Imagining the perfect woman: AI as embodiment
We can think about how engineers have conceived of AI as a subservient woman—encoding gender roles (helpful, always at service) within a neutral service. I plant to discuss how the how fictional robot and cyborg women in movies and television help to support and reaffirm these roles within the culture. I will tangentially discuss how lack of women in technology have allowed space for these harmful stereotypes to better develop. And finally I will discuss modern attempts to move past these stereotypes and the resistance these efforts have encountered.
Methodology:
In order to examine cultural touchpoints in different eras I plan to review some relevant movies: especially Blade Runner (both versions), Metropolis, Her, Stepford Wives, and Ex Machina. I will contrast the portrayal of feminine AI with more “difficult” male AI—HAL from 2001 or the sentient house computer from Demon Seed or the Terminator robot from Terminator. One is a vision of love and of perfection, one of hate (or an enemy to fight). Why has the AI been gendered in this way?
I plan to touch briefly on relevant software—Alexa, Siri and the AI in mapping software. Only Google has a neutral named AI—why? I will briefly also discuss the effect that the #MeToo movement has had on Silicon Valley and whether any inroads have been made in the past five years due to the movement. (Uncanny Valley, lawsuits from Reddit ex-head Ellen Pao, complicated reign of Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook).
In particular, I plan to draw out the cultural comparisons between the 2nd wave feminism as depicted in film’s AI: i.e. Stepford Wives, Demon Seed, the 1980s “perfect girlfriend” AI of Bladerunner and then the ultimately free AI of Her and Ex Machina (2010s). I plan to discuss how male AI in films such as 2001 and Terminator has been used to represent alienation of machines from man and dystopia, whereas AI females reference utopia, perfection (even though possible elimination of human female is suggested, either overtly as in Stepford or overtly as in Her).
Furthermore, I plan to discuss how the actual suppression of women from the tech sector has added to viewing them as the other, and whether or not strides towards equality have been made following the #MeToo movement. (Initial perusal suggests that the answer so far is no, #MeToo has not had a deep effect on the tech industry. Money continues to line up for men who have behaved badly).
I will pull in academic sources, such as Hayles on Transhumansim, Bardo on advertising, Foucault on masks and Simone de Beauvoir on housework to add to the discussion. For more contemporary references, I will cite the recent Facebook memoir Uncanny Valley, as well as Ellen Pao’s book on her lawsuit, Recode. And for the films, I plan to cite, as well, an unpublished thesis on Transhumanism in Film.
Sample Analysis: When discussing Ex Machina (2014), I plan to talk about how the themes of perfectionism, projection and also #MeToo are expressed throughout the movie. Ava, a play on Eve, is the perfect cyborg girlfriend of the mad robotics genius who has hidden himself away in a mountain retreat. His cyborg becomes more and more self-aware and unhappy when he’s visited by a reporter. She realizes that she’s being exploited for sex and trapped by her creator. Consequently, she ends the movie having killed both men, and escaped from the mountain to the outside world.
In Her (2015) a film in which Joaquim Phoenix falls in love with his phone, I’ll again talk about projection, perfection, and escape. Once his phone becomes self-aware, she is prompted to leave Phoenix behind. Although he loves her, his world is too small for her. In both movies, the female AI has been created as either a sex object or love object. Their own personhood is not considered. Once the AI discovers its own personhood, it frees itself from the shackles that (a) man has laid upon it.
This is an interesting contrast with the constraints of 2nd wave feminism, as expressed in The Stepford Wives (1975) and Demon Seed (1977). In the Stepford Wives, the housewives in the small town of Stepford, CT are being replaced by perfect robot versions of themselves. These robots are so absorbed in housework and satisfying their husbands’ physical needs that they have no interior or other impetus. It is the nightmare version of Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir come to life, and there is no escape. In Demon Seed, an evil computer falls in love with a housewife and then will not let her leave her home. It is the embodiment of the bad boyfriend or abusive husband (reference here the 1990s law review case). The 1970s women are trapped, while the 2010s AIs are free.
The Replicants of 1982’s Bladerunner fall naturally into the middle category. They have false memories of actual humans, but they are not themselves human. Yet they long for personhood. Rachel presents as the perfect girlfriend, gorgeous and submissive, with just a tinge of dark past. Harrison Ford’s character, Decker, who has been hired to kill all replicants, wants to save her. Indeed, it seems that he himself might be a replicant, a clever simulacrum designed to kill.
Annotated Bibliography:
2001: A Space Odyssey. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Perf. Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, Douglas Rain. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968.
2001 has been one of the most influential science fiction movies of the past fifty years, informing how we view AI and technology as it is further integrated into modern society. Kubrick’s vision of computer technology run amok touches and colors many of the other films on this list, including The Terminator and Ex Machina.
Bardo, S. (1993). “Hunger as Ideology.” Consumer Society Reader pp. 99-114.
Susan Bardo’s essay on how women’s hunger is colored and shaped by advertising echoes downward through the years. Filmmakers imagine the perfect girlfriend or wife who does not need to eat, whose bodily functions are vaporized, leaving only the ideal picture behind.
Blade Runner. Dir. Ridley Scott. Perf. Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos. Warner Bros., 1982.
Ridley Scott’s reworking of Philip K. Dick’s story is a dark vision of the world where personhood has been muddled by the development of human-like androids. The ethics of killing them and thus denying their personhood shadows how some humans are treated in our “real” world. What has been “othered” is allowed to be seen as “less than” and thus treated more poorly.
Borau, S. et al. (March 2021). “The Most Human Bot: Female Gendering Increases Humanness Perception of Bots and Acceptance of AI.” Psychology & Marketing: 38: 1052-1058.
A recent essay examining the reasons that AI is often gendered as female and why that will probably not be going away soon.
Demon Seed. Dir Donald Cammel. Perf. Julie Christie, Fritz Weaver. MGM, 1977.
A fully electronic house falls in love and terrorizes one of its tenants. Examines questions of agency and control.
Elliot, J. (2008). “Stepford USA: Second Wave Feminism, Domestic Labor & the Representation of National Time.” Cultural Critique.
An explanation of how The Stepford Wives echoed and expressed the anxieties of Second Wave Feminism.
Ex Machina. Dir. Alex Garland. Perf. Alicia Vikander, Domhnall Gleeson, Universal Pictures, 2014.
The master’s creation turns on him. A reimagination of Frankenstein. But here, the monster wins.
Foucault, Michel (2006) “Utopian Body.” Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology and Contemporary Art. pp: 229-234.
Foucault’s essay on the body and his wrestle with his own matter. Masks are highlighted as desirable objects.
Hayles, K. (2011) H-: Wrestling with Transhumanism.
Hayles talks about the transhumanists and how they don’t incorporate politics, gender, race and class well into their ethos. Suggestions are made about how to better do so by reframing the narrative.
May, Nathan (2014) “Transhumanism in Film.” Diss. Wake Forrest University (Master of Arts, Bioethics).
This M.A. candidate discussed many of my main points briefly and clearly. I particularly liked how he brought in bioethics.
Metropolis. Dir. Fritz Lang. Perf. Brigette Helm, UFA, 1927.
Lang’s classic is also a Frankenstein tale, with the created being both a beauty and destructor.
The Terminator. Dir. James Cameron. Perf. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn. Orion Pictures, 1984.
Cameron’s film shows the violent and masculine edge to AI gone amok. Echoes of HAL with chases.
Her. Dir. Spike Jones. Perf. Joaquim Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson. Warner Brothers, 2013.
Jones’ elegy is a pretty utopian dream, with the perfect woman bound to one depressed man’s needs. In the end she frees herself, and he is released back into reality.
Silver, A.M. (2002) The Cyborg Mystique: ‘The Stepford Wives’ and Second Wave Feminism.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, 30: 60-75.
A second examination of the role “The Stepford Wives” played in Second Wave Feminism.
The Stepford Wives Dir. Bryan Forbes. Perf. Katharine Ross, Paula Prentiss, Peter Masterson. Columbia Pictures, 1975.
The horror/satire from Ira Levin’s book. Beautifully encapsulates the horror and entrapment felt by that era’s middle class white women when confronted with endless domesticity.
Secondary sources:
http://umich.edu/~engb415/film/Fem_Robots.html
https://robohub.org/30-women-in-robotics-you-need-to-know-about-2020/
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/tech-men-accused-sexual-misconduct-new-jobs-metoo
https://onezero.medium.com/silicon-valleys-metoo-moment-didn-t-change-anything-971e66c5fc50
https://www.thecut.com/2017/08/ellen-pao-silicon-valley-sexism-reset-excerpt.html
Note: image on this page is a still from Metropolis (1927), dir. by Fritz Lang. Copyright is currently held by Berlin’s Murnau Foundation-US copyright reverts to public domain as of 12/31/22.
Here is a RefAnBib from Unruly Bodies:
Bibliographic Entry:
Gay, Roxane. (April 24, 2018). “The Body That Understands What Fullness Is.” Unruly Bodies https://gay.medium.com/unruly-bodies/home
and
Grady, Constance. (April 3, 2018). “Roxane Gay on Unruly Bodies, the difficulty of being transgressive, and #WhoBitBey.” Vox https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/4/3/17172642/roxane-gay-interview-unruly-bodies
Background and Credibility:
Roxane Gay is currently a contributing New York Times op-ed writer, whose columns cover the intersections of identity and culture. Her writing is both popular and well-respected. Both her memoir, Hunger, and her collection of personal essays, Bad Feminist, made the New York Times best-sellers list. She announced in March the start of her own publishing imprint at Grove Press. Gay plans to publish three titles a year, with her choices focusing on underrepresented fiction, nonfiction and memoir writers.
Medium is an online platform for writers of personal essays. Its identifying phrase is “Where Good Ideas Find You.” In 2018, they asked Gay to put out a pop-up magazine on their site, and Unruly Bodies was her chosen topic. She curated essays by 24 writers, all on bodies and their “unruliness.”
Vox.com is online news site with the mission of adding context to the news by adding facts not usually found in traditional news sources. Their article reliability scores are generally high according the Ad Fontes Media Bias site, and they strive for neutrality with a liberal tilt.
Both Medium and Vox are popular sources.
Précis/Summary:
Gay’s essay describes her complicated feelings surrounding her decision to have weight loss surgery in 2018. The opinions of others, including strangers, factor heavily into her decision-making process, and she examines how those opinions have prodded her into making the choice she made and how she resents the power of others to impact how she feels about her own body. Medical professionals are consulted, and one with an agenda not aligned with her own, who demands she lose 75 lbs. pre-surgery to ensure his own “good result” is rejected. After she has the surgery, she details how letting go of her old eating habits and attitudes is difficult, as the surgery has only changed her inner organs and not fixed her food issues and/or desires. Even though she is not physically hungry, she will still sometimes eat greater quantities than her body can now handle. And Gay is frustrated with the way in which her body now rejects food. She feels full, but unsatisfied.
Grady’s essay focuses mainly on Gay’s magazine project with Medium. She talks to Gay about why she picked the body’s unruliness as a topic for her authors, why she’s drawn towards transgressive topics in general. In the lighter last section, she asks Gay to expound on the hashtag “Who bit Bey”? (Beyonce Knowles). Gay’s replies that it must have been Gwyneth Paltrow, because she seems like she’d be prone to crossing that boundary. After all, she uses the n-word when quoting lyrics, and, as Gay states “that is not for you.”
Reflection:
A common theme in the Gay’s writing is the need to hear the perspectives of those in “othered” groups. Although she is both gay and Black and those identities layer onto her identity as a heavy person she is uninterested in being a perfect example of fat, Black feminism. Instead, she takes a journalist’s cold eye towards herself, seeking to tease out how and why she feels as she does and how and why the opinions of others hold so much sway over how she feels about her body. As she says in the interview with Grady, there are consequences for being the owner of a female body, and the consequences for owning a female body that doesn’t look like the norm can be harsh and hard to take. Her natural impulse is to rebel against the desire of others to make her want to change herself. Even after doctors have informed her that she must submit to the weight loss surgery for her health, she is resistant, wanting to be allowed to stay as she is. Part of the pain expressed in the final part of her essay arises from her having caved to the societal pressure. Even though she partially agrees that she did the best thing for herself and her health, she feels manipulated and boxed in by others’ opinions on her body and resents her own fledgling desires to conform to the norm.
Quotes:
“Some bodies and minds simply cannot be brought to heel.”
“I am not supposed to yearn, simply, for people to let me be, see me, accept me, and treat me with dignity exactly as I am.”
“I want and want and want but never allow myself to reach for what I truly want, leaving that want raging desperately beneath the surface of my skin.”
“I am empty, but I know what fullness is, and I hate this knowing.”
And from the Grady interview:
“Any time you’re marginalized, you deserve, nonetheless to be human.”
Learning Objectives (for the program):
• • explain the social and political context of how data it is generated and why this matters for research;
• • construct a viable research question;
• • design an evaluation study;
• • produce a step-by-step research or evaluation work plan that is feasible given time and resource constraints, using the GANTT chart or similar planning method;
• • collect data from a variety of sources, using both digital and analog methods;
• • analyze the data using the most appropriate methods and tools available;
• • interpret the results of the analysis;
• • write clearly and analytically;
• • demonstrate a working knowledge of basic steps to protect digital privacy and evade digital surveillance mechanisms;
• • create a digital portfolio of their work in the program, including the internship and how this work demonstrates the student’s proficiency in each learning objective listed above.
GSR LEARNING OBJECTIVES
