Queer Exercises

Abstract

The recent exercise works of the performance and social media artist Amber Hawk Swanson explore extreme fitness as an allegory for self-realization. Her exaggerated engagement with such activities as CrossFit compels Hawk Swanson to treat herself as her own object to be both cultivated and punished, and her works expose the slippery relations between self-admiration and same-sex desire that underwrite the pursuit of normative bodily ideals. These performances are placed in the context of Hawk Swanson's earlier investigations of conflicted self-objectification — in particular, her multiyear Amber Doll Project (2006 – 8) in which she daily collaborated with a life-size sex doll (a RealDoll) made in her own image. Hawk Swanson often stages her work for social media, and she has an online presence that has received millions of viewers. With this practice, she exposes herself to online forums that play out the enforcements of normativity in the generation of both ruthless anonymous comments and impassioned defenses. Such comments about gender, bodies, and sexualities were the catalyst for the exercise works and are incorporated into their defiant performances of self-realization.

Design, Use, and Effects of Sex Dolls and Sex Robots: Scoping Review

“…An artist in the United States, Amber Hawk Swanson, who identifies as a lesbian commissioned a RealDoll sex doll in her own likeness from Abyss Creations, married her, and lived and collaborated with her in video and performance artwork. Amber Swanson’s Amber Doll Project (2006-2011) triggered and disrupted the audience’s clichéd (heterosexual) fantasies about lesbian desire, twin sexuality, and the role of females as sexual objects [ 40 ].…”

Plastic fantastic: Sex robots and/as sexual fantasy

“…For instance, grappling with her difficulty finding a female partner, Hawk Swanson found herself admiring, sympathizing, and identifying with the online community of “doll husbands”—men who owned and loved their own RealDolls—and in 2006 commissioned a life-size RealDoll (not a robot) in her own image. Of her art, Getsy writes that Hawk Swanson disrupts “clichéd (heterosexual) fantasies of lesbian desire and of twin sexuality, both of which repeatedly surface as erotic ideals in popular culture as well as mainstream pornography” (2013: 469) while also complicating the boundary between “victimizing owner and victimized image” thus exposing “the anxious interdependence of self-objectification and self-realization” (2013: 474 and 475). Hawk Swanson’s subsequent conversations with doll users in her collection entitled Doll Closet (2017), draws on the closet metaphor to signify the stigmatization that keeps doll owners hidden, while also acknowledging the closet as a necessary space for sex doll/bots that must be hung to avoid being damaged.…”