Barbie Girls: Lil’ Kim, Nicki Minaj, and Mattel
Given Lil’ Kim’s own remarks about her physical insecurities, it’s hard not to read this 2011 promotional photograph as tapping into Barbie’s white aesthetics. Even the pink Mattel-style sticker in the corner hints at her beauty’s commercial appeal. In a Newsweek interview with Allison Samuels, she discussed how her blonde hair, blue contacts, breast implants, and rumored nose job and skin-lightening treatments all stemmed from the cultural feedback that she received about her appearance.
“‘I have low self-esteem and I always have,” she says. ‘Guys always cheated on me with women who were European-looking. You know, the long-hair type. Really beautiful women that left me thinking, ‘How I can I compete with that?’ Being a regular black girl wasn’t good enough.’ And the implants? ‘That surgery was the most pain I’ve ever been in my life,’ says Kim. ‘But people made such a big deal about it. White women get them every day. It was to make me look the way I wanted to look. It’s my body.’”
On one hand, this quote lends credence to the argument that the Barbie label appeals to Lil’ Kim (and perhaps other black female rappers as well) because the doll represents “European-looking,” “long-haired” beauty and femininity. On the other hand, Lil’ Kim makes the valid argument that her body is her own, and she has a right to do with it as she pleases. This is certainly true. However, it also seems unlikely that she would have chosen to make these specific changes if she lived in a culture that sent more positive messages to African-American women.
Yet perhaps Kim’s clearly altered appearance is part of the photograph’s point. Lil’ Kim and Nicki Minaj frequently challenge the idea of natural beauty in their self-presentations. They don over-the-top costumes and brightly colored wigs that show they’re playing with their appearance–much as young girls might play with their dolls. In so doing, they make the labor of beauty visible and weird. Barbie may appeal to them because she, too, stands for a particularly artificial and constructed kind of beauty. After all, she’s a doll whose measurements would prevent her from walking upright if she were real.
Minaj’s Pink Friday cover art deploys exaggerated Barbie imagery in order to call attention to the artificiality of her appearance. One outstretched leg, shiny as plastic, is more than double the length of her torso. She has no arms, and her breasts are thrust so high they cover her collarbone. These out-of-whack proportions and missing limbs communicate the impossibility of the femininity she embodies. Meanwhile, her vacant expression—eyes wide and dull, pink lips in an expressionless pout—suggests not a doll come to life but a life-size doll, revealing the non-transferable nature of the Barbie ideal.
The cover art of the album perfectly captures Minaj’s approach to gender and beauty as performance. As Lisa Lewis wrote of Madonna, Minaj “engages with and hyperbolizes the discourse of femininity.” Appropriating the Barbie image, and taking it to its logical extreme, may actually be a way of subverting white beauty ideals.
It’s also worth noting that both Lil’ Kim and Minaj use Barbie as a means of allying themselves with girls and girl culture. In Barbie’s world, clothes, exciting careers, and Malibu dream houses take precedence over Ken, who is doomed to be a helmet-haired afterthought. Since boys who play with dolls tend to get stigmatized in our culture, Barbie has traditionally been a toy that girls play with by themselves or with other girls. When Lil’ Kim and Minaj call themselves Barbie, they’re appealing to a female fanbase. Minaj also calls her fans Barbz and Ken Barbz, which has the effect of both de-fanging some of Barbie’s harmful elements (if everyone’s a Barbie, then everyone’s beautiful) and empowering Minaj (she names her fans after herself).
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