“Between Technology & Toy: The Talking Doll as Abject Artifact,”

in Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence, ed. Maggie Hennefeld and Nicholas Sammond (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 164–84.

https://www.dukeupress.edu/abjection-incorporated

Talking dolls are often met with equal parts enthusiasm and disgust in popular culture. On one hand, they are novel and amusing, beloved companions brought to life. On the other hand, the source of that lifelike quality, the doll’s technological infrastructure embedded beneath their superficial features, has the capacity to evoke horror and discomfort. In this essay, I explore the talking doll as an enduring yet consistently maligned cultural form. Drawing upon historical and contemporary patent records, popular culture representations, and online discourses of tinkerer and fixer communities, who sustain material interest in these dolls, I trace the talking doll’s fraught status and its implications for the imagined child user. The talking doll oscillates between subject and object, at once an affective playmate and unwieldy, material thing. These dolls are frequently derided for curtailing the child’s creative latitude, predetermining a “script” for play, an objection that relies largely upon a romantic view of childhood as both a developmental state but also a period of innocence arrested from the temporal flows of commodity culture. I argue that such anxieties surrounding these dolls are linked to the temporal incongruity of their traditional “toy-like” components and their undergirding technological components. This tension between internal and external, between the timeless affect of the plaything and the planned obsolescence of its interior, positions the child user within contradictory terrain in which they are asked to both relinquish and retain emotional attachment to the talking toy.