Description
In this thesis, I use queer of color and intersectional feminist knowledges and practices–and draw from performance studies, media and cultural studies, post-humanist theories, and robotics to read the hyper realistic sex doll and robotic prototypes of female sex robots as cultural artifacts and as objects. I specifically analyze the processes of production of the dolls and the ways in which owners and producers genderize and racialize them. I argue that, beyond the simple commodification of women, the high-end sex doll is a performative commodity comprised of technologies produced and able to endure the reproduction of categories of social difference (gender, race, class, and so on). The ability to sustain the reproduction of those categories through performative practices, makes the dolls able to provide the experience of owning a stable female servant subject –with a customized appearance, identity, and personality. Their impressive performative power exposes the socially constructed nature of fixed and oppressive humanistic notions of the subject, precisely because they reveal that categories of social difference can be mass produced and customized. I explore the ways in which signifiers and/or representations of womanhood are becoming womanhood itself. I argue that womanhood–as a gender category–is detaching from what we know as organic women and is becoming a commodified performative space, in which womanhood is performed without hiding the simulations that gender involves for sexual pleasure. In this sense, I highlight the existence of what I am calling “synthetic hyper femininity”: a performative location (habitable by organic and synthetic women) that exists in that space in which the sex industry intersects with the industrial complex that reinforces whiteness, thinness, being cis-gender and being heterosexual as what is considered desirable and beautiful. I argue that the sex doll is a high-tech puppet with agency that, despite her immobility, drives the simulation of synthetic hyper femininity. To conclude, I delve into my experience visiting Abyss Creations, and explain why looking forward to a queer futurity where womxn of color and Queer Trans People of Color can live their lives to their fullest involves a process of reimagining sexual technologies.
