Laurie Simmons’ »The Love Doll«: Looking at a Sex Doll Anew

Abstract

As a female photographer who has been interested in miniature dolls throughout her Career, Simmons started in 2009 with a new series entitled “The Love Doll,” featuring a life-sized sex doll. On a family trip to Japan, Simmons discovered love dolls. She ordered one of these life-sized high-end customized sex dolls from Japan and captured her evolving relationship with it in the hybrid form of a diary and photo journal. Simmons documents the doll’s transformation from object to subject but also its transition from girlhood to womanhood. By closing her exhibit catalogue with images of the doll dressed as a traditional geisha, she uncovers twice the masquerade of femininity as artifice and artificiality. While engaging with the doll’s uncanniness, Simmons’ photographs display the inability to distinguish between animate and inanimate and the confusion between woman and doll as a result. Because Simmons casts a maternal, platonic, de-eroticizing gaze on her Love Dolls, she manages to “Look at a Sex Doll Anew”.