Are you obsessed with Shelley Jackson?

Apparently I am. I looked at her website (which was linked as "IS" to her Skin project; check it out if you haven't yet) as well as some of her other projects. I don't even know how to begin to describe this, so check out the "toy" she created. Another unusual, interesting project she has is "The Doll Games." As it says on the bottom of the first screen, it has to do with "doll sex, doll mutilation, transgender dolls, prosthetic doll penises, doll death, doll dreams." She and her sister "began" it in 1970's when they played with and mutilated dolls. As Jackson says, "The Doll Games emerged in Berkeley, California at a time when race, gender, politics, and sexuality were fiercely and publicly debated. Indeed, as the dolls were taking their first steps toward literary history, the artists' family was opening a feminist bookstore just down the street from People's Park. The Doll Games' privately staged confrontations between androgynes and 'dainty ladies,' their outlaw utopias and anarchic child societies, and their uncompromising moral vision, cannot be understood without reference to the larger public discourse within which they took place." Cool concept, I think. You can look through journals they wrote for the dolls or look at pictures of transformed, reconfigured dolls. (As a sidenote, I immeditaley clicked on "voyeurism" photo album because, as I posted earlier, I was trying to understand what that word means. I thought the pictures made sense, because they are crotch shots of the dolls, but then I realized that the other albums contain similar photos. Oh well.)

As interesting and at times creepy as the project is, though, I can't seem to begin analyzing it in the way that we studied Skin. I thought the number eleven-- "play with us"--section was really funny and cool. It invites visitors to share their doll stories with the Jackson's (which I assume they then use for the doll interview section). I found it especially funny because the authors/creators admit how they are not democratic when they choose what they will include on their website. They write: "We may also reject your contribution if we take a strange dislike to your email address, if your findings don't support our theories, if we have recently been rejected ourselves, or if we wish to give ourselves a feeling of power. In other words, this project is neither democratic nor thorough. It is conducted according to whim. That's how we like it." I feel like a similar selection process might have occurred with Skin, especially since there were so many applicants, but I'm not sure...