Anxiety, Subjectivity, and the Voice of the Talking Doll

Console-ing Passions / University of Notre Dame / June 2016 

Since Thomas Edison’s phonographic doll croaked to life in 1890, the talking doll has been a much-maligned but consistently reinvented cultural form. As scholars such as Miriam Forman-Brunell have argued, such technologically-enhanced playthings fundamentally engage questions related to gender—most prominently in the tension between their (typically male) inventors and the girls who are the dolls’ imagined consumers. A critical and contested concept within the field of childhood studies, voice is a register that the talking doll engages on a literal level. Building upon Robin Bernstein’s contention that dolls, as culturally situated material forms, contain “scripts” that represent the range of intended actions the user is to perform with them, this paper explores the literal scripts of talking dolls. The paper will draw upon historical and contemporary examples to examine what dolls have been made to say and to consider the raced and gendered subjects to and for whom they are meant to speak. In particular, I will examine an archive of literary, promotional, material, and technological evidence to demonstrate the recurrence of anxieties surrounding the origins of dolls’ voices and instances where their voices fail to correspond to their presumed racial or gender identities. Even as the particular technologies have changed, from the phonographic cylinder to cloud-based cognition and synthesized speech, the doll’s voice has remained a key site at which to explore broader aspirations and anxieties about race, gender, and the child.