CLASS DESCRIPTION

This lecture examines the doll as both a culturally significant and a deeply gendered object, following its long trajectory from prehistoric figurines to contemporary artistic practices. Starting with three central case studies (the Venus of Willendorf, the Anatomical Venus, and Barbie) the session considers how dolls and doll play reflect and shape dominant ideas about femininity, beauty, embodiment, and discipline. Drawing on feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and material culture studies, it explores not only what dolls represent but also what people do with them: how play creates a space where desire, projection, control, and fantasy converge, and where social norms can be rehearsed, resisted, or inverted.

Alongside this historical and conceptual framework, the lecture briefly turns to examples from modern and contemporary art where artists work with dolls or doll-like figures to think about the gendered body, the double, or the abject. These artistic moments help illuminate how the cultural functions of the doll persist, shift, and reappear, and how the figure of the doll continues to offer a way to question how bodies are represented, gendered, and understood.

ABOUT OUR LECTURER

Dr Anna Johnson (they/them) is a writer, poet and lecturer, and earlier this year completed their PhD in creative writing at Kingston University. Anna lectures in creative writing and runs writing workshops. They hold a first-class BA (hons) in History and Theory of Art, University of Kent and an MA in Fine Art, Central Saint Martins. Anna lives and works in East London.

Anna’s prose/poetry life writing practice, and research, centre around motherhood, haunting and failure, drawing on, amongst other things, disability theory, queer and feminist theory.

They have published widely, both academic and creative works, and their first full-length prose-poetry work (as Anna Brook), Motherhood: a ghost story, is out with Broken Sleep Books. They are also currently guest editor of Studies in the Maternal journal.

INSTAGRAM: @annaotheranna
WEBSITE: https://www.annabrook.co.uk/

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This is a recording of a live session hosted by The Feminist Lecture Program in January 2026. The reading list for the class can be found alongside this rental.

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