Paper short abstract:

Irena Hayter considers the images of the first Japanese fashion models as robots and of the mannequin dolls as sentient, within the context of rationalization of bodies and machines during the interwar years.

Paper long abstract:

Japan’s robot boom from the late 1920s, with its proliferation of cultural images of robots and artificial humans (jinzō ningen), overlapped with the furore over the first fashion models. ‘Mannequin girls’ were hired by department stores to pose still in show windows or on specially created displays. Like other women in new jobs related to new technologies or urban spectacle (telephone operators, elevator girls, ‘gasoline girls’, etc.), they were often described as soulless and machinic. Show window mannequins, on the other hand, also objects of media fascination, were sometimes depicted in terms reserved for humans, with language slipping between the sentient and the inorganic.

My paper traces these crossings of ontological boundaries and the traffic of meanings between live models, mannequin dolls and robots, along with the European literary and filmic intertexts that structured them – Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (1920), Metropolis (dir. Fritz Lang, 1927) and Alraune (dir. Henrik Galeen, 1928). I argue that the artificial woman is both a philosophical toy appropriate to an age of mechanical reproduction and a fantasy construct mediating anxieties about the becoming-machine and becoming-commodity of the human body. The artificial woman gave concrete form to relations of capital, labour and power, in a manner strikingly similar to that of our own historical moment.