Keioui Keijaun Thomas’ Halloween performance Come Hell or High Femmes: The Dolls Rise, was set in a post-apocalyptic future where only ‘the dolls’ – “trans femme(s) so flawless and unbound [they are] no longer considered real”11https://performancespacenewyork.org/shows/keioui-keijaun-thomas-nasty-full/ – exist. Thomas’ performance took place within her exhibition Nasty & Full, guest curated by Isis Awad. Throughout the performance, Thomas wandered between the exhibited artworks, including two of her sculptures, Waterbodies (2023) and Paper Bag Soldiers (2022-2024), and a video trilogy that shares the title of her performance (2020-2022). Displayed on a trio of suspended, custom-made screens, the video trilogy projected evocative images of Thomas amid stunning natural backdrops – the rocky shores of an ocean, a pyramid of rubble next to the shorn side of a mountain, and an expanding sprawl of cornstalk – invoking Thomas’ body as divine priestess, as spirit that once was and still might be.

Thomas’ sculptural assemblages conjured far more recalcitrance than transcendence. Waterbodies, a floor-based sculpture located between the video screens, featured spirals of braided blue surgical gloves. In one of these coils, Thomas placed Barbie dolls drowned in dark refractive paint. Elsewhere in the installation were bits of tinsel that resembled fragments of stardust floating in the aftermath of a cosmic event. The installation reminded me of the poetic and political force of queer portraiture found in Zanele Muholi’s striking photographs of figures adorned with inflated surgical gloves, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ candy clumps qua portraiture.

Thomas’ performance summoned these queer histories and iconographies, out of which the trans-femme-of-color as political, historical, and aesthetic subject emerges. At times, Thomas was a working girl, moving between seated spectators while cutting off strips of plastic wrapped around her body in what a reviewer of an early iteration of this performance described as a “messianic striptease.”22Simon Wu, “House of Leaves,” Artforum (2022). At other times, she played an astrological water-bearer. Towards the end of the performance, Thomas carried a bowl of water, climbed onto a makeshift plinth and poured the water over herself, reciting haunting words from the video projection: “It is unbelievable and thinkable. It is so black it is blue. It is so queer it is detached.” What Thomas’ sensually abluted body displayed across these tableaux was a recognizable force that aspirational vernacular like ‘doll,’ ‘high femme,’ or ‘glamour’ seek to name. Much of this is familiar, beautiful, and even tired for me, a feeling that says less about how excellent Thomas is and more about the contexts I find myself in.

The performance ended when two attendants strapped Thomas into a harness that raised her high into the air, arms outstretched. People I spoke to after the performance (and overheard while walking through the space) all justifiably beheld this final moment with reverence and awe, but I was reminded of something else. In Pixar’s classic 1995 animated movie Toy Story, there is a scene where main characters Buzz and Woody get stuck in a claw machine with three-eyed alien dolls. The dolls create a mythology about their environs: every time the claw descends, only one among them will be chosen for a brighter future. “I have been chosen, farewell. I go to a better place,” says a lucky alien figurine when the claw picks it up. This idealistic vision is quickly thwarted, as we soon find out that it is the violent neighbor Sid, notorious for cruelly destroying and recombining toys, who operates the claw. Unaware of their imminently perilous fate, Buzz and Woody cling onto the doll and hitch an escape. In the final moments of Thomas’ performance, I wondered: is she floating, or has she been captured? The magic of performance and stadium adoration were tempered by the menacing possibility that this doll might have been ascending to unforeseen danger.

Back on solid ground, a doll is often conscripted and conformed to her dollhouse. Polly Pocket is small because she must fit the house already made for her. Barbie’s blonde is what Ken’s brunette demands. Barbie’s ever-proliferating new ethnicities are but the materializations of dreams to belong, converted into market demographic and subjected to liberal conscience. But a doll’s excess cannot be withheld. Her extravagant stylings and presentations may be demanding of us, approximating her agency. The various entrails and profusions that ornamented Thomas’ performance and particularly her Paper Bag Soldiers installation – latex, paper bags, plastic mesh baskets, and signs brandishing slogans like ‘for sale,’ ‘wet paint,’ ‘private property,’ and ‘bussy for rent’ – seemed to be the material traces of an ongoing metaphysical, erotic, and political event: the making of a doll. Indeed, one is a doll not because one has been beheld or caressed, but because one has been gripped, clawed, cathected, and finally discarded in a feint of love and escape. Dolls are not totally wrought by choice. They are a response to demand. Hell and high femme indeed.

In response to the trendy inescapability of doll discourse, I want to ask instead how we might perceive not the doll, but the labors required to embody and survive dollhood. Feminist scholars like Robin Bernstein, Anne Anlin Cheng, and Sianne Ngai have offered compelling words I would refer readers to for a cultural history of 20th-century American doll enthrallment.33See Robin Bernstein’s analysis of dolls as “scriptive things” in Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, Anne Anlin Cheng’s discussion of dolls and the Brandeis briefs in the introduction The Melancholy of Race: Psychooanalysis and the Hidden Grief of Assimilattion and the chapter “Dolls” in Ornamentalism, and Sianne Ngai’s “The Cuteness of the Avant Garde” in Our Aesthetic Categories and the chapter on “Animatedness” in Ugly Feeliings. A particular feature of 2010s and 2020s dolls – evinced in the puffed lips courtesy of the Bratz doll revival and the porcelain genius of Pat McGrath’s makeup for a 2024 Maison Margiela runway show – is gloss. Tacky in its application, but gleaming in its display, gloss seals the prior labors of the cosmetic — a word derived from the same roots as cosmic and cosmology — while diffusing tint. Desire condemns as much as it amplifies. We readily identify and celebrate doll content on our social media feeds, but how do dolls live and handle themselves in the wake of their own synthesis? How might we better appreciate where, why, how, with whom, and most importantly for whom dolls practice self-portraiture?