Programming gender: surveillance, identity, and paranoia in Ex Machina

ABSTRACT

This article examines the 2015 film Ex Machina as a cultural text that exemplifies the technologization of gender within algorithmic culture. Analysing different textual elements — the narrative diegesis, the marketing material, and the digital techniques used in the VFX post-production process—I argue that gender is consistently figured as a kind of technology. That is, gender is systematised, codified, and reduced to a programmed set of instructions that can be used by machines to manipulate and deceive. I argue that understanding gender through its figuration with the technological, specifically through code and algorithms, raises pertinent issues concerning surveillance, race, and bias. This is reflected in the film through a problematic representation of racialised figures, particularly techno-Orientalist tropes of labouring Asian bodies.

KEYWORDS:

• Ex Machina
• gender
• surveillance capitalism
• automated culture

Acknowledgements

Versions of this paper were presented at the 2019 Automated Culture Symposium, hosted by the Monash University Culture, Media, Economy (CME) research hub in Melbourne, Australia, and the 2019 Bodies and Media Symposium, organized by the University of Queensland Platform Media research group in Brisbane, Australia.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For example, the field of scholarship that examines the gendered aesthetics of digital assistants, such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon Echo’s Alexa (see Hester 2016; Phan 2017, 2019; Kennedy and Strengers 2020)

Additional information

Funding

This research was conducted as part of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, and partially funded by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council.

Notes on contributors

Thao Phan

Thao Phan is a Research Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society and the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University, Australia. She is a feminist technoscience researcher who specialises in the study of gender and race in algorithmic culture.