Why Do Dolls Die? The Power of Passivity and the Embodied Interplay Between Disability and Sex Dolls

摘要

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes I am deeply grateful to Nicole Markotić, Tobin Siebers, Cynthia Wu, Jenell Johnson, Janice Hladki, Sarah Brophy, Michael Gill, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions, insights, and support. There are sex dolls in male form marketed for male and female customers. However, male dolls are rarely represented as characters in American, British, and Japanese television programs and films. In 2010, Bae Doo Na received the Best Actress award both from the Tokyo Sports Film Awards and from the Takasaki Film Festival; thus, a nondisabled actor performing the role of a doll was commended for skillfully performing different embodiment, much as nondisabled actors often receive recognition for acting as disabled characters. This is in a clear contrast to the recent remake of The Stepford Wives (Oz Citation2004), a film in which Joanna persuades her husband not to make her into a robot by emphasizing that a robot saying “I love you” cannot mean it. Thus, the quality of being human in The Stepford Wives presents humanness as having the emotional ability to feel and the autonomy to express genuine love, rather than the corporeal capacity of aging and of being reducible to ashes. This focus on abilities as criteria for human status is in line with Singer's “weirding” of the care given to unexpressive being without such capacities. The use of weird as a verb is adopted from Mel Chen's (Citation2011) theorization of “weirding families” as “the placing of idealized family under a weird lens, one that is racially quirky or posthuman” (Chen Citation2011, n.p.).