Event Title
“Giving people what they want”: Dolls, desire and danger
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.
The conceit of Dollhouse revolves around desire and the agency of the desired. “We give people what they want” promises the corporate representative, reassuring a client that he won’t just be granted a woman who pretends to love him: his imprinted doll will be fully, authentically, and “chemically” besotted. What is on offer is not merely a body or a complex role-play. The Dollhouse offers the promise of perfectly reciprocal desire.
In reaching to explain what is disturbing about Dollhouse, the comparison to the sex industry is tempting. Dolls are constructed agents of pleasure. They are young, beautiful and – it appears – most often hired for sexually themed engagements. But, dolls are not only bodies for hire; they are persons for hire. Feminists who seek to abolish sex work lament that sex workers are demeaned because they are objectified, that is, they become merely the instrument of someone else’s desires for and on their bodies. Paid sexual encounters always risk the agency of the sex worker by reducing her to “just” a body. There is theoretical danger in this move, of course: it risks negating the agency of sex workers themselves, and also risks reading materiality as necessarily dehumanizing. While there is much in the mainstream sex industry that is degrading and coercive, it seems at least possible that being the sexual object, even a commercially contracted sexual object, can be choiceworthy and even empowering. Nor need it preclude being a sexual subject. Indeed, in the case of dolls, an engagement only succeeds to the extent that the client’s fantasy lines up with the doll’s own (imprinted) desires. It only works if both people “really” feel it.
If so, then what is so wrong with being a doll? Nancy Bauer’s work on the “logic of the pornutopia” may offer an alternative approach. Bauer (2007) suggests what is most problematic about pornography is the distorted picture of desiring agency it presents, as always, instantly, satisfied and reciprocated: “to respect your own and other people’s humanity, all you have to do is indulge your sexual spontaneity” (67). Whedon’s dolls are constructed according to others’ desires, and they are only given exactly those desires that will be instantly, immediately fulfilled – a limitation potentially more corrupting than the technological origin of those desires. Dolls live out the fantasy of the pornutopia. In this paper, I explore the questions of sexuality, contracted desire and the structure of agency raised by the technological fantasy of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse.
“Giving people what they want”: Dolls, desire and danger
This presentation is part of the Vision of the Dolls: Theorizing technology, identity and agency in Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse track.
The conceit of Dollhouse revolves around desire and the agency of the desired. “We give people what they want” promises the corporate representative, reassuring a client that he won’t just be granted a woman who pretends to love him: his imprinted doll will be fully, authentically, and “chemically” besotted. What is on offer is not merely a body or a complex role-play. The Dollhouse offers the promise of perfectly reciprocal desire.
In reaching to explain what is disturbing about Dollhouse, the comparison to the sex industry is tempting. Dolls are constructed agents of pleasure. They are young, beautiful and – it appears – most often hired for sexually themed engagements. But, dolls are not only bodies for hire; they are persons for hire. Feminists who seek to abolish sex work lament that sex workers are demeaned because they are objectified, that is, they become merely the instrument of someone else’s desires for and on their bodies. Paid sexual encounters always risk the agency of the sex worker by reducing her to “just” a body. There is theoretical danger in this move, of course: it risks negating the agency of sex workers themselves, and also risks reading materiality as necessarily dehumanizing. While there is much in the mainstream sex industry that is degrading and coercive, it seems at least possible that being the sexual object, even a commercially contracted sexual object, can be choiceworthy and even empowering. Nor need it preclude being a sexual subject. Indeed, in the case of dolls, an engagement only succeeds to the extent that the client’s fantasy lines up with the doll’s own (imprinted) desires. It only works if both people “really” feel it.
If so, then what is so wrong with being a doll? Nancy Bauer’s work on the “logic of the pornutopia” may offer an alternative approach. Bauer (2007) suggests what is most problematic about pornography is the distorted picture of desiring agency it presents, as always, instantly, satisfied and reciprocated: “to respect your own and other people’s humanity, all you have to do is indulge your sexual spontaneity” (67). Whedon’s dolls are constructed according to others’ desires, and they are only given exactly those desires that will be instantly, immediately fulfilled – a limitation potentially more corrupting than the technological origin of those desires. Dolls live out the fantasy of the pornutopia. In this paper, I explore the questions of sexuality, contracted desire and the structure of agency raised by the technological fantasy of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse.