Gender Plasticity: Fashion Dolls and Queer Aesthetic Labor

This article argues that the designing and dressing of fashion dolls are forms of queer aesthetic labor that engage in gender plasticity, enabling new aesthetic possibilities for envisioning gendered bodies in contemporary fashion. Through exploration of the interactions between the doll, maker, and dresser, I contend that such labor creates speculative futures which challenge binary gender narratives. By integrating reflective artistic practice, queer theory, and fashion studies, I comprehend the designing, dressing, and restyling of dolls as practices of queer worldmaking, whereby the plasticity and artifice of the bodily surface are central to the envisioning of gender as a fantasy beyond our social construct. Here, gender is framed not as an embodied experience but as an aesthetic negotiation, as exemplified by the fashion doll. By examining the connections between dolls and drag performance, the article demonstrates that both nonhuman and human bodies are shaped through intersecting economies of desire and creativity, which are in turn sustained by aesthetic work. Ultimately, this investigation broadens our understanding of visual queer aesthetic practice in fashion beyond corporeal self-fashioning, and it positions fashion dolls as repositories of queer sensibilities and speculative canvases for imagining gender in fashion and visual culture.