public mop-handle

here is a few off the top of my head: edison’s eve (highly recommend, no pdf)

on the marionette theatre - pdf

almost human - dolls and robots in contemporary art - pdf

a study of dolls - pdf

on longing - narratives of the miniature (dollhouses) - pdf

the youngest doll - pdf

puppets, masks, and performing objects - pdf

exploring the uncanny valley - pdf

the uncanny - pdf

sex dolls at sea (history of sex dolls) - pdf

the sex doll by ferguson

uncanny dolls: images of death in rilke and freud

the uncanny afterlife of dolls: reconfiguring personhood through object vivification in gothic film

anthropology: playing with dolls

adjacent topics:

a cyborg manifesto - pdf

technologies of the gendered body, reading cyborg women - pdf

how we became posthuman - pdf

the social life of things - pdf

vibrant matter - pdf

the arcades project by benjamin walter - pdf

postmodernism, the culture of late capitalism - pdf

You think you know something, don't you? You think you're the clever little girl who knows something. There's so much you don't know. So much. What do you know, really? You're just an ordinary little girl living in an ordinary little town. You wake up every morning of your life and you know perfectly well that there's nothing in the world to trouble you. You go through your ordinary little day, and at night, you sleep your untroubled, ordinary little sleep filled with peaceful, stupid dreams. And I brought you nightmares. Or did I? Or was it a silly, inexpert little lie? You live in a dream. You're a sleepwalker, blind. How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you ripped the fronts off houses, you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it? Wake up, Charlie. Use your wits. Learn something!

Chimney-sweeping might, at a push, have something in common with the dramatic model. As secret conduits between the interior and the outside world, chimneys do evoke something of the ghostly ambiguity of the hysterical symptom as ‘foreign body’, a nebulous and unwelcome visitor to the patient no longer master in their own house. But chimney-sweeping is not normally to do with getting rid of intruders. What is removed is only the unmourned ashes and dust of daily life. And the blackness of the chimney is not in itself threatening or ominous; it is the remains of a warm hearth. So chimney-sweeping might point towards the move away from the rigid separation implied by the metaphor of the foreign body. No house (or body, or subject) is at any time complete and whole, without openings through which outsiders, welcome and unwelcome, come and go. Otherwise, there would be no circulation, no life and no history. Thus it is not the foreign body as such which is the source of trouble, but the way in which it can be received. Freud’s analogy with the surgical operation points to exactly this modification: the task of analysis now is to enable the patient (like the bodily environment) to be able to take in and respond to what comes her way.