Magic Toyshops: Narrative and Meaning in the Women's Sex Shop
- Submitting institution
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Ravensbourne University London
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- FC02
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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- Book title
- Love Objects: Emotion, Design and Material Culture
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Academic
- ISBN
- 978-0-8578-5846-7
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
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- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The chapter was commissioned by the editors for a book published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Academic exploring the emotional potency of objects.
The chapter explores the ways in which a plurality of sexual identities may be realised by women via consumption. It shows how female sexual consumption relies on a narrative of ‘empowerment’ to turn the sex toy from ‘seedy’ to luxurious and ‘uncomfortable’ to liberating, demonstrating how sexualised spaces and objects are transformed and normalised through design. Professor Victor Margolin states that the essay shows the way that ‘such differences are evidence in a microcosm of how complicated the question of love is once it becomes entangled with the cultural processes that make its expression possible' (2014, p.2).
Carter’s chapter breaks new ground in bringing women’s relationship with the design of sexualised objects and spaces to the field of Material Culture, using ethnographic interviews to interrogate in detail, the meanings women make of shops and goods designed to ‘empower’ the sexual consumer.
The work is of interest and concern to academics, design practitioners and students of design. Invitations to present the research included Design/Body/Sense: Design History Society in September 2007, The Institute of Contemporary Arts in October 2014 at and Researching Sex and Sexualities, an international conference at Sussex University in May 2015. Professor Jan Baetens writing in Leonardo, published by MIT Press, suggests that ‘Love Objects studies well-known objects but through the lens of surprising and always very interesting cases that cover less-analysed aspects of design and material culture in the 19th and 20th century’ including ‘…brilliant essays on, for instance, the spread of sex shops for women in posh London Neighbourhoods’ (2015, pp. 209-10).
Magic Toyshops reveals the outcomes of in depth research with women consumers, its methodological impact is explored in my other REF submission.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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