Barbie Q and Celebrity Worship in the Wake of Corona

Though the main characters of the short story are children, it’s easily inferred that Barbie-Q takes place in a profit-driven society much like our own. The narrator and her friend treat the barbie dolls as representations of the affluent lifestyle they strive towards; the dolls wear elegant, “Jackie Kennedy”-esque outfits of “satin splendor” and work in such lavish professions as lounge singing. The children themselves presumably come from a lower to lower-middle-class background, given that they can’t afford most of their barbies until they go on sale for being damaged, and it would seem that they’ve been conditioned to associate wealth with self-fulfillment, as is often the case in societies run by capitalism. They treat these dolls as the representation of everything life could be, burying their hopes and aspirations within them.


The reverence for these dolls reminded me of one aspect of our own culture, celebrity worship. They represent for us what the Barbie dolls represent to those children, people whose affluence to aspire to, people who we could supposedly be with a little luck and pluck. But lately, the stars whose lives and antics once symbolized an exciting goal to strive towards now seem more annoying and tone-deaf than anything else. It’s no longer fun to idolize those who’ve benefited from the same capitalism failing nearly everyone else in America. Were the capitalist structures in Barbie-Q to fail the way ours have started to in real life, I’d guess the narrator and her friend would be singing a different tune about the dolls.