She “Cries Real Tears”! Weeping and Wetting Technologies in Doll Play

Children’s Literature Association (ChLA) / San Antonio / June 2018

Over half of the body, many of us learn in science class, is composed of water. Sustaining life requires consuming and evacuating it; water passes in, on, and through the body. Given water’s importance to biological life, it is perhaps unsurprising that so many efforts have been made to incorporate water features into dolls in order to make them more lifelike. From Tiny Tears to Betsy Wetsy, water has been deployed to heighten the emotional experience of doll play. Components that make the doll cry, urinate, or that store water inside the doll’s body to simulate the warmth and heft of a human child use water to enhance realism and replicate cultural caregiving practices such as feeding, comforting, and changing. However, incorporating these features also commonly compromises still other attributes of the doll, such as requiring a rigid body, increasing vulnerability to mold or water damage, and fixing its facial features in unnatural arrangements. In these instances, the addition of water to animate doll play often results in grotesque playthings that threaten to distance the child user.

 Building upon the work of Miriam Forman-Brunell, Eugenia Gonzalez, and others who examine dolls as literary figures and technological assemblages, this paper weighs the tensions between emotional attachment and disdain and abandonment that crying and wetting dolls produce. The paper draws on patent records and promotional materials to excavate the technological and rhetorical mechanisms used to frame these dolls as playthings that heighten emotional connections. Such records, in turn, expose some core structural and material compromises that water features require, thereby documenting the problem solving process of doll design. Through this exploration, I consider assumptions about dolls’ gendered users embedded in these toys and how water features tend to accentuate certain forms of caregiving at the exclusion of others. Finally, I probe the reasons why the addition of water features has endured as a goal for designers of girls’ play.