Investigating and reimagining the origin story of the sex doll through the tale of the sailor's dames de voyage. The sex doll and its high-tech counterpart the sex robot have gone mainstream, as both ...the object of consumer desire and the subject of academic study. But sex dolls, and sexual technology in general, are nothing new. Sex dolls have been around for centuries. In Sex Dolls at Sea, Bo Ruberg explores the origin story of the sex doll, investigating its cultural implications and considering who has been marginalized and who has been privileged in the narrative. Ruberg examines the generally accepted story that the first sex dolls were dames de voyage, rudimentary figures made of cloth and leather scraps by European sailors on long, lonely ocean voyages in centuries past. In search of supporting evidence for the lonesome sailor sex doll theory, Ruberg uncovers the real history of the sex doll. The earliest commercial sex dolls were not the dames de voyage but the femmes en caoutchouc: “women” made of inflatable vulcanized rubber, beginning in the late nineteenth century. Interrogating the sailor sex doll origin story, Ruberg finds beneath the surface a web of issues relating to gender, sexuality, race, and colonialism. What has been lost in the history of the sex doll and other sex tech, Ruberg tells us, are the stories of the sex workers, women, queer people, and people of color whose lives have been bound up with these technologies.
While previous research has theorized the potential benefits and consequences of intimate relationships with robots and dolls, little empirical research has been conducted on today's love and sex ...doll owners. By drawing on digital ethnographic data and interviews with 41 love and sex doll community members, I explore how love and sex doll owners account for their transgressive sex practice. I argue these accounts reveal the underlying sexual selfhood project of doll owners, what I term the silicone self. I analyze silicone selves to show how doll community members manage stigma by emphasizing sexual individualism and drawing on pro‐sex, feminist, and anti‐feminist discourses. I further highlight tensions within the community that stem from conflicting views about gender and sexuality.
As a female photographer who has been interested in miniature dolls throughout her Career, Simmons started in 2009 with a new series entitled “The Love Doll,” featuring a life-sized sex doll. On a ...family trip to Japan, Simmons discovered love dolls. She ordered one of these life-sized high-end customized sex dolls from Japan and captured her evolving relationship with it in the hybrid form of a diary and photo journal. Simmons documents the doll’s transformation from object to subject but also its transition from girlhood to womanhood. By closing her exhibit catalogue with images of the doll dressed as a traditional geisha, she uncovers twice the masquerade of femininity as artifice and artificiality. While engaging with the doll’s uncanniness, Simmons’ photographs display the inability to distinguish between animate and inanimate and the confusion between woman and doll as a result. Because Simmons casts a maternal, platonic, de-eroticizing gaze on her Love Dolls, she manages to “Look at a Sex Doll Anew”.
The ownership of sex dolls has become an increasingly discussed phenomenon in recent years, with legal scholars and legislators calling for increased regulation and criminalization of such articles. ...However, our knowledge of sex doll ownership is lacking, and the peer-reviewed literature is especially sparse on detailed phenomenological analyses of the motivations of sex doll owners and their experiences of owning a doll. In this study, we interviewed nine male owners of sex dolls to investigate these issues. Two main themes were elicited from the data: “
the ‘perfect’ partner
” and “
sex doll or love doll?
”. In understanding doll ownership in this way, we hope to add to ongoing social discussions about the types of people who own dolls, why they do so, and how dolls act as a functional aspect of their sexual (and nonsexual) lives.
The host-guest recognition between two macrocycles to form hierarchical non-intertwined ring-in-ring assemblies remains an interesting and challenging target in noncovalent synthesis. Herein, we ...report the design and characterization of a box-in-box assembly on the basis of host-guest radical-pairing interactions between two rigid diradical dicationic cyclophanes. One striking feature of the box-in-box complex is its ability to host various 1,4-disubstituted benzene derivatives inside as a third component in the cavity of the smaller of the two diradical dicationic cyclophanes to produce hierarchical Russian doll like assemblies. These results highlight the utility of matching the dimensions of two different cyclophanes as an efficient approach for developing new hybrid supramolecular assemblies with radical-paired ring-in-ring complexes and smaller neutral guest molecules.
Artificial bodies constructed in human likeness, from uncanny automatons to mechanical dolls, have long played a complex and subtle role in human identity and culture. This book takes a range of ...these bodies, from antiquity to the present day, to explore how we seek out echoes, caricatures and replications of ourselves in order to make sense of the complex world in which we live. Packed with case studies, from the commedia del’arte to Hans Bellmer, and the work of André Courrèges to the 1980s supermodel, this volume explores the divide between the “real” and the constructed. Arguing that the body “other” plays a crucial role in the formation of the self physically and psychologically, leading scholar Adam Geczy contends that the “natural” body has been replaced by a series of imaginary archetypes in our post-modern world, central to which is the figure of the doll. The Artificial Body in Fashion and Art provides a much-needed synthesis of constructed bodies across time and place, drawing on fashion theory, theatre studies and material culture, to explore what the body means in the realms of identity, gender, performance and art.
Persona Dolls are fabric dolls that are used as part of a specific approach (The Persona Doll approach) with young children to encourage inclusion and to challenge inequality and discrimination. ...Whilst dolls have been celebrated for foregrounding children's voices in research, previous scholarship has not considered the potential for dolls to evade the insider/outsider researcher status dichotomy, facilitating a position of 'inbetweenness'. In this Viewpoint, we propose the use of Persona Dolls in research with children as useful tools to combat the insider/outsider researcher status dilemma recognised in much geographical and other scholarship.
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