I was also translating the French rap project Pretty Dollcorpse with my friends. It came out in October; I listened to it at a friend’s urging in November, and it quickly rose up the ranks as one of my favorite releases of last year. I can recommend it with no holds barred, but please do note that the project was realized as the contending and conversation of two artists with their respective traumatic experiences—child sexual abuse, juvenile prostitution, gender dysphoria, and homophobic bullying, to name the most prominent themes. The “doll” motif emerges to signal the breakability, breaking, and subsequent (and almost antithetical?) corpsification of an object meant to be—but is not quite—cute/pretty. Here inserting a Sianne Ngai excerpt with diction that resonates:
“... commercially manufactured dolls were made almost solely of hard materials, with easily breakable, finely painted bisque heads mounted on bodies made of wood, pewter, steel, and even “electroplated sheet metal.” Like the fully jointed, highly ornate, talking Big Beauty advertised by the American Mechanical Doll Works Company in 1895, most of these dolls were also mechanical or machinelike and easily breakable—which is to say, by contemporary standards, not particularly cute.”
In that same section, Ngai discusses Francis Ponge anthropomorphizing an orange in L’Orange to conceptualize the human construction, manufacturing and imposition of cuteness in/of/onto objects—which typically involves giving them face, making them humanlike and thus cute(r) but not-human in a way that often prevents cuteness from being fully realized—as a violent and dominating gesture. For some context, here’s L’Orange’s first paragraph translated:
“Like the sponge, the orange aspires to regain face after enduring the ordeal of expression. But where the sponge always succeeds, the orange never does; for its cells have burst, its tissues are torn. While the rind alone is flabbily recovering its form, thanks to its resilience, an amber liquid has oozed out, accompanied, as we know, by sweet refreshment, sweet perfume-but also by the bitter awareness of a premature expulsion of pips as well.”
In the poem, the coercive bestowing of face—humanlikeness—is, against conventional expectation, actively disempowering and humiliating; it is an ordeal that makes the anthropomorphized orange “lose face.” It’s violent, in a way, especially because cuteness is constructed → imposed and its assignation is not consented to by the orange/ analogously lifeless object similarly unable to consent e.g. doll. “With its exaggerated passivity, there is a sense in which the cute thing is the most reified or thinglike of things, the most objectified of objects or even an “object” par excellence.” When uncanny life is bestowed onto the forcibly-made-cute thing for its makers to commodify it however they see fit, the objectification that comes with being a humanized-but-not-human object can be of greater(?) injury.
This is where we go back to Pretty Dollcorpse, and I’m thinking of the lines “Pour cette merde, on meurt, de toute façon, on était déjà morts/ Déjà morts bien avant l'heure” and “Ça m'enrichit quand tous ces gueux s'la touchent en m'guettant nécroser” in particular. Translation: “For this shit, we die, anyway, we were already dead/ Dead way before the hour came” + “It gets me filthy rich when those beggars jack off to my necrosis.” Children have restricted—if not a complete lack of—exercisable autonomy; for some in abusive environments or on walks of life structurally consigned to disposability, this is akin to a lack of life, something-like-death. Then when you have your sense of barely-self and what little you can exercise of that childhood autonomy trampled all over by something so personally violating like sexual abuse and the forcible commodification of your body, it can be a “death” that keeps you dying over and over again, reinforcing that not-life-ness of oppressive childhood over and over. As a kid, you’re denied autonomy and personhood in a way that renders you property of the Family—property of adults—an object; then broken, with breakability perceived of you, you become a doll, imbued with commodified purpose you didn’t ask for, and becoming-doll is becoming-dead again, just more(?) injuriously in a way, a slow, necrotizing process. You’re forced to live out your commercial purpose and monetary value, and purchasedness and/or purchasability defines your entire not-life not-death unending process of dying. (Woah sounds like a certain someone talking about boughtness! Consult Contenere Pg13.)
So that’s the type of doll-ness I was working with in the other project. I think the thematic core of Pretty Dollcorpse bled into Dolly’s preoccupation with wanting life/ being forced (though by whom? just State of Things gestured vaguely at?) to live a not-life/ wanting the viscerality of death, which would’ve meant she at least did live, fully, for a while—something richer than the boxed-up not-life she experiences with/in a body she dispossesses. Dolly starts off incredibly bitter, you know. She’s ridiculous, and the things she thinks up are ridiculous, so instances like her being jealous of the teddy bear for “getting to” get vomit particles on him end up being almost funny. (frenchie note: i laughed at that part, along with the stupid fucker namecalling because girl… girl how do you know that… so um, it is funny… to me.) But I sometimes reread the first dollysection and feel sad for her—there’s a sense of having been wronged that she keeps lashing against and trying to win over, even to the end, in her dejected “ha” interjections and the quietness—not passivity—with which she receives and reacts to everything, that “I have been wronged all (not-)life long, and now weird things that don’t necessarily leave me feeling wronged are happening, but I’m used to (what I think is) the worst, so whatever happens happens” undercurrent of her every thought and in how she strings them into language.
the postmortem for CONTENERE, our #dollandkigujam hybrid novella, is coming soon! in the meantime, i’ve excerpted here some reflections on pretty dollcorpse, an album that helped shape how i wrote morbidity into one of our character’s desire for life
![Do you get why I couldn’t be toxic? Dolly’s mission to hate was cut off by Kigu being cute. Her moe is unmatched.)
[reze receiving the flower denji threw up captioned: "Dolly after seeing the atonement pancakes: MISSION POSTPONED !!!!!"]
[reze & denji in battle captioned: Kigudolly scissors scene if we went down the evil route]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:4zyrrflinshzohiy77als6d6/bafkreih2e4sln67vltgpqfwklopmnl2snc3yp67xnx72kmnesxkrvzrhmi)
