WEEK 9 - FEMINIST MACHINES
“As the technology changes, social relations change; as social relations change, the technology is altered. Cybernetic systems, at least potentially, tend toward a post hierarchical labor structure in which the system stresses interaction-among workers and management, computer systems and operators-as much as production. “ (458)
In Automating Gender: Postmodern Feminism in the Age of the Intelligent Machine, Jack Halberstam envisions a utopic cybernetic system build on social relations that morphs and shifts with user needs. Writing in 1991, Halberstam seems to predict the social media craze, where networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram interrelate and are directly effected by each others success. However, Halberstam, like many of the cyberfeminists overshoots technology's ability to move beyond the gendered body. Gender, race and even sexuality and marital status continue to be key identifiers for social relations both on and offline. What Halberstam fails to understand is that many of online social relations are extensions of our material selves. Though there are cyberspaces where these qualities can be supreceded, the most popular and widely used sites still rely on a narrow view of gender essentialism. Even many of the so-called “trans- or post-human” bodies that have been created exist as gendered bodies, and have given birth to the newly-defined “robo-sexism.” Prevalent in techno-saavyy cultures like Japan, the process of gendering robots makes especially clear that gender belongs both to the order of the material body and to the social and discursive or semiotic systems within which bodies areembedded. Ass part of the process of “reality construction” and in order to assist with their integration into everyday activities, robots are assigned limited definitions of sex and gender. Many robots created in Japan to be employed in the home or workplace are assigned a narrow and stereotypical form of gender, often based on assumptions about male and female sex and gender roles. These static, gendered robotic bodies present a controlled and fixed construct of gender, further conflating the relationship between bodies and gender, rather than transcending it, and creating new manifestations of sexist thinking.
A documentary Gendering Robots is available on the subject via Youtube.