Sex Dolls at Sea

Imagined Histories of Sexual Technologies

Bo Ruberg

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English

MIT Press
14 June 2022

Technology: general issues

Series: Media Origins

Investigating and reimagining the origin story of the sex doll through the tale of the sailor's dames de voyage.

Investigating and reimagining the origin story of the sex doll through the tale of the sailor's dames de voyage.

The sex doll and its high-tech counterpart the sex robot have gone mainstream, as both the object of consumer desire and the subject of academic study. But sex dolls, and sexual technology in general, are nothing new. Sex dolls have been around for centuries. In Sex Dolls at Sea, Bo Ruberg explores the origin story of the sex doll, investigating its cultural implications and considering who has been marginalized and who has been privileged in the narrative.

Ruberg examines the generally accepted story that the first sex dolls were dames de voyage, rudimentary figures made of cloth and leather scraps by European sailors on long, lonely ocean voyages in centuries past. In search of supporting evidence for the lonesome sailor sex doll theory, Ruberg uncovers the real history of the sex doll. The earliest commercial sex dolls were not the dames de voyage but the femmes en caoutchouc- ""women"" made of inflatable vulcanized rubber, beginning in the late nineteenth century.

Interrogating the sailor sex doll origin story, Ruberg finds beneath the surface a web of issues relating to gender, sexuality, race, and colonialism. What has been lost in the history of the sex doll and other sex tech, Ruberg tells us, are the stories of the sex workers, women, queer people, and people of color whose lives have been bound up with these technologies.

By: Bo Ruberg
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 369g
ISBN: 9780262543675
ISBN 10: 0262543672
Series: Media Origins
Pages: 296
Publication Date: 14 June 2022
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

"Series Foreword ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction: ""The Beginning of the Modern Sex Doll""--Imagining the History of Sex Tech 1 I Searching for the Very First Sex Doll 29 1 Contemporary Tales of the Dames de Voyage: The History of an Imagined History 31 2 How Fantasy Became History: The Dames de Voyage in Pseudoscience, Erotica, and Advertising 59 3 The Birth of the Dames de Voyage: From Sex Workers to the Sexual Technologies of Sailors 89 4 ""All Is Rubber!"": The Femmes en Caoutchouc and the Actual Origins of the Commercial Sex Doll 115 II Interrogating the Story of the Very First Sex Doll 147 5 Making Sex Tech Masculine, Making Sex Tech Straight: The Disavowal and Return of Femininity and Queerness 149 6 From Bamboo Lovers to Undersea Kingdoms: Colonialism and Race in Stories of Sailors' Sex Dolls 171 7 Legitimizing Sex with Technology: Prisoners, Nazis, Misogynists, and the Origin Stories that Go Untold 193 Conclusion: Reclaiming the Dames de Voyage--The Feminist Potential of a Fictional Past 213 Notes 227 Index 275"

Bo Ruberg is Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of The Queer Games Avant-Garde and Video Games Have Always Been Queer.

Reviews for Sex Dolls at Sea: Imagined Histories of Sexual Technologies

“. . . Warmly recommended, especially to young researchers facing challenges in their choices of obscure, poorly documented topics.” —H-Sci-Med-Tech “By challenging established narratives, amplifying underrepresented voices, and offering a critical analysis of the intersections between technology and sexuality, the book provides a unique and thought-provoking perspective on the history of sex technology, a topic whose shrouding in stigma and taboo has for too long affected its academic rigor.” —Winterthur Portfolio “Diving deep into the citational traces of sex doll history and transitioning to the potential Afrofuturist retellings of the dames de voyage, Ruberg aims to alter the course of sex tech by queering and challenging the attempts to masculinize, heterosexualize and naturalize the all-male past of cited sex doll history.” —International Journal of Communication