Academic approaches to the BJD hobby?

I know people have in the past here on DOA done polls for research papers. Some people have just asked a few questions and people copy and paste questions in a post with their answers added. As far as history of bjd hobby Wikipedia, and the difference between eastern and western hobbyists try either designing a question form of look to YouTube.

If you put questions in general discussion thread you will get a lot of replies. I can tell you the age range as well as years in hobby will vary greatly, as well as taste in types of BJD collected.

 

I stumbled across a reference to BJDs, comparing them to the surrealist constructs of Hans Bellmer, in the chapter "Girls in lace dresses: the intersections of Gothic in Japanese Youth fiction and fashion" from "New Directions in Children's Gothic: Debatable Lands" edited by Anna Jackson (2017).

 

Cursory looking thru JSTOR uncovers only brief references in a work on otaku culture, so that would be no.

I’d love to read some research on dolls (no, not on DoA members, I don’t think that’s what OP is looking for either). Modern machine learning could probably be applied to assess what facial feature ratios and body/limb ratios are preeminent in sculpts, which would be very very interesting.

 

On the podcast ningyo-bingo they have a few episodes discussing these topics. I listen to the podcast on stitcher (it's an ok app) but you can probably listen from their website or if you have a preferred podcast app it might be there.

 

I actually have read one for a class, and I was planning to do BJD research myself this year but because of the whole COVID fiasco I had to postpone my project. I'm still planning to conduct research, hopefully next year, and I was hoping to conduct it both in the US and in Japan (because I'm planning to study abroad). Unfortunately, the only fully academic paper I've read on BJD was a little.... well, I disagreed with a lot of it. It was a very Freudian analysis of men's relationship with different types of dolls (love dolls, dakimakura, and BJD) all in one article. It was interesting, but I didn't feel that the author adequately researched the culture surrounding BJD, to be honest. It didn't really acknowledge female and GNC people who collect BJD, which I'd argue make up a huge portion of collectors, at least in the US.

They also didn't distinguish between Dollfie Dream and Super Dollfie (their research was focused on Volks since it was Japan-based and a bit older) and the cultures surrounding those are so different that this seemed like a big problem with the article to me. For example, from my own observations there seem to be more male DD collectors and female resin BJD collectors (not universal at all of course! I myself collect both, haha) as a general trend, and the way they interact with their dolls tends to be somewhat different between the two groups. Sorry, went off on a tangent there but I had a lot of issues with that article to be honest!

If you're interested, this is the article (I read it for my Gender and Sexuality in Japan course last semester):
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14649365.2016.1228112
As you can see from the abstract, it's not really focused on BJD but about men and dolls in general, and dolls as forms of alternative intimacy. It is a very interesting read, but take the information about BJD culture with a grain of salt because I can tell they didn't do a huge amount of BJD-specific research or actually speak to collectors. And keep in mind it is focused solely on the Japanese male market (no problem with that of course, but it's not the only market for BJD, as you can see from this forum).

This isn't really an academic article, but it is by an anthropologist who has done academic research on otaku culture, maid cafes, and other pop culture subjects in Japan: https://japantoday.com/category/features/lifestyle/plastic-fantastic-japans-doll-industry-booming
It's more of a news article, but I appreciate Galbraith's writing about it since he is knowledgeable about Japanese pop culture and he writes from an anthropological perspective.

I hope this helps, and I hope it's okay that I shared these on here! I know it isn't allowed to conduct research on DOA but I'm hoping it's okay to share these articles.

 

I think searching for preexisting academic papers specifically on BJDs won't turn up much, since it's such a small, relatively new hobby. Interested parties would have better luck searching for general doll-figures in art, specifically surrealist art. Try reading analyses of the works of Hans Bellmer's dolls and Cindy Sherman's medical model photos.

 

It's definitely been done by one person. She wrote her thesis on BJD culture and posted about it on a Facebook forum. Here is the thesis:
https://curve.carleton.ca/system/files/etd/9c061a92-c4d8-4900-87b0-7d5234c354d2/etd_pdf/6f4907c5fdf53404d419baf7fbc56488/guo-theriseofdollmommiesanddolldaddiesinchina.pdf

 

mikeg. thanks for. sharing this interesting thesis-very relatable to alot of us 'collectors'

love that the history is pretty clear in what I remember when I began collecting in 2004

 

@mikeg thank you for linking that! It’s a wealth of hobby information from someone with knowledge of dolls and an eye towards accuracy, which is more than that “Into the Arms...” paper seems to have afforded BJDs (I guess understandable given that the paper was discussing dolls in the narrow context of fertility.) I enjoyed learning about the particulars of the hobby in China as well, am always curious about what specifics differ between hobby communities around the world.

 

@mikeg Thank you for that link. It's such a fascinating read!