Sex dolls

colonizing connections between fables, technologies and sexualities

Abstract

Review of: RUBERG, Bo. Sex dolls at sea: imagined histories of sexual technologies. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2022.

In Sex Dolls at Sea: Imagined Histories of Sexual Technologies, Bo Ruberg takes Foucauldian genealogy and feminist reading as a method to unravel the nebulous intersection between fabulation, history and science that hovers over the dames de voyage. From a bibliographic analysis and investigation of archives, films, newspapers, reports and a variety of other documents, the researcher not only reveals vicious and misogynistic academic practices in the 20th and 21st centuries, but also, how the imagery around traveling dolls shaped the sex market indust ry to create a range of sex technologies such as inflatable dolls, vibrators and rubber toys. In this process, the threshold between dolls, sex dolls, “being a woman”, sex worker, saints, is blurred, modeling visions of possession, use, disposal, purity to feminized corporeality at the same time as masculine narratives and power structures, colonizing and Eurocentric are conditioning sexual practices, the imagery about sex and the products we consume. Sex robots are presented as the future, and, in the face of a society solidified in discourses that segregate women, queer and black people from the production and consumption of technologies, especially digital ones, it is important to destabilize these dominant narratives, identifying how sexual technologies were imagined and how they manage contemporary social practices, so that we can produce other perspectives for the future in which inclusion and pleasure are central.