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All Dolled Up: Fashioning Cultural Expectations

All Dolled Up: Fashioning Cultural Expectations is an exhibition in miniature. While its purview is a cultural politics of dolls, it nonetheless resonates at the levels of the personal, the corporeal, and the affective. It couches its potent artifacts in an intimate environ. Sparse wooden flats at the entrance evoke a sense of crated containment and orient us toward the one-room exhibition space, with white partitions that frame and segment the area, illustrated with full-scale, black, pop-art outlines of furniture and fixtures that reinforce our enclosure. Each doll is housed in a glass display case for our inspection but in no instance for our tactile interaction. In his examination of dolls, marionettes, and automata as featured in the fields of fashion and art, Adam Geczy situates the doll as a beacon for our embodied anxieties, aspirations, desires, and pleasures, in its uncanniness as humanlike double or as other. The wall illustrations of domestic and retail environments imbue the dolls with a dual condition as keepsakes, as complex, intricate, and often immaculate material objects, on which we manifest attachments—as what Sara Ahmed terms happy objects, those items that “affect us in the best way”—that “take up residence within our bodily horizon,” as immediate even if untouchable. The exhibition room is divided into a series of smaller sections that evoke dwellings and retail spaces. The first sections indicate particular rooms or domains within a domestic realm, from a living room with curtained windows to an armoire with clothes and accessories—then a row of mirror-outlines, a liminal point between private and public, toilette and cosmetics counter. The domestic space presents a selection of iconic westernized dolls that for decades have informed children’s self-perception and expectations of gendered labor and comportment. Barbie—the confluence of aspiration and eroticism—is present in a reproduction of her 1959 template, sporting her black-and-white striped 1 Adam Geczy, The Artificial Body in Fashion and Art: Marionettes, Models, and Mannequins (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).