Theorizing femininity in artificial intelligence: a framework for undoing technology’s gender troubles

ABSTRACT

This article responds to technofeminist calls to unpack the gendered politics of technologies and create critical crossover between their representation and design. I analyze feminized artificial intelligence (Siri, Alexa, Cortana) in light of two science-fiction narratives: Tomorrow’s Eve, a Victorian novel; and Her, a postmillennial film. Each story exemplifies a pivotal moment in media history: Eve the transition from symbolic to technical media; Her the transition from technical to computational media. Both stories depict a man falling in love with an artificially intelligent, feminized version of the communication media du jour. Whereas Eve and Her operate on our imaginary, Siri, Alexa, and Cortana are by our side every day, naturalizing contingent gender divisions. I address three questions: what is the cultural work accomplished by feminized AI? Which boundaries are coming down or built up? What gendered relations are (re)produced? Drawing on media archaeology, critical theory, gender studies, and media theory, this article argues the association of femininity with technology sustains differences across three dimensions: docile labour, replaceable embodiment, and artificial intelligence. This triadic framework weaves together analytic threads that often remain separate to develop a nuanced critique of femininity as a mode for domesticating new technology and technology as materializing gender relations. The discussion extends the framework to a more generalized analysis of AI as a problematic prescription for how we become machine-shaped. I advance an entangled reinterpretation of the Turing Test and suggest ethics, aesthetics, and performativity as key sites of intervention in rethinking AI design to include rather than exclude multiple forms of difference. The conclusion offers the framework as a novel heuristic for intersectional, nonreductive critiques of technology and difference.

KEYWORDS:

• Artificial intelligence
• gender
• media archaeology
• critical information studies
• communication technologies
• media theory

Acknowledgements

My sincere thanks to the reviewers for their engaged reading of the text and thoughtful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Daniel M. Sutko studies digital media, culture, and the history of communication technologies. His work appears in multiple journals and edited collections. He is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media at California State University, Fullerton.

Notes

1 Computer scientists distinguish between two types of AI. ‘narrow AI’ is shorthand for machine learning and evident in everything from Roombas to Siri to IBM’s Deep Blue. ‘general AI’ is the conscious AI imagined in scifi that may not be achievable (Broussard 2018).

2 Cleaving has a dual meaning of ‘bringing together’ and ‘splitting apart.’ It’s particularly apt to describe imbricated technology/nature/culture questions (see Pias 2011).

3 Kittler (1990, p. 272, 230, 347–348, 1999, p. 28) identifies Eve as a fictive exemplar of this inflection point.

4 The director, Spike Jonze, also works in music videos and advertising and has considerable experience framing the zeitgeist.

5 Hadaly means ‘ideal’ in Persian.

6 Dissociation is also a consequence of PTSD associated with trauma.

7 Her suggests that if our technologies evolve beyond the need for human intervention, abandonment is a more likely scenario than destruction (a la Terminator) or enslavement (a la The Matrix).

8 Female telephone switchers were hired because ‘Respectable deportment, accuracy, attention to detail, good hearing, and good speech were commonly held to be female more than male traits’ (Lipartito 1994).

9 Identified as ‘self-surveillance and discipline’ and the ‘makeover paradigm.’

10 Identified as ‘individualism, choice, empowerment’ and the shift in representation ‘from sex object to desiring sexual subject.’

11 ‘Convenience’ is another topos that has been addressed thoroughly in the literature (see, e.g. Morozov 2012, Slack and Wise 2014)

12 Thus undercutting progressive politics based on embodiment, materiality, affect, etc.

13 ‘Discourse, now objectified as communication technologies, literally replaces the material body with simulated body senses. Whereas Foucault’s project was to explicate how discourses of modernity redefined the body as machine, in [Kroker’s] postmodernity what we discover is that technology now transforms the body into nothing more than discourse’ (Balsamo 1996, p. 30).

14 This is not to body-shame Portia Doubleday but to observe that she fits the stereotype of first-world, white, Western beauty.

15 ‘Tape recorder one is Adam. Tape recorder two is Eve’ (Kittler 1999, p. 110).

16 Foucault observed that discourse speaks through us. Kittler extends this to technical media.