Dolldonics: Doll Games as a Laboratory of Experimental Desire

Abstract

This article considers doll games not as an exercise for reproductive heterosexuality but as a laboratory of queer sexuality. My main source is the literary hypertext The Doll Games by Shelley and Pamela Jackson. In this work, the unsexed doll body is described as the ‘sexless baton’ at the core of sex and penises are compared to dolls played with in the doll games of sex. The term dolldonics indicates a Deleuzian understanding of such objects used to prosthetically extend bodies and make desiring connections. They are not to be understood as fetishes in the psychoanalytic sense, inevitably pointing back to the phallus. There is a tradition of surrealist artists such as Hans Bellmer taking an interest in the recombinant possibilities of doll bodies. However, in the work of male artists, the queer potential of such polymorphous prosthetics has often been restricted by an erotisation of the doll as stand-in for the little girl, with whom it is so closely associated. In doll work by female artists with experience of being girls and playing with dolls, such erotisation of the girl-as-doll and doll-as-girl is less likely to occur, or at least occurs in different and more complex ways. The erotisation of doll bodies is based less on it standing in for the forbidden sexual object of the little girl, and more of the tactility of holding, manipulating, dismembering, dressing and undressing them. In doll games, the conventional distinction between desire and identification is undone, which confuses categorisations such as gender and sexual identity, and further subject/object, animate/inanimate and human/nonhuman.