5 things learned from studying dolls, including gender, queer identity, material culture, memory, collecting, childhood, glamour, and emotional attachment.

At five years old, I wanted Crystal Barbie more than anything. I never received her. Instead, I watched my cousin unwrap Peaches ’n Cream Barbie while I quietly learned that beauty, glamour, and softness were not things a little boy was supposed to want.

Dr. Erick DuPree explores the emotional persistence of dolls as objects of memory, grief, kinship, and identity and examines heirloom dolls, adult collecting, nostalgia, and the ways ordinary objects become repositories of attachment and relational history long after childhood ends.

Dolls are never just toys. They are cultural mirrors through which societies teach kinship, gender, care, race, fantasy, and belonging. From childhood socialization and maternal role rehearsal to queer self-fashioning, racial representation, collecting cultures, and ritual traditions, dolls reveal the deeply relational nature of human identity.