Designed women: gender and the problem of female automata

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. The Bionic Woman ran from January of 1976 through May, 1978, beginning on ABC but with the final 22 episodes shown on NBC. The show was a spin-off of The Six Million Dollar Man, which was an adaptation of Martin Caidin’s novel, Cyborg.

2. For the relationship between science and reason in the Enlightenment, see for instance Hankins, Science and the Enlightenment. Much of the literature on the Enlightenment has focused on whether and how it created modern political categories. For a review of the literature, see de Dijn, “The Politics of Enlightenment.”

3. Women did manage, but it was always a struggle. See for instance, Hesse, The Other Enlightenment. For the gender dynamics, see for instance Goodman, The Republic of Letters.

4. There were women’s guilds, and women could sometimes head enterprises on a limited basis. See for instance Hafter, Women at Work. One of the best accounts of female guilds is Crowston, Fabricating Women. Men were also likely to move in when businesses became economically viable. See Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters.

5. Although men were more frequently patrons, some eighteenth-century women were patrons particularly of the arts (broadly construed). See for instance Lawrence, Women and Art in Early Modern Europe. For women using patronage for political purposes in the eighteenth century, see for example Marschner, Queen Caroline.

6. Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel des Öffentlichkeit. While not quite the underbelly of the Enlightenment exposed in Darnton, The Literary Underground, the publicity mechanisms around the automata were not exactly highbrow philosophical material either.

7. The critiques of Habermas for omitting gender seem particularly pertinent to Voskhul’s project. See for instance Mary Ryan, “Gender” and Landes, Women and the Public Sphere.

8. The association of women with affect is both acknowledged and challenged by Dena Goodman, Becoming a Woman.

9. Berlant, The Female Complaint. See also the discussion of shame as a public affect in Sedgwick, Touching Feeling.

10. The literature on the gendering of work, and especially work under capitalism is vast. Among the early analyses, see especially Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power. For a more recent, rangy analysis, see Weeks, The Problem with Work.

11. There is an even earlier version that might be worth considering. In William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck says, ‘My mistress with a monster is in love./Near to her close and consecrated bower,/While she was in her dull and sleeping hour,/A crew of patches, rude mechanicals,/That work for bread upon Athenian stalls,/Were met together to rehearse a play,/Intended for great Theseus’ nuptial day.’ (III, ii, 6–12). Ignorant workers are mechanicals – a class association that Voskuhl’s androids subvert but later iterations of fears about mechanized humans does not.

12. I would add to Cold War fears the notion that machines or robots might destroy humanity. This is, of course, the premise of James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) and the television series Battlestar Galactica (2004–2009; mini-series pilot aired 2003).

13. Laqueur, Making Sex argues for the prevalence of the one sex model until the eighteenth century, and even if he overstates the case, the notion of bodies on a spectrum was certainly an important heuristic.

14. The literature is vast but one of the best studies of the period remains Cott, Bonds of Womanhood.

15. Rousseau, Emile devotes book five to marriage, family, and the education of women. Among the many contemporary critiques, see especially Graham, Letters, which allows that female chastity is an issue, but argues that only through actual education and development of the faculty of reason can women hope to protect it effectively.

16. Kant, Beobachtungen, section 3 considers the gendering of beauty.

17. Condorcet, “Sur l’admission des femmes.”

18. Modern theories of subjectivity abound, and while I follow Voskuhl’s lead in trying to avoid anachronism, for just some of these theories, see Freud, Interpretation of Dreams for the theory of the unconscious and the split subject; Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage’ for the subject as constituted in language; Foucault, Surveiller et punir for subjects constituted in relation to power; Kristeva, Powers of Horror for subjectivity as psychological process; and Butler, Gender Trouble for the argument that subjectivity is iterative performance.

19. Locke, Two Treatises; Kant, Critique of Pure Reason; Descartes, Discourse on Method.

20. Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, 279 on the tendency to read Enlightenment ideas about the self backward into early modernity.