[Last modified: October, 21 2024 11:17 AM]
I plan to conduct research into the reborn community on social media, which is a group of women and girls who buy, make, and roleplay parenthood with extremely lifelike “reborn” dolls. Most are designed to replicate the ages of newborn (including premature) to around one year old. These dolls are weighted and painted to feel as close to reality as possible, and many of the owners go through the exact motions of motherhood with them: giving bottles, changing diapers, taking for public outings, and sometimes even breastfeeding. Currently, my research question is:
- Why do these women spend a large amount of time and money on these dolls, when the action of doing so (especially publicly) is non-normative?
I’d also like to explore the bonds formed in this activity: between owner and doll and between owner and other owners.
My positionality will undoubtedly play a role in this research. I am a mother of two (human) children, so I have experienced the ups and downs of raising of a newborn twice over. I will doubtless have some personal biases stemming from that. To complicate things, I was raised in a very traditional culture that held motherhood as the pinnacle of existence for a woman. I followed that path to a point, but my current feelings about gender roles are quite different and will grant me biases in regard to the way the teenage girls in this community fetishize the actions of motherhood.
As the name implies, some owners of reborn dolls use them as a way to cope with pregnancy or infant loss. My positionality as a person who has experienced pregnancy loss grants me a type of empathy that may be helpful in my participant observation of this community. It may also help gain the trust of interlocuters, many of whom also have living children like myself.
Two other big parts of my positionality to consider are class and education. I was raised in a lower financial bracket, but I am currently living an upper-middle class life in my home country. A large portion of reborn owners seem to be in the working class and sometimes with a lower level of education. I have a lot of internalized biases from the way I was raised, including implicit judgments about education and intelligence. No anthropologist can go into a fieldsite completely neutral, but I will certainly need to stay aware of these potential biases during my research. As Danny Miller says, anthropology is a discipline of “radical empathy,” and so I will design my research in a way that avoids pre-suppositions and allows the interlocuters to speak for themselves.