european journal of

Article

‘Let’s play mummy’: European Journal of Cultural Studies

14(1) 25–39
© The Author(s) 2011
Simulacrum babies Reprints and permissions: sagepub.
co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
and reborn mothers DOI: 10.1177/1367549410377142
ecs.sagepub.com

Louise Fitzgerald
University of East Anglia

Abstract
This essay serves as a response to the ‘nightmarish’ discourse that emerged after the broadcast
of Channel 4 ‘shock doc’ My Fake Baby. I will argue that the disproportionately excessive and
intense response to My Fake Baby mirrors the programme’s extreme emphasis on the trope of
motherhood. As such, this article considers how the construction and articulation of different
forms of motherhood and femininity within the show functioned successfully to articulate
ideologies about, and displays of, problematic, inept, immature and non-maternal failed femininity.
I consider why images of mature women ‘playing’ with dolls should prompt such a cultural furore,
and explore why these female figures were perceived as symptomatic of a much deeper cultural
crisis about contemporary femininity.

Keywords
Channel 4, female play, maternalism, postfeminism, Reborn dolls, shock doc, simulacra babies

Introduction
On Wednesday 2 January 2008, the UK’s Channel 4 aired two ‘shock docs’ back-to-back:
Half Ton Mom (8pm), which told the story of Renee Williams, a morbidly obese His-
panic lone mother; and My Fake Baby (9pm), which explored the phenomenon of Reborn
dolls – that is, dolls that look like real babies, as their primetime viewing.1 In the follow-
ing days the two programmes yielded a flurry of popular media and audience attention.
Women’s magazines printed interviews with Jamie Eaton, the Reborn dollmaker fea-
tured in My Fake Baby, and images of Renee Williams emerged as a common feature of
internet websites where her body became a site for ridicule and violent sexual innuendo.

Corresponding author:
Louise FitzGerald, School of Film and Television Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich,
Norfolk NR4 7TJ, UK.
Email: louise.fitzgerald@uea.ac.uk

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26 European Journal of Cultural Studies 14(1)

The Channel 4 teatime show, Richard and Judy, dedicated 20 minutes of airtime to an
interview (in the presence of in-house psychiatrist Dr Raj Persaud) with two of the
women from My Fake Baby. Channel 4 also responded to vast numbers of requests from
the British public for a repeat airing of the documentary, which was broadcast again on
28 January 2008 at 9pm. In the following days, extracts from My Fake Baby and Half Ton
Mom proved to be the most popular clips on many UK websites, testifying to the rich
digital afterlife that shows such as these regularly acquire.
While the number of hits recorded on websites demonstrated the feverish activity of
members of the public hoping to catch a glimpse of the programmes that everyone
seemed to be talking about, hundreds of internet forum sites offered the public an oppor-
tunity to voice its response to the merits of both shows. Reactions characterizing the
participants ranged from the obscene and offensive to those that revelled in the seem-
ingly inherent pathos foregrounded in the women’s stories. Outside the internet forum
debates, talk about Half Ton Mom and My Fake Baby thrived, with many respondents
speaking of being so ‘freaked’ by the women on the show that they had experienced
nightmares.
This article serves as a response to the ‘nightmarish’ discourse surrounding My Fake
Baby: a discourse which, I suggest, has become disproportionate in volume and inten-
sity in relation to the programme itself. Indeed, I will argue that the excessive response
to My Fake Baby mirrors the programme’s extreme emphasis on the trope of mother-
hood. As such, this article will consider how the construction and articulation of differ-
ent forms of motherhood and femininity within the show functioned successfully to
articulate ideologies about, and displays of, problematic, inept, immature and non-
maternal failed femininity. I consider why images of mature women ‘playing’ with dolls
should prompt such a cultural furore, and explore why these female figures were per-
ceived as symptomatic of a much deeper cultural crisis about contemporary femininity.
This article will argue that the images of mature women holding dolls, as profiled in My
Fake Baby, exemplify a particularly postfeminist categorization of dysfunctional femi-
ninity that is consolidated in a prevailing discourse about infertility, reproduction,
motherhood and the female ageing process.
Central to the thematic concerns of this article are issues of play and gender. Thus, by
drawing from and engaging with social theories and cultural discourses about the social
function of play, I aim to provide a conceptual framework (albeit not an exhaustive one)
which might help to contextualize some of the reactions to My Fake Baby that were
voiced by entertainment correspondents and internet forum users alike. I will argue that
the punitive approach taken to the women in the programme reflects cultural and social
perceptions in the UK and other western countries about gendered play, and suggest that
while ‘play’ seems to have moved from a childhood prerogative towards an increasingly
adult one, ‘play’ for adult women is still regarded as inappropriate and symptomatic of
female pathology.2 Such cultural assumptions made about female play and female pathol-
ogy are evident in the crude responses articulated in internet forums after the broadcast
of My Fake Baby.
Thus this article contends that the ‘strangeness’ of watching women ‘playing’ with life-
like dolls foreground in My Fake Baby mediates any challenges to this postfeminist era,3 in
which some women are trying to fill gaps in their emotional worlds with what are,

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Fitzgerald 27

essentially, moulded pieces of plastic. I will argue that in focusing on the spectacle of grown
women engaging with childlike activity, we are in danger of ignoring the wider social, polit-
ical and cultural issues at play which have encouraged women to invest emotionally and
financially in plastic dolls. By systematically reinforcing established or traditional concep-
tualizations of gender, age and culturally sanctioned play activities, My Fake Baby prompted
bloggers and entertainment critics alike to refer to the women foregrounded in the show as
‘abnormal’, ‘insane’, ‘nutters’, ‘psychos’, ‘weird’, ‘horrifying’ and ‘creepy’.

Child’s play
Since the late 18th century, play has been an important mechanism for defining and
enforcing boundaries between adult and child.4 From the time of the Industrial Revolu-
tion, the paradigm of child, toy and play emerged as a distinctive cultural template
employed to define childhood as a distinct life stage requiring different philosophies of
care to facilitate good psychological development. The cultural and political sanctifica-
tion of the Victorian middle-class nuclear family positioned childhood as a distinct
period of innocence, nurturance and psychological formation, and play was heralded by
religious leaders, philosophers, philanthropists, health experts and heads of industry as
the locus for the discovery and development of the ‘self’. It was in this context that the
relationship between gender, consumerism and religious ideology informed philosophies
of gender-appropriate play which proselytized particularly prescriptive play activities for
young middle-class girls. Indeed, Miriam Formanek-Brunell’s historical account of the
production and consumption of dolls describes how the doll became the central tool in
directing girls ‘towards usefulness in their play as natural training in conservative values
they would need as future wives and mothers of citizens’ (Brunell, 1998: 1). As such, doll
play became synonymous with unformed and immature displays of pretend motherhood,
and served as specific and solid markers in the rituals of a particularly middle-class form
of female socialization and maturation. Indeed, the substantial investment in doll play as
a crucial factor in the successful formation of femininity remains intact: to see a young
boy playing with a doll still invites suspicion and ridicule, despite the many challenges
to the gendering of play and politics of cultural socialization.
Yet, despite these well-established ideas about gender, age and appropriate play which
have shaped collective perceptions of childhood, revision of the trilateral relationship
between these three concepts is currently emerging as a growing area for cultural studies
research. Prompted in the main by the arrival of the computer, PlayStation games, virtual
gaming and so on, these virtual gaming arenas have blurred, albeit superficially, the
boundaries of age and gender-related play, prompted community play and opened the
boundaries of global interactive play. Undoubtedly such technological advances have
challenged some cultural assumptions to do with the concept of play, but the majority of
these games are still categorized according to gender and age. ‘Gaming’ is generally
perceived to be a male prerogative associated with a form of extended male adolescence
encouraged by the gaming industry, and illustrated in the recent emergence of ‘Brom
com’ films from directors such as Judd Apatow, whose cinematic ‘rejuveniles’ are cele-
brated in films such as 40 Year Old Virgin (2005) and Knocked Up (2007).

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28 European Journal of Cultural Studies 14(1)

The recent cultural celebration of the rejuvenile is the subject of Christopher

Noxon’s ‘pop’ sociology text Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes and The Revo-
lution of the American Grown-Up (2006), in which he documents the growing number
of American adults who refuse to consign the pleasure of play to their childhood years.
Beginning his account with what can only be described as a call to arms, Noxon writes
that the rejuvenile is

wagging all out assaults against longstanding notions of young and old, mature and immature
… It’s hard to imagine a time in previous eras where adults are so unashamedly engaging in
their inner child. (Noxon, 2006: 1–2)

Noxon’s reference to the inner child acknowledges a shift in conceptualizing play as

a solely childish pursuit that evolved from the lexicon of new age therapies, which posit
that play for adults is vital for physical and emotional well-being. Yet, even as Noxon
exults a cultural moment in which he sees a ‘new breed of adult, identified by determina-
tion to remain playful, energetic and flexible in the face of adult responsibilities’, he
qualifies his enthusiasm by noting that for many observers, ‘adults who indulge in child’s
play are nothing more than poster children for a culture in crisis … perceived as some-
how out of joint … a touch, perhaps more than a touch, grotesque’(Noxon, 2006: 2).
Noxon’s caveat reinforces the notion that the activity of playing, of pretending and
imagining, rests on a certain set of rules to do with age. Frank Kendon, author of The
Small Years, agrees:

Pretending is a child’s art alone, and grown-ups cannot practice it, they can only act. The pre-
tender has no audience but himself [sic], he is not trying to appear like the character, he is that
character and feels like it. (Kendon, 1950: 57–8)

If, as Kendon intimates, the difference between adults who, as he claims, act rather
than pretend, and children who become the character in play, is the principle that distin-
guishes child play from adult play, how do we begin to understand the actions of mature
women who buy dolls for the explicit purpose of feeling like – and more importantly,
being identified as – mothers, as seen on Channel 4’s My Fake Baby?
I argue that in a postfeminist cultural environment that emphasizes age freedom while
policing age dictates (chronological female markers of marriage and motherhood as the
nexus of mature female identity) in ever more repressive ways, the images of women
bonding with dolls in the same manner as young girls strays outside our cultural imaging
of ‘natural behaviour’.5 Thus I suggest the grotesqueness conjured by My Fake Baby is
grounded in its depiction of simulacra babies and the ‘unnatural’ behaviour of mature
women performing motherhood with a doll.

Simulacrum babies and Reborn mothers

The French social theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote that a simulacrum is not a copy of the
real, rather, it becomes truth in its own right – the hyperreal. The concept of hyperreality

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Fitzgerald 29

designates or highlights the failure of consciousness to distinguish reality from fantasy

(Baudrillard, 1994). For the viewers of My Fake Baby, montage images of Reborn dolls
laying in cots, being played with and cooed over by grown women as if they were live
infants, and referred to by their names by the programme’s narrator, assaulted percep-
tions of reality and fantasy. More importantly, My Fake Baby relied on and exploited its
central subjects’ slippage between moments of ‘pretence’, where the women attested to
‘feeling’ like a mother, and reality, when for at least two of the women in the show, moth-
erhood was a central role in their ‘actual’ lives. This paradox begs the question: why
would these women freely refer to ‘feeling’ like a mother with a Reborn doll while ignor-
ing their actual status as biological mothers? Although this is a deeply interesting issue,
and one that I hope to address, I want to offer a brief account of the consumer history and
commodity status of the Reborn doll in order to contextualize further analyses.
Reborns, silicone babies and OAKK babies (clay-like sculptures) are at the centre of
an international industry of state-of-the-art collectable dolls that retail for anywhere from
£250 to £1,000. It is difficult to be precise about the potential economic effect of this
specific doll-making industry (primarily because it is home-based, coded as a female
hobby and sells mainly via internet, craft fairs and mail order). However, some evidence
of the flourishing nature of the business of ‘Reborning’ is attested by Jamie Eaton,
Reborner and entrepreneur featured in My Fake Baby, who claimed to have a four-year
waiting list for commissions of her Reborn dolls. Further proof of the financial value of
Reborn dolls was voiced by Mary Flint, My Fake Baby’s self-confessed obsessive collec-
tor of the dolls, who claimed to have spent in the region of £25,000 on her ‘babies’.
Indeed, in a response to vicious criticism of her hobby received after the airing of the
show, Mary pointed out that since the broadcast, her doll collection had doubled in value.
What is more, interest in Reborn dolls rose exponentially since the airing of My Fake
Baby, with eBay placing the dolls in its top 10 most wanted items. At the time of writing,
a cursory look on eBay showed 2856 Reborn products for auction on the British site,
which were being sold by 1656 eBay sellers. A quick analysis of figures confirms that
more than 6000 sellers send to UK and North America addresses. This figure excludes
eBay Germany, eBay France and other non-English speaking countries.
According to the Richard and Judy show, Reborning began in the USA some five or
six years ago. While the doll-making practice finds its origins in the USA, the Reborning
community is global, with the internet providing a myriad of forums for Reborners to
share their skills and testimonies from happy customers apparently delighted to declare
the arrival of their ‘newborns’. While some testimonials speak to the quality of Reborn
craftsmanship, most employ the language of motherhood and birth. Whether or not this is
a marketing technique is not the most important question here; rather, it is more important
to consider how and why motherhood is being packaged, sold and consumed in this way.
The origins of the term ‘Reborns’ evolved from a recycling process, creating a new
doll from an older one. However, it seems that the term ‘Reborning’ has taken on new
meaning, since the vast majority of Reborn dolls are no longer recycled. I argue that the
rhetoric of Reborning is a proactive marketing language for Reborners who imbue the
dolls with special meaning by implying a process of giving life back to something that
has already existed (resurrecting) rather than an industrial venture. Given the emphasis
of this article on the subject of motherhood, the notion of resurrection is particularly apt

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30 European Journal of Cultural Studies 14(1)

for the women in My Fake Baby who describe being reborn as mothers. However the
language of Reborning also connotes a connection with the spiritual or religious; an
association further reinforced by Reborners who have ventured out of the world of dolls
as collectable items into the ‘actual’ world by offering their services to parents grieving
over the death of a child.
Referred to as Memorial Reborns, their creators use family photographs of the
deceased to resurrect a ‘reborn’ copy of the child. The link between Christianity, or more
pointedly, Born Again Christianity, is made ever more apparent on the ‘Memorial
Reborns’ websites, which include overt references to passages in the Bible, praise given
to God for the ‘gift’ of Reborning, and images and allusions to deceased children being
reborn as angels. It is also worth noting that the majority of Reborners advertise their
support of pro-life groups. To attempt to theorize the slippage between reality and fan-
tasy in the case of bereaved parents commissioning a simulacrum of their dead child is
perhaps slightly insensitive (although it is not so hard to berate those Reborners who
profit from the grief of bereavement). In a culture which heralds consumerism as a pal-
liative for all sorts of trauma, Memorial Reborn websites attest to the popularity and
success of the commercialization of grief in photo-montage displays of plastic replicas
of dead children with messages attached from the bereaved parents.
However macabre the Memorial Reborn business might seem, the principle aims of
Reborners are to ‘present quality Reborn babies while providing the freedom to express
our art’ (http://laurieslullabies.com, author unknown). A professional Reborner will
place an order for a specific type of doll, i.e. the ‘eyes wide open’ model or the ‘pre-
termer’ from manufacturers who deliver the separate parts along with a signed certificate
of authenticity. The non-gendered reborn doll kits, which retail for approximately £30,
arrive at the homes of the Reborners.6 Once the limbs and head have been heated in the
oven or microwave, the Reborner begins the task of Reborning, enhancing the vinyl doll
to look and feel like a baby, attaching arms and legs to a weighted body (filled with what
is termed as simulated baby fat), applying the ‘Genesis Heat Set’ paint (note the name)
to give a mottling effect to the skin, puncturing the skull to knit in the hair, glossing the
lips so that they are perpetually moist and so on. As one Reborn artist explains:

Each baby is given a new jointed body, even their heads are weighted down so you have to support
their heads when you pick them up. Detail by detail, the baby is born. (http://laurieslullabies.com)

There is considerable information available that is designed to instruct Reborners how

to paint on milk spots, create authentic ‘ethnic’ dolls, simulate pregnancy scan images,
what paint works best for birthmarks, how to open eyes in vinyl (a skill much desired),
the ingredients required to recreate baby formula (washing detergent), and fake orange
juice for the dolls with magnets imbedded in their mouth that attach on to a bottle teat to
simulate feeding.
Recent technological advances have enabled Reborners to equip Reborn dolls with
electronic devices to replicate breathing, and ‘warm to the touch’ Reborns are now in
production. Indeed, the psychiatrist Dr Persaud suggested on the Richard and Judy show
that this innovation has special advantages for women suffering from work-related stress.
Persaud claimed that the Reborn doll acts as a kind of stress-release mechanism: ‘Women

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Fitzgerald 31

come home tired at the end of a hard day’s work and curl up on the sofa cuddling these
dolls whilst they watch TV.’ Ostensibly there seems nothing amiss in Persaud’s analysis,
he does not openly pathologize these women, yet his comments about stress unwittingly
tap into postfeminist discursive practices that consistently warn women of the ‘dangers’
of workplace-related stress and time scarcity that function to maintain the backlash
against feminism.7
In contrast with the often deeply vicious responses addressed to the women fore-
grounded in My Fake Baby, Persaud’s reaction to Reborns seems a little ambivalent: that
is, until he begins to describe that the physiological and chemical changes that occur in
the female body when hugging the ‘warm to the touch’ Reborn are due to a chemical
release of oxytocin (translated in Greek as ‘quick birth’) present in the female body dur-
ing hugging, touching and orgasm. Oxytocin is also released in the final moments of
childbirth after the distension of the vagina and cervix, initiating the lactating process.
Wearing a pained expression on his face, Persaud states, ‘Yes, that means when women
regularly cuddle these “new warm to the touch dolls” they could actually begin to pro-
duce breast milk.’ The claim that chemical and physiological reactions allegedly occur in
women’s bodies when in close contact with a ‘warm to the touch doll’ may seem to
be inflated rhetoric. However, while Persaud’s horrified reaction (along with those of
Richard and Judy, who ask to move on to another subject) might provide the viewer with
a moment of comedic relief, their responses speak to a fear about uncontrollable female
bodily secretions. Furthermore, they reflect the moral panics elicited by forms of techno-
logical advancements (think of test tube babies, cloning, surrogacy, etc.) in reproductive
technologies that disrupt and challenge our understanding of what constitutes ‘natural’
reproduction.
The progress made in reproductive technologies and the impact of such technologies
on broader society, public policy and ethics is responded to in E. Ann. Kaplan and Susan
Squier’s highly insightful book Playing Dolly: Techno-cultural Formations, Fantasies
and Fictions of Reproduction (1999).8 Kaplan and Squier argue that bodies reproduced
through reproduction technologies such as in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments catapult
us into the ‘hyper-reality of the post-modern condition’, presenting challenges to percep-
tions of ‘truth, falsity, authenticity and imitation’(Kaplan and Squier, 1995: 5). Although
the phenomenon of the Reborn doll does not challenge culturally endorsed notions of
‘natural’ reproduction in the same ways that reproduction technologies seem to, Persuad’s
discourse about the ‘warm to the touch’ Reborn doll certainly serve to blur the boundaries
of the cultural understanding of ‘authentic motherhood’. The fact that the potential exists
for women’s bodies to react to a replica by producing breast milk appears to consolidate a
fissure or slippage in the construction and understanding of authentic or false mother-
hood. Yet, as the following section will argue, the debates about false and authentic moth-
erhood invoked in Persaud’s intervention consolidate the discourse already in circulation
about the maternalism of the women foregrounded in My Fake Baby. As such, I offer a
critical reading of the programme to show how the narrative is constructed to generate and
mobilize discursive practices which function to delineate false and authentic motherhood,
by using examples of female play and female pleasure to pathologize the women in My
Fake Baby. I shall suggest that such discourse reiterates particularly postfeminist assump-
tions about age, gender, motherhood and consumerism.

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32 European Journal of Cultural Studies 14(1)

Constructing imagined motherhood

My Fake Baby begins by introducing Jamie Eaton, professional British Reborner, as she
enters a supermarket car park and pulls into a designated mother and baby parking space.
Eaton wraps a blanket around a small baby as she walks towards the shop, and in the next
scene she is pushing her baby (strapped into a baby seat) around the store. At this point
the audience is not privy to the fact that baby Lydia is, in fact, a Reborn. Indeed, the show
explicitly frames Eaton as a vigilant and caring mother (designated car parking space,
wrapping the child in a blanket and strapping it into a baby seat), so when she approaches
an elderly couple in the store and asks if they would like to buy her baby, her maternalism
is quickly brought into question. The challenge posed to Eaton’s motherhood by the cod-
ing her as a bad/false mother (interestingly, the title of the show and the introductory
narrative imply that the programme’s thematic concerns are more to do with women trad-
ing in the sale of babies for the black market than a focus on collectable dolls) to mother-
hood is reinforced in the accompanying voiceover narrative from a male British actor,
who informs the audience that Eaton is a lone mother. Invoking Eaton’s lone mother
status – an identity that is seldom couched as a positive form of motherhood – at the point
that she has offered her baby for sale frames Eaton as a deeply problematic female fig-
ure.9 Of course, the implication of corruption and criminality is dispelled once it is made
known that Eaton is in fact selling Reborn dolls.
Yet, despite the fact that Eaton is engaged in a legitimate commercial transaction, the
unease invoked in the opening scene about her maternalism and mental health is not
mediated. In fact, as the programme continues, the pathologization of Eaton is reinforced
in a narrative that consolidates concerns about her motherhood and mental well-being. In
a scene reminiscent of a horror film, Eaton, accompanied by a haunting orchestral
soundtrack, demonstrates the Reborning process: placing limbs and head on a baking
tray, baking them in the oven and fixing the separate pieces together before beginning the
painstaking process of painting on the delicate features. Although this scene serves to
foreground the creative process of ‘Reborning’ (and this is the only time throughout the
programme that we see the techniques involved) and explore the financial remuneration
for Reborners, her craftsmanship and professionalism are undermined by her constant
use of words such as ‘birth’ and ‘baby’, obfuscating the boundaries between fantasy and
reality and coding Eaton as a deeply dysfunctional, ‘horrifying’ woman. The narrative
and editorial techniques employed in My Fake Baby generated concerns about Eaton’s
mental health and were used again in the story of Christine, a British grandmother who
commissioned a Reborn in the likeness of her grandson, Harry.
Shortly after meeting Eaton, and accompanied by soulful orchestral music (rather
than the horror soundtrack that featured in Eaton’s story), viewers are introduced to a
very tearful Christine, who shows the interviewer a photograph of a smiling boy and
asks, ‘How would you feel not waking up to that face every morning?’ The implication
here that the young boy has died is heightened as Christine relates a story of grief and
loss. The viewers are told that after giving birth to Harry, Christine’s daughter was diag-
nosed with cancer and Christine and her husband Arn became Harry’s primary caretak-
ers. As Christine speaks, the camera lingers over photographs of Harry as a baby in his
grandmother’s arms, as a toddler playing with a ball, and on his bike. These images all

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Fitzgerald 33

serve as chronological markers of time with his grandparents. Christine’s narrative of

grief seems to function to mediate initial responses of shock towards her emotional
investment in the Reborn doll and legitimizes the decision to commission Baby Harry.
As the day of Baby Harry’s ‘birth’ approaches, Christine becomes more animated. How-
ever, it is precisely at this point that the viewer’s emotional or empathetic connection
with Christine is severed as she explains that Harry emigrated to New Zealand with his
mother. Christine’s tears, her narrative of grief and loss, the montage of images of a
healthy and happy young boy and the emotional extradiegetic music led viewers to make
the assumption that Harry was dead. The revelation of Harry’s emigration seems to have
created a fissure in the viewer’s connection with Christine; viewers are likely to cease
being empathetic, and instead are invited to question her mental stability. By manipulat-
ing viewers’ emotions with a prolonged pseudo-bereavement narrative, the programme
makers explicitly invite viewers to make a value judgement about the ‘hysterical’ behav-
iour of an obviously distressed woman. Those value judgements came thick and fast in
the numerous forum messages which, rather than challenging the politics of the pro-
gramme makers, level their anger towards Christine, blaming her for misleading the
audience and viciously deriding her ‘over-attachment’ to her grandson.
That Christine had a strong and loving relationship with her grandson was apparent;
indeed, the loss of her identity as a grandmother seemed to be the driving force behind the
commission of Baby Harry. Christine’s apparent desire to feel valued in a culture that
devalues women over a certain age seems to override her cognitive process of distinguish-
ing between truth and reality. In fact, when Christine’s husband remarks on the similarity
between Baby Harry and a dead baby laid out in a morgue, while initially upset by Arn’s
comments, Christine becomes more militant in her choice to recognize the hyperreal Baby
Harry as her truth. Rejecting her husband’s criticism of her investment in the hyperreal,
Christine turns to the camera and informs the viewers that contrary to her earlier decision
to keep Baby Harry indoors, she was now determined to buy a pram to use to take
Baby Harry out for a walk. In a moment that seems to reflect her isolation and anonymity,
Christine adds, ‘It will be nice. People stop and talk to you when you have a baby.’
Foregrounding an older woman as an example of dysfunctional femininity has deep
resonance in our culture, which regularly casts the natural physiological transition from
reproductive to post-reproductive woman as the ‘death’ of femininity. Indeed, the cul-
tural labelling of menopausal women as post-reproductive (the cessation of the ability to
bear children), obsolete, decaying and mentally unstable has great significance in this
postfeminist era, which relies so heavily on notions of youth, female sexual agency and
‘yummy mummyhood’. Postfeminism’s emphasis on the young, highly sexual, repro-
ductive female body keeps the ageing post-menopausal body at a distance (unless of
course she is being ‘made over’) from cultural conceptualizations of ‘true’ femininity.
In this formulation of femininity, established cultural assumptions that cast the post-
menopausal body as lacking agency are persistently reinforced.19
In framing Christine as a post-menopausal, ‘functionless’ and culturally isolated women,
My Fake Baby suggests that the purchase of a plastic doll that looks and feels like a baby is
indicative of her mental instability. For Christine it appears that Baby Harry serves as a
palliative for her social isolation and signifies to others (and to herself) her role of and
identity as a grandmother. It would seem that the plastic body of the Reborn doll also acts

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34 European Journal of Cultural Studies 14(1)

as a sort of portal into the international Reborning community, a cyberspace society in

which Christine can meet and talk to others interested in Reborning. That My Fake Baby
shows how commodity purchase can accentuate displays of femininity nicely demonstrates
the interdependent relationship between consumerism and postfeminism, but it also uses
the same theory to undermine the choices that women make, especially if those choices
challenge cultural assumptions about age and gender. In other words, buying a Reborn doll
might help Christine to reconstruct a definable female identity, but the choice to purchase
a lifelike doll ultimately positions her as evidencing a pathological cognitive process.
The programme negotiates the pleasure that Christine takes in her role as grandmother
and her purchase of a Reborn doll by constructing a narrative that casts her as a mentally
unstable woman. This negotiation is repeated in My Fake Baby’s story of Sue, a 40-year-
old self-confessed ‘nut’ about Reborn dolls. Seated with her husband, Sue explains that
buying Reborn dolls is her hobby. Claiming to have spent somewhere in the region of
£20,000 on Reborns, Sue indicates her awareness that viewers might feel uneasy about
her collection by drawing attention to the fact that her husband’s hobby involves collect-
ing motorbikes. From the outset, it would appear that Sue is much more aware of the
differentiation between actual and replica children than Christine appeared to be, when
she notes that the impassive nature of the Reborn signifies its difference from real chil-
dren. According to the programme, the unresponsiveness of the Reborn doll is a sad
reality for Sue (although she does admit to occasionally imaging that her ‘babies’ roll
over and move when her back is turned), but the lack of dirt, noise and disruption associ-
ated with real children makes Reborns an attractive alternative for her. While Sue pro-
fesses to be aware of the differentiation between reality and fantasy, terms such as ‘real’
and ‘actual’ that she uses when describing the difference is illustrative of the rupture of
her own distinctions between the real and the simulacrum: for Sue, they are all children,
they just exhibit different forms of realness.
As My Fake Baby continues, the slippages that the programme has relied on in casting
its female subjects as deeply disturbed and disturbing intensify when the viewers watch
Sue fly to Washington DC to collect her newly-commissioned Reborn, Sophie.11 Before
her departure, the programme follows Sue and her husband as they shop for a homecom-
ing outfit for ‘Baby Sophie’. According to Sue, one of the central pleasures of owning
Reborn dolls is choosing their outfits – an activity which, she argues, enhances her ‘bond’
with her ‘babies’: ‘Once I have dressed her in the clothes I want her to wear, and I have
washed and styled her hair, I can begin to bond with her,’ she says after taking delivery
of ‘Baby Sophie’. To enable the bonding process with her much-desired new Reborn,
Sue and her husband are shown spending in the region of £300 on a perfect outfit for
Sophie. According to My Fake Baby, the new outfit must fulfil a number of require-
ments: it must coordinate with the pram covers and the feeding bottle bag; it must reflect
the ‘personality’ of the Reborn, and it must be a designer label. Watching images of Sue
choosing the homecoming clothes and listening to snatches of her conversation with her
husband, it would appear that the most important requirement is that the outfit must
match the style and colour of Sue’s clothes.
As reported by My Fake Baby, appearance and style means everything to Sue. Thus,
her choice to have four different prams in the house to suit each occasion (with matching
Reborn dolls) represents not a luxury but a necessity. As such, Sue embodies – or at least

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Fitzgerald 35

stages – the essence of the postfeminist woman: affluent, glamorous, married and adher-
ing to a postfeminist dogma that insists on motherhood as the central defining feature in
the tableau of true and enlightened femininity. The pleasure that Sue derives from her
simulacra motherhood is in the presentation and performance of ‘yummy mummyhood’.
The recent investment in the archetype of the ‘yummy mummy’ has become com-
monplace in popular postfeminist culture. Defined by the Urban Dictionary (www.
urbandictionary.com) as ‘A sexually attractive mother, who shops and lunches her way
through pregnancy and uses her baby as a fashion accessory’, ‘yummy mummyhood’ has
emerged to mark a new demographic of women for the lifestyle and fashion industries.
The commerce of maternalism is not a new concept but, as Angela McRobbie notes in
her editorial, ‘Yummy Mummies Leave a Bad Taste For Young Women’, the cultural
idealization of the ‘yummy mummy’ has offered the ‘ideal opportunity to extend the grip
of consumer culture by suggesting that successful maternity now requires that mother and
baby afford high maintenance pampering as well as a designer wardrobe’ (McRobbie,
2006). The story of Sue foregrounded in My Fake Baby does not completely accord with
McRobbie’s argument, since Sue has not been, neither does she ever envisage being,
pregnant.12 Nonetheless, McRobbie’s observations about the neo-conservative project of
postfeminist and capitalist ‘family values’ and hyper-maternalism, do help to explain
Sue’s investment in motherhood as the missing piece of the jigsaw in the conceptualiza-
tion and enactment of her identity.
It is not surprising that Sue is presented by My Fake Baby as somehow ‘lacking’,
because the programme clearly draws from the melancholic rhetoric of testimonials from
childless or infertile women that have been foregrounded in popular culture over the last
two decades. The emphasis on the childless woman is an important selective rendering
of white, middle-class, heterosexual women. There is, for example, much more negativ-
ity in the UK around poor and/or teenage mothers. It seems that hardly a week goes by
without a female celebrity publicly recounting her emotional trauma of infertility, or the
publication of yet another medical report highlighting causes of the alleged rise in female
infertility. For example, in an article published at the time of writing, women were
warned once again of the ‘threat’ of the ‘fertility timebomb’ that is supposedly ticking for
‘one in seven’ couples unable to conceive. Quoting Professor Bill Ledger, Head of
Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of Sheffield, the article is an exploration
of the reasons behind the seemingly exponential increase of fertility problems, and points
to Ledger’s research which sees ‘factors like obesity, hidden perils like Chlamydia and
higher stress levels among women’ as partly to blame (Wright, 2008: 70–2).
Of course, the magazine from which the article comes is primarily a women’s maga-
zine, and Ledger’s expertise focuses on female infertility, but it is noticeable that the
responsibility for infertility rests squarely on the shoulders of women who eat too much,
are promiscuous and stressed. As Ledger adds, while these issues are certainly having a
disastrous effect on women’s inability to conceive, ‘the main reason is that women are
simply leaving it too late to conceive’ (Wright, 2008: 70–2; emphasis in original). That
infertility is seen as a ‘woman’s’ problem is explicit, but Ledger’s observation that infer-
tility is caused by women leaving motherhood too late confirms Susan Faludi’s conten-
tion that the constant scaremongering of the media and medical institutions about ‘the
infertility time-bomb’ constitutes anti-feminist propaganda.

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36 European Journal of Cultural Studies 14(1)

Furthermore, far from just addressing the issue of the ‘barren womb’ for older women
who have neglected to heed the ticking of their biological clock, rhetoric about mother-
hood as the central tenet of femininity also has affected women who have children but,
through disease or other circumstances, are no longer able to conceive. While Reborner
Jamie Eaton was used in My Fake Baby as an example of an entrepreneurial woman, her
final remarks serve to reinforce the cultural and personal significance of pregnancy and
new motherhood – even among women such as Eaton herself who already have children.
In a moment of personal testimony, Eaton describes the horror she experienced on dis-
covering that she could no longer conceive, after her womb ruptured in childbirth. Eaton
describes to the audience that while her Reborning practice was set up as a business, the
fact that she is able to hold her ‘new babies’ daily and pretend to be a new mum is her
greatest motivation. In framing Eaton’s desire to feel like a new mother all the time, and
to be identified as a mother of a newborn when out in public, My Fake Baby highlights
the undeniable value invested in new motherhood. As Eaton notes, ‘Everyone pays atten-
tion when you have a newborn.’ That Eaton’s four children do not seem to accord her the
same sense of cultural capital speaks volumes to a culture in which female visibility and
agency is so shortlived.
Although Sue does not speak about pregnancy, let alone make any mention of infer-
tility, she is presented as having made a decision not to have children in order to
engage in a more consumerist lifestyle. Sue’s alleged choice to forsake motherhood is
included within the narrative precisely because it implies that her focus on career and
materialism was flawed. It was in her pursuit of ‘having it all’, so My Fake Baby inti-
mates, that Sue neglected to address the very essence of female identity: motherhood.
Yet in a society where industry profits from social pressures placed on women to have
children, Sue and women like her no longer need to see themselves as lacking, as not
in possession of all the parts that make up the equation of perfect postfeminist feminin-
ity because, in the time-honoured tradition of capitalism, wherever there is a ‘need’ in
the market place, it will be filled. As a result, a commodity has been produced that
simulates motherhood and thereby promises the fulfilments of a form of motherhood
that sees the perfect baby as one which stays forever young, quiet and clean, and one
that enables women like Sue to be perceived by others, and in moments of slippage, by
herself, as the epitome of true femininity. In this sense Sue is perversely fulfilling the
postfeminist script.

Conclusion
The main enticement for 99 percent of women purchasing Reborn dolls is collecting an
item of artistic credibility or, as in the case of Mary Flint, as a financial investment. That
Flint was forced to highlight this in response to the offensive comments left on internet
forums about her and the other women in My Fake Baby speaks to the ideological bias of
this supposed documentary. Rather than highlighting the artistic merit of Reborners and
Reborn dolls, or the rational choice made for financial or aesthetic reward, My Fake
Baby revelled in pathologizing its four female subjects as ‘freakish’ examples of femi-
ninity through narratives of failed, redundant and grotesque motherhood.

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Fitzgerald 37

Furthermore, that the representations of four women shored up the ideological doc-
trines of postfeminism mirrors the pernicious strictures of an ideology that pits women
against women in order to maintain a hierarchy of femininity through undermining, cas-
tigating and ridiculing those who do not adhere to, or fit in with, the requisites of post-
feminist femininity. Moreover, that motherhood was utilized in My Fake Baby as the
trope for the articulation of failed and inept femininity is indicative of the intensive cul-
tural, political and emotional investment in motherhood which has become so highly
conspicuous in the UK and other western countries. The cultural excitement that ensued
after the broadcast of My Fake Baby speaks to a deep distrust of, distaste at, and morbid
fascination with, women whose bodies and minds supposedly betray their alleged pathol-
ogy. Channel 4’s ‘shock doc’ compounds postfeminism’s deep suspicion of women who,
regardless of the cultural emphasis on extended youth, do not recognize or adhere to
culturally sanctioned markers of female maturation and domesticity. As such, female
play as prioritized in My Fake Baby functions as a freakish spectacle to remind women
what they should be doing as consumers and caregivers.

Notes
  1. According to many critics, Channel 4’s profit orientation has been the central incentive for the
recent proliferation of ‘shock docs’, a television documentary format that systematically pro-
files shocking and salacious materials while purporting to adhere to a public service mandate
by inviting ‘experts’ to take part in the documentaries. The ‘shock doc’ is perversely marketed
as instrumental in raising issues not otherwise discussed within mainstream media. In the case
of Half Ton Mom, the constant referencing of Renee Williams’ obesity as symptomatic of
disease through the voice of a medical expert mediates the almost pornographic nature of the
visual displays of female bodily excess.
  2. In stark contrast to the responses levelled at the female ‘Reborners’ in My Fake Baby, com-
ments posted on website forums after the airing of Guys and Dolls (16 October 2006) – a
‘shock doc’ exposé of men who have sex with plastic blow-up dolls – evoked a sense of soli-
darity and empathy with the men prioritized within the show.
  3. Rosalind Gill’s (2007) cogent description of postfeminism as a ‘distinctive sensibility’ serves
to highlight one of the most troubling aspects of postfeminist ideology, the highly pervasive
but deeply vague nature of the term. Such ambiguity results in difficulties of definition but its
slippery nature means that it is difficult to challenge the problematic nature of a postfeminist
sensibility that re-enacts deeply sexist, racist and class-based prejudices in ways that feel like
commonsense. This article understands postfeminism as the articulation and reiteration of a
set of cultural, political and social discourses which frame the work of feminism as: deeply
problematic because it complicates the hegemony of patriarchy; accountable for a generation
of ‘lost’ women who, adhering to so-called feminist principles, are now single, unfulfilled at
work and infertile; unnecessary because women have gained equality; and passé, framed as
an old-fashioned and irrelevant politics, particularly in a cultural environment shaped by con-
sumerism and orientated towards the market place (see also Tasker and Negra, 2007).
  4. See the following for a more concise account of the history of play and its relationship to capi-
talism and commercialism: Cross (2004), Goldstein (1994), Peers (2004), Pecora (1998),
Sund (nd).
  5. See Negra (2008) and Wearing’s (2007) deeply insightful essay in Tasker and Negra.

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38 European Journal of Cultural Studies 14(1)

  6. Reborners who work in the home or workshops attached to the home constitute the historical
continuation of the working environment and practices of women doll-makers in the 18th
century, who also worked in outbuildings attached to the home in order to maintain their pri-
mary job as mothers.
  7. I say unwittingly, because backlash ideology is incorporated as commonsense into the daily
lexicon of political, social and cultural discourse.
  8. See also Angela Wall’s (2000) fascinating account of the role that assisted reproduction has
played in the coding of post-menopausal women as ‘monstrous’.
  9. Cultural and political discourse about lone motherhood consistently codes lone mothers as
inadequate. To suggest (whether implicitly or explicitly) that Eaton is attempting to sell her
baby reinforces discourse about lone mothers as deeply selfish women and deeply damaging
mothers.
10. The practice of distancing the older post-productive female body from the culturally sanc-
tioned rubric of femininity is also evident in feminist politics, which tends to ignore the nega-
tive conceptualization of the older female body in preference to issues of birth control,
abortion and childbirth. Clearly these issues are extremely important, but ignoring the cultural
politics that surround the ageing female body is symptomatic of the cultural and political
marginalization of older women. Woodward (1999) is one of a few exceptions in this regard.
11. That Sue’s mother accompanied her on the trip to the USA to collect her new reborn offered
the producers of My Fake Baby the opportunity to juxtapose two paradigms of motherhood:
the real and the imagined. Fascinatingly, Sue’s mother, although seemingly supportive of her
daughter’s hobby, was always filmed at a distance from her daughter. While Sue and ‘Baby
Sophie’ were prioritized within the frame, Sue’s mother remained in the background as a
blurred figure. However, when Sue unwraps her Reborn, the image of her mother (still at a
distance from her daughter) is brought into sharp relief, presumably inviting the audience to
monitor her disdainful reaction to Sue’s apparently bizarre, but seemingly playful, narrative
of prolonged labour and delivery of Sophie, and her emotional reaction to her purchase.
12. For a short period of time after giving birth the stomach remains extended, and only really
returns to pre-pregnancy size after a prolonged period of exercise and/or breastfeeding. How-
ever, the recent cultural excitement and celebration of female celebrities who have rapidly
shed their ‘baby weight’ and returned to their pre-pregnancy body shape has seen this transi-
tional period become even shorter – so much so that some women appear as if they have never
been pregnant. That Sue has not been pregnant, and neither wishes to be, is made clear in the
programme; however the rupturing of the natural visual markers of the female body after birth
with the female body that has not carried a baby means that Sue’s bodily staging of new moth-
erhood is now visually authentic.

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Biographical note
Louise Fitzgerald is a lecturer in film and television at the University of East Anglia. Her research
interests include gender and sexuality studies, film authorship, ‘race’ theories, feminism and post-
feminism, discourse theory and contemporary maternalism.

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