Table of Contents

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

About the Author

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

“. . . warmly recommended, especially to young researchers facing challenges in their choices of obscure, poorly documented topics.”
—H-Sci-Med-Tech