Event Title

Authenticating bodies in the Dollhouse

Presenter Information

Ami Harbin

Start Date

28-6-2010 9:00 AM

End Date

28-6-2010 10:30 AM

Description

This presentation is part of the Vision of the Dolls: Theorizing technology, identity and agency in Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse track.

Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse is filled with actives (rather than agents) who take up various engagements (rather than projects), guided by imprints (rather than identities). In this paper, I examine the connections between selfhood and responsibility at work in the show, discuss how the ‘dolls’ compel re-conceptions of authentic selfhood, and argue that the series can support rich conceptions of agency as embodied.

The question of responsibility in the dollhouse is challenging: it is unclear to what extent the dolls can be held responsible for their actions given that they largely lack control over their decisions and behaviour, even while viewers are reminded of their ambiguous role in arriving at the house. Issues of the dolls’ moral agency become more compelling when we ask questions from different angles:

1) To what extent can the dolls’ selfhoods sustain agency and responsibility? In what ways does the series encourage us to view Caroline/Echo as not responsible for most actions during engagements, while still being responsible in a forward-looking sense for subverting the injustice at work in the ‘house’?

2) What conceptions of authenticity underlie the kind of self we take to be necessary for responsibility? How can the ambiguity of dolls’ possibilities for responsibility loosen the traditional sense that I need to be my authentic self (‘the real me’) in order to be responsible?

3) How might the series’ emphasis on the dolls’ bodies bolster new feminist inquiries into embodied agency?

I suggest that the dolls’ bodies provide some of the most important areas for discussion. Reading the various representations of scarring and tattooing as drives to ‘authenticate’ (i.e., my body and its marks will indicate who I genuinely am and always have been, even when I do not or cannot identify with it), I argue that efforts to authenticate selves by the permanence of bodies is troubling in its assumption that the authentic self must be established at birth, not fundamentally alterable (no matter how much wiping and imprinting), and in need of rigid identification. Having said this, dolls’ bodies are also used in a more promising way to flesh out the physicality of memory, identity, and most importantly for my purposes, responsibility – we come to see the dolls’ bodies as holding the greatest promise for stopping harm and implementing change.

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Jun 28th, 9:00 AM Jun 28th, 10:30 AM

Authenticating bodies in the Dollhouse

This presentation is part of the Vision of the Dolls: Theorizing technology, identity and agency in Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse track.

Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse is filled with actives (rather than agents) who take up various engagements (rather than projects), guided by imprints (rather than identities). In this paper, I examine the connections between selfhood and responsibility at work in the show, discuss how the ‘dolls’ compel re-conceptions of authentic selfhood, and argue that the series can support rich conceptions of agency as embodied.

The question of responsibility in the dollhouse is challenging: it is unclear to what extent the dolls can be held responsible for their actions given that they largely lack control over their decisions and behaviour, even while viewers are reminded of their ambiguous role in arriving at the house. Issues of the dolls’ moral agency become more compelling when we ask questions from different angles:

1) To what extent can the dolls’ selfhoods sustain agency and responsibility? In what ways does the series encourage us to view Caroline/Echo as not responsible for most actions during engagements, while still being responsible in a forward-looking sense for subverting the injustice at work in the ‘house’?

2) What conceptions of authenticity underlie the kind of self we take to be necessary for responsibility? How can the ambiguity of dolls’ possibilities for responsibility loosen the traditional sense that I need to be my authentic self (‘the real me’) in order to be responsible?

3) How might the series’ emphasis on the dolls’ bodies bolster new feminist inquiries into embodied agency?

I suggest that the dolls’ bodies provide some of the most important areas for discussion. Reading the various representations of scarring and tattooing as drives to ‘authenticate’ (i.e., my body and its marks will indicate who I genuinely am and always have been, even when I do not or cannot identify with it), I argue that efforts to authenticate selves by the permanence of bodies is troubling in its assumption that the authentic self must be established at birth, not fundamentally alterable (no matter how much wiping and imprinting), and in need of rigid identification. Having said this, dolls’ bodies are also used in a more promising way to flesh out the physicality of memory, identity, and most importantly for my purposes, responsibility – we come to see the dolls’ bodies as holding the greatest promise for stopping harm and implementing change.