Paper short abstract:

Reborn dolls, hand-crafted baby dolls that are ultra-realistic in appearance, are collected and used by women who enact care as hobby. Looking at the use of reborns in pregnancy-loss support networks they can be viewed as meaningful forms of resistance upon which women negotiate mother-identities.

Paper long abstract:

Reborn dolls, handcrafted dolls designed to be ultra-realistic in appearance, size, weight, feel, and even smell, provide their makers and collectors with interactive experiences in which maternal care is constructed as a hobby. These dolls are, to "reborners" and outsiders alike, different from other types of dolls in both form and function. The doll's ability to simulate newborns so effectively is at once their appeal to the reborn community, and a source of anxiety to outside critics. The dolls have, notably, been put to use as child stand-ins, memorializing representations of children, therapeutic tools, and coping mechanisms and the relationship between dolls and collectors was at the center of my research. This paper aims to look at how reborn dolls are used to reclaim mother-identities, specifically in support networks for women who have experienced pregnancy loss and involuntary childlessness, through the use of ethnographic research within the community. In it I will draw attention to the many ways in which working class women, excluded from utilizing reproductive technologies which allow middle class women to address reproductive set-backs, use reborn dolls to similarly resist their status as non-mothers. Through creation rituals and role-playing activities in which the dolls act as secondary agents and are essential actors in performances of motherhood, reborners are active in constructing motherhood as a practice which is accessible to them, often in spite of involuntary childlessness or pregnancy loss.