RealDollsTM and Real Men: Understanding Socially Constructed Identity and the Subjective effects of RealDoll Ownership through Amber Hawk Swanson's Amber Doll Project

Abstract

What happens when subjects abdicate the social roles of desire, and what happens when the social roles of love and desire are directed towards an inanimate object? How does this change the subjects that are produced and how does it restructure the modes of sociality they partake in? In this project, I am analyzing the works of performance artist Amber Hawk Swanson, such as Amber Doll Project, Amber Doll > TILIKUM, Doll Closet, and Dollstock / DollPile, that involve RealDolls and the communities which surround them. I am reading Hawk Swanson's work in conjunction with theorists such as Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, and Luce Irigaray whose collective writings help us understand the taken-for-granted contours of subjectivity itself—how it is constructed, experienced, and discussed—as well as the way that sexual specificity is at times ignored in the philosophical discussion surrounding subjectivity and how these discussions change when one views gender, sexuality, and race as being constructed elements which in turn construct subjective experience. These theoretical frameworks will help to illustrate the mechanisms that RealDolls provide that allow certain people—doll husbands—to use them as tools to fashion and anchor their sense of self and their subjective experience. They will also give us the language to specifically define the various models of selfhood that are constructed by engaging in RealDoll relationships. Finally, I will discuss how these asocial relationships allow for doll husbands to form new frameworks of sociality unique to their own communities of other doll husbands