Thursday, January 9, 2014

Dollification: Transforming Lives with Sex & Silicone

Silicone Dollification body suit and transgender molded parts

"I am planning to become 100% silicone girl
...completely dollified."*
SiliconePleasure
(Dollification.com)

*Note: if you are a church member or search committee,
please, actually ready the scholarship and don't jump to conclusions based on visuals.
The thesis of the argument is about thinking critically and not judging on first glance.

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In 2012, I began the "Feminine Products &  Queer Objects" Project
examining a series of trans-human matters including
Among them, Silicone received the most hits,
standing today as the 2nd most read post on this blog.
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Objectification

Dollification is an international practice of transforming a human body into a "Living Doll." Practitioners use make-up, special eye-lenses, clothes, surgery and prosthetics to modify body parts to appear more artificial. Some base their aesthetics on specific icons like Barbie or Lolita, while others model their new look on mannequins or sex dolls.

Most "dollers" are only part-time. For many, becoming a living doll is part of sex play. The prosthetics function as temporary modifications of the body. While the process of procuring and putting on silicone, rubber or latex body-suits may require a substantial investment of time and money, these are able to be removed.

The transition from human to doll is envisioned as a loss of subjectivity and self-control. While BDSM and Sub/Dom play frequently employ "objectification" as a mode of suspending the power of parters, dollers attempt to take this to a particular extreme by becoming literal non-human objects.

For those who decide to become a full-time doll, the distinction between human & non-human objects break down. The consistent use of make-up or clothing associated with dolls draws on how women, children & other human categories share (or can be forced to share) properties with objects that are regarded as inanimate, thoughtless & worthless.

People can be -- and enjoy being -- affirmed as objects, even while consent agreements, civil rights and an insistent humanism protects their subjectivity. The social responsibility to act, think and be a human subject in the world can build up a lot of tension from which tactical dollification & objectification can provide release.

Ariadne, from Dollification.com, testifies to joys of objectification, as part of power-play with sexual partners:

"The mental removal of who and what I am, no choices, no emotions, no thoughts, no conscious reactions to stimuli, nothing more than a still and silent toy for my owner to use, abuse, display and adore. Probably an extreme extension of our O/p relationship, it gives me absolute freedom from human feelings and responsibilities whilst at the same time pleasing my owner, giving him even greater control than normal and ability to increase his sadistic capacity."

It is critical that this form of objectification comes as a "removal." It presumes that the process is contingent on the powers of choice and enjoyment being established, even as they are set aside or suppressed. We can imagine that as an "extreme extension" of an Owner-Property (O/p) relation that power exchanges are contingent on the context of a  "safe, sane, and consensual" environment.

From here more people can begin to appreciate the enjoyment of coming to occupy the position of a sex-doll or mannequin. The release from normal social rules that comes with playing with a toy or facsimile rather than a fully enfrancished "human," allow for a whole range of forbidden pleasures. 

This liberation may be checked by the impossibility of ever fully escaping the human-subject position, but as the uncanny resemblance between human and living doll demonstrate, neither do we ever fully escape our object position. The joy then is not in obeying or destroying these distinctions but by playing at their shifting intersection.


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Silicone Dollification body suit and transgender molded parts
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Trans-Formation

The process of becoming-object, particularly in cases where surgery & implants are employed, demonstrates the temporal essence of human beings. We are not "born this way" but transform this way. From Judith Butler (Gender Trouble) to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus), scholars of the body argue that as subjects or objects, we are always "becoming" rather than merely "being." 

Discomfort with transformation (an insistence on "being" over "becoming") explains stigmas around "plastic" surgery and "artificial" or "fake" breasts. Society insists on "real" beauty, or the random lottery of properties a body was born possessing. Some liberty is given to "malformed" or "broken" bodies to help bring them into the norm, but there remains little candid public affirmation of changing bodies that already occupy a fixed place in the order of things.

At this point, if not already, we can see why "dollification" is critically engaged with Trans-politics. Access to the tools of transformation & radically new visions of what it means to be or become a thing are at stake for Dollies & Trannies alike. This is especially evident when dollification includes gender-transition.

Inaugerated Guy, from Dollification.com, narrates how becoming-object for him was linked with becoming-woman.

"I've always had a bit of a thing for cross-dressing, and finally told [my girlfriend] about it recently, this promptly encouraged her to tell me she has allways wanted to transform a boy into a sexy little dolly girl."

The trans relevance to this instance of gender transition is not as the affirmation of an eternal identity category (i.e. transgender) but the insistence of a perpetual change. He has "always had a bit of a thing for cross-dressing," meaning that what is persistent here is not the occupation of identity but the crossing. 

He is and has a "thing" here which allows for a new form of relation and identification to open up between him and his girlfriend. She "always wanted to transform a boy into a sexy little dolly girl." Like her partner, her desire is not for a fixed body but for a trans-forming body.

Several stores, like 2nd Skin, are available online for Dollification, many of which also market their wares explicitly to a variety of Trans bodies. A customer can buy just a pair of silicone breasts or else a full-body suit complete with a prosthetic vagina, ass, and face. Whether the desire is to "pass" as a born-this-way woman or else flaunt the process of objectification that comes with becoming a woman, many of the materials are the same.


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Dollification and silicone doller body parts

Valeria Lukyanova featured on Likes.com

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Materialization

As discussed in previous posts, silicone exists at the fraught intersection between living and non-living matter. Resembling our carbon-based flesh in many key properties, silicone allows for us to transform bodies by materializing a wider range possible forms. We can transform things with silicone in places that flesh limits us.

Silicone helps our eyes see new things (as contact lenses), feel new things (as personal lubrication), express new things (as make-up), possess new things (as breast implants), & fuck new things (as sex toys & sex dolls). We transform silicone into a variety of gendered & sexualized things, and in turn, these products change our bodies.

Stepping into a full-body silicone suit, a person becomes a living doll. The body becomes identified with the Real Doll sex dolls that they resemble. Laying totally still, a Living Doll and a Real Doll can be difficult to differentiate. Both are silicone covered bodies. Both may be passive to the actions and penetrations of others. 

Both fulfill the desire of owners to possess a silicone body that they are free to use & abuse. The Living Doll becomes so like an object so as to be treated like one and the Real Doll is so like an subject so as to be desired like one.

SiliconePleasure, at Dollification.com, describes how his desires materialize as a longing to have and be silicone:

"I am planning to become 100% silicone girl with a beautiful silicone face, tight small silicone hands with cute fingers, sweet silicone vagina, very tight silicone ass, and insert in myself some deep silicone rectum...completely dollified"

In this Doller's testimony, the beauty of a silicone face is inextricable from the material from which it is formed nor from the power of transformation it provides. The addition of a silicone vagina is "sweet" and the insertion of a silicone rectum goes "deep" into the body. Joy and identification flow together, materializing a new thing between subject and object, sex and silicone.

Dollification cannot be reduced to a desire to becoming object or to become woman. For many there is a joy in becoming a doll, becoming silicone. What on many Real Dolls or other Sex Dolls are features dictated by necessity of the material (open round lips, vacant round eyes, stiff joints, squeaky skin) becomes a critical to living as a Living Doll. Specific prosthetics and work goes into holding the human body in these positions. Silicone life is desired & valued.

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Dollification and silicone doller body parts
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Production

Existing at this intersection of objectification, transformation, desire and silicone emerge a host of contingent lives. Meeting in bedrooms, kink parties, conventions and online Dollers are changing what it means to be human and to have a life. They produce these transformations by coming together as a community of human and non-human things. New possibilities are produced every day out of this dizzying collision of contacts, property exchanges, & shared existence.

Dollification has deepened their internal subjectivity as much as it extended their material relations. K-8 (likely a play on "Kate") blogs on her imaginative journey as she explores her "quirks, kinks and fetishes" as The Thoughts of a Conscious Object. As part of her meditations and networking, K-8 contemplates the role anxiety and depression play in her life in the kink community.

"Currently I'm not on any depression/anxiety meds (the negative side-effects just didn't seem worth it to me) and haven't been for quite some time. And I think I'm doing fairly well without them. What I've come to realize, though, is the effect that the meds have possibly had on the blog at different points.

Sometimes side-effects aren't necessarily negative, and with a few meds I've been on, I've experienced an increased libido. In fact, I think that's partly what led to me starting this blog in the first place...being asexual (or kinksexual), having an increased libido and nowhere to direct it meant increased kinky desires, and an increase in a desire to talk about those desires. In hindsight, it also likely led to some risky behavior on my part, not being as safe as I should have with some of my early experiences exploring bondage IRL."


The psycho-neurological states of anxiety and depression at once propelled her through a series of changes: to experience her body as an anxious object and then to seek meds; to move from being an asexual body to developing her kink life as a conscious object; which in turn brought her to start a blog, meet others & continue a line of thought that led her to then abandon her meds. These changes form the story & material journey of her existence. Each transformation comes at points of contingency: the meeting of thoughts & things, pasts & futures, lives & deaths.

Most recently, K-8 shared a digital eulogy for a member of the kink community that has formed around the production of things like Dollers. Matt from Kink Engineering recently passed away. The bringing together of subjects and objects into master-pieces of kink technology supported Matt's life as an engineer and connected him to a wider community of people, things, and people-things. Matt lived and died at this intersection, as the Kink Engineering Blog explained.

"Matt’s death was a direct result of prolonged neck compression from the neck gasket. The bed he chose to go in had been custom fitted to Archean, who has a much smaller neck. The baro receptors in his internal carotid arteries signaled to his body that his blood pressure was dangerously high, and this sent off a vagal response to slow the heart. Since the signal of high blood pressure could not be relieved, Matt lost consciousness and the vagal response caused his heart to stop completely.

Had there been a person to assist outside the vac bed, they would have been able to get him out at the first sign of trouble or non-responsiveness. All Matt’s safety contingency plans relied on him still being conscious enough to implement them, and thus, they were useless."

The word "contingency" here strikes at the heart. Becoming an object for pleasure required the sustenance of subjectivity; his own and/or others from the community. The result, his death, manifests at a breaking point between his body and these subjectivities. As the engineer of many transformative love objects and as a friend, he continues to act in the world but the specific life that met at the former "contingency" leaves an absence behind.

As a warning of what can happen and as a story of what does happen, Matt's death reminds us that trans-formation (subject & object, Living Doll & Real Doll, past & present, flesh & silicone) does not collapse all things into a chaos where forms have no meaning. Change comes at the crossing or spanning of boundaries, it lives at the point of contingency. Transformation exists only through community.


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Explore more silicone
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Silicone Dollification body suit and transgender molded parts
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Silicone Dollification body suit and transgender molded parts
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Silicone Dollification body suit and transgender molded parts
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