The doll as object always belongs in some respect to the gothic. It is the empty and cold shell of a beautiful body that is at once life-like and dead. Blythe dolls are the quintessential gothic cute, however you dress them up. Blythe dolls encourage customization. Their eyes, hair and cladding is entirely changeable. The wide-eyed Blythe is always so obliging in the horrific scenes of costume change, popping her eyes out to replace with a dazzling emerald, ripping off her wig to implant another tone. This is the element of play offered by the Blythe doll. As a piece explicitly for exhibition play occurs in the inbetween acts of creating gothic identities for the dolls that might be finalized in ironic narrative photography. Gina Garan re-popularized this practice with a series of photographs that capture the gothic in their bodies irrespective of the context. The film captures not only the 'dead moment' synonymous with its medium, but the deadness of these sweet bodies.
There is little attempt in the design of the doll to approach realism. Their features are, according to S. Masubuchi, definitively cute with their huge eyes and disproportionate bodies that connote naivety and innocence. Their figures are a slew of paradoxes, tiny and large, innocent and sexual, sweet and creepy, all positioned for photographs in live environments that foreground their rigid or reposed bodies. In many ways the Blythe doll suffers the inverse crisis of the cyborg, not emitting the signs of uncanny life but of empty identity.
Blythe dolls represent the commodification of the gothic culture, offering ownership over a sub-cultural form that predicates itself on 'not belonging'. Like the punks of Returning of the Living Dead this sub-culture comes to belong absolutely. Yet there is a production element to these toys and themes that allows the consumer to create identities through making practices. The making of clothes and accessories is a large part of the doll ideal and while the identities imposed onto the doll and reinforced in the practitioner are essential bought, they are worked for at the same time. And through this production the purchasing is sutured over.
Gothic Lolita fashion extends the gothic doll discourse as well as the commerce. The culture of gothlolita is grounded in an advanced level of making for the purpose of wearing. A premium is set on the appearance of what is produced. Magazines and blogs share patterns and perpetuate the craft of the sub-culture. One applies the doll dress to their own bodies producing an uncomfortable appearance of cuteness on the developing female form. The soft white meringues that flutter around the body, the luxurious black velvets and the complicated knots, buckles, twists and metals that garnish the typical outfit are young with a disturbing edge of age inappropriateness. Projecting what is perhaps a female gaze onto the gothlolita one is struck by the uncanny spoke of by Helen Cixous. Speaking against Freud's interpretation of ETA Hoffmann's The Sandman, Cixous claims that female terror in the story is derived from the idea of becoming a doll. The figure of Olympia represents the objectified woman. Yet the gothlolita girl quite consciously operates within this frame. Beholding the girl of a certain age that has willingly become the doll, however gothic the resonance and willingly transgressed to good ideas of innocence unable to shed the sexuality, is inherently confusing and converse.
This is probably a draft.
xoxo Final Girl
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