Ryan Gosling’s rendition of “I’m Just Ken” from “Barbie” at the Oscars on Sunday night was somehow more campy, more flamboyant and more homoerotic than the film version, and his Kenergetic performance stole the show.
As I’ve written before, the song and Gosling’s portrayal of Ken in “Barbie” were designed to paradoxically embrace and subvert ideas of toxic masculinity. But Sunday’s performance took the embrace and subversion to the next level. Though Gosling, as Ken, sang longingly for Barbie, a potentially perfect heteronormative counterpart, he did so in a glittery hot pink suit, while caressing the faces of the throngs of adoring Kens who surrounded him on stage.
Ryan Gosling’s rendition of “I’m Just Ken” from “Barbie” at the Oscars on Sunday night was somehow even more camp, more flamboyant and more homoerotic than the film version.
Though the song’s implicit message is that his worth is tied to his heterosexuality, the Kens whose faces he caressed were seemingly all hot for one another as they performed a dance routine that could have been lifted out of the Rockettes (an expression of regressive hyper-femininity). There was a playful both/and about it. This was the very definition of a queer performance, one that fundamentally embodies “resistance to the normative, in terms of gender and sexuality and dramaturgy,” as the authors of “What’s Queer About Queer Performance Now?” wrote in the academic journal Contemporary Theatre Review.
Crucially, as the authors go on to note, “As part of this resistance, we see how queer performance’s best current manifestations can challenge and question histories (including queer histories), drawing attention to their fluidity and lack of stability ... ”
In flamboyantly and homoerotically embracing an ostensibly toxic and cisgender/heterosexual brand of masculinity, Gosling’s performance destabilized historical understandings and constructions of gender and sexuality as fixed and binary. And, in doing so, the performance evinced how fragile such constructions are in the first place.
Queer performances, such as Gosling’s on Sunday night, are a direct intervention to the fallacy that gender and sexuality are somehow tied to our biological imperatives. “Masculine and feminine roles are not biologically fixed but socially constructed,” philosopher and pre-eminent gender studies scholar Judith Butler famously wrote in their seminal work, “Gender Trouble.” This is precisely what made Ken’s performance so kenergizing and exhilarating: In flagrantly destabilizing these categories, it’s as though we were all suddenly in on the joke that is gender.
This is precisely what made Ken’s performance so kenergizing and exhilarating: In flagrantly destabilizing these categories, it’s as though we were all suddenly in on the joke that is gender.
Gosling’s ability to destabilize these categories lay in his integrating elements that respectively typify hyperfemininity and hypermasculinity, heterosexuality and homosexuality — seemingly mutually exclusive forces, which instead existed in harmony, complementing each other. Furthermore, in refusing to subscribe to one expression or dimension of gender and sexuality, Gosling’s performance, like so much of queer culture, offers us divergent and emergent expressions of these identities.
Yes, it was subversive (in as much as a capitalistic, white, mainstream, homonationalist expression of queerness can be). But its fluidity also meant that it was unifying. Most of us could find some element of ourselves in it. And there are few things more humbling — and honest — than seeing ourselves in something that makes us laugh.
CORRECTION (March 14, 2:24 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article misstated Judith Butler’s pronouns. Butler uses they/them pronouns, not she/her pronouns.