Reborn dolls, dementia, disability, and grief: the linguistic construction of synthetic parenting as non-pharmacological therapy

Abstract

The reborn subculture is widely perceived as macabre and unsettling, as online communities, as well as newspaper articles, blogs, and posts on social media, are generally prone to label collectors as ‘freaks’, and their reborns as ‘creepy’ and ‘nightmarish’. However, handling a hyper-realistic baby doll has been proven to significantly improve the psychological state of people who have dementia, depression, mood, and anxiety disorders, preventing moments of relapse and promoting feelings of attachment (Pezzati et al. 2014). Similarly, simulacra babies are sometimes proposed as a non-pharmacological coping mechanism to help parents overcome the traumatic experience of miscarriage, stillbirth, and child loss, protecting vilomahs from grief-induced depression, and other types of emotional and psychological distress related to mourning. Drawing on corpus-based approaches to text analysis, this paper investigates the synthetic relationships that collectors entertain with their baby dolls through an opportunistic corpus made up of online content. Studying the occurrence of specific keywords in discourses around the reborn subculture will highlight how ideologies on the trope of alternative and non-reproductive parenthood are developed and construed in discourse. Furthermore, a Qualitative Content Analysis of the data will show how the reborn subculture intersects with discourses on disability, and address Doll Therapy as a healing process for people who are grieving or are affected by (mental) health conditions. The lack of linguistic research in this field may be a clear index of the taboo that this topic represents, which makes it urgent and interesting to put it under a magnifying glass.