a long time before Ken is a drag queen.”

Boston-based drag queen Missy Steak remembers playing with Barbie dolls at her babysitter’s house as a young child and sees a parallel between the type of play Barbie encourages and the work she does now as a performer.

Missy Steak

“Barbie is kind of a kids’ own drag queen, in the way we dress ourselves up, like, ‘Oh, I’m doing a nurse number or a doctor number,” she told Polygon. “It’s make-believe, but it’s the power that can come from make-believe.” She added, “Barbie gets every job in the world. There’s nothing she can’t do! Drag is putting on the clothes that make the woman and suddenly you’re the woman.”

Handler may have intended to expand young girls’ worlds with the introduction of Barbie, but the reality has gone far beyond her intent. When considered alongside the art of drag, Barbie’s motto — “We girls can do anything!” — feels apropos of the art of drag as well. “There’s a lot of power and politics in drag,” Byrne said. “Drag is no different than Barbie play.” That message is always on display in shows like Drag Race, which constantly underscores the art form’s ability to empower those who practice it. Other depictions, says cultural critic Manuel Betancourt in The Atlantic have used this trope too. The musical La Cage aux Folles, the drag queen main character Albin, who performs as Zaza, sings, “To make depression disappear / I screw some rhinestones on my ear / And put my brooches and tiara / And a little more mascara on.”

Erica Rand asserted similar claims in her book Barbie’s Queer Accessories, in that “Mattel-generated meaning” and “consumer-generated interpretation” vary wildly when it comes to the 11-inch-tall icon. “One consumer might dress Barbie in Ken’s clothes to protest repressive gender stereotyping,” she wrote. “Still others seem to have expressed resistance through games that seem to follow Mattel’s directions, using Barbie’s glamorous careers, for instance, to imagine themselves out of difficult circumstances.”

Barbie, like drag, isn’t about the standards that society sets for us. It doesn’t matter how we act, wear, or even what our future jobs will be. Barbie gives anyone, regardless of age or gender, a blank page to paint with. They can then fill it in with their imagination. Given the ongoing right-wing anti-drag push, which is mostly obsessed with keeping children away from the art of drag, it’s clear exactly how much the right understands the power of imagination. RuPaul’s maxim that “drag doesn’t hide who you are, it reveals who you are” sounds almost trite or rote when she says it enough times, but there’s some truth to it.

The choices a person makes, whether it’s a drag queen or a kid playing with toys, can reveal what they really want. It is not just that children are happier when given the opportunity to choose what they want and need, it also shows that gender stereotypes can be flimsy.